Martial on a number of occasions declares himself the literary inheritor of Catullus, and repeatedly evinces that indebtedness by unmistakable echoes and adaptations of his Republican predecessor. But the Catullan legacy in Martial has not fared well at the hands of scholars. Many of the passages pertinent to the topic are industriously assembled in the secondary literature. But that literature is (it must be said) seriously deficient. Ferguson's 1963 article ‘Catullus and Martial’ is lightweight and vitiated by value judgements as to the respective worth of the two poets. Despite a disclaimer of bias, Ferguson is plainly of a mind with Muretus, who said that Martial was to Catullus as a buffoon is to a gentleman, and with Andrea Navagero, who each year burned a copy of Martial in an assertion of Catullus' superiority. A similar criticism can be levelled at Offermann's ‘Uno tibi sim minor Catullo’, which, descriptive rather than analytical, devotes a great deal of space to castigating Martial for sacrificing Catullus' intense emotionalism and to devaluing the Flavian poet in consequence; Offermann was unwilling to recognise that impassioned sincerity more Catulliano was not part of Martial's epigrammatic brief. J.K. Newman's recent treatment of Catullus and Martial, while helpful in some respects, makes much of the ‘carnivalesque’ or Saturnalian spirit which allegedly infuses the work of both poets, a claim which is valid for Martial, for the most part,8 but questionable for Catullus.

Catullus is fascinated by the subject of incest. In the last third of his collection, no less than eight pieces are devoted to this particular topic. There are, in addition, thematically significant mentions of the practice in poems 59, 64 and 67. Furthermore, China's Zmyrna, the neo-Callimachean virtues of which are famously touted in poem 95, dealt centrally with the incest of the eponymous heroine and her father Cinyras. To put the matter crudely, then, the incest-theme surfaces in roughly ten per cent of Catullus' surviving poems. But the bulk of such allusions are clustered in poems 69-116, most particularly in the cycle on Gellius (74, 88-91), who, while not disdaining an oral-genital fling with a male partner (80), suffers, according to Catullus, from a psychologically and somatically unhealthy obsession with bedding his closest female relatives. Of especial importance is poem 79, Lesbius est pulcher: it will be discussed at the close of the paper.

‘One of the unwritten chapters in the literary history of antiquity is that providing a comprehensive account of (ancient) translation.’ This statement still holds true after 20 years, and so this study will inevitably lack completeness; all it can aim at is to try to give an outline of what one might consider to be the most important issues concerning our theme.

To underline the vast quantity of material concerning our topic we might refer to a list entitled ‘Greek works translated into Latin before 1350’. This list is restricted to philosophical works only, omitting all other fields such as medicine, law, mathematics, theology, and liturgy. Nevertheless even this limited list gives the names of no less than 119 authors whose philosophical works in Greek were translated into Latin; the space needed for Aristotle alone runs to more than five pages. Thus it is easy to estimate what an enormous number of Latin translations there were, and what countless efforts must have been taken over more than one and a half millennia for this kind of literary work. One may add that there is a very helpful collection of some 90 testimonia covering the time of St. Augustine, in the book of Heinrich Marti, Übersetzer der Augustin-Zeit. There is also the basic study of Jiȓi Levỳ, which deals with modern theory, and outlines all the problems and all the facts of the art of translation.

The quaestiones perpetuae, although added to, refurbished and furnished with a definitive procedural code by Augustus, did not fare very well in the Principate or in the sources. Our view is constantly obscured by the senate and the emperor’s court, and by the praefectus urbi whenever he chooses to put in an appearance. The broad outlines are reasonably clear: Augustus sent down to the Principate a fully-formed and fully-functioning system of jury-courts, but by some time in the third century the whole system had collapsed and the bulk of the jurisdiction previously exercised by the quaestiones perpetuae was in the hands of the praefectus urbi, with a small but politically important minority of trials continuing to be brought in the senate or in the emperor’s court, as hitherto. So much for the general picture. There is less certainty about the various stages in the decline. It is clear that the problem cannot be considered as an organic whole, for different courts undoubtedly decayed at different times. Some courts, notably the quaestio maiestatis and the quaestio repetundarum, were not called upon to handle a large volume of day-to-day work at any time, and least of all when the senate and the emperor began making inroads into their spheres of competence. There is therefore no reason to assume a long currency for either of these courts, and the same can be said of the quaestio de ambitu, the quaestio de annona and the quaestio de plagiariis.

