In Catullus 50, after an enjoyable day writing poetry with Licinius Calvus, the poet warns his friend not to ignore him lest Nemesis punish him for it, ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te (‘lest Nemesis demand punishment from you’). It will be proposed in this article that, in keeping with neoteric ideals, Catullus is playing on the phrase a te to create a bilingual pun on the Greek word ἄτη ‘delusion’, ‘mental blindness (often divinely sent)’.

This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus. By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates’) become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever.

This article examines the alleged author, or first-person narrator, of the tenth pseudonymous letter in the Corpus Aeschineum. It argues that the forger, in a short epistolary novel that describes the seduction of a certain Callirhoe in Troy, uses puns (αἰσχύνειν, ἀναισχυντία, etc.) on the name of the fourth-century BC orator Aeschines. It notes that αἰσχρός-words recur in ancient works and, as a rhetorical device, are attested in Demosthenes. The forger’s aims are, first, to serialize the ‘Aeschinean’ letters as a whole by relating them to the same author and, second, to create an ‘aischrologic’ counterpart of the Callirhoe, which is attributed to Chariton (Χαρίτων/‘The Graceful’). Thus there is less likelihood of suggesting other figures such as the eponymous Aeschines Socraticus.

The poem discussed has long been regarded as a “nonsense” poem that was extemporized as part of some kind of poetry game at Court. This article presents evidence to demonstrate that through the use of puns and double entendre the poet in fact ingeniously devised a witty scatological verse. Rather than “nonsense”, the poem is discovered to offer covertly a deeply satirical social commentary on the contemporaneous relationships between men and women, aristocrats and outcastes.