This article argues that the Virgilian narrator’s account of Juno’s anger at the outcome of the Judgement of Paris at Aen. 1.25–7 contains an allusion, which seems to have gone unnoticed, to a prologue transmitted in some manuscripts of the Rhesus attributed to Euripides. It also discusses the problem of the origin of this prologue. Finally, it suggests some interpretative possibilities arising from recognition of the allusion.

In recent years there has been a marked escalation in the study of Graeco-Roman associations. Useable data for recreating associational groups usually derive from the inscriptions embedded in stone monuments that have survived in the material record. Because data of this kind usually originate from groups with middling economic resources, it is imperative to focus particular attention on any data emerging from groups lower on the socio-economic scale. The second-century b.c.e. papyrus fragments of SB 3.7182 from Philadelphia in Egypt are a prime resource in this regard, surfacing from what must have been one of the most inconspicuous of associations. This article offers a detailed investigation of the general prosopography of the low-level association comprising a few enslaved men. It proposes that ten meetings are evident in the heavily damaged associational ledgers; that the association consisted of enslaved members of three distinct households; that a subscription or epidosis was collected at one meeting; and that we get a rare glimpse of low-level generosity enacted within the association in relation to the payment of membership fees, as well as an extremely rare glimpse of the agency of the enslaved.

Alexandrian poetry is mostly characterized by the metrical forms of the hexameter and the elegiac distich, but also provides evidence of experimental attempts to innovate formal aspects of rhythm and metre. Taking inspiration from the archaic tradition of monody and song-making, especially in the third century b.c. poets toyed with verse forms that allowed them to ‘widen the repertory’ of metres available for the composition of literary poems,1 using them in stichic forms, as markers of poetic expertise. This article explores some of these experiments and aims at unveiling the Hellenistic reuse of metres from the archaic tradition of lyric poetry (such as the greater asclepiad and the pherecratean) to evoke specific narrative tropes, thus generating literary associations through metre.

The drinking party at Medius’ in Babylon on 31 May 323 b.c., marking the onset of Alexander’s terminal illness, is explored from contemporary and later texts. Close reading of fragments by Nicobule and Aristobulus, set beside the reticence of the court daybooks (Ephemerides) and the studied vagueness of secondary sources, clarifies in detail the sequence of events. Justin, Plutarch and the author of the Liber de morte Alexandri cast light on the silence imposed by the King’s successors. A narrative emerges of the day itself, the spread of rumour, the two false explanations for Alexander’s death that were successively propagated, and the third explanation, most probably correct, that Aristobulus was first to publish.

Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was one of three Roman legati sent to Greece in 201/200 b.c.e. and ended up confronting Philip V of Macedon at Abydus. Scholars have debated whether this young man was already a senator by 201 or had yet to become one. This paper argues that he had actually been a senator since 216, enrolled in Buteo’s extraordinary lectio of one hundred and seventy-seven new senators, after he had gained a corona ciuica and spolia ex hoste during the early stages of the Hannibalic War.

This article analyses a passage of Plutarch which relates that Alexander the Great visited Cyprus and appointed the gardener Abdalonymus, descendant of the Cinyrads, as king of Paphos. While historical records attest to a king Abdalonymus in Sidon, Plutarch’s account is clearly ahistorical. Alexander never set foot in Cyprus, and Abdalonymus never ruled over Paphos. The transfer of the story from Sidon to Cyprus was not a simple factual mistake, however, but a deliberate political and propagandistic device, created by an unknown author with strong Ptolemaic interests, most likely in conjunction with the establishment of Ptolemaic dominion over Cyprus by Ptolemy I. Through the long-standing Ancient Near Eastern tradition of royal gardening symbolism, which significantly influenced the island and the Levant, the story aims to legitimize the new Ptolemaic rule in Paphos, the capital of Ptolemaic Cyprus. By lending a venerable air to the new order, the story offers an alternative narrative to the dramatic death of Nicocles, the last king of Paphos and priest of the local great-goddess, who claimed descent from Cinyras and eventually committed suicide under pressure from Ptolemy I.