When Euripides’ Helen was first produced in 412 B.C., it seems to have created a literary sensation. We have Aristophanes’ word for it. In the Thesmophoriazusae, staged almost certainly at the Dionysia of the following year, the comic poet introduces an old relative of Euripides, who says at line 850 ‘I’m going to copy that newfangled Helen’ τήν καινήν ΈΧένψ μιμήσομαι, and this he proceeds to do by burlesquing four scenes from the tragedy.

The ancient critics were not in doubt about the purpose of the Aeneid: it was to glorify Rome and Augustus. In the Donatus-Suetonius life we read (21) ‘Last of all he began the Aeneid, a varied and complicated theme, a sort of equivalent of both Homer’s poems; also it was concerned with characters and events which were both Latin and Greek, while in it (and this was his special interest) there would be contained the origin of the city of Rome and of Augustus’ (… in quo, quod maxime studebat, Romanae simul urbis et Augusti origo contineretur). Similarly Tiberius Claudius Donatus says (Prooem. Aen. i): ‘he had to depict Aeneas as a worthy first ancestor of Augustus, in whose honour the poem was written’ (talem enim monstrare Aenean debuit, ut dignus Caesari, in cuius honorem haec scribebantur, parens et auctor generis praeberetur). And again, Servius (in the introductory note to his commentary on the Aeneid): ‘Virgil’s intention is to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus by means of his ancestors’ (intentio Vergilii haec est, Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus); and he quotes a magno demissum nomen Iulo (i 288).

I begin with a quote from W.R. Johnson on Propertius 4.11: ‘When we have finally gotten to Cornelia, whose central message is that the game of recusatio has ended, overwhelmed by her chilly sublimities and conquered by the powers of her Roman Truths and Virtues – when the performance ends and the silence begins, we may be shocked to hear Cynthia laughing loudly at the lachrymose deity and the metonymic skid that has now enfolded him.

I print the passage without a full stop until the last line, to avoid interrupting the unity of its structure:

‘The stars of slight magnitude and slight brilliance between the Rudder and the Sea-monster, lying beneath the flanks of the grey Hare, are nameless in their course; they are not cast in a resemblance to the structure of any specific figure, like the numerous constellations that pass in ordered ranks along the same paths year after year, constellations that someone in a past generation observed and thought of calling all by names, after giving them definite shapes; he could not, of course, have named or identified all the stars taken individually, because they are too numerous all over the sky, many of them are alike in magnitude and in colour, and all of them have a circling movement; therefore it seemed best to him to make the stars into groups, so that different stars arranged in conjunction with each other could represent figures; and that is how the named constellations came into being, and no star-rising is a surprise nowadays; but while the stars in general are fixed in clear-cut figures when they appear, those beneath the hunted Hare are all very dim and nameless in their course.’

The verb is translated as ‘wench’ by LSJ, λαικάστης as ‘wencher’ and λαικάστρια as ‘strumpet’. They are followed by Frisk with ‘huren’ and Chantraine with ‘forniquer’. Against the Grecians, Walde-Hofmann and Ernout and Meillet s.v. laecasin equate the Greek verb with fellare. An examination of the evidence shows that the Latinists must be right. The Grecians had no Heraeus to guide them.

The relationship of the ancient historian to his sources has not infrequently been compared to detective work. When the problem in hand is to discover the circumstances surrounding a murder, it is little wonder that ancient historians delight in retreading the same ground, encouraged by the absence of a final solution. There are a number of such mysteries thrown up by the world of antiquity, some more mysterious than others. Often there is the problem that at least one major suspect in some sense succeeded the victim in power, a dual problem in fact, since if guilty, the successor could cover up his tracks, if innocent, but nonetheless beneficiary of the death, he would incur suspicion anyway. I use the masculine pronouns, but female involvement is frequent — think of Livia and Agrippina. The case in hand is such as to excite curiosity: there seems to be an amount of evidence sufficient for a solution and the involvement of Alexander III raises tantalizing questions. Nor do we lack modern parallels to add spice to our investigation. The attempt to explain the assassination of President John Kennedy continues. Was there one gunman or, as now seems likely, two at least? Does that point to a conspiracy? There are further and more remarkable suggestions which, whatever their validity or otherwise, show a similarity with our case.

