At Iliad 13.751-3, Hector heeds Polydamas' advice to rally the Trojans by gathering their best fighters together and debating their next move (13.736-47). The speech is followed by a simile that has puzzled some commentators, in which Hector is compared to a snowy mountain as he moves through the Trojan ranks. The passage runs as follows:

‘Πουλυδάμα σὺ μὲν αὐτοῦ ἐρύκακε πάντας ἀρίστους,
αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ κεῖσ’ εἶμι καὶ ἀντιόω πολέμοιο·
αἶψα δ’ ἐλεύσομαι αὖτις ἐπὴν εὖ τοῖς ἐπιτείλω.’
ἦ ῥα, καὶ ὁρμήθη ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι ἐοικὼς
κεκλήγων, διὰ δὲ Τρώων πέτετ’ ἠδ’ ἐπικούρων. 755
οἳ δ’ ἐς Πανθοΐδην ἀγαπήνορα Πουλυδάμαντα
πάντες ἐπεσσεύοντ’, ἐπεὶ Ἕκτορος ἔκλυον αὐδήν.

There is a major problem in connection with the wrath of Poseidon in Homer's Odyssey. We are told by Homer and Zeus (Od. 1.20-1, 1.68-75) that Poseidon raged continually against the hero from the time that the Cyclops was blinded until Odysseus reached Ithaca; and, when back on Ithaca the man complains to Athena about her absence and lack of help during the whole period of his wanderings after the fall of Troy, she says at 13.341-3 that she was avoiding confrontation with her angry uncle during all that time. But the only specified manifestation of that anger is the storm roused by the sea-god after Odysseus leaves Calypso in Book 5, in the tenth year after Polyphemus’ prayer to his father for revenge. It seems extraordinary that Poseidon should have waited so long before acting against him, and then have attacked him only once, merely causing him difficulty before he reached Scheria, and not (since it was fated for him to get home, and troubles there are already assured thanks to the suitors) ensuring his late return in a miserable plight on another's ship after losing all his companions, as his blinded son had requested (at 9.532-5).

The month name Ἀγαγύλιος is attested in Thessaly and Achaia Phthiotis. Recently, excavations at a Thessalian temple of Apollo in Pythion, at the foot of Olympus, have brought to light numerous ex-votos dedicated to Apollo, Poseidon and to an Artemis whose epiclesis is Agagylaia. Neither the month name nor the epiclesis, which is certainly to be connected with the month name, has yet received an explanation.

In chapter 12 of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Socrates as the new Orpheus, who rises up against Dionysus and murders tragedy:

Novelties introduced into traditional myths are an essential characteristic of Greek tragedy. Each and every play demonstrates, in different ways, how tragedians were versatile and innovative in handling mythic material. Modern prefaces to individual tragedies often discuss the possible innovations in the dramatization of a myth compared to previous or subsequent versions. Innovations advanced in a play sometimes became so familiar that they came to be regarded as ‘standard’. Such examples include the condemnation and death of the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone and, in all likelihood, Medea's filicide in Euripides’ Medea.

Two fragments of the Lydiaca attributed to Xanthus of Lydia (mid fifth century b.c.) preserve a curious claim that a king of Lydia (either the famous Gyges or the mythical Adramytes) was the first person to make eunuchs of women. In an attempt to make sense of these passages, it has been suggested that εὐνουχίζειν here refers not to castration, but rather to female genital cutting. If correct, this would provide our first evidence of this practice in Lydian culture or indeed anywhere in Anatolia. However, the assumption that what Xanthus describes somehow related to real practices is highly questionable. Instead, we should re-contextualize this story in terms of other fifth-century representations of luxury and eunuchs and in terms of Xanthus’ own exemplary portraits of other Lydian kings.

