This article involves a case-study of one of the most generally accepted literary accounts of a Greek settlement abroad – the Greek colonisation of Thasos. Here, according to the generally accepted account, we have an eye-witness, Archilochos, son of the oikist, who actually settled on Thasos not during the first Greek settlement but during a subsequent wave of settlers. He didn't like it much – he calls it ‘thrice-wretched’ (228W), the settlers were the dregs of Greece (102W), the island looked like the back of an ass (21W), it wasn't pretty like Sybaris in Italy (22W), and the Thracians were described as ‘dogs’ (93aW). Fighting between Greeks and Thracians is portrayed (5W).

The archaeological evidence for the first period of Greek settlement on Thasos is scarce, but what there is has been marshalled in support of this literary model. Archaeology's main role has been to be used in chronological disputes. The orthodoxy dates the Parian colonisation to 680 BC, arguing that the Delphic oracle concerning the foundation of Thasos has Archilochos' father as oikist. The subject-matter of several of the poems has allowed Archilochos' poetry to be dated to 650 BC, and therefore the colonisation of Thasos to a generation before. Pouilloux (1964), indeed, has used the archaeological evidence from a house in the lowest levels of Thasos town to argue for this early date for the Parian settlement, seeing the ‘Thracian’ (and distinctly un-Cycladic) character of many of the finds as indicative of a certain amount of interaction between Parians and Thracians in the first generation of the colony.

Past responses to ancient literature and the reading practices of previous centuries are of central relevance to the contemporary exegesis of Greek and Roman authors. Professional classicists have at last come to recognise this. However, accounts of reception still tend to engage in a traditional form of Nachleben, as they unselfconsciously describe the extent of classical influences on later literary production. This process of influence is not as straightforward as it may first seem. It is often taken for granted in practice, if not in theory, that the movement is in one direction only – from antiquity to some later point - and also that the ancient text which ‘impacts on’ on the culture of a later period is the same ancient text that we apprehend today. Of course it is never the same text, even leaving aside the problems of transmission. The interaction between a text and its reception in another place, in another time, in another text, is really a dynamic two-way process. That interaction (which has much in common with intertextuality) involves, or is rather constituted by, our own interpretation of it.

Aristophanes' Plutus is often regarded as a dull play. According to two of the leading specialists on Aristophanes in Great Britain, the comedy displays ‘a certain amount of disjointedness in its moral and religious themes, and a certain lack of energy in its humour’, and the modern reader feels a ‘decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness’. Others regret alleged or real inconsistencies, the lack of punning and verbal play, the absence of nearly all choral interludes, a parabasis, and political advice in general, and the dearth of references to historical figures. Thus, the temptation is strong to follow those who read a medical history into Plutus: Aristophanes, by now sixty-five years old, had grown tired and saved his esprit for every third or fourth play. But such speculations do not do justice to a poet who did not have to write for a living. Before accepting them, we should first try to explain the change in other ways, admitting that Plutus may differ from the earlier plays for generic reasons. On this path, the linguistic analysis of Plutus will turn out to be helpful.

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.

Almost four decades ago, Donald Russell published in this journal an analysis of the first sixteen chapters of the Life of Alkibiades, which consist largely of short self-contained anecdotes about Alkibiades' childhood, youth and early career (Russell 1966b). As Russell demonstrated, most of these anecdotes are juxtaposed without any causal link. Although there are the occasional chronological markers – indications, for example, that Alkibiades is getting older and passing from childhood to early manhood – some are plainly out of chronological order and it is impossible to extract a clear chronology from them. Russell argued, however, that to try to extract such a chronological narrative would be to misunderstand the function of this material, which is not to provide a narrative of Alkibiades' early years but rather to illuminate and illustrate his character.

Russell's argument, in particular the stress on Plutarch's interest in character, was seminal; together with two other papers published at roughly the same time, it marked the beginning of a new appreciation of Plutarch as an author of literary merit. But Russell was rather less convinced of the logic of selection of the first five anecdotes, which relate to Alkibiades' youth and comprise some one-and-a-half pages of Teubner text (Alk. 2–3).

Recent discussions on the politics of Minoan Crete concentrate on the relations between the ‘first-order centres’, ‘central places’ or ‘palaces’ and their function within the wider social landscape. The arguments have been based on the proliferation of signet rings and their iconography (Schoep (1999) 213–21), on pottery evidence, i.e. storage capacity (Christakis (1999)) and petrological composition (Day and Wilson (1994); (1998); (2002); Knappett (1999); Knappett and Schoep (2000)), as well as on other iconographical and administrative evidence (Palmer (1995); Knappett and Schoep (2000)). The evidence regarding administration is perhaps the most reliable, since it is within administrations that the relations between centres are crystalised.

Ruth Palmer (1995) and Ilse Schoep (1999) have made important contributions in this area. The former presented much of the evidence on the variation between the various sites, whereas the latter elaborated on that information and argued that the various administrations on Crete are independent of one another and therefore also independent of the Knossian hegemony.

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.

Lesbius est pulcer. quid ni? quern Lesbia malit

quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua.

sed tamen hic pulcer uendat cum gente Catullum,

si tria notorum sauia reppererit.

notorum is the reading of O; GR have natorum, which is now generally rejected; among other things Catullus himself had no children and could hardly use childlessness as an insult, even if Clodius' children had not been born at the time of the poem. On the other hand notorum has caused some degree of unease; Skinner (1982) 203–4 takes it as meaning not only ‘acquaintances’ but also ‘well-known, distinguished men’, though there seems no evidence for such a meaning for substantival noti; it could also theoretically be the genitive plural of notor; likewise Birt (1904) 470 suggested that it is a partitive genitive with sauiorum understood; to leave even the possibility of such ambiguities is untypical of Catullus. Calphurnius and Heinsius, who were of course unaware of O's notorum, suggested amatorum; this accounts for natorum with the loss of a by haplography and consequent alteration of m to n to produce a Latin word, but it does not account for notorum; furthermore it is a word not used elsewhere by Catullus, and there would be an awkward ambiguity between ‘lovers’ and ‘well-wishers’; cf. OLD s.v. It will be suggested here that amatorum is almost right, and that we should read amicorum.

1.192–3 huc accedit uti sine certis imbribus anni

laetificos nequeat fetus summittere tellus

Does anni go with fetus (rather than, as everybody seems to take it, with imbribus; ‘fixed rain-showers in the year’, Bailey)? TLL 6.638.60f. adduces Sisenna, Hist. 100 fetum omnem … eius anni; Columella 10.256f. uersicoloribus anni / fetibus; Pliny 12.83 annuo fetu (for annus itself in the sense of anni fetus see OLD 8). Certis will then mean ‘reliable’, ‘assured’.