This note presents a new supplement for Euripides, Heracles 767.

This article discusses Ovid’s allusive engagement in Tr. 1.2.75–80 with his own earlier works, as well as with the works of his elegiac predecessors—Propertius and Tibullus—and of Catullus. It is argued that this suggestive intertextuality may point toward Ovid’s re-articulation of his conceptualization of elegy as it is now to be written from exile.

The lion’s share of attention given to the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas has focussed—not unreasonably—on Perpetua, the eponymous heroine, and on the ways in which her voice and character have been manipulated. But she is not the only figure in this text who is made to sing a tune. This article concentrates on the two military characters mentioned in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas—Pudens, optio carceris, and the unnamed tribunus—to suggest that we should pay more attention to the deployment and characterization of minor martyrological characters. An examination of Pudens and the tribune reveals previously understudied facets of the text, such as the anonymous Editor’s hand in attempting to stitch together Perpetua’s diary with his own concluding narrative, and the anxiety of the Carthaginian Christian community to be positively recognized by Roman authority figures. Finally, this examination contributes to previous debates over the text’s original language and date of composition, suggesting that the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas was written in Latin in the early third century—against a recent charge that the text is a late antique forgery.

In the Laws, Plato argues that legislation must not only compel, but also persuade. This is accomplished by prefacing laws with preludes. While this procedure is central to the legislative project of the dialogue, there is little interpretative agreement about the strategy of the preludes. This article defends an interpretation according to which the strategy is to engage with citizens in a way that anticipates their progress toward a more mature evaluative outlook, and helps them grow into it. The article shall refer to this strategy as proleptic engagement. While the virtuous ways of life required by law are intimately connected to happiness, the preludes do not persuade by spelling out this connection. Rather, they persuade by telling citizens what they need to hear so that they can come to appreciate this connection for themselves, in the context of their own lives. While the preludes are many and varied, this article argues that all preambular material can be understood as proleptic engagement.

This note argues for the restoration of the MS reading ἀέξϵι in Orph. fr. 779d v. 5 Bernabé (= 287 Kern), which transmits verses from the poem Πϵρὶ ἐπϵμβάσϵων (On Planetary Entrances) attributed to Orpheus.

This article combines allegorical, symbolic and metaphorical readings with modern theoretical approaches (primarily, affect theory) to explore the representations of objects and bodies within Peristephanon 9. In Prudentius’ poem, the tortured body of Cassian overlaps with the tormented soul of the poet; the written text is both a co-actor in Cassian’s death and a vehicle for the perpetuation of his extra-textual memory. Figurative language provides words and concepts with new meanings so that a pen can transform into a sword, writing into torture. Through a process of materialization and resemantization, the physical objects become agents in the narrative construction.

Uncertainty about the pragmatic context, the fundamental content and hence the philosophical significance of Xenophanes B6 DK prevents this comparatively extensive fragment from playing much of a role in scholarly discussions. This essay reviews interpretations of that difficult text and then offers a new reading which arguably better accords with the preserved Greek, Xenophanes’ other fragments and ritual custom. It is also suggested how B6 fits in with Xenophanes’ philosophical and specifically ethical concerns as evidenced in other fragments.

One of the tendencies among scribes who transmitted the corpus Philonicum was to divide treatises into smaller units. This article argues that Philo’s De gigantibus and Quod Deus sit immutabilis were originally a single treatise that scribes split in an effort to create thematic unities for each half. Two lines of evidence support this conclusion. There is significant evidence that the two treatises circulated as a single work in antiquity. The most important evidence lies in the titles. Eusebius knew a compound title for a single work and the eighth-century compilers of the Sacra parallela attributed fragments from Quod Deus sit immutabilis to De gigantibus. The second line of evidence is internal. De gigantibus is noticeably shorter than any other treatise in the Allegorical Commentary with the exception of De sobrietate that may be incomplete. More importantly, the work concludes with an internal transitional phrase that introduces the citation that opens Quod Deus sit immutabilis. While Philo creates a bridge between treatises, this is an internal transition marker. For these reasons, we should discontinue following the scribal tradition and reunite the two halves of Philo’s treatise.

This article proposes a new emendation to a problematic passage from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problêmata, section 19. It surveys prior editors’ strategies for emending the passage and explains why the new proposal is preferable. This emendation also is supported by the Latin manuscript tradition, as a concluding discussion of Bartholomew of Messina’s Latin translation reveals.

In Plato’s Statesman , the stranger compares the statesman to a weaver. The modern reader does not know a priori how the statesman and the weaver resemble one another and therefore could be compared, but Socrates the younger reacts as if the comparison is natural. This note suggests, with reference to the gender division of labour in ancient Greece, that the male ‘weaver’ did not do much weaving but was a supervisor, which means that the fundamental similarity between a statesman and a weaver is that both managed subordinates. This cultural knowledge explains why the comparison seems natural to Socrates the younger.

Nemesianus’ eclogues are an important witness to the development of classical culture, being the last extant collection of bucolic poems before the dramatic socio-political shifts of the fourth century. Within his reuse of Virgilian and Calpurnian characters, tropes and narrative structures, however, resides a consciousness of contemporary issues political, societal and cultural. In none of the third-century poet’s four eclogues is this more apparent than in his programmatic first. This article reads Nemesianus’ inaugural eclogue as a fictionalization of such concerns, analysing its thematic structure with a view to the poet’s historical context. Amidst the preoccupation with loss, senectitude and nostalgia, it becomes clear that Nemesianus intended his eclogues—with the first as its primary expression—to be a poetic response to the crises of his era, one which finds recourse not in hoping for a new political Golden Age but in the consolatory and preservative power of a poetry oriented towards—and reverent of—the past.