Unlike tragedy, Old Comedy openly acknowledges its own festival context and the existence of a world beyond the one created for and occupied by its masked characters. Admission of the theatrical setting is a standard well-documented feature and was an effective way of drawing spectators into the drama's fiction. To the same end, speaking directly to the audience formed an integral part of Aristophanes' plays and very probably of the comic genre as a whole. We can therefore think of comedy as an ‘inclusive’ art form, one that (self-)consciously attempted to involve and engage its consumers, in particular via explicit verbal address. On the other hand, the evidence is much slimmer for actors moving outside of the performance area or otherwise physically bringing the audience members and the fictional cast into contact and, regardless of how attractive it might seem, this type of spatial negotiation is far from established. It may well be the case that in spite of comedy's relative liberty, certain barriers continued to exist, including the invisible barrier that divided the acting area from the auditorium.

Revising Clouds for publication some five years after its third-place showing in the City Dionysia of 423 b.c., Aristophanes retooled the first parabasis (lines 510–626) to praise the play's propriety, omitting as it did distasteful matter and gratuitous buffoonery, which—along with the judges’ crassness—accounted, he says, for its failure.

This article argues that Aristophanes' Clouds treats Socrates as distinctly interested in promoting self-knowledge of the sort related to self-improvement. Section I shows that Aristophanes links the precept γνῶθι σαυτόν (‘know yourself’) with Socrates. Section II outlines the meaning of that precept for Socrates. Section III describes Socrates' conversational method in the Clouds as aimed at therapeutic self-revelation. Section IV identifies the patron Cloud deities of Socrates' school as also concerned to bring people to a therapeutic self-understanding, albeit in a different register from that of Socrates. Section V discusses a sequence of jokes connected to ‘stripping’ that give a concrete image to the search for self-knowledge. Both the action of the Clouds and the tales of cloak-stripping provide models for understanding self-knowledge in a Socratic key. Section VI argues that Socrates' other interest in the phrontistērion, myth-rationalization, is consistent with the promotion of self-knowledge. Section VII supports the claim that Plato's Phaedrus alludes constantly to the Clouds, and because the Phaedrus pays careful attention to self-knowledge, Plato must think that the Clouds does too. It notes in particular that we can explain the Platonic Socrates' famous self-knowledge-related curiosity about his similarity to Typhon (230a) as Plato's allusion to Aristophanes, an allusion made apt by Aristophanes' coordination of Socrates with self-knowledge. Section VIII concludes the paper.

In the Timaeus Plato says that, among the infinite number of right-angled scalene elementary triangles, the best (τὸ κάλλιστον) is that

Both W.D. Ross's and J. Brunschwig's editions of Aristotle's Topics contain the following passage:

My aim in this paper is to examine Aristotle's puzzling and contentious claim in Politics 1.13 that the deliberative faculty in women is ‘without authority’ (ἄκυρον):

At Ph. 3.4, Aristotle begins his discussion of the Unlimited. As is customary with him, a preliminary to the investigation proper is set up: he presents and discusses other thinkers' opinions on the subject, from which to draw indications on the meaning—and possibly the existence—of the entity at issue. As for the question of what the Unlimited is, Aristotle points out that there is a complete agreement on two points: the Unlimited pertains to physics, and it presents itself as a principle of sorts. A matter of disagreement concerns the categorial status of the Unlimited: Plato and the Pythagoreans regard it as something existing per se, whereas the Physicists claim that it is only the attribute of something else. A concise exposition of these theories follows.

