1.1 Dialectical diversity is common to all languages. It comes about when groups of speakers of the same language become isolated from one another and from the conformist pressures of an administrative or cultural centre. The tendency to local change can be accelerated by the presence nearby of another language and the growth of bilingual interaction in settled conditions over several generations. Like linguistic change in general, dialectal diversity tends to be retarded by improved communications and a universal homogeneous education system.

1.2 Modern dialect geographers go about their work with a questionnaire, a tape-recorder and a note-book, listing items of pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and syntax that distinguish particular localities from one another. If their aim is not the purely linguistic one of establishing an underlying diasystem and the range of variation within it, but is more concerned with the sociological aspects of the linguistic data, then they will plot the dialectical variations against the ‘standard’ language, viz. the dialect which because of its association with an administrative or cultural capital has in an elaborated and artificial form acquired prestige and dominance throughout the whole speech community. If researchers find that their information is incomplete, they can simply return to the field with further questions.

The excavation of Aphrodisias in Caria has now uncovered so substantial an area of the city that the site must now feature in studies of both the Ancient and Byzantine city. Aphrodisias offers an example of a city whose history runs from the second half of the first century BC (when the settlement first prospered as a Free City in the fertile plain around the shrine of Aphrodite) until the late Middle Ages. But the chronological range of the surviving material also sets a familiar problem of urban history. How can such studies interpret buildings and settings which existed and functioned over many centuries, maintaining a presence in the city as its history passed from one historical ‘period’ to another? Can their permanence be recognised as a ‘continuity’; or should one look for clues of change and discontinuity? Is indeed the dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity an inevitable part of the vocabulary of urban history? The words have certainly dominated discussion of ‘capital’ cities like Rome and Constantinople in which much stress has been laid on identifying ‘continuities’, the strength of ‘tradition’, and significant ‘renewals’ of the past.

My subject is point of view in the Aeneid. I want to make some theoretical points about that concept, and to discuss some examples. In writing this paper, however, I have come to realise that underneath there lies an attempt to come to terms with the work on Virgil of two of my elders, betters, and friends, Oliver Lyne and Gian Biagio Conte, to whom this piece is offered with affection. But I shall not try to conceal the Oedipal nature of these encounters. As will be seen, there is also an element of prolepsis: I want to forestall a particular line of interpretation about the Aeneid which I sense is about to make its appearance.

In my title I use the term ‘focalisation’ rather than ‘point of view’. The term is Genette's, later taken up especially by Mieke Bal. I use it for three reasons. First, I believe the reason that led Genette to coin it was a valid one, and perhaps the single most important proposition in his narratology. Genette criticised traditional accounts of point of view for confusing two distinct questions: ‘who speaks?’, and ‘who sees?’. In relation to any textual feature, the answers to these questions may be different. For the first phenomenon, we have the term ‘voice’, and it is helpful to have a separate term for the second; that is, focalisation.

Two artistic competitions in the Metamorphoses, those between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus (5.250–678) and between Arachne and Minerva (6.1–145), are now widely recognised as exploiting familiar generic differentiations. Ovid's treatment of these differentiations is further seen to have a bearing on establishing the elusive poetic identity of the whole poem, and to locate that identity firmly within the Roman response to Alexandrian poetics. The significance of these sections for the literary programme of the Metamorphoses has been persuasively argued by H. Hofmann and E. W. Leach for the Arachne competition, and more recently by Hofmann and S. Hinds for the Pierides. It is now clear how wide the range of literary forms represented at this pivotal point in Metamorphoses actually is, at the close of the first pentad and at the start of the second. Each of the episodes spanning this juncture has its winning and losing side, and there is an obvious way in which the positive and negative judgements in an artistic competition refine the reader's literary discrimination: the outcome of the contests encourages us to see in the competition itself at least an implicit comment on the relative qualities of the participants.

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)

The aim of this paper, which is what scientists would call a ‘working paper’, is to provide some orientation and ideas for future research on the level and distribution of population in Graeco-Roman Egypt. A traditional concern of historians has been to fix the size of the total population. On the shaky basis of an incidental figure in Josephus and a doctored passage of Diodorus Siculus, this is conventionally pitched, for the most prosperous periods of Ptolemaic and Roman domination, in the range of 8 to 10 million. In section 1 of this paper I discuss the literary sources at some length, not because of their value but in the hope of ending misleading citation of them. In the more positive section 2 I use general considerations and what documentary evidence we have to argue instead for a population in the Graeco-Roman period of from around 3 million to a maximum of 5 million.

Such vague total estimates, however, are of limited value. They serve as an introduction to and as parameters for the more historically interesting questions of relative increases and decreases over time, and of the density and distribution of population in relation to other socio-economic factors such as the quantity and type of land under cultivation, the prevailing agricultural regime, the scale of urbanisation, elite exploitation through taxes and rents, and the standard of living of the rural population.

It was decided that a marble arch (Ianus) should be erected in the Circus Flaminius at public expense, positioned by the spot where statues have already been dedicated to Divus Augustus and the Augustan household by G. Norbanus Flaccus, together with gilded images of peoples conquered, and an inscription on the face of that arch stating that the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this marble monument to the memory of Germanicus Caesar, since he … (account of achievements follows) … unsparing of his labours, until an ovation should be granted to him by decree of the senate, had died in the service of the republic; and above the arch there should be set a statue of Germanicus Caesar in a triumphal chariot, and at his sides, statues of his father Drusus Germanicus, natural brother of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, of his mother Antonia, his wife Agrippina, his sister Livia, his brother Tiberius Germanicus and of his sons and daughters.

Few, if any, Euripidean plays are altogether free from interpolation. The Phoenician Women, apart from the posthumous Iphigenia at Aulis, has incurred more suspicion than any other. No reputable scholar now doubts that this play contains numerous intrusive verses; and few would deny, though there is almost infinite room for disagreement in detail, that some of these intrusions are of passages rather than odd lines.

More controversial, but also more important, are the related issues, whether it contains longer or otherwise structurally significant interpolations that affect the play's essential integrity; and (if so) whether in a purely additive way (so in principle still remediable by excision) or with an element of retractatio (not so remediable, the Urtext having been deliberately altered with some cutting to make way for new material).