In the prologue of Terence's Eunuchus, written, according to the didascalia, in 161 BC, the author of the play defends himself against the charge of literary theft. He denies completely any knowledge on his part that the Greek plays he had combined to produce his own play had already been translated into Latin. In the alternative, he argues against the charge of comic theft by way of the very nature of stock characters. ‘If’, argues Terence, ‘a man isn't allowed to make use of the same characters [personae] as other writers, how, all the more, is he allowed to write of the running slave, to make his matrons good and his prostitutes wicked, his hanger-on greedy, his soldier arrogant; how is he allowed to have a child substituted, an old man deceived through his slave, to love, to hate, to be suspicious?’ This last line — amare odisse suspicari — aims to evoke the characteristic attitude of the comic adulescens, whose emotional vacillation is presented as just another stock aspect of the genre, a literary inheritance as clich6d as any of the comedy's archetypal stock characters. ‘Nothing is said nowadays which hasn't been said before’, concludes Terence. Mid second century BC, and the Latin literary lover is already afflicted by textual, as much as emotional, exhaustion.

This paper does not aim to establish the ‘dramatic date’ of Plato's Gorgias, nor does it seek to establish with any precision the date at which Euripides’ fragmentary Antiope was written. Nor does it aim to show that Athenian anti-intellectualism had some fixed beginning and conclusion rather than persisting, in some fashion, as long as intellectuals frequented its public places. It does, however, have aims that may easily be mistaken for these. First, while Plato was not too particular about fidelity to a dramatic date, he frequently shows a strong desire to supply an intellectual background for the views that his characters will propound and the debates that follow from them. In the case of dialogues that employ a single interlocutor that certainly tends to produce a reasonably coherent dramatic date, but what matters to Plato is not so much fidelity to history as the appropriate intellectual context.

The Nostratic Theory was first proposed by the Danish scholar, H. Pedersen, at the beginning of this century. He had observed certain similarities between Indo-European and Semitic and saw these two families of languages as belonging to our territory around mare nostrum and hence his name for this group.

Speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages were surprised that Indo-Europeanists after working on the comparative philology of IE should turn next to Semitic, but the interest in Arabic as the preserver of Greek mathematics and science and Hebrew as the language of the Old Testament inevitably suggested that Semitic had an interest for Philology as well as Theology. But there is a closer resemblance of Finno-Ugrian to Indo-European than there is between Indo-European and Semitic. Moreover, Finno-Ugrian has been in contact with and a close neighbour to the North of IE since prehistoric times. Burrow lists over 20 words of Sanskrit origin borrowed by Finno-Ugrian languages in the prehistoric period when both families of languages were in contact probably in south Russia. Strangely enough they include the Sanskrit svásar- ‘sister’ giving Finnish sisar, Mordvin sazor ‘younger sister’, Cheremis suzar id. where the survival of the sibilant is a clear indication of borrowing before the Aryan branch split into Indian and Iranian with the characteristic Iranian sound change to h as in Av. xvanhar-. It is surprising to find ‘sister’ among these loan words.

John Whittaker has again challenged the assumption that Numenius fr. 13 (des Places = fr. 22 Leemans) requires emendation at the beginning of the second sentence:

Without doubt he is correct in assuming that Numenius must have been familiar with the Judaeo-Christian manner of referring to the supreme God as ‘he who is’; one notes that other philosophers of his age, less concerned than he with Jewish religion, had adopted doctrine which would support such a formula; and it does not seem inappropriate that Numenius, who was capable of referring to this divinity as αύτοὸν (fr. 17 dP = 26 L), should use the expression ὸ ὢν as well. I have little doubt that the text does not require emendation, but I do not believe that the principal factor which has led Dodds, Thillet, and Dillon to propose emendations has been fully understood; and a more difficult problem concerning the fragment’s relation to Timaeus 41a ff. requires considerable discussion.