As is well known, the work of Aristarchus on Homer is not preserved by direct tradition. We have instead many fragments preserved mainly in the Homeric scholia, the Byzantine Etymologica and the Homeric commentaries by Eustathius of Thessalonica. These fragments go back to the so-called Viermännerkommentar (abbreviated VMK), the ‘commentary of the four men’, a commentary that is dated to the fifth-sixth century c.e. and collects the works of Aristonicus, Didymus, Nicanor and Herodian. In the first century b.c.e. Aristonicus explained the meaning of Aristarchus’ critical signs in a treatise called Περὶ τῶν σημείων τῶν τῆς ᾿Ιλιάδος καὶ ᾿Οδυσσείας, while in the Περὶ τῆς ᾿Αρισταρχείου διορθώσεως Didymus studied Aristarchus’ Homeric recension. In the second century c.e. two more scholars, Herodian and Nicanor, dealt with Aristarchus while analysing questions of prosody in the Homeric language (Herodian) or the punctuation of the Homeric text (Nicanor). Not all of these four ‘men’ are equally important, however, as sources for Aristarchus. In fact, Herodian and Nicanor had aims that were quite independent of Aristarchus’ enterprise: the former was concerned with problems of prosody, accentuation and aspiration in Homer, whereas the latter had developed a new system of punctuation to elucidate the Homeric text from a syntactic point of view. Although both Herodian and Nicanor did take an interest in Aristarchus, their focus was thus different from that of their Alexandrian predecessor. The goal of Aristonicus and Didymus, on the other hand, was specifically to reconstruct Aristarchus’ work on Homer; it is for this reason that they are considered the most trustworthy witnesses for Aristarchus’ fragments.

In the following, I will propose and/or defend new or previous emendations for a set of passages in Catullus, most of which are deemed corrupt or even beyond repair by many, if not all, philologists. For the sake of simplicity, I will first quote Mynors's OCT text, except for possible changes in punctuation that will be justified, either implicitly or in their own terms, in the ensuing discussion. Those sections I consider incorrect I will put between obeli (which, on several occasions, are also Mynors's ones). In addition, I will reproduce the relevant manuscript readings recorded in Mynors's apparatus, checked against Thomson's more complete collations. In each case, I will begin with summarizing the state of the question; nevertheless, owing to the vast amount of corrections or conjectures to be examined for many passages, I will concentrate on the most significant proposals. Next, I will try to show that the correction suggested conforms to the constraints of metre and language, and (in some cases at least) sheds some light on the symbolic or intertextual dimension of the poem at hand. Finally, I will provide an account of the corruption process that presumably operated, with the aim of establishing the palaeographical verisimilitude of my proposal.

Toward the end of the Republic, Cicero was not alone in planning to collect his own letters for publication (Att. 16.5.5). Most likely, Caesar (Suet. Iul. 55.1; Gell. NA 17.9) and Varro, among others, intended to do the same, and Cicero had access to letters by the Elder Cato (Off. 1.36–7) and Cornelia (Brut. 211). But it was not only authors or recipients who assembled and circulated letters. In December 59, Cicero wrote to his brother Quintus, who was concluding his mandate as governor of Asia, and encouraged him to leave behind a positive image of himself (relinque, quaeso, quam iocundissimam memoriam tui, QFr. 1.2.8). In particular, Cicero did not hide his concern at some carelessness Quintus displayed in sending out certain letters (litterarum missarum indiligentiam reprehensam, 1.2.7): of those, Quintus should destroy the ones he was able to find (tolle omnis, si potes, iniquas, tolle inusitatas, tolle contrarias, 1.2.8), while nothing could be done about some collections which had already been circulated and criticized (esse uolumina selectarum epistularum quae reprehendi solerent, 1.2.8). In other words, both the authors (or their friends) and their ill-wishers selected, assembled and circulated letters. Who chose which letters mattered enormously, since collections had the power to enhance or damage a person's public image.

In Virgil's seventh Eclogue, Meliboeus relates a singing contest that Corydon and Thyrsis undertook. Upon beginning their songs, Corydon invokes the Libethrian nymphs (21), and Thyrsis invokes ‘Arcadian shepherds’ (25–6). Scholars have previously interpreted Thyrsis’ Arcadian shepherds as people, but here I suggest that they should be interpreted as divinities. In support of this assertion, I rely on the expectations of the capping style (which requires that Thyrsis ‘cap’ Corydon's invocation of Libethrian nymphs), Virgil's description of the setting and the characters present, an epigram by Erucius (an intertext for this poem), the Greek and Roman literary tradition that developed especially in relation to gods associated with Arcadia, and Thyrsis’ quatrains, which can be profitably interpreted if we assume that Arcadian gods