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 this note I argue that the generally accepted view that Diodorus preserved a tradition which limited the fourth-century anarchy in Rome to one year is groundless, and that the author’s confused chronology of the Early and Middle Republic strongly suggests that in the source he followed the solitudo magistratuum lasted several years, as in other reports.

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 paper argues that the unknown editor of Ad M. Caesarem et inuicem arranged the letters in their non-chronological order so as to create a work that is essentially historical fiction, providing the reader with a romanticized version of the early life of Marcus Aurelius, a Marcopaedia of sorts or even a quasi-prequel to the Meditations. The paper demonstrates that the anomalous Book 5—full of shorter, less elaborate letters—can be read not only as an appendix composed of leftover letters but also as a part of the broader narrative. Book 5 creates a sense of closure to the epistolary fiction created by the editor. In particular, this article focusses on the recurrent motif of Fronto’s health; the frequent references to Fronto’s illness work in a metaliterary fashion to signal the impending conclusion of the work, creating a sense of resolution for the health/sickness letters appearing in Books 1–4. The sickness/health topic also connects to certain philosophical topoi regarding death, illness and consolation—a connection that is appropriate in light of the young Marcus’ burgeoning interest in philosophy.

This article offers a critical evaluation of Bernard Williams’s influential account of ancient Greek historiography and the place of ancient Greek thought in the early history of ideas in his last book Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, 2002). It argues that such an evaluation is warranted now not only because Williams’s stance continues to influence how Herodotus and Thucydides are viewed by scholars outside of classical studies; more importantly, it also opens up the field of classical studies itself to a much needed engagement with those ideas from Williams’s influential study that can be productively applied to the study of Herodotus and Thucydides.

The first part consists of a critical appraisal of Williams’s views in light of current classical scholarship on early Greek historiography. The second part makes the case for why Herodotus rather than Thucydides would have served as the better example for Williams to explore the historical conditions and intellectual milieu that led to the emergence of truth and truthfulness as a problem in the Western historiographic tradition. Drawing on recent classical scholarship, the article shows that it was Herodotus, rather than Thucydides, who first conceived of the truth as a problem; that it was him rather than Thucydides who first grappled with sincerity and accuracy as the values that Williams identifies as fundamental to the truth-claims embedded in the historiographic tradition.

The article thus suggests that the history of truthfulness as a relational concept that binds together author and audience in a mutual contract of trust should start with him rather than Thucydides. It shows how Williams’s account of truth as a social value that binds author and audience together in a mutual contract of trust can be productively applied to the study of Herodotus’ Histories. A conclusion focuses on the role that has typically been attributed to the ancient world in genealogical accounts of the history of ideas.

This note discusses two places in Statius’ Thebaid (6.22 and 6.224), in which the transmitted text may be improved, and proposes new emendations.

This article argues that a joke about the demagogue Hyperbolus in Aristophanes’ Peace (685–7) can be illuminated by a reconsideration of the meaning of the little-attested word περιζωσάμενος in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3), where it describes how Cleon dressed in an unconventional manner when appearing before the assembly. In recent translation of and commentary on the Aristotelian text there appears to have been no investigation of the meaning of περιζωσάμενος in Greek comedy: readers are informed that Cleon either hitched up his (unspecified) clothing or somehow fastened his cloak to allow him to make gestures with both hands. However, the philological and material-cultural evidence presented here points to something more specific and more dramatic. Elsewhere in classical and later Greek the word περιζώννυσθαι means belting or knotting something around the waist and is most frequently found in contexts of manual labour. Here, it is argued that the import of Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3 is that Cleon spoke to the assembly dressed for work in his family’s tannery—a powerful symbol of his allegiance to the manual-labouring demos and his antagonism towards the aristocratic elite. It is to his unconventional self-fashioning that Aristophanes alludes in Peace when he jokes that after Cleon’s death the naked demos has wrapped itself (περιεζώσατο) in Hyperbolus, the new leader of the people.

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 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.