The study of narrative, narratology, has for some decades now been a well-established subdiscipline within the large field of critical methodology. Even classical scholars generally resistant to theory have found it acceptable. In part this can be explained by its classical ancestry: it was Plato who emphasised the importance of distinguishing narrator-voice and character-voice, and Aristotle who identified some of the key elements constituting plot structured as story. Part of the success of narratology is also due to the distinction of its classical practitioners. Naturally, the main emphasis among the studies of classical texts has been upon the major narrative forms, epic and the novel; but broader examination of the whole generic range has extended the scope of this method, and the first volume of an encyclopaedic study of narrator and narration in classical literature has recently appeared.

This article explores two contrasting accounts of the exposure of Cyrus the Elder: the lengthy version in Herodotus, replete with characteristics of the infancy of royal mythological heroes, and that in Isocrates’ Philippus, in which the ekthesis implies illegitimacy and inferiority, as part of Isocrates’ political agenda. Cyrus’ alleged exposure is an ideal case study for the ambivalence of infant exposure in classical Greek discourse, either to signify heroicity in an individual destined for greatness and the founding of a dynasty (as in Herodotus), or to allude to illegitimacy and so exclude the individual from civil society (as in Isocrates).

This article analyses orthographic variation in the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos. Despite the general consistency in spelling found in Linear B texts from all sites, variation was in certain cases both permissible and entirely normal, even within the work of a single writer. Examining the patterns of orthographic variation found in the texts from Pylos, along with the factors which may have influenced this variation, sheds light on how the Mycenaean scribes were taught to write and how they applied this training in the process of creating their documents.

The Eighth Nemean has never been reckoned among Pindar's more difficult odes. It has its own problems, as does every other ode, yet beside the Seventh Nemean, for instance, or the Second Pythian, these problems pale into insignificance. But although the significance of the central myth has generally been recognized, scholars have failed, I believe, to appreciate the overall cohesion of the ode and the single-mindedness with which Pindar pursues his argument. I should like to offer a personal appreciation of this poem, to demonstrate its striking unity of design and its impressive economy. The text is based on that of A.Turyn.

Vegetius wrote his Epitoma rei militaris between 383 and 450. It survives in at least 220 witnesses designed to be complete, perhaps a dozen of them written in the ninth century. The earliest editions were all printed from inferior manuscripts, and later printers largely followed what is in many respects the worst of them, published at Rome in 1487. In the eighteenth century none of the older and better manuscripts happened to be preserved in the place that would have given it the best chance of making a mark, namely Leiden, and only G, which had reached Wolfenbüttel, seems to have been collated, first by G. Kortte, then by Wernsdorf for N. Schwebel's edition (Nürnberg 1767); not until Friedrich Haase in 1847 reported the outcome of a preliminary exploration, undertaken because he planned a corpus of ancient military tracts, did most of the others emerge. Carl Lang used several for his Teubner editions of 1869 and 1885, such a milestone that for critical purposes the earlier editions seldom repay consultation. The new Teubner edition of Alf Önnerfors, which appeared in 1995, has a fuller apparatus, but his preface sheds less light on the nature of the tradition than might have been expected; indeed, it restores darkness to areas where Lang shed light.

1. 151-7 qualiter expressum ventis per nubila fulmen
aetheris impulsi sonitu mundique fragore
emicuit rupitque diem populosque paventes
terruit obliqua praestringens lumina flamma:
in sua templa furit, nullaque exire vetante
materia magnamque cadens magnamque revertens
dat stragem late sparsosque recolligit ignes.

Of the rival interpretations of templa in 155, ‘temples’ and ‘quarters of the sky’ Housman espoused the latter; but he did not explain sua, which Weise explained as ‘loca aut regna, in quibus oritur et quasi habitat et regnat fulmen’ (‘the quarter of the sky whence it came’ Haskins). Such in fact seems the only possible interpretation, given the chosen sense of templa, despite Duff's ‘it rushes to its appointed quarter of the sky’ or Bourgery's ‘elle fond sur les lieux qu'elle consacre.’ But why should Lucan tell us this (Weise's ‘habitat et regnat’ is only his own embroidery), and so spoil his sequel? How a Roman reader would understand templa should be obvious to anyone who has read Pease's note on Cic. Div. 1.19 ipse suos quondam tumulos aut templa petivit/et Capitolinis iniecit sedibus ignis.

In the Theaetetus, after identifying Theaetetus' conjecture that knowledge is perception with Protagoras' theory that man is the measure of all things, Socrates associates this view with what he suggests may have been a ‘secret doctrine’ of Protagoras. What we say ‘is’ really is only in process of becoming: nothing is really of any definite sort. What is called white colour simply arises between the eye and the ‘motion’ which it encounters and is something peculiar to each several percipient. At this point (154b) Socrates goes on to say that ‘the thing which measures itself against the object or touches it’, like ‘the thing that we measure ourselves against’, is constantly undergoing change, for otherwise ‘when a different thing came into contact with it or were somehow modified, it, on its side, if it were not affected in itself, would not become different’. He continues, ‘For as things are we are too easily led into making statements which Protagoras and anyone who maintains the same position would call strange and absurd’, and he instances the case of six dice, which are said to be more when compared with four and fewer when compared with twelve, and himself, who is now taller than Theaetetus, but within a year will be shorter, without having lost in height (because Theaetetus is growing).

