In an age when size really did matter, the length of the long pike (sarissa) employed by armies of the Hellenistic Age (c. 350-168 BC) was consistently altered by successive armies trying to gain an advantage over their opponents. These alterations are well attested in the ancient sources — albeit in an ancient Greek unit of measure. But how big were these pikes in terms of modern units of measure? This has been a topic of scholarly debate for some time. This article engages with these debates, and the evidence and theories that these arguments are based upon. A critical review of this evidence not only allows the changing length of the sarissa to be calculated in a modern unit of measure, but also examines descriptions in the ancient sources that suggest the forerunner to the Hellenistic pike phalanx was created a generation before the rise of Macedon as a military power in the mid fourth century BC. This, in turn, allows for the configuration of one of the weapons that changed the face of warfare in the ancient world to be much better understood.

In a recent note in Historia Léonie Hayne has written the following:

Partly on the basis of this she suggests that Cn. Servilius Caepio, cos. 141 and eventually censor in 125, may have suffered a repulse in the censorial elections of 131, having stood in tandem with Q. Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus. Those elections, of course, produced the first all-plebeian censorial college.

Hayne, therefore, has used data on censors arranged in an extensive chronological framework in the middle of which stand the elections in question. My own attempts to present patterned data which may help to elucidate the phenomena of Roman politics have made me particularly aware of the necessity to arrange such data in compartments of defensible significance. So here I must object to the use of ‘after 218’ as a proper time reference for the evidence. The plebeian college of 131 would seem to present one significant point of division. This was in fact realized by Suolahti, who uses two periods, not one, namely 218-133 and 133-30, and who is much more cautious and much less specific about patricians. Yet, even so, one must be careful about assembling or describing the data in convenient periods. Perhaps this is especially so with the censorship, a position only filled once every five years in normal circumstances, so that to have a reasonable number of censors on which to base statistical conclusions, one must necessarily encompass a considerable span of time.

This paper continues the author's long-standing quest to define the historicity of ‘epic society’ and to understand epic warfare and battle descriptions. It summarises the range of questions involved and a number of aspects on which some agreement has been achieved. Further progress is only possible by using new approaches. One of these, the comparative study of epic traditions, has recently yielded important results that are briefly summarised. Another new approach, overlapping with that of narratology, aims at understanding the working methods and conventions of the epic singer's art. The application of this approach to the narrative of epic battles has made it possible to distinguish between two large type scenes: ‘normal battles’ and ‘flight and aristeia phases’. The former are essentially historical and thus help us understand early Greek fighting, while the latter are essentially fantastic. Three elements occur predominantly or almost exclusively in these fantasy scenes: the aristeiai of the greatest heroes, the active intervention of gods in battle, and the use of chariots in battle. The demonstration, provided in the final section of this paper, that the latter — a component of Homeric battle that has long resisted convincing explanation — is part of the singer's arsenal of fantastic entertainment and ‘special effects’, removes it from historical consideration and further facilitates the explanation of epic battles and their historicity.

The normal interpretation of the oath μή μνησικακεĩν in Greek legal terminology is ‘to forget past wrongs’. Conventionally, the Athenian amnesty of 403 BC, in which the phrase is best documented, has been understood as an undertaking by both sides to draw a line under the past and prevent revisitation of cases which predated the restoration of democracy in that year. This article defends that view against the revisionist interpretation of E. Carawan in JHS 122 (2002) and CQ 62 (2012), which claims (a) that there was no general amnesty when democracy was restored to Athens, and (b) that the scrutiny of laws which followed was limited to ones affecting the amnesty’s beneficiaries. The oath forbade prosecution of all crimes committed in the time of the Thirty or before, and was therefore more than a mere technicality which sealed specific terms of agreement between the warring factions who came to terms. The scrutiny of laws encompassed all the laws of Athens and not a subset pertaining to a limited set of concerns. The revised laws were re-inscribed in the environs of the Stoa Basileios for future consultation.

