If we look to the Protagoras for philosophical lessons, it may seem an irritating patchwork of niggling argument, irrelevant digressions, false starts and downright fallacy. Read as a play in which the most outstanding and individual minds of a brilliant period meet and engage in a battle of wits, it will give a different impression. That is how it should be read. A serious discussion of the nature of virtue, and how it is acquired, must be left, as Protagoras said, for another occasion - and, we may add, for different company: it is not to be achieved in the competitive atmosphere of a public gathering of Sophists.

The Protagoras is palpably interested in character, vividly reviving a lost intellectual generation. But it also seems to argue for a conclusion, albeit a very provisional one. How should we relate the dialogue's array of luminaries to its argument? A reader may be tempted, as in the quotation above, to use the dialogue's literary lustre merely to excuse its arguments from charges of philosophical clumsiness. But by the end of the work we have been shown apparently successful arguments for the unity of virtue, with Protagoras' attempt at a counter-example refuted (360d8–e5).

Five forms of the modal particle are attested in ancient Greek (ἄν, κε, κεν, κᾱ, and κ’). This article argues that ἄν is an inherited particle, and that the k-forms were the result of reanalysis of prevocalic οὐκ and εἰκ (i.e. εἰκ was reanalysed as εἰ κ’), supported by the vestiges of an old topicalising/conditional force of the IE particle *kwe (which appears elsewhere in Greek as connective τε). The attested forms in Greek grew out of *kwe in contexts where an adjacent u caused the labiovelar *kw > k (West Greek κᾱ was influenced by indefinite *kwā). The form κεν is a creation of epic diction.

This article demonstrates that the spatial category of depth is crucial for understanding Aeschylus' Persians. Underground spaces are often symbolically represented in Greek drama not only on a vertical axis but also by the interior of the stage-building (skene). By investigating the connections between ‘interiority’ and ‘depth’, this article argues that the most economical and effective reconstruction of Darius' apparition is to suppose that he emerged from the interior of the skene, whose existence at this date is often disputed. The article furthermore analyses the multifaceted concept of the earth in the Persians, to suggest new ways in which underground, ground and interior spaces can be connected holistically to other spatial and natural imagery.

This article presents some fresh evidence in favour of recognising in a series of late testimonia on Hipponax the vestiges of a poem in which the iambist recounted his poetic initiation. It argues that Herodas alludes to such a poem in the opening of his programmatic Mimiamb 1 and in his own account of poetic investiture in Mimiamb 8. Finally, the article attempts an interpretation of this proposed new fragment of Hipponax with the aim of teasing out some of its implications for his poetics.

The third part of the Timaeus, where the account is focused on the cooperation of reason and necessity, has received far less attention than the opening two sections. Particularly, the description of irrigation, digestion and respiration constitutes a challenging passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by scholarly research. Virtually the only modern explanation for the passage was devised by Cornford, and despite several inaccuracies it has been unanimously accepted by all commentators. This paper will challenge Cornford's interpretation, and use some modern biological concepts to provide an alternative approach to the passage more compatible with an actual human body.

The Freudian engagement with the classical world represents one of the most important and intriguing episodes in the ongoing dialogue between antiquity and modernity. That Freud returned to antiquity to formulate his revolutionary theories of the human mind should strike classicists and psychoanalysts alike as a fascinating enigma. And yet classicists have to a large extent given short shrift to this issue. They have not only shown themselves indifferent to the question of why Freud takes the ancient world as the starting-point for his examination of modern man, they have also, by and large, rejected psychoanalysis as a methodological tool for providing insights into the classical world. Even those classicists who are most open to the benefits of contemporary theory have largely isolated psychoanalysis as a uniquely inappropriate methodology for understanding antiquity.

So, for instance, those classicists who display an interest in the complex series of discourses and practices which surround the construction of the ancient self have explicitly distanced their analyses from the insights of psychoanalysis. Thus in Christopher Gill's 500-page work on ‘Personality’ in Greek culture, Freud gets a mere three perfunctory citations.