‘The shape of the whole of Britain Livy, the best of the older school, and Fabius Rusticus, the best of the moderns, have compared to an elongated scutula or a battle-axe.’

So runs the context in which these words are situated. On the surface all is plain, but when one asks further ‘what shape has Tacitus in mind?’ serious difficulties are met. Editors usually get round these by analysing the words separately and deciding on parallels from Strabo that vagueness was all that was needed, and that though Tacitus links the words with vel they need not be strikingly similar.

But this is impossible: first, Tacitus must have had in mind objects of mutually similar shape; secondly they must have had a clearly recognizable shape, which conveyed a very definite picture to the minds of those for whom Tacitus wrote. Thirdly why did Tacitus prefer oblongae scutulae vel bipenni to the descriptions of ‘the many writers who have spoken of the geography of Britain’? Tacitus does not claim that Livy and Fabius are most correct, only that they are eloquentissimi.

It is now nearly two and a half years since Mr Lobel published the fragment which he has called ‘as surprising as any recovered from the soil of Egypt’. Since then a considerable literature has grown up around the fragment. Mr Lobel with caution and Professor Page with more conviction have attributed the fragment to early Attic tragedy. But the other scholars who have written on the subject have with striking unanimity assigned it to the tragedy of the Hellenistic age, some of them with what seems to me a surprising self-assurance.

Arguments from the nature of the subject-matter seem to give little help in reaching a decision. If one party can adduce the Persae of Aeschylus and the Phoenissae and the Capture of Miletus of Phrynichus, the other can retort with the Themistocles of Mausolus and the Cassandreis of Lycophron. Leaving subject-matter aside, three main types of evidence have been brought forward, that of the style, that of the language and that of the metre. Any inference about the date based solely on the style must rest on foundations that are at least partially subjective.

The complex patterns of repetition and reversal in the Heracles have been carefully and convincingly explored. Whether dividing the play into two, three, or even four major scenes, scholars have shown that it is not simply imagery or language, but whole actions or plot-elements which recur from scene to scene, and indeed from generation to generation. A consensus has developed that the play's violent disruptions and juxta-positions of opposites work together with near-obsessive repetitions of language, plot, and myth to stage Euripides’ vision of epic valour savagely mutated into a new, moral heroism contained by a new, democratic philia.

It is appropriate that repetition, and repetition-as-reversal, should figure so largely in this drama, whose action depends on a doubly-fathered hero and whose centrepiece is the triply repeated description of an action which is itself a play within a play. In a prominent ode the chorus long for a second youth as a sign of goodness (655-72), a desire apparently realised by Heracles' reappearance from the dead. Nor is he the only one to be reborn: in the last act, Theseus' appearance, also – ultimately – from Hades (1170), redoubles Heracles' first entrance: another hero with two fathers, another monster-killer, another rescuer from the dead.

One of the most arresting of Herodotus' ethnographic tales is the famous story of Darius' anthropological investigations in which he asked certain Greeks and Indians how they treated the corpses of their parents when they died (3.38). The Greeks burned their dead parents, the Indians ate them. The Persian king asked each group how much money it would take to get them to treat the parental remains as the other group treated theirs. Each group expressed pious horror at the others' customs, each was convinced that their own practice was the proper one, the other outrageous. So, Herodotus concludes, this shows, as Pindar said, that nomos is king of all; if you were to ask any people which customs were the best (τοὺς ϰαλλίστους) of all nomoi, they would certainly choose their own.

In piscibus (sc. nascuntur) obsonatores et rhetores: thus Trimalchio concludes the sign-by-sign interpretation he gives in Petr. 39 of the astrological repositorium that has been served some chapters before (35.1–5). While the obsonatores – ‘buyers of fish’ (TLL 9.234.49–70), from ὀΨωνέω, ‘buy fish and other dainties’ (LSJ s.v.) – pose no problem, the rhetores have mystified interpreters since Peter Burman, who frankly confessed: ‘Causam non video, cum pisces vulgo muti habeantur, rhetores vero loquaces. Fortasse corrupta vox. An vectores aut veteratores? Haereo.’

The sufficiency of virtue for happiness is a central Stoic doctrine. Indeed it can be argued that it is one of the doctrines that define the Stoic position; and it was the subject of extensive controversy in antiquity, coming under attack both from Academics and from Peripatetics. And Peripatetics had a particular interest in the topic, for Aristotle had already discussed it in Nicomachean Ethics 1.8–10, in a way which, to say the least, left room for a range of divergent interpretations.

The objections that were raised against the Stoic position in antiquity differ in their degree of persuasiveness. Some indeed point to fundamental differences of opinion of the sort that are not easily, if at all, reconcilable by argument. But others simply misinterpret or misrepresent the Stoic position. It is with some of the latter that the present paper will chiefly be concerned. Its aims are therefore limited even though the issue is important.