This inscription was published with commentary by Dr H. W. Pleket in The Greek Inscriptions in the ‘Rijksmuseum van Oudheden’ at Leyden (Leiden, 1958), as no. 57. The principal discussions of it since that of Pleket have been by Mrs K. M. T. Atkinson in Revue Internationale des droits de l'antiquité, 3e sér. VII (1960), at pp. 227–72, and by Prof. W. Kunkel in Studi Betti, at pp. 593–620.

Heroides 15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer, the Greek love poet par excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks very written, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of the Heroides' illusion of female authorship.

In doing so, Sappho functions as the crucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?

This is not the age of the amateur. There is every inducement for the specialist to remain a specialist, and if he strays beyond the limits of his particular field, he will be mistrusted, and perhaps rightly. But there are times when he has no choice but to do so, and to risk the consequences; there are some fields which are so untrodden that the amateur will find himself in good company, or perhaps in no company at all. And there are times when the classicist, the Old Testament scholar, and certainly the Egyptologist will need to remind themselves that the world of the eastern Mediterranean was never a large one, and that communications in the first millennium B.C. were not so rudimentary. A month's journey could have covered much ground, or sea: and some people had the courage to travel far longer than this.

Herodotus (5.115) records how, shortly after the outbreak of the Ionian revolt, the Persians launched a counter-attack, retook Sardis in Lydia, and turned south across the river Maeander into the thickly-wooded areas beyond. It was no time to be a defender. Two disastrous engagements are recorded, together with some Herodotean numbers of dead, but the few survivors succeeded in laying a night ambush for the invading Persians, and cut them to pieces. All three Persian commanders perished. As it happened, it was no time to be a Persian.

For Stefania

The Amazon's son

Two things distinguish Phaedra's from the other letters in Ovid's Heroides. In the first place, Phaedra's is not a letter without consequences. On the contrary, it will have a decisive effect on the addressee. But above all, Phaedra's letter is important just as a letter. The very fact of Phaedra's writing a letter touches a fundamental point in the story, and a controversial one. In the Heroides problems of communication are important in themselves, but, after the gratuitous letters by Penelope, Phyllis and Briseis, this is the first (and it will remain the only one) in which the complication always caused by an epistolary intrusion into the body of the story is superimposed on a pre-existent problem. Phaedra's declaration of her love to Hippolytus is a crucial point, a turning-point for the various tragic treatments of the history. Ovid adds problem to problem.

The close association in the literature of antiquity of seeing with sexual desire inspired the tragic poet Agathon to pun on the similarity between the Greek verb ‘to see’ (ὁρᾶν) and the verb ‘to desire’ (ἐρᾶν), as suggested by a fragment preserved by Zenobius: ἐκ τοῦ γὰρ ἐσορᾶν ἐγένετ' ἀνθρώποις ἐρᾶν. As is the case with many fragments, it is difficult to identify the degree of irony (or seriousness) with which Agathon intended this isolated line, but the passage is repeated (without attribution) in a number of other ancient sources, and it perhaps lays some claim to a measure of ‘folk wisdom’: for human beings the source of erotic desire lies in an act of seeing. In his brief and pithy love-letter ‘To Nicetes’ (Epistle 52), which Nauck observes may well draw on the pun of Agathon, the third-century sophist Philostratus would similarly appeal to the association of ὀρᾶν with ἐρᾶν to refute, in an ironic way, two time-honoured maxims about erōs: that love is a ‘disease’; and that lovers are ‘blind’: οὐ τὀ ἐρᾶν νόσος ἀλλὰ τὸ μὴ ἐρᾶν· εἰ γὰρ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὁρᾶν τὸ ἐρᾶν, τυφλοὶ οἱ μὴ ἐρῶντες.

‘It is probable that Englishmen are right in counting Porson the second of English scholars, but many judges on the Continent would give that rank to Markland. He is the only one except Bentley who has been highly and equally eminent in Greek and Latin; and I believe that Bentley did him the honour, extravagant I admit, to be jealous of him.’

No judgment of Markland's scholarship will be better founded than this, written by A.E.Housman in 1920. The surmise of Bentley's jealousy gives it special colour, but there is little record of what passed between the two men. In 1718 Markland, then a newly elected Fellow of Peterhouse, represented the Regent Masters when the Caput of the University voted to deprive Bentley of his degrees. It is not known whether Markland himself thought Bentley's conduct contumelious, and within a few years, when Markland published his first book, he was writing with proper deference to the age's greatest scholar.

Constantine the Great's sons, Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans, were the first Roman emperors since Commodus (AD 180–92), Marcus Aurelius' son, to have been brought up in the imperial household and groomed as heirs apparent. Constantine II reigned for a mere three years and suffered damnatio memoriae, while our evidence for Constans is scant due to the loss of the early books of Ammianus' Res Gestae. As a result, we know little detail regarding their education and any subsequent influence it may have had upon their respective rules. Fortunately, the same is not true of their brother, Constantius, who reigned for some twenty-four years as Augustus and is the subject of seven still-extant panegyrics.

