This paper challenges certain more or less standard interpretations of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica prologue, viz. that lines 5–9 reveal that the poet was a xvvir sacris faciundis, that the cortina (6) stood in or in front of his house to symbolise his quindecimvirate, and that Caledonius … | Oceanus (8–9) refers to an exploit of Vespasian during the Claudian invasion of Britain. I argue that Valerius’ quindecimvirate is a mirage, that the cortina stood in a different ‘house’, and that ‘Caledonian Ocean’ refers to an event or events closer in time to the composition of the Argonautica. The alternative interpretations proposed radically alter perceptions of the prologue.

This article attempts to account for the fact that nemesis occurs only once in Herodotus. It connects the term to Phrygia and the importance of Nemesis there, esp. as seen in ‘confession-inscriptions’ (Beichtinschriften). It argues that the Atys-Adrastus story is meant as an interpretative guide to the rest of the History through its use of significant names, comparable to the use of significant names in the Old Testament.

This article offers a comparative reading of Solon's Elegy to the Muses (fragment 13 West) and the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, focusing on the interplay of literary form and theological content. It argues that in both poems, shifts in the identity and perspective of the poetic voice enable the speaker to act out, or perform, a particular vision of humanity and its relationship with the divine. The comparative analysis improves our understanding of both texts, showing for instance that Solon's elegy is a highly sophisticated attempt to articulate a coherent vision of divine justice and the human condition. It also sheds light on the particular modes in which ancient literature and theology interact in different contexts, and how this interaction could affect audiences.

Starting from the comparative standpoint of elite hostility to nineteenth-century British melodrama, this article posits pantomime's ‘melodramatic’ mode of exhibitionist excess as one of the missing links in the landscape against which Horace composed his Ars poetica. It suggests that lines 182–8 of the Ars that disapprove the display of death, violence and physical impossibilities on the tragic stage may be better understood as Horace's hostile response to pantomime's increasing prominence in Roman theatrical life, more precisely to the dislocation of ‘horror’ and ‘marvel’ from the realm of the ‘heard’ to that of the ‘seen’ favoured by the pantomime genre.

From the mid-nineteenth century, it became de rigueur for Classics Departments to acquire casts of Greek and Roman sculpture to form reference and experimental collections. Recent scholarship has revived such casts, investigating their role as instruments of teaching and research, and their wavering popularity. This paper further examines the aims of those responsible for collecting casts, and discusses how these objectives influenced their materiality and treatment, as well as showing how the de facto creation of a new canon of casts through their repetition across the collections of different institutions contributed to the decline in their perceived importance.

This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate education and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.

The correspondence between Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, housed in the Mycenaean Epigraphy Room in the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, provides valuable insights into the decipherment of Linear B and the collaboration between the two men which produced first ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’ (Ventris and Chadwick (1953)) and then Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Ventris and Chadwick (1956)). The letters also reveal interesting information about the relationship between Ventris and Chadwick and other scholars of the day. This article examines their relationship with Arthur Beattie, who never accepted the decipherment, and Leonard R. Palmer, who disagreed fundamentally with many of their interpretations of the texts. A file of correspondence containing letters from 1956, discovered only after the publication of Andrew Robinson's biography of Ventris (Robinson (2002)), casts doubt on the conclusion that, perhaps in part owing to difficulties with Palmer, Ventris had lost interest in Linear B immediately before his death.