A mock theogony from Cratinus' Chirones seems straightforward and uncomplicated evidence of the jibes of the comic poets against Pericles. The source for this fragment, Plutarch's Life of Pericles, chapter 3, in fact connects it with the usual sallies of the archaia about the shape of Pericles' head. Yet, the fragment equally reflects the presence of contemporary opposition in Periclean Athens against the statesman. Plutarch simply covers the density of its allusion, which is something beyond the comic resource of attacking marked peculiarities of appearance of politically prominent individuals: the Homeric-style hapaxκεΦαληγερέταν alludes to the deformity of Pericles' head but also to his demagogic ability to assemble the masses in the so-called ‘language of the gods’.

Many questions are, however, posed when we attempt to account for the allegories or the analogies the passage establishes. As Hanow wondered back in 1830: verum quidΧρόνος πρεσβυγενήςad Periclem faciat, non reperio; quamquam certam quandam rem a Cratino spectatam arbitror. The main purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the fragment afresh, in the hope of showing that the source for the parody of this piece of Cratinus may be traced elsewhere than so far suggested, and that there is good reason for Stasis and Chronus fathering this sinister infant.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Statius' Thebaid is a rarity. More of the surviving Latin epics of the classical period are incomplete or unfinished than not: Lucan's Bellum civile, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Statius' Achilleid, perhaps Silius Italicus' Punica and of course Virgil's Aeneid (although his dissatisfaction may relate to polish rather than scope: we do not know). Only Ovid's Metamorphoses and Statius' Thebaid seem complete. Yet the question of epic endings casts a fascination upon critics, especially perhaps where the ending does not exist or where there is evidence that it is not the ending planned by the author. Critics use their interpretations of the endings to inscribe meaning in the preceding text and to clinch one reading against another. The readings advanced enact different kinds of closure or refuse to see any closure at all.

It seems paradoxical that one of the few epics to survive complete has not yet received a full stint of attention devoted to its ending. In this paper, my purpose is to situate the end of the Thebaid in its literary and ideological context. This involves examining how the close of the poem interacts with earlier epic, particularly with the Aeneid. My argument is that Statius offers a supplement to, or even a critique of, the open-endedness of the Aeneid in the form of a triptych of resounding endings. I shall then suggest that there are other elements in Statius' closural strategy which are highlighted by a consideration of his Romanisation of his Greek material.

The relationship between poetry and the visual arts is seldom close and never simple. But special difficulties attend the study of it in the eighth century before Christ in Greece, when evidence is not only in excessively short supply but, when it does come, is almost by definition ambiguous. On the whole question of the interpretation of Late Geometric vase-painting and other eighth-century art, there are well-established opposing positions: each new discovery finds a different interpretation on the part of what may be called the optimists – those who seek for correspondences between the Homeric epics and the visual arts – and of the sceptics, who habitually argue that there is no evidence for anything of the kind. Each party appears to have found an outlet for the promulgation of its view, inasmuch as many general or semi-popular accounts of Geometric and other early Greek art present it as having a major mythological content derived from epic poetry; while many closer scholarly studies, deploying an array of iconographical learning and strict logic, nowadays reach the opposite conclusion, that there is little or no narrative content of any kind, mythological or otherwise, and no significant contact with epic, until the end of the Geometric period.

This paper investigates the visual recreation of Helen in the medium of cinema by using as case studies two runaway productions of the 1950s: L'amante di Paride starring Hedy Lamarr and Helen of Troy with Rosanna Podestà in the title role. Examination of features such as costumes, makeup and hairstyle shows that in the former film Helen's representation is informed by and seeks to capitalize on Lamarr's status as a queen of glamour, equating Greek royalty with Hollywood royalty. The analysis of the second film explores further the homology between ancient and modern celebrity on screen and in extra-cinematic discourses, and shows how Podestà's stardom was built on and remained anchored in Helen's iconicity.

§1. The Homeric case form in -ϕι corresponds to the Indo-European instrumental plural morph *-bhi(s)2 which roughly corresponds to the senses of the English preposition with, expressing both the instrument of verbal action (‘He killed Dr Black with the lead piping’) and the notion of comitativity (‘He was with Col. Mustard’): yet Homeric -ϕι seemingly stands as a generic oblique case marker in all numbers. Except for literary dialects in which it may be regarded as an epic feature, it was unparalleled in Greek until the decipherment of Linear B demonstrated that Mycenaean knew a case form spelled -pi, which may be taken as standing for /-phi/ (the Linear B script making no distinction between the voiced, voiceless and aspirated stops), functioning probably only as a plural, and in declensions other than the thematic. While -ϕι and -pi have a certain degree of overlap in their function and formations, the Homeric and Mycenaean forms also show significant differences; this paper examines and attempts to explain those differences.

