In February 1968, a red sandstone altar bearing a Greek inscription (Figure) was discovered in Chester on the English–Welsh border. It records a dedication by a doctor to a number of deities. The inscription has now been published or discussed at least six times but it would seem that essential points in its interpretation have so far been missed.

The text as it appears on the inscription is, for the most part, well visible and its reading uncontroversial:

It is evident that the inscription is incomplete and one or more lines may be missing. The dating of the inscription is uncertain but it is commonly thought to date from the end of the second century A.D.

In a short article published in The Classical Quarterly, Professor W.V. Harris questioned some of the opinions that I have put forward concerning revenge in Athenian society. His reservations presupposed certain methodological premises that he believes the researcher should adopt when dealing with ancient sources that reveal sentiments and emotions. In expressing the aforementioned opinions I criticised these premises by implication, but without dealing directly with the methodological problems surrounding the issue. Professor Harris's article has now provided me with an excellent opportunity to confront these problems explicitly and to examine how two different methods of analysis have given rise to diametrically opposed opinions concerning revenge in Athenian society. Revenge is a common human sentiment that is expressed in the individual's outward behaviour, influences social behaviour and has implications for society as a whole. The question of whether it was controlled and repressed or fostered and stimulated in classical Athens is of no trifling importance.

Our understanding of ancient erotic poetry has, in my opinion, been greatly furthered in recent years by the shift from an approach which sees the poetic world of Roman love elegy as the creation of mimesis to one which reads it as semiosis. The elegiac poet portrays neither experienced reality nor conditions at least conceivable as such, but constructs a fictional situation using certain literary motifs provided by generic tradition, and thus challenges the reader to a game of semiotics. The latter, conversant with the ‘sign language’ of the motifs – for example of servitium amoris – will appreciate the poet's playful variations on a familiar theme and decipher the new meaning it has been given. Particularly significant here is, I find, the new perception of the two central characters in the elegiac world: the first-person poetalamator and his puella are both part of this fiction. The poet assumes the mask of an elegiac lover, playing the part as an actor would; he does not, then, re-enact his own experiences for an audience. In addition to this he designs the figure of the puella, who appears less as a character with its own personal profile and more as a typified representation, contrived in the main to reflect the poetic ego's thoughts. Women such as Cynthia, Delia, and Corinna are, to use Alison Sharrock's very apt definition, the product of ‘womanufacture’, and their names therefore cannot be read as pseudonyms for real-life women.

[L]es travaux considérés partagent, entre autre choses, ce que faute de mieux j'appellerai un ‘rapport’ à la ‘chose grecque’, qu‘à cet égard certains d'entre ‘nous’ puissent dire ‘nous’, ‘nous et les Grecs’ […] Il doit bien y avoir des raisons, je veux dires des causes de toute sorte (et non seulement dans l'ordre du discours philosophique, aussi dans ce qu'on appelle – et je me sers à dessein de ces mots conventionnels – la société, l'histoire, la politique, la macro- et la micro- économie des passions et des désirs), pour rendre compte de ce fait: à tel moment, dans un pays donné, un certain nombre de philosophes qui appartiennent à peu près à la même génération, à des institutions très voisines, en gros à la même, et qui publient à peu près en même temps, disent des choses qui se ressemblent.

(Jacques Derrida ‘Nous Autres Grecs’)

In Tom Wolfe's most recent novel, A Man In Full, a young Californian, down on his luck, converts a macho sixty-year old tycoon, facing financial ruin, to Stoicism. The young man, Conrad, has miraculously escaped from the Santa Rita gaol as a result of an earthquake. Shortly before, he had discovered Epictetus in a book called The Stoics, a book he had been sent mistakenly in place of a riveting thriller by his favourite author with the title, The Stoics' Game. He rapidly comes across this passage: ‘I [Zeus] gave you a portion of our divinity, a spark from our own fire, the power to act and not to act, the will to get and the will to avoid. If you pay heed to this, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none’ (p. 398). Conrad is hooked. An innocent among a bunch of hideous felons, he asks himself: ‘What would Epictetus have done with this bunch? What could he have done? How could you apply his lessons two thousand years later, in this grimy gray pod, this pigsty full of beasts who grunted about mother-fuckin this and mother-fuckin that?’ (p. 410). Conrad memorises chunks of Epictetus. He refers a series of challenges to Zeus, overcomes a thug twice his size, and radiates Stoic strength. At the end, hired as a male nurse in Atlanta for the massive but now ailing Croker, the about-to-be ruined tycoon, Conrad tells Croker about the Stoic Zeus and Epictetus. Croker was on the point of clinching a deal that would have saved him from bankruptcy at the cost of compromising his Georgian sense of honour. Instead, he gives a press conference, disavows all interest in wealth, parrots Epictetus to the bemused Atlanta elite, and walks away from everything that had previously defined his life. At the end we learn that he has become a highly successful televangelist, with a programme called ‘The Stoic's Hour’.

‘Choice of metre is never arbitrary’ is a useful rule of thumb for critics of any poetry which conforms to a regular rhythmical pattern. The rhythm of a poem is plainly as much a product of the poet's creative choice as any other aspect of the composition, and consequently a fully integral element of the literary project. Out of all the components of a poem, in fact, metre has a claim to a certain priority, since the choice of metre determines to a significant degree the content of a poem as well as its form. That said, to speak in terms of ‘the straitjacket of traditional metrics’ is of course misconceived: the wealth of ancient metrical forms was an enabling rather than restrictive factor in literary composition–an idiom in itself, offering its own expressive possibilities. Like the classical orders of architecture, metres were not merely structural devices but ‘bearers of meaning’ in their own right, perceived, like Vitruvius' Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders (De arch. 1.2.5), to have their own individual characters, and thus particular uses to which each of them might appropriately be put. To what extent these perceived characters, either of metres or of orders, arose from any intrinsic property they possessed, or merely from associations more or less accidentally accruing with usage and theory over time, is perhaps debatable.

The sufficiency of virtue for happiness is a central Stoic doctrine. Indeed it can be argued that it is one of the doctrines that define the Stoic position; and it was the subject of extensive controversy in antiquity, coming under attack both from Academics and from Peripatetics. And Peripatetics had a particular interest in the topic, for Aristotle had already discussed it in Nicomachean Ethics 1.8–10, in a way which, to say the least, left room for a range of divergent interpretations.

The objections that were raised against the Stoic position in antiquity differ in their degree of persuasiveness. Some indeed point to fundamental differences of opinion of the sort that are not easily, if at all, reconcilable by argument. But others simply misinterpret or misrepresent the Stoic position. It is with some of the latter that the present paper will chiefly be concerned. Its aims are therefore limited even though the issue is important.

It has been generally agreed for some time that the best piece of extant evidence for Pyrrho's thought is contained in a section of Eusebius' Praeparatio evangelica (14.18.1–4 = T53 Decleva Caizzi) where Eusebius cites Aristocles of Messene's πεϱὶ ϕιλοσοϕίας book eight, where Aristocles in turn cites Timon on Pyrrho. But there the agreement stops. The wealth of recent writing on this very short passage provides evidence of its difficulty. Ausland, Bett, Brennan, Brunschwig, and Stopper have all within the last ten years or so offered their own various interpretations of these dozen lines of Greek text.