As the tumultuous Triumviral decades of the Republic ended and the Augustan era began, the shadow of Rome's majesty continued to envelop the shores of Judaea some 2000km to the east. King Herod had survived the struggle for dominance between Octavian (Augustus after 27 B.C.) and his rivals, Mark Antony and his ally and wife Cleopatra VII, in part by not being at Actium in 31 B.C. where the final battle in Rome's long series of civil wars was fought. Although his fealty had been to Antony, he had managed to be east of his kingdom's borders conducting a military operation against Malichus I of Nabataea, who had been accused of disloyalty by Cleopatra and Herod (Joseph. AJ 15.110).

Roman mapping can seem a mystifying process. What could any reader garner from an itinerary or a periplus – a list of successive towns and geographical features reeled off in order? The itinerary has been compared to directions given to a stranger: in both written and graphic form, it simplifies, and gives a route with a definite aim, states what is near or comes after along the route, but does not attempt to give any extraneous information about the landscape which surrounds the single route. There is no overview, no aspirations to comprehensiveness or universality.

Euripides’ Orestes is a paradox. Few critics of drama today would place it at the summit of the playwright’s achievement, on a level with the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae. In antiquity, however, it appears to have been one of the most popular Greek tragedies, performed and praised without stint. The hypothesis prefixed to the play’s text in one mediaeval manuscript called the Orestes ‘one of those dramas with a great reputation on the stage’. The comic poet Strattis referred to it as ‘a most clever play’, Menander used one of its scenes as the model for a long messenger’s speech in his Sikyonioi, and several other comedians in Athens parody or quote phrases from the play. A house in Ephesus has an incident from the Orestes painted on one of its walls. Such evidence for the play’s popularity can be corroborated further by the state of its text in the mediaeval manuscripts and by epigraphy. The former is grossly adulterated with actors’ revisions, the latter provides evidence for a performance of the play at the Dionysia of 340 B.C.

The extant Notitia Dignitatum describes itself as a list of the highest civilian and military officials of the Roman state and their administrations, or rather as two such lists, one for the parts of the empire in the East and one for the parts in the West. Each begins with a list of officials (the so-called index), followed by separate entries for these officials (the so-called chapters). These modern labels are dangerously familiarising devices which set up anachronistic preconceptions about the nature of the text and its parts. I shall refer to the two lists as the initial list and the sectional lists. The latter all have a similar structure, being divided into three parts: (i) an illustration representing the jurisdiction of the official in a primarily visual form; (ii) a list of the functions and/or other officials within his jurisdiction; (iii) a list of his bureaucratic staff. The text first surfaces in fifteenth century copies of a probably Carolingian manuscript in the Codex Spirensis.

A dominant and fascinating figure at the very beginning of the Republic is Porsenna, king of Clusium. He has been a focus of attention since the Renaissance and for the following seven centuries. Fashions in interpretation have come and gone. This essay surveys those interpretations, and attempts to sum up the complexities of contemporary scholarship.

In modern scholarship a distinctly ‘Homeric’ presentation of the ancient Macedonian kings and their court still endures, in spite of recent notes on the use of ‘artifice’ in key ancient accounts. Although the adventures and achievements of Alexander the Great are certainly imbued with epic colour, to extend those literary tropes and topoi to the rule of earlier kings (and to wider Macedonian society) is often to misunderstand and misrepresent the ancient evidence.

This paper offers a fresh review of the presentation of the early-Macedonian monarchy in the ancient sources, and considers the depiction of the Argead dynasty in both hostile and more-sympathetic accounts. It highlights the importance of another mythological model for these ancient kings: one that was supremely heroic, but not Homeric. The Argead appropriation of Heracles, Pindar’s ‘hero god’ (ἥρως θεός: Nem. 3.22), was a key part of the self-representation of successive kings. Undoubtedly the crucial paradigm for Macedonian rulers, Heracles provided them with an identity and authority that appealed to diverse audiences, and it is time to consider the subtlety of the Argead presentation of their dynasty as Heraclid.