Scholars disagree over why Plato's Clitophon ends without any response to Clitophon's criticisms of Socratic method. A close examination of the characterisation of Clitophon provides a potential answer. During the course of his speech, Clitophon shows himself to have misunderstood Socrates, in terms both of method and teaching. The manner in which he reports Socratic conversations suggests that he is more interested in Socrates' personal authority than in entering into productive dialogue. Clitophon represents the kind of young man who wants Socrates to tell him what to think and who will go elsewhere if Socrates will not answer this desire. Socrates remains silent in the face of Clitophon's criticisms because Clitophon has offered no thoughts of his own and, this being the case, there is no possibility of making elenctic progress.

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

‘Diktys of Crete’ is a fictionalised prose account of the Trojan War. It does not enjoy a high profile in modern thought, but looms large in Byzantine and mediaeval histories of the Troy matter. Although the ‘Latin Dictys’ has enjoyed a moderate revival in recent scholarship, the Byzantine testimony to Diktys is still badly neglected. The present article focuses on: (1) a general overview of the Greek Diktys, including up-to-date information on dating; (2) a comprehensive list of witnesses to Diktys (the first list of its kind for over a century, and the first ever in English); (3) some problems relating to Book 6 of the ‘Latin Dictys’; and (4) an overview of the Sisyphosfrage, that is, the question of the role of ‘Sisyphos of Kos’ in the transmission of the Greek Diktys.

This paper investigates differing forms of attention entailed by the ecphrastic gaze in epic and epigram as a way of considering issues of time and narrative as crucial elements of ecphrasis. Its first section focuses particularly on Paulinus of Nola, who has been almost wholly ignored in recent discussions of ecphrasis, but who not only provides the first example of an ecphrasis of an ecphrasis – the description of an ecphrastic inscription attached to a work of art – but also provides a set of poems which construct the viewer's experience of visiting a church. This is taken as exemplary of a new development of a Christian gaze, a new form of attention. The second section looks specifically at temporality in ecphrasis (through Pliny, Virgil, and epigram), to see how different ideas of time and the experience of looking are inscribed in different genres – which in turn expect and create different forms of knowing. The third section looks particularly at later Greek epigrams, Callistratus and Achilles Tatius, to see how different authors play with ideas of temporality and narrative explored in the first two sections of the paper. Together, these interrelated arguments demonstrate how investigating forms of attention and modes of temporality allows us to develop a more nuanced comprehension of ecphrasis as a historical and aesthetic expression.

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.

Since antiquity, Greek tragedy has continually preoccupied philosophers. From Plato and Aristotle, to Hegel and Nietzsche, many of the most interesting ideas in the history of thought have been developed through a dialogue with tragedy. This article explores the continuities and ruptures between Plato and Aristotle's reading of tragedy and the so-called “philosophy of the tragic” which emerged in the late eighteenth century. The influence of this modern tradition has been so profound that, even today, no reading of Antigone, of Oedipus or of the Bacchae is not also, at least unconsciously, in dialogue with Hegel, with Freud and with Nietzsche. Although there is some recognition that the philosophical understanding of tragedy has historically shaped the discussion of ancient drama, classicists remain resistant to returning to its insights to further the study of classical texts. This article aims to redress the situation not only by revealing the persistent traces of the philosophy of the tragic in our modern critical vocabulary, but also by arguing that a renewed interest in this tradition will invigorate debates within our field. By looking at the examples of the French feminists Hélène Cixous' and Luce Irigaray's interpretations of Sophocles and Aeschylus, the article investigates the apparent tension between historicist and universalising readings of tragedy and argues that these two approaches are not necessarily incompatible.

Horace, Odes 3.27 consists of two relatively distinct parts: a long farewell to a woman named Galatea, and an even longer retelling of the myth of Europa. Europa's story is staged as an analogy to Galatea's situation (v. 25 sic et Europe…) but the apparently awkward comparison has long failed to satisfy readers. This paper reconsiders the poem in the light of a recent development in imperial geography, the transformation of Galatia in Asia Minor into a vast new Roman province in 25 BCE, and examines some of the implications of the proposed affinity between Galatea and Galatia.

Dictys of Crete's Journal of the Trojan War seems to invite the reader to imagine two different versions of the imaginary ancient Ur-text: one that was written in Phoenician language and script, and another that was written using ‘Phoenician letters’ but whose language was Greek. What is the meaning of the text's different fantasies of its own origins? And how is the reader to understand the puzzlingly implausible Punico-Greek text that is envisaged in Septimius' prefatory letter? This article examines first why the Journal's fantasy Ur-text changed as the Dictys-text itself evolved, and what the text's fiction of its own origins can tell us, not only about its readers' contemporary context, but also about their fantasies about their own literary past – and future as well. Secondly, comparison with the work of Dionysius Skytobrachion, himself the author of a pseudo-documentary Troy-history, offers a new interpretation of what, precisely, Septimius' ‘Punic letters’ may have represented in ancient readers' minds, and opens up a new (imaginary) literary hinterland in the heroic past for the fictional author Dictys and his text.

Classics has been characterised as both a radical and a conservative discipline. Classical reception studies has enjoyed exploring this paradox: antiquity has provided an erotic example for modern homosexual counter-culture as well as a model for running exploitative empires. This article brings these aspects of reception studies together, to examine how the Victorian homosexual reception of the ancient Greeks was framed and worked out in a particular imperial context at the end of the nineteenth century.

This paper focuses on the pair of philosophical puzzles, in the first section of Plato's Theaetetus, concerning the comparison between cardinalities and sizes. My initial task is to analyse some difficulties and distractions which affect our understanding of the argumentation that Socrates puts forward on Protagoras' behalf. I then offer a revised interpretation that integrates the puzzles with the rest of the Protagorean/Heraclitean theory. The emerging discussion, far from being a bridging passage or detour, is a unit with its own specific identity. Its goal is to stretch the Protagorean/Heraclitean metaphysics of events to a new limit: the dematerialisation of change. Change may also be the simple effect of quantitative comparisons as such. At the same time, important traces of Plato's indirect move against Protagoras are detected: the conceivability itself of this Protagorean view descends from a common application of mathematics.