It is well known that sometime before 700 b.c. the Greeks took over from the Near East a complex theogonic myth about the succession of rulers in heaven, involving the motifs of the castration of Sky and a swallowing and regurgitation by his successor, and that this story forms the framework of Hesiod's Theogony. It is less well known that at a later epoch, sometime before the middle of the sixth century b.c., a quite different and no less striking oriental myth about the beginning of things was introduced to Greece: the myth of the god Unaging Time, who created the materials for the world from his own seed, and of the cosmic egg out of which the heaven and the earth were formed. I have discussed this myth and its variants elsewhere. My purpose in re-examining it here is firstly to clarify various details of the Phoenician versions of the cosmogony as reported in Greek sources, secondly to obtain a sharper picture of its original form, and thirdly to argue that the world model of the early Ionian philosophers, which to some extent set the pattern for subsequent Greek cosmology, owed more to the myth than has generally been appreciated.

It has been claimed that the earliest expression of a robust scepticism is in the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, and even commentators who would not go that far have thought the passage an important guide to epistemological attitudes in Homeric antiquity. It will be argued here that a close examination of the text does not support such conclusions. On the other hand, there are respectable reasons for an interpretation in which religious factors are operative, rather than epistemic ones. The conclusion to be drawn is that the epistemic reading is groundless.

Few things can be more confusing, or confused, than the ancient reports about Empedocles' astronomy. Attempts in the modern literature at resolving the difficulties invariably either add to the confusion, or end by urging the need to ‘acknowledge the insufficiency of our data and suspend judgment’. In fact, as we will see, it is possible not only to reconstruct Empedocles' own ideas but also to retrace the history of their subsequent misunderstanding.

The number of speaking actors in Old Comedy has been much discussed, but no consensus has been reached. The old assumption that the number was three, as in tragedy, was shaken when it was realized that some scenes of Aristophanes have four characters on-stage at once, all taking part in the dialogue: for example, in Lys. 77–253 we have Lysistrate, Kalonike, Myrrhine, and Lampito, and in Frogs 1414–81 we have Dionysos, Aiskhylos, Euripides, and Plouton. Rees therefore argued that there was no fixed number, but that view was not generally accepted. A more widely held view is that there were three principal actors with additional performers for small parts. However, there is no evidence contemporary with Aristophanes which distinguishes three actors from the others in this way, and it is probable that writers of later periods who mention three actors are referring to their own times and did not have authentic information about the fifth century. The passage which DFA, p. 149, seems to regard as the most trustworthy is in a brief account of comedy attributed to Tzetzes: πιγενμενος δ Κρατῖνος κατστησε μν πρτον τ ν τῇ κωμῳδᾳ πρσωπα μεχρ τριν, στσας τν ταξαν4DFA paraphrases this as ‘Cratinus reduced the disorderliness and, in some sense, fixed the number of regular actors at three’. But πρσωπα means ‘masks’ or ‘characters’; it does not mean ‘actors’ (for which the Greek word is ὑποκριτα). What the writer meant by saying that Kratinos settled the masks or characters in comedy at ‘up to three’ is not clear, but his statement is useless as evidence for the number of actors.

Demosthenes' client Euxitheos is attempting to defend his claim to citizenship, and finds himself obliged to counteract the prejudice raised by his opponent Euboulides from the fact that his mother works, and has worked, in menial wage labour. The implication is that no citizen woman would sink so low; therefore, she is no citizen, and so neither is he. His response is defensive: he acknowledges that such labour is a source of prejudice (42), but argues that people often find themselves obliged to undertake such demeaning work through poverty, which is deserving of the jury's sympathy, and in any case has no bearing on questions of citizenship (45). He does not challenge the assumptions behind the prejudice, suggesting that he expects the jury to share them, and this might encourage us to extrapolate from the passage to a set of common values held by Athenian citizens, namely that paid work by women is degrading, embarrassing and only acceptable as a temporary expedient under the compulsion of poverty. If we then align these attitudes with the implications elsewhere in the orators that women led lives of seclusion, usually confined indoors and largely separated from the exterior male world, we might be inclined to conclude that the labour of women was also confined to the oikos and almost entirely distinct from the labour of males, not least in having little or no monetary aspect, a point which the usual view of the economic capacity of Athenian women appears to confirm.

