This article argues that the attribution to Lysias of the erōtikos (230e6–234c5) in Plato's Phaedrus is more significant than has generally been acknowledged. The erōtikos is attributed to Lysias because he is a logographer, whose success is dependent on writing speeches for other people. A careful consideration of both the context and the content of the speech encourage us to consider its relevance to Socrates. By attributing an (underwhelming) attempt at Socratic rhetoric to Lysias, the Phaedrus frames his speech as an example of the potential pitfalls of putting words into Socrates’ mouth. As such, the speech has broader significance for our understanding of what it means to write Socratic logoi.

This article reads Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in dialogue with Euripides’ Trojan Women, synthesising a Nietzschean reading of Euripides’ tragedy with, as it were, a Euripidean reading of Nietzsche's theorisation of the tragic. It focuses on the way in which both texts confront the threat of nihilism in the face of human suffering and attempt to redeem or transfigure it. This is manifested internally and self- consciously in Euripides’ play through the actions of Hecuba and the chorus, who seem both to exhibit what Nietzsche might call a ‘pessimism of strength’, and to express Nietzsche's fundamental claim that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’. Yet Trojan Women ultimately resists Nietzschean theorising – a form of critical resistance which, as it will turn out, is already anticipated by Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. More than a close study of two texts, this dialogic reading also has some big implications for thinking through the relationship between philosophy and tragedy in general.

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it collects and discusses the evidence that supports A. M. Belardinelli's identification of the speakers in lines 150–271 of Menander's Sikyonioi; her reconstruction can also be strengthened and improved upon in some important details. Further, a re-examination of line 169 allows for a new interpretation of the staging of the play: three stage doors need to be active, and the third stage building is a shrine which Eleusinios enters to take part in the sacrifice.

Offering a re-evaluation of all the available evidence, including passages from Aristotle's Rhetoric, Poetics and Sophistici Elenchi, Diogenes Laertius’ biographical sketch as well as the grammar scene in Aristophanes’ Clouds, this article argues that Protagoras’ engagement with grammatical questions must have been more sophisticated and thorough than is often assumed. In Protagoras’ discovery of grammatical gender, formal considerations – most likely inspired by the analysis of personal names – played a more fundamental role than semantic ones, and his typology of πυθμένες λόγων equally presupposes the formal recognition of at least verbal mood, if not also tense.

In In cael. 655.9–656.5 Simplicius reports an argument in which an apparent justification is offered for the false claim by Aristotle that ‘pyramids’ (regular tetrahedra) can completely fill space. This argument was analysed by Ian Mueller in an Appendix to his translation of In caelo, and the outline of an alternative has been presented in Myrto Hatzimichali's study of Potamo of Alexandria. In this article I contest Mueller's interpretation, and expand on the one reported by Hatzimichali. I also contest Mueller's claim that a version of his interpretation can be found in the partial commentary by Peter of Auvergne. It is suggested here that the ‘justification’ reported by Simplicius is a deliberate slip in logic, which is accompanied by a carefully constructed cover-up involving some quite tricky geometry. Simplicius makes frequent reference to Alexander of Aphrodisias, but it is argued here that he has been very selective with these citations.

The Antiatticist lexicon has a short lemma on the adjective ἡσύχιος ‘silent, quiet’ which has suffered heavy shortening and possibly interpolation. The present article argues that the text of this lemma should be edited as it stands in cod. Coisl. 345 and should not be changed. The entry and the mutual relationship between the words it includes should be assessed in the light of the Antiatticist's approach to classical Greek, and of the Byzantine reception of the lexicon and its contents.

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.