Xenophon records that in 371 an embassy was sent from Athens to Sparta in order to negotiate a settlement. His account contains several peculiar features concerning both the procedure of the embassy and the personnel employed. To submit the historical writings of Xenophon to close and detailed scrutiny is often an unrewarding task, yet it is well to bear in mind that at the time of the events under discussion Xenophon, who had been exiled from Athens, was resident in the Peloponnese and he ought therefore to have been in a position to combine an understanding of the political workings of Athens with a knowledge of what went on in Sparta.

We read that Callias the son of Hipponicus, Autocles the son of Strombichides, Demostratus the son of Aristophon, Aristocles, Cephisodotus, Melanopus and Lycaethus, seven names in all, were sent as envoys, and further that the popular orator Callistratus was also present in Sparta. Included in the account are three speeches which at first sight are discordant and which Xenophon attributes to Callias, Autocles and Callistratus.

Theocritus, Idyll 26 is short, starkly dramatic, and highly puzzling. Gow (1952) and his predecessors generally regarded it as bad, or even un Theocritean; and many of its details remain obscure. Lines 27–32 in particular present acute problems; and, as Gow (1952) II.475 wrote, ‘no explanation of the poem as a whole can be satisfactory unless it accounts for these mysterious lines’. No ancient scholia survive (except for scraps in P3), and Idyll 26 in isolation offers scant indications of a cultural or social context. In consequence any new attempt to increase understanding of Idyll 26 must inevitably be speculative, particularly when it moves from text-based, literary aspects to more general questions about the idyll. Such an effort may, however, seem more worthwhile nowadays, when the characteristics of professional hellenistic poetry can more easily be recognised in Idyll 26.

Pausanias' qualities as a historian have long been the subject of scholarly attention, not least because some of his historical accounts present modern commentators with seemingly insurmountable problems. In fact, there is no denying that at times, Pausanias gets his history spectacularly wrong. Such apparent errors are all the more problematic because Pausanias' version is sometimes incompatible with major historical works which he, as a very well-read man, should have known. Do we have to assume that Pausanias sometimes chose to present historical accounts which he himself could identify as inaccurate or at least as clashing with other literary works?

In this article I investigate Pausanias' description of Mantinea which contains two of the most blatant examples of his inaccurate historical accounts, both set in the third century BC, and both incompatible with alternative sources: we are offered a lengthy description of a battle that probably never took place, and Pausanias' version of Mantinea's fate after its defeat in 222 BC seems a complete reversal of what Polybius reported much closer to the time. I use these examples to demonstrate how such idiosyncratic versions of history could develop and survive within their local context, and why they may have seemed an attractive addition to Pausanias' Periegesis.

In his Panathenaicus, which was issued in 339 BC, Isocrates condemns Athenians for their rampant bribery:

[Formerly] those who had been elected to office were expected to neglect their own property, and also to abstain no less from those perquisites (λημμάτων) which nowadays the officials have become accustomed to gain than from the sacred treasures; who under the current circumstances would have such sense of self-restraint? (Isoc. 12.145)

There are many references suggesting that the Athenians not only deplored but also had strict attitudes towards bribery, which they considered to be a distinct crime. What should not be overlooked, however, is that the Greeks had their traditional values concerning gifts and reciprocity, according to which they were expected to give in return when given something. In so-called Homeric society gift-giving was one of the most fundamental principles of social relationships, as is notably pointed out by M. I. Finley. That the Greek word dôra, which is most commonly used to mean bribery, originally refers to gifts in general epitomises the ambivalence of Greek values concerning bribery.

Classics has been characterised as both a radical and a conservative discipline. Classical reception studies has enjoyed exploring this paradox: antiquity has provided an erotic example for modern homosexual counter-culture as well as a model for running exploitative empires. This article brings these aspects of reception studies together, to examine how the Victorian homosexual reception of the ancient Greeks was framed and worked out in a particular imperial context at the end of the nineteenth century.