This paper looks at the structure of Semonides’ catalogue in fragment 7, and at the metaphors that underpin it. There is a tension between the organising function of this catalogue and the hybrid entities it lists. It is suggested that the opening and closing lines frame the catalogue conceptually, exploiting ambiguities in the words χωρίς, γένος and φῦλον. Not only does Semonides play with ideas of order and embrace ambiguities of language, but he suggests that these are a feature of his poetic inheritance: the female types of his catalogue are a collection of hybrids assembled from a variety of Archaic texts and traditions.

This paper argues for the existence of the topos of oroskopia in Greek and Latin literature. Gods and mortals are positioned on mountains to watch events or landscapes below. The view from above symbolises power (in the case of the gods) or an attempt at control or desire for power (in the case of mortals). It may also suggest an agreeable and relaxed spectatorship with no active involvement in the events watched, which may metaphorically morph into a historian's objectivity or a philosopher's emotional tranquillity. The elevated position may also have a temporal aspect, gods looking into the future or mortals looking back on their life.

This paper argues that the shipwreck scene in Juvenal 12 should be read as another exploration of the satiric ‘sketch’ offered in the proem to Lucretius, De rerum natura 2: a thematic response to and exploration of the scene of troubles at sea in the Lucretian proem. The beleaguered sea-merchant Catullus should not have gone sailing at all – but he responds to trouble as an Epicurean would recommend. Juvenal 12 displays Epicurean conceptions of friendship and sacrifice, and an allusion to a storm scene in Persius 6 (itself intertextually connected to Lucretius’ proem) confirms the satiric importance of Lucretius in Juvenal's passage.

Forged mostly in readings of the modern novel, the tools of narratology have allowed us to detect many features that ancient literature shares with modern texts. At the same time, they have detracted from crucial differences between ancient and modern narratives. This article argues that, while being at the origin of the classical western plot, the Odyssey also features a narrative logic that differs significantly from what the modern novel has taught us to expect. It focuses on the case of Penelope. Various theories have been advanced to explain Penelope's intervention in books 18 and 19. The difficulties that modern scholars have had with Penelope, it is suggested, are due to a special kind of motivation which is also prominent in medieval narrative.

This article scrutinises one of the most challenging theses of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be (or appear to be) ‘justified’. Through a close examination of the work's frequently masked revaluation of a series of Greek sources of thinking, not least its ‘inversion’ of both the metaphysics and the aesthetics of Plato's Republic, the article shows how the thesis of aesthetic ‘justification’ is caught up in a tension between Apolline and Dionysian interpretations, the first entailing a quasi-Homeric sense that the Olympians justify human existence by living a transfigured form of it themselves, the second involving a tragic insight into reality as itself the creative work of a ‘world-artist’, the latter allusively associated by Nietzsche with the philosophy of Heraclitus.

This paper seeks to highlight and assess the presence of allusions to Roman military apparatus in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe. In the introduction, I contextualise the argument within the history of scholarship on the novel, and discuss issues relating to the author's date, Aphrodisian provenance and readership. I then divide the argument into three parts. At the end of the novel, Chaereas returns to Syracuse and publicly displays the spoils won from the east in a manner that, I argue, is highly suggestive of the Roman triumph (Part i). He then extends a grant of citizenship to the Greek element of his army and issues them cash donatives, while Hermocrates gives farmland to the Egyptians. As I demonstrate, this is characteristic of what happens upon the demobilisation of Roman military manpower (especially the auxilia) (Part ii). I then draw out the ramifications of an imperial-era author who represents Greek military exploits against the Persians, writing during a period in which Greeks were not interested in military endeavours (Part iii).

Scholarship on Homer's Odyssey has long recognised the importance of naming and reference in the poem, particularly in the way speakers refer to Odysseus. Here I consider one term regularly used for the protagonist, but largely overlooked in these studies: κεῖνος, ‘that man’. I argue that it acquires a specific and rich association with Odysseus in the epic, one that depends on the deictic properties of the pronoun as marking its object as distant in space and uncertainly located. This is contrasted with Odysseus’ use of the proximal deictic ὅδε, ‘this man’, to reveal his identity at the poem's climax.

The article examines the two different genealogies of the Emmenids reported by the scholia on Pindar's Olympian 2: scholl. 16c ~ 70f Dr. connect Theron to the Labdacids Thersander and Polynices via Thera (the ‘Therean’ genealogy), whereas 82d Dr. links him with Eteocles via Rhodes (the ‘Rhodian’ genealogy). Modern interpretations associate the former with the Epinician, the latter with the Encomium to Theron. By contrast, it is argued that the ‘Therean’ genealogy originated from an ancient mistaken interpretation of the role of Thersander in Ol. 2.43–7: a careful reading of that passage and of relevant testimonia shows that Pindar endorsed the ‘Rhodian’ version in both poems, thus showing a unanimous tradition.

For archaeologists discussion of style is unavoidable. Within classical archaeology ‘style’ is closely associated with connoisseurship as practised by J. D. Beazley. Style identifies individuals, artistic personalities such as the Amasis Painter. This notion of style necessarily overlaps with another debate within both anthropology and prehistoric archaeology (personhood) which also touches on an older discussion within classical studies. These two debates have remained strangers to each other. The article explores these issues in relation to the iconography of hares and arming scenes. Notions of personhood and agency force us to re-evaluate such iconography and its effectiveness as narrative.