In a recent paper (Antichthon 9 [1975], 81-3), Brian Croke usefully draws attention to Getica xxviii 145, wherein Jordanes seemingly makes a fool of himself by connecting Eugenius with the murder of Gratian. There is one immediate dividend to be had: this reference (and also Jordanes’ other discussion at Romana 317-18) may be used to supplement the entry for Eugenius in The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, which ignores Jordanes. However, it is not enough to accuse the chronicler of ‘the most vile error’ and leave it at that. Other explanations are possible, and merit a hearing. Hence a warrant for the following remarks.

The force of example is nowhere greater than in the adaptation of institutions observed abroad and modified for local conditions. Is it not possible, that in addition to his Stoic mentors, in addition to the radical ideals of Agis and Cleomenes, Tiberius Gracchus may have had the practical inspiration of a contemporary system of land settlement before him? It is my suggestion that Ptolemaic Egypt offered Roman agrarian reforms in the second century B.C. an example worthy of imitation, either in part or whole, and that such nobiles as M. Aemilius Lepidus, Laelius, Aemilianus and, not least, Tiberius Gracchus himself were attracted by the way the Ptolemies ran the rural sector of their economy.

In 125 B.C. the Latin town of Fregellae rebelled against Rome and was captured and destroyed by the praetor L. Opimius. A year later Fabrateria Nova was founded near the site of the defunct municipality. There has been a tendency, especially among English-speaking scholars, to treat the revolt as an isolated event; David Stockton, for example, has recently stated that ‘no other community joined in the revolt.. .’ Such views have gained wide currency, possibly because our sources for the event are diverse and rather unattractive; there is, however, evidence to suggest that the insurrection was more widespread than Stockton (inter alios) would have us believe. We need to re-examine this anti-Roman outbreak in such light as might be shed on the matter by certain neglected source material.

In this paper, I offer a cognitive analysis of the invocations of the Muse in earliest Greek epic poetry that is based on recent advances in cognitive science in general and the cognitive science of religion in particular. I argue that the Muse-concept most likely originated in a feeling of dependence on an external source of information to provide the singer with the subject matter of their song. This source of information is conceptualised as an ontological type (or template) ‘person’ by means of the hyperactive agency detection, and the Muse’s full access to strategic information, along with other characteristics, establishes her as a minimally counter-intuitive concept (that is to say a concept that conforms to most of our intuitive expectations and runs counter to a few of them), which, in turn, significantly increases the probability of the acquisition and transmission of the Muse-concept within the culture.

For a century and a half, since at least the appearance of probably the first general monograph on Livy, Hippolyte Taine's Tite-Live, in 1856, scholars have argued over one of the most fundamental questions which can be raised about the character of the historian: was he a ‘Republican’ or an ‘Augustan’ writer? The answers have been much more varied than might be expected, but have mostly relied on an endless discussion of the same few pieces of ‘evidence’: Livy's few mentions of Augustus and the usually quite misquoted reference in Tacitus (Ann. 4.34).

In a number of Near Eastern texts dating to the period of the Hittite New Kingdom, the term Lukka appears as a geographical and/or ethnic designation for one of the Late Bronze Age population groups of western Anatolia. Unfortunately we have no documents which deal primarily or specifically with the Lukka people; what we know of them rests essentially on incidental references in Hittite treaties, letters, prayers and historical records, along with several references in non-Hittite sources. Yet although the evidence is meagre, it still provides a relatively clear picture of the general character of the Lukka people and the role they played in the political and military affairs of Hittite Anatolia.

This article offers a new examination of the place of philosophy in Catullus’ Carmina. It focuses on Egnatius, the ‘smiling Spaniard’ of poems 37 and 39, and argues that Catullus’ attacks on this character make use of many standard invective tropes against Epicureans in the late Republic. More than merely an opportunity to show off his whitened teeth, Egnatius’ smile may well have been proof of his philosophical detachment and ataraxia. Yet Catullus maliciously misrepresents this mark of Epicurean virtue as a social gaffe, and an unflattering reminder of Egnatius’ provincial origins. I then reinterpret poems 37, 38, and 39 as a poetic series unified by the ‘banalization’ of philosophical ideas. Ultimately, Catullus creates his own singular voice – the arbiter of style and taste – by representing aspects of other people's behaviour as trite and ordinary. To banalize is an act of power, and it is a weapon that Catullus wields to articulate a sense of difference from other poets and thinkers in his intellectual world.