Xenophon's concern with morality in his more philosophical writings is evident. But (as Vivienne Gray has recently argued) that concern embraces also his approach to history. In the Hellenica this interest in morality is not to be written off as a matter of marginal comment, but, it may be claimed, is integral to the historian's purpose. He is one for whom the determinants of history are (under the gods) the personalities and actions of great (and not so great) men, and it is natural for him to observe the interaction between personal morality and political and military actions. It is from this standpoint that the present article seeks to illustrate from Xenophon's writings one aspect of his outlook on these matters, – the role of self-control (or lack of it) over homoerotic desire in the context of military history. How far we can go behind his text to determine ‘what actually happened’ or use his testimony in developing a wider understanding of erōs in classical Greece at large are matters for further enquiry.

Although much of great interest has been written recently about the period of the socalled Peace of Philocrates, little or nothing has been said of a passage which provides important information in Justin's Epitome of the Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus. This passage, 8.3.12–15, comes between the destruction of Olynthus (September, 348) and the arrival of the Athenian envoys at Pella (February, 346). In subject matter it corresponds with ‘the subjugation of Thrace and Thessaly’ (Thracia atque Thessalia subactae) in Prologue 8 of Pompeius Trogus – a topic which Justin began in 8.3.1–6 and continued in our passage, 8.3.12–15.

It is a commonplace of modern criticism that every text is to be located within a complex network of cultural practices and material. Students of the ancient world may sometimes feel at a disadvantage; we simply do not have as much information as we would like in order to contextualize thoroughly. This has been especially true in the study of Platonic dialogues. The meagre remains of the writings of the sophists against whom Plato measured himself and of the art to which he refers (to mention only two areas) entail that analysis of Plato is often confined to the structure of his philosophy. Of course, the requirements of Plato's arguments must always be assigned primary importance; the relative lack of information about Plato's cultural context has not prevented detailed exposition of his method and achievements. Occasionally, however, a kindly fate allows us to set a dialogue, or part of it, in its appropriate material and ideological context and to create an interface between literary, philosophical, and archaeological evidence. Such evidence may not alter our evaluation of Plato's arguments on the analytic level, but it can enrich our appreciation of his literary artistry and recapture for us some of the resonance that his work would have had for a contemporary audience.

The concept of an ‘art of love’ has been popularised for all time by the naughty masterpiece of Ovid. A good deal of critical attention has been devoted to this work in recent times, including some to his possible sources, but under this latter rubric attention has chiefly been directed rather to his parody of more serious types of handbook, such as an ars medica, an ars grammatica, or an ars rhetorica, than to the possibility of his having predecessors in the actual ‘art’ of love.

There is a certain conventional interpretation of Aristotle's argument, in Metaphysics Λ.7, for the identification of the first unmoved mover as God, according to which that argument has the following outline

In his excellent commentary on Callimachus' fifth Hymn, A. W. Bulloch has discussed the many allusions to earlier literature out of which this poem is made. He has, however, missed one: an allusion to Hesiod's Catalogue, which, as I shall show here, not only sheds light on one of the poem's most puzzling scenes – Athena's consolatio to the nymph Chariclo – but also helps to explain the articulation and function of the poem's first, so-called ‘mimetic,’ section.

Augustus' account of the events of 28 and 27 b.c. is maddeningly vague. In part the problem is simply that his individual phrases are ambiguous, but a more fundamental difficulty is the very nature of the Res Gestae itself. The idea of publishing such a self-satisfied account of one's own doings is so alien to our modern sensibilities that we tend to read the Res Gestae as though Augustus were capable of saying almost anything. We have concluded too easily, therefore, that at R.G. 34.1 Augustus is telling an outrageous lie, or at least an outrageous half-truth. After saying that he ended the civil wars, and acquired supreme power, Augustus claims to have handed over the state to the senate and the people of Rome. On the traditional reading this last claim is seriously misleading; Augustus may have handed over the state, but he fails to mention that the senate handed it back.

