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.

Late Antique Cyprus – autocephalous in relation to the Christian ecclesial systems of organization, with island ports accepting the traffic of continental Mediterranean cities, replete with beautiful mosaics, still echoing with the powerful voice of heresiologist-bishop Epiphanius – deserves even more attention than it has received of late. The two volumes under review attend to the island and inspire future directions for research. The collected papers in Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology between the Sixth and Eighth Centuries (2023), edited by P. Panayides and I. Jacobs, and G. Deligiannakis's A Cultural History of Late Roman Cyprus (2022) come at a moment when academic inquiry into this region and period is actively raising new questions with new data, while also reevaluating points long considered.

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.

This article looks at Byzantine dogs for the first time from the animal's point of view, i.e. not for what our textual sources tell us about their contribution to Byzantine human history, society, and culture, but for what they may enable us to trace regarding the dogs' own sensory and emotional experience, reactions and dispositions, individuality and agency. Methodologically this is made possible by using methods and insights from Animal Studies, especially by exploiting the benefits of a modern biological and ethological understanding of the nature of dogs, and of posthumanistic approaches that collapse the human–animal divide.

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.