In Tom Wolfe's most recent novel, A Man In Full, a young Californian, down on his luck, converts a macho sixty-year old tycoon, facing financial ruin, to Stoicism. The young man, Conrad, has miraculously escaped from the Santa Rita gaol as a result of an earthquake. Shortly before, he had discovered Epictetus in a book called The Stoics, a book he had been sent mistakenly in place of a riveting thriller by his favourite author with the title, The Stoics' Game. He rapidly comes across this passage: ‘I [Zeus] gave you a portion of our divinity, a spark from our own fire, the power to act and not to act, the will to get and the will to avoid. If you pay heed to this, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none’ (p. 398). Conrad is hooked. An innocent among a bunch of hideous felons, he asks himself: ‘What would Epictetus have done with this bunch? What could he have done? How could you apply his lessons two thousand years later, in this grimy gray pod, this pigsty full of beasts who grunted about mother-fuckin this and mother-fuckin that?’ (p. 410). Conrad memorises chunks of Epictetus. He refers a series of challenges to Zeus, overcomes a thug twice his size, and radiates Stoic strength. At the end, hired as a male nurse in Atlanta for the massive but now ailing Croker, the about-to-be ruined tycoon, Conrad tells Croker about the Stoic Zeus and Epictetus. Croker was on the point of clinching a deal that would have saved him from bankruptcy at the cost of compromising his Georgian sense of honour. Instead, he gives a press conference, disavows all interest in wealth, parrots Epictetus to the bemused Atlanta elite, and walks away from everything that had previously defined his life. At the end we learn that he has become a highly successful televangelist, with a programme called ‘The Stoic's Hour’.

This article considers acrotelestich wordplay in the major poets of the Augustan period, with particular reference to Ovid, and analyses its main types and characteristics. The article's final section seeks to demonstrate that Ovid invented a new category, that of political acrostics and telestichs, unique to him and uniquely suited to his own experience of Augustan terror and of the need for literary subterfuge and plausible deniability.

In ‘the only coherent piece of autobiography which we possess from Horace's pen’, as Fraenkel has called it, the poet wrote these famous lines (Epist. 2.2.49–52):

unde simul primum me dimisere Philippi,
decisis humilem pinnis inopemque paterni 50
et laris et fundi paupertas impulit audax
ut uersus facerem.

As soon as Philippi discharged me thence, poverty drove me—grounded as I was, with my wings clipped, and deprived of my ancestral home and farm—boldly to produce verses.

As is remarked by Lyne, however, ‘Horace here omits an intervening and prosaic stage’. The evidence for this omission comes from Suetonius' biography of the poet, in which the same period of Horace's life is described slightly differently: ‘uictisque partibus uenia impetrata scriptum quaestorium comparauit. ac primo Maecenati … insinuatus…’ (‘after the defeat of his party and a successful request for pardon he procured the position of scriba quaestorius. And having first become involved with Maecenas…’). What was the exact sequence of events? Lyne, like Brink, proposes that Horace after Philippi derived income from his position as scriba quaestorius and that this in turn enabled him to write the poetry which eventually brought him to Maecenas' attention. Nisbet, on the other hand, thinks that Horace's early poetry elicited subsidies from ‘grandees like Pollio and Messalla’ and that these provided him with the wherewithal to buy his position as scriba, from which he was effectively relieved by his later association with Maecenas.

This paper focuses on the pair of philosophical puzzles, in the first section of Plato's Theaetetus, concerning the comparison between cardinalities and sizes. My initial task is to analyse some difficulties and distractions which affect our understanding of the argumentation that Socrates puts forward on Protagoras' behalf. I then offer a revised interpretation that integrates the puzzles with the rest of the Protagorean/Heraclitean theory. The emerging discussion, far from being a bridging passage or detour, is a unit with its own specific identity. Its goal is to stretch the Protagorean/Heraclitean metaphysics of events to a new limit: the dematerialisation of change. Change may also be the simple effect of quantitative comparisons as such. At the same time, important traces of Plato's indirect move against Protagoras are detected: the conceivability itself of this Protagorean view descends from a common application of mathematics.

On the hideous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humourist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

It is often said that amicitia, so prominent in the love poetry of Catullus, plays a negligible role in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the elegists avoid the vocabulary of amicitia and prefer to describe the relationships with their beloveds in terms of militia and seruitium amoris. In this paper, however, I shall show that this is mistaken. While the elegists do not use the vocabulary of amicitia systematically, they clearly do continue to appeal to its protocols and moral code – Ovid above all. It will be seen that Catullus and the elegists share the use of the ideology of amicitia to pressurize their beloveds to accept or make a return on the benefacta which they as lovers bestow.