The article will discuss the importance of the phalanx as a way to point out cultural links and cultural competition between Greeks and Romans. It will argue that there is a wider discourse in military literature on the phalanx as a cultural commodity, by both historians and authors of ‘military manuals’, each author building on the arguments of the other, and that the Taktika of Aelian and Arrian are a key link in understanding this discourse in the context of the second century AD.

This article is the first to consider book 8 of the Palatine Anthology as an integrated collection. Book 8 consists of funerary epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus. We consider how the book is structured as a coherent collection, what its place in the Palatine Anthology is and, above all, how these underdiscussed poems contribute to the changing discourse of death in fourth-century Christianity. We also look at how the poems contribute to the Byzantine culture in which the Palatine Anthology was put together. The article reveals how Gregory rewrites both the positive values of death in a Christian community and negative descriptions of those who transgress such values.

Christian poetry, and biblical epic in particular, is intensely self-conscious. Both Greek and Latin Christian poets begin or end their compositions, paraphrases and centos with poetological reflections on the value and objectives of their works. The fifth-century Paraphrase of the Gospel according to John is an anomaly in this tradition. While Nonnus’ mythological epic, the Dionysiaca, is heavily self-conscious in that it includes a strong authorial voice as well as an extensive prooemium and an interlude, the Christian Paraphrase has no prooemium, epilogue or interlude, and its narrator never identifies himself. This article examines two passages in the Paraphrase where subtle, implicit poetological reflections may be detected, and then explores the reasons why Nonnus may have chosen to deny the Paraphrase a clear (meta)literary identity. It argues that Nonnus’ poem presents itself as the Gospel of John, and that its narrator ‘becomes’ John the Evangelist in a spiritual exercise which is indebted to Origen's views on that Gospel.

A substantial number of passiones (some forty) of Roman martyrs was composed at Rome and its environs between the early fifth and late seventh century (c. 425 – c. 675). Although these texts have hitherto been neglected by students of the Latin language (not least because they are only available in early printed editions dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, none of which are easily accessible), they provide a valuable witness to changes in the language during that period, when, as a reflex of developments in the spoken language and of deterioration in educational standards, written Latin began to exhibit a rightward shift of verb satellites (change to VO-order in main clauses, placement of the infinitive after the modal auxiliary, placement of the dependent genitive after its noun etc.), as well as a number of associated linguistic features. These changes are illustrated by statistical analyses, the results of which are presented in accompanying tables.

Ovid is clear that the cause of his exile was a carmen and an error, the one his poem the Ars amatoria (although written several years before his exile in AD 8), the other something which he was never allowed to explain. This paper argues that Ovid has encrypted a plausibly deniable statement contradicting the official reason for his exile in three interrelated telestichs in his Fasti, a work already known to have been revised in exile.

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.

This paper looks beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria to consider the literary dynamics of another Hellenistic kingdom, Attalid Pergamon. I offer a detailed study of the fragmentary opening of Nicander's Hymn to Attalus (fr. 104 Gow–Schofield) in three sections. First, I consider its generic status and compare its encomiastic strategies with those of Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17). Second, I analyse its learned reuse of the literary past and allusive engagement with scholarly debate. And finally, I explore how Nicander polemically strives against the precedent of the Ptolemaic Callimachus. The fragment offers us a rare glimpse into the post-Callimachean, international and agonistic world of Hellenistic poetics.

The Neopythagorean Diotogenes, author of a lost treatise On Kingship of which some fragments have come down to us in Stobaeus’ Anthology, is a largely neglected writer. Scholars either ignore him or briefly discuss him in the context of general overviews of Greek political thinking, usually comparing him to other Neopythagoreans such as Sthenidas and Ecphantus. This article argues that Diotogenes deserves to be read for his own sake, as a creative and subtle thinker who managed to contribute to his own philosophical tradition by benefiting from Homeric exegesis and by taking into account the more concrete demands of daily life.