Almost everything we know of Michael Marullus – Greek exile, Neoplatonist, mercenary soldier – is mediated by his poetry, much of which seems positively to invite biographical decoding. The poet tells us he was conceived in the year Constantinople fell to the Turks (1453), after which his family fled, via Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), to Italy. Here he grew up under the Iliadae … tecta Remi (Siena?), received an excellent education, and from an early age was frequenting the humanist academy of Giovanni Pontano at Naples. Marullus reports that when just seventeen, fate tore him away from his studies and plunged him into a military career (Epig. 2.32.71–3). Between wars, both abroad and within Italy, he composed Latin poetry – including four books of controversial ‘pagan’ hymns –, edited Lucretius, and fraternised with such prominent figures in the literary and intellectual culture of the day as Jacopo Sannazaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Severed from an eventful life by a fittingly dramatic death, Marullus drowned in an attempt to cross the river Cecina in full flood. His poetic talents were much appreciated in his own time, for example by Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas More. The love lyrics to ‘Neaera’, though perhaps stiff and conventional to modern taste, inspired Ronsard. His untimely death drew Latin epitaphs from all over Italy.

This article examines the character and identity of Seneca's Medea. Focusing on the recognition scene at the end of the play, I investigate how Medea constructs herself both as a literary figure and as an implied human personality. The concluding scene of Seneca's Medea raises crucial questions about self-coherence and recognisability: in contrast to other moments of anagnōrisis in Greco-Roman drama, it confirms the pre-existing facets of Medea's identity, rather than revealing new ones. This concept of recognition as self-confirmation is also integral to Seneca's Stoic view of human selfhood, and Medea's use of Stoic principles in this play reinforces her dual status as textual entity and quasi-person.

A paradox is like a pun. It is also like a Delphic oracle. For in all three cases, we escape puzzlement, or spoil the joke, when we interpret, when we follow the tracks of the words and disentangle their meaning. So paradoxes are about words - either about the relation between one word and another, or about the relation between words and the world; and the punch of the paradox is delivered by its verbal content. Thus it is characteristic of a good paradox that its verbal content is vicious: paradoxes are very often self-referential, such as ‘Please ignore this notice’.

Paradoxes may be classified according to two main types. Firstly, there are the innocuous paradoxes which tell - or point the way to - a surprising truth. The Socratic Paradoxes, for example, are paradoxical because to say ‘No-one does wrong willingly’ is to contradict the phenomena. But deeper reflection upon Socrates' moral psychology and his account of the good life, might make us concede the truth of his dictum. Certainly it is Socrates' view that we all hold beliefs that entail his thesis. Similarly Heracleitus tells the truth that we cannot step into the same (in all respects) river twice; although if we concede that the waters may flow without damaging the identity of the river, what he says is false. Thus ordinary paradoxes tend to have two faces - their initial, paradoxical one, where they appear false, and their truth, apparent upon reflection.

Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile at Aene.d 1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear.

It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce.

These two chapters (642 b 5–644 a 11) form a continuous argument in which Aristotle offers three reasons for rejecting ‘dichotomy’—a misnomer, as it turns out. It is the only passage where he mentions dichotomy, and the three reasons against it do not appear in his discussions of Division elsewhere. They are:

1. 1. The final differentia of a dichotomy is inadequate to mark out the species;

2. 2. Dichotomy cannot avoid splitting up natural kinds, like Birds;

3. 3. Dichotomy cannot make use of privative differentiae (στερήσεις).

The rest of his argument is in support of these three reasons, as I will try to show. It falls into separate sections in which he adduces various rules and practices of Division to show that if Dichotomy is properly conducted according to these rules it cannot work. The rules that he gives here are all found elsewhere, with one minor exception at 643 a 35 which is applicable only to zoology. Neither here nor elsewhere does he suggest that division in general is unsound or useless. (He denies that it can prove, but allows that it helps towards finding a definition, An. Pr. 1. 31; An. Post. 11. 5 and 13.) True, dichotomy is a particular kind of division. But having shown that it is useless in zoology, he replaces it with another kind of division.