The end of Iliad 3 presents the reader with a strange spectacle. The duel between Paris and Menelaos has been summarily curtailed by the intervention of Aphrodite; Paris has been spirited away from the battlefield and deposited in his bedchamber, there to enjoy with Helen the fruits of his labours; and meanwhile Menelaos

The socio-economic composition of the assembly and the law-courts in the period from the mid-fifth century to 322 B.C. constitutes one of the most intractable problems in the history of Athenian public life. The difficulties arise from two major sources: the paucity and the character of the evidence, and the possible range of variables that may have affected participation in the Ekklesia and the Dikasteria.

In his article ‘Notes and Conjectures on the Astronomica of Manilius’, Antichthon ii (1968), 63 ff., of which he has been kind enough to send me a copy, Mr D. B. Gain discusses the following passage:

687 artibus Housman, urbibus Ω 689 Pella Schrader, ilia Ω 690 utrisque Gain, ripis Ω

In his article ‘Clouds, Mysteries, Socrates and Plato’ (Antichthon 4 [1970], 13-24), Professor A.W.H. Adkins starts from the agreed fact that certain passages of the Clouds compare entry to the phrontisterion to initiation to mysteries. He argues from this (and here I should not necessarily disagree with him) that Socrates was in the habit of using initiation-language when speaking of philosophy and that Aristophanes, shocked by such blasphemy, ‘used it as one more weapon against Socrates and the New Thought in his Clouds’ (24).

In 55 BC, Caesar massacred reportedly 400,000 Usipetes and Tencteri. When a supplicatio was proposed in the senate, M. Cato moved instead that Caesar should be surrendered to the enemy. This paper offers a technical analysis of an episode which, while well known, has not always been well understood. What Cato proposed was deditio (surrender) on the grounds that Caesar had committed a breach of fides (breach of truce and/or mistreatment of ambassadors) and thus an offence against the gods. Deditio was a means of expiation, so that Caesar alone should suffer for his crime, as in the famous case of C. Hostilius Mancinus in 136. Cato’s motivations were obviously political, but the technical and religious nature of his allegations meant they could not be ignored. Caesar, I argue, felt obliged to respond, and does so in BG 4 within particular constraints imposed by the nature of fides and deditio.

Gaius Marius (157-86 BC) is widely known as one of the most innovative commanders of the Roman military. In 101 BC Marius implemented an alteration to the design of the heavy legionary javelin (pilum). However, unlike Marius' previous reforms, this modification of an elemental aspect of the Roman legions was not adopted as a standard military practice. An examination of the evidence relating to the reform and of the events surrounding the time of its implementation demonstrates that the benefit of the modification was different from that currently accepted by scholars. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that the reason why this reform failed to be adopted by the legions was not that it provided no clear tactical advantage on the battlefield, but was due to the course of Roman political and military history immediately after it had first been implemented.

In a much discussed passage Pindar uses the expression when speaking of early performances of the dithyramb. The passage was famous in antiquity and before the discovery of a papyrus fragment early in the Twentieth Century, we owed our knowledge of it chiefly to citations in Athenaeus. In discussing it, Athenaeus explains the words in the context of asigmatic odes, i.e. odes in which for the sake of euphony the letter sigma was avoided or omitted altogether. This explanation remains the most commonly accepted one, though scholars continue to puzzle over it, as it is hard to see why Pindar would use the word which means ‘false’ or ‘counterfeit’ in such a context. A more natural interpretation, and one which would, I believe, have been readily accepted had it not been for the comments of Athenaeus, is that in early dithyrambic performances the ‘s’ sound was in some way impure or unauthentic when compared with current practice. In what follows, I will re-open the discussion, arguing that Athenaeus misunderstood the passage or based his explanation on a tradition which obscured its true meaning. It will be necessary in the first place to examine evidence for the pronunciation of Greek sibilants and it is here that some light may be cast upon the discussion from a rather unexpected source—the adaptation of the Greek alphabet for writing down the Middle Iranian language of Bactria.