In the following two passages we read Apollo's epiphany to (respectively) the Trojan leader Aeneas and Callimachus

The story of the death and catasterism of Chiron is one of the most charming and skilfully-presented episodes in the Fasti. Ovid relates how Hercules, in the course of his twelve labours, came to Mount Pelion, and was hospitably received by the centaur Chiron and his pupil, the young Achilles. While admiring Hercules' splendid arms, Chiron drops one of the hero's poisoned arrows onto his foot. Despite desperate attempts to find a remedy, he fails to recover, but is transformed into the constellation of Centaurus.

Housman reads assueta euolitans; the former word is a conjecture of his own, the latter a conjecture of Ellis, which I think he would have ignored if the relevant fascicle of the Thesaurus had been available to show that euolitare occurs once in Columella and then (if at all) not before the sixth century. If assueto is sound, mundi must be changed to mundo (an isolated variant) or to another noun. Bentley read mundo, and this may well be the right solution: the eagle carries thunderbolts to the sky, “cui scilicet per diuturnas operas assueuerat”. Shackleton Bailey (1979, 162) emends to nisu (on the theory that this fell out after -mina and was replaced by the stopgap mundo). If emendation were required, I suggest that motu would be palaeographically more satisfactory; the assumed process of corruption is well illustrated by 3.82, motu GL: modum M: mundo LV.

The episode at Croton is the last series of events we possess from the surviving Satyrica, though not necessarily the last part of the novel in its original form. The action takes place in a town which no longer existed at the suggested time of the novel's composition. The plot is focused, mainly, on two themes: legacy-hunting and Encolpius' impotence. His unsuccessful relationship with the nymphomaniac Circe (126.1–130.8) and his painful experience with the witch-like priestesses Proselenos and Oenothea (131.1–139.5) are manifestations of the latter theme. Philomela's prostitution of her children (140.1–11) is a brief example of the former theme and shows the kind of gifts the Crotonians offered Eumolpus in order to win his favour and a share in his vast legacy (124.4). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the anecdote of the matron Philomela was composed by Petronius as a narrative equivalent of a theatrical farce. The paper is divided in two parts. The first aims to establish the theatrical (mimic) backcloth of the story, in front of which the ensuing action is going to take place. The second shows the theatrical nature of the anecdote itself, i.e. the structure, the characters, the staging, the language and the multiple levels of its description that demonstrate its theatricality.

‘Epaphroditus’ (= ‘lovely’, ‘charming’) is perhaps the commonest of Roman slave names apart from ‘Felix’, which it sometimes renders as a Greek equivalent. It is also used very extensively under the early empire by those with tria nomina, whether freedmen or freeborn, whether descendants of freedmen or not, whether citizens or Junian Latins. It is also found among decurions and even equestrians, but not senators. It thus has a non-elite resonance in the western half of the empire, but, like almost all personal cognomina, not exclusively so.

1. NA 1.22.11 qui dicit ergo superesse se ei quem defendit, nihil istorum [sc. of the legitimate senses listed by Julius Paulus in §§9–10] uult dicere, sed nescioquid aliud indictum inscitumque dicit.

Adversus Mathematicos (M.) x is the second book dedicated by Sextus to the discussion of the physical doctrines put forward by dogmatic philosophers. An extensive section (M. x 85–120) deals with Diodorus Cronus' arguments concerning movement.

I have devoted a separate study to the question of how far the account in the Alexander Romance of Alexander's meeting with the Naked Philosophers, later known as Brahmans, rests on genuine information about India. My conclusion was that the author of the Romance knew the Alexander historians but did not add any genuine knowledge; and that he incorporated a separate text of Cynic origin, the series of ten questions and answers.