If we remember anything about Cicero's political ideas, it is that he believed in the right and duty of the senate to exercise supremacy in Rome, but that he also advocated a concordia ordinmi, an alliance between and recognition of the common interests of senators and equites, to whom property and the status quo were sacred. Closely connected with this is the idea of a consensus omnium bonorum, a wider alliance to include most of the plebs, and Italy. In the service of this ideal of unity he believed that the conservative statesman should be concordiae causa sapienter popularis, though he should consult the true interests of the people even more than their wishes; and that all government should be mild and conciliatory. These are the views by which we distinguish him from his more obstinate optimate contemporaries, above all Cato, who are less flexible, more rigidly reactionary. Although, since Strasburger's famous study of Concordia Ordinum, students of Cicero ought to have been prepared to pursue some of these beliefs of his back into the Roman past, too many historians and biographers still give the impression that they were Cicero's own invention (and an unhappy and unrealistic one too, it is often implied). But this is rash. Cicero, pace some of his detractors, was an intelligent man; but he was not a man of deeply original mind, as would be generally admitted. His greatness lay not in originality, but in the life and form that he could give to the Roman tradition, enriching or illuminating it, sometimes even criticising it, from his knowledge of Greek history and thought.

We should be chary therefore of supposing that Cicero's political programme was wholly his own; and, where a programme on a practical level is concerned, we should probably look more closely for Roman than for Greek sources. The first place to search is of course in a man's immediate family background, its position, traditions and contacts. This is true of all ages and places; but it is especially true of Rome. In the recent and justified reaction against the idea of fixed family parties, allied to or warring with certain other families from generation to generation, we are in danger of forgetting that family tradition in a broad sense was often very important. Cicero explains in the de officiis how one should imitate not only the maiores in general, but one's own maiores in particular – thus successive Scaevolae have become legal experts, and Scipio Aemilianus emulated the military glory of the first Africanus.

For over 2000 years views of the Persian empire founded by Cyrus c. 550 B.C. and conquered by Alexander in the space of ten years between 334 and 323 have been constructed on the basis of Greek literary sources (in which I would include historical works, such as Herodotus' histories) and some sections of the Old Testament. Despite the fundamental ‘honesty’ of Herodotus' account, the fact that the focus of his history centered on the Greco-Persian conflict of 480/79 and aimed to explain the unexpected Persian defeat which had such enormous repercussions for Greek political and cultural development, means that his work serves to commemorate for us the ineffectiveness of the Achaemenid style of imperialism and to emphasize its ultimate failure. A failure epitomized at the very end of Herodotus' work (9.122), where Cyrus, the wise ‘father’ of the empire, is made to utter a prophetic warning about the enfeebling dangers of successful imperial expansion particularly when connected with the system of ‘oriental despotism’. The implication, given the detailed descriptions of Xerxes and the huge Persian army's defeat at the hands of a small number of Greeks, is that by the time of the Persian wars the rulers of the empire had lost their former rugged strength and had been seduced by the soft life offered them by the countries they had defeated: the conquerors had been taken captive by their victims and emasculated.

Altogether in his History Thucydides finds occasion to mention about 530 persons, of whom 496 are men, twenty-two are heroes, seven are gods and six are women. Most of these people are never introduced or described in any way, so that the mere presence of an introductory phrase or description in itself may be thought to have some significance. Especially, Thucydides is notoriously reticent about the private and personal affairs of his public characters; so that any exceptions to that rule ought to be interesting. Especially interesting, as I see it, is anything that he may see fit to tell us, that he evidently judges to be something we need to know about a man before he makes his first appearance, or before he begins the particular course of action that is just about to be described. That is the point of using the phrase ‘when introducing persons’ in the title of this paper.

ALCMAN 58 (D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci) = 38 Bergk; 36 Diehl.

It is not Aphrodite, but wild Eros plays like a boy (or ‘like the boy he is’), coming down over the tips of the galingale flowers: don't touch them!

There are no serious textual variants; Bentley's παῖς looks a certain supplement. The context in which the fragment is quoted (Hephaestion 13. 6, p. 42 Consbr.) is a discussion of the cretic; the lines are cited as a metrical example, without reference to their meaning.

Meineke's comment on the passage was sensus non plane liquet, but it is tempting to go further, because this is the earliest extant reference to Eros at play, an idea that was to be interestingly influential in later poetry.

An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. [Sir Henry Wotton (Seventeenth century).]

A seemingly straightforward passage in Thucydides' history offers a good point of departure for the elucidation of an ambiguity which bedevils ancient texts but has received little attention in modern research:

After the disaster in the Sicel country (413 BC) the Syracusans gave up the idea of an immediate attack on the Athenians. Meanwhile Demosthenes and Eurymedon, now that their forces from Corcyra and from the mainland were ready, crossed the Ionian gulf with the whole of their expedition to the headland of Iapygia. Setting out from here, they put in at the Iapygian islands called the Choirades, and took on board 150 Iapygian javelin-throwers of the Messapian tribe. Then, after they had renewed an old friendship (ἀνανεωσάμενοί τινα παλαιὰν φιλίαν) with Artas, the local ruler who had provided the javelin-throwers, they went on and reached Metapontum in Italy. (Thuc. 7.33.3–4, adapted from the translation by Rex Warner, as are all quotations from Thucydides in this article)

Comme tous les Grecs, il n'a pas pu ne pas embellir ce qu'il a touché. On retrouve en lui cet éminent esprit d'une race privilégiée qui dans les sujets les plus arides fait pénétrer l'art et même la poésie. … même en quittant … le Périple d'Arrien, nous pouvons dire comme Fuséli en quittant les marbres du Parthénon: ‘Ah! les Grecs, les Grecs, c'étaient des dieux.’ H. Chotard, Le Périple de la Mer Noire par Arrien

Arrian's Periplus maris Euxini (Circumnavigation of the Euxine) is an ambitious and unusual work. Written in the 130s AD in the form of a letter to the emperor Hadrian, who had himself visited the Black Sea a few years earlier, it was a literary complement to a report Arrian made in Latin, as governor of Cappadocia, on Rome's military position in the Black Sea. It is also unusual in its form: unlike most periploi, which are marked by continuity of movement and by a highly repetitive style, it is discontinuous both in its spatial movement and in its narrative style.

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

In the closing chapter of his Greek tragedy in action Oliver Taplin writes:

Understanding, reason, learning, moral discrimination – these things are not, in my experience, incompatible with emotion (nor presumably in the experience of Gorgias and Aristotle): what is incompatible is cold insensibility […] our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning, are indivisible from them: they are simultaneous and mutually dependent.

On the other hand, Malcolm Heath's work inveighs against Taplin's suggestion of a balance between reason and emotion, and proposes

a third possibility: intense but ordered emotion, controlled not by intellectual interests, but by the coherence of the whole simply as an emotional experience, by the aesthetic satisfaction which the audience receives through its experience of the emotions as an ordered sequence.

They are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years – a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilisation to what it is at present, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem that the study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it.

But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language – to do so with fluency being the mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people know their own affairs best.

A few lines of a famous fifth-century treaty inscription between Argos, Tylissos and Knossos are the focus of this study which attempts to reconstruct the border between Tylissos and Knossos in the Classical period. Borders are important intangible features inscribed on the landscape, separating or uniting people. The two Classical states had a long history as neighbouring states, and the comparison between the Classical border and the projected borders of other periods is of particular interest.

Thucydides' account of faction in the Peloponnesian War (3.82–83) is perhaps more often admired than appreciated; and indeed its structure and wording have not always satisfied commentators. Two kinds of question raised by the passage may be identified:

(1) What does it say and what is it about? We need to examine it as a coherent train of thought, and at the same time – for it is plainly not a mere digression or show-piece – as an essential part of Thucydides' whole work. Both the historian's practice and his programme suggest that the reader should do this. For in putting his thoughts in so highly generalized a form, he invites us to apply them widely. Even when they occur in speeches, where a fallible or even dishonest orator is trying to persuade an audience, general statements may be thus widely applicable; how much more when they come directly from the historian. We should also be ready to consider whether what are presented as remarks on stasis may not apply beyond situations of stasis. For war and faction as twin causes of violent death are closely connected in the proem to Thucydides' whole work (1.23.2); and 3.82.1–2, which echo the proem (1.22.4), bring out that the growth of stasis was a natural consequence of war and that in stasis, as in war, human nature is revealed.

quodsi in animum quis inducat, tormentis quibus et quibus machinis simulacrum omne formetur, erubescet timere se materiem ab artifice, ut deum faceret, inlusam. deus enim ligneus, rogi fortasse vel infelicis stipitis portio, suspenditur, caeditur, dolatur, runcinatur; et deus aereus vel argenteus de immundo vasculo, ut saepius factum Aegyptio regi, conflatur, tunditur malleis et incudibus figuratur; et lapideus deus caeditur, scalpitur et ab impurato homine levigatur, nec sentit suae nativitatis iniuriam, ita ut nec postea de vestra veneratione culturam. nisi forte nondum deus saxum est vel lignum vel argentum. quando igitur hic nascitur? ecce funditur, fabricatur, sculpitur: nondum deus est; ecce plumbatur, construitur, erigitur: nec adhuc deus est; ecce ornatur, consecratur, oratur; tunc postremo deus est, cum homo illum voluit et dedicavit. (Minucius Felix, Oct. 22)