In addition to the acrostic–telestic combination natu ceu aes ‘from birth like bronze’, Catullus poem 60 contains the earliest attested Latin mesostic (mi pia ‘dutiful to me’), which runs down its caesuras. The use of pius anticipates the language of aristocratic obligation that is used of Lesbia in the epigrams and is perhaps also a wordplay on the praenomen of Clodia’s father, Appius. The complex acrostics and the syntax of mi pia, along with the setting of poem 59 (in sepulcretis), suggest that poem 60 can be read as a literary epitaph. Additional closural elements in the poem include an allusion to Callimachus and a sphragis in the form of a play on the author’s name.

In the hymn to Bacchus (Tristia 5.3), Ovid looks from Tomis back to Rome, where the chorus of poets gathers for the Liberalia. This article argues that Ovid fashions in Tristia 5.3 a poetic rebirth out of Tomis, deploying in this elegy themes and motifs from the god’s mysteries to bolster the pervasive message of persistence in the Tristia. This Bacchic mystic tone is accomplished through the hymn’s ritual elements and dithyrambic strategies, which reflect on both Ovid’s death-like position in exile and his poetic activity there. Furthermore, this article argues that Ovid encodes his mystic dithyrambic strategies in a hitherto unnoticed bilingual acrostic. Through ritual and dithyrambic strategies, Ovid merges three loci of time and space—past Rome, present Rome and present Tomis—and thus reintegrates himself into Rome, rearticulating his Roman citizenship as a literary one.

Proba’s Cento Vergilianus contains a corruption at line 42, sometimes printed as two half-lines separated by a lacuna (42a–b). Previous attempts to emend the passage based upon the four classical elements have met with limited success. This article argues for a novel reconstruction of the passage based upon the six days of the biblical creation, summarized in reverse. Two possible variants of the reconstruction are presented and evaluated on textual, metrical, compositional and contextual grounds.

Sardismos is the name, in several Latin works of literary criticism, for a combination of more than one language or dialect in a sentence. Quintilian (first century c.e.) uses the term disparagingly; the Christian author Cassiodorus (sixth century c.e.) uses it positively. A similar term, sardîstôn, is found in the rabbinic work Exodus Rabbah 2, created in the sixth-century Byzantine empire. This article is a short study of this term, the history of its misinterpretation and reinterpretation, its meaning in context, and its relationship to sardismos.

Modern accounts of Sicilian history in the late fifth century b.c.e. and its relations with Athens often follow Thucydides’ Athenocentric narrative closely, largely ignoring the Sicilian background. This article instead foregrounds the actions and concerns of two important Sicilian cities, Segesta and Leontini, whose perspectives Thucydides chose to leave out or downplay. In particular, Segesta was involved in the complex cross-cultural dynamics of western Sicily, while Leontini demonstrated resilience in its resistance to Syracusan imperialism. Both cities’ relations with Athens emerged from their pre-existing policies and strategies. This article thus develops an alternate narrative of these events that complements Thucydides’ Athenocentric one. To accomplish this, it argues for a more nuanced approach to Thucydides’ narrative: reading it against the grain, supplementing it with data from Diodorus and epigraphy, and placing it in its Sicilian historical and cultural context. In this way, the article develops a new approach to the methodological issues involved in writing the history of poleis that are not emphasized in major extant narrative sources. Recognizing Segesta and Leontini as political actors with their own goals and agendas enables both a new reading of Thucydides and a less Athenocentric account of late fifth-century Sicilian history.

Anth. Pal. 11.418 is traditionally attributed to Trajan. The distich mocks a man’s large nose and is a typical example of a scoptic epigram. Even though the attribution to Trajan looks suspicious, scholarship has been inclined to accept his authorship. However, it is possible that the poem was written about the emperor instead, which would also explain the misattribution. This hypothesis, if correct, sheds light on the surprising opening anecdote of Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (172E), which is dedicated to Trajan.

Ancient writers, including philosophers such as Aristotle, often depict friendship as a source of pleasure; by contrast, in his Laelius de amicitia, Cicero describes such relationships as sweet and delightful, but never connects them with uoluptas, which for him is a largely negative term reserved for Epicurean doctrine. This paper argues that there is more to this pointed use of language than Cicero’s well-known dislike of Epicureanism. Considering first the Latin philosophical vocabulary of pleasure and then the vexed question of what exactly qualifies as pleasure according to the Epicurean system, the paper makes the case that Cicero believed (probably correctly) that the pleasures of friendship as conceived of by himself and many ordinary language-users would not in fact qualify as instances of Epicurean uoluptas. If, as Epicurus appears to have held, all pleasures are either bodily or mental, and all mental pleasures are derived from bodily ones, then many activities experienced as pleasurable in and of themselves—including many traditional elements of friendship—are not in fact Epicurean pleasures.

This article reconstructs the system of storage, organization and presentation of written evidence in Athenian courts of the Classical period, with wider implications for the discussion about oral and written culture in Classical Greece and legal professionalism in Athenian democracy. It explores court speakers’ references to an assumed order of documents, their storage in containers called echinoi, and verbal presentation by the court secretary. It is the first systematic analysis of all remarks on storing, organizing and reading documents in the corpus of Athenian oratory, supplemented by other literary and epigraphic sources. Based on the surviving evidence, this article argues for the existence of a developed legal culture that made attempts to facilitate the handling of documents in courtrooms through practical organizational measures, including the speakers’ interactions with court aids, notably the grammateis and hypogrammateis.

This article explores Lucian’s treatise, How to Write History, in the context of ancient rhetorical and literary theory. While situated within the domain of historiography, the treatise prioritizes issues related to literary composition, such as the linguistic register and content selection deemed fitting for the historical genre. Through comparisons with critics and theoreticians like Aristotle and Demetrius, this study re-evaluates Lucian’s instructions for preface writing and other stylistic guidelines throughout the work. The conclusions highlight Lucian’s innovative approach to historical composition, influenced by rhetorical and literary theory yet reshaped to fit his vision of history and its purpose. Additionally, the examination reveals Lucian’s strategic use of rhetorical and literary theory in critiquing not only writing style but also issues intrinsic to history.

This note offers the solution to a puzzle in the manuscript tradition of Polybius that has baffled eminent modern authorities.

This article reassesses the contribution of the late Renaissance scholar and teacher Petrus Victorius (Pier Vettori) to the reconstruction of the text of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, which has come down to us in what is often a highly corrupt form. It proposes an interpretation of certain abbreviations in the marginalia in one of Victorius's copies of the Aldine Eudemian Ethics which reveals them as recommending readings rather than recording them; it proposes that many more of those readings constitute his own conjectures than previously thought. The article goes on to suggest why Victorius never produced an edition of the Eudemian Ethics as he did of other Aristotelian works, despite returning repeatedly, over much of his life, to the task of improving this particular text. Victorius is revealed nonetheless as a highly creative—but also highly disciplined—textual critic, at least the equal of his nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors.

Following Janko's suggestion that two trimeters cited at Strabo, Geography 8.6.20 form a couplet from an unknown, possibly Aristophanic comedy, this note explores the resonance and meaning of the third citation contained in the same chapter of the geographer's work. It proposes that this third citation, which relates to a Corinthian hetaira's work at the loom and is possibly from either the same or a different comedy, contains a joke hinting at the Odyssey and alternative traditions regarding Penelope's chastity. This Odyssean echo thematically connects this citation to the comic trimeters, which also contain clear allusions to the Odyssey.

Virgil has Evander trace the origins of the name of the river Tiber back to the death of a giant, called ‘Thybris’ (Aen. 8.330–2). This article argues that the reference to the violent (asper) giant can be understood as etymological wordplay on the Greek word hubris and as a potential allusion to the grammatical debate on the nature of aspiration. Varro's De gente populi Romani is identified as an important source for the characterization of the Tiber as a giant in primeval times. The political implications of the word hubris are also briefly explored with reference to various identities to which Evander alludes. The final part of the article argues that Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and the scholiast to Theocritus may have also inspired Virgil's description of the Tiber in this passage.

A passage in Eunapius (476–7, pp. 440–2 Loeb) draws an interesting contrast between the attitudes to divination of the two sophists Maximus and Chrysanthius: Maximus, who manipulates the omens until they say what he wants, and Chrysanthius, who scrupulously obeys their apparent meaning. But a passage a little later (500–1, pp. 542–4 Loeb) apparently ascribes to Chrysanthius the opposite attitude. This article suggests a transposition to restore coherence to the text. Even if the transposition is wrong, the contrast drawn in the first passage between two attitudes to divination, one rigorous and literalist, one manipulative, is important.

Notes on the text and interpretation of passages in Plutarch's Life of Alexander.

This paper examines a neglected fifteenth-century manuscript of the opusculum of Julius Exuperantius. It argues that that manuscript (Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, 748) is a sibling of Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 3334, and situates the new manuscript in the stemma established by the last editor. It then proposes a modification to that editor's stemma, arguing that those two fifteenth-century manuscripts in fact descend from Milan, BA, H 37 sup., once owned by Francesco Pizolpasso. Finally, it considers the implications of those arguments for the editing and the history of the text.

This article analyses Anth. Pal. 8 as a Hellenistic book of poems, i.e. as a collection artfully arranged by an author-editor and not as a mere gathering of sepulchral epigrams devoid of any reflection or literary aspiration. In common with modern poetry books, Anth. Pal. 8 was conceived for linear sequential reading. A close study of its tripartite structure, of the thoughtful collocation of each piece and of their organizing principles in well-thought-out sequences reveals the ultimate eschatological meaning of the book. Finally, a comparative contextualization with other late antique poets indicates a late antique dating for the elaboration of this collection as such, whereas the strong numerological element and the religious transcendence sought by the distribution of the poems point to Gregory of Nazianzus himself as the author-editor of Anth. Pal. 8.

This article deals with the fight between the river Trebia and Scipio the Elder in Silius Italicus’ Punica (4.525–703), notoriously based on the Homeric battle between Achilles and Scamander (Il. 21.1–382). By means of a close reading of the geographical details of Silius’ account, this article aims at highlighting the peculiar role given to the landscape in this episode. By intertwining well-established epic topoi and historiographical reflections, the poet imbues Italy's landscape with a profound ideological meaning. His depiction of the natural environment thematizes key issues relating to the Second Punic War, such as the disruptive effects of Hannibal's invasion on the bond between Italian communities, the problematic nature of shared Italian identity, and the contagious nature of rebellion.

This article argues for an as-yet-undiscovered double allusion to Aratus’ Phaenomena (1–5 and 100–7) embedded in Cicero's De diuinatione (1.79). This intertextual link sheds light on a now-lost passage of Cicero's Aratea and raises some questions about the relationship between Cicero's dialogue and Catullus 64.

The article makes a case for a thorough reappraisal of the text of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica by discussing a number of textual problems in Book 8. It proposes some twenty new conjectures, as well as reviving six old ones that seem to have been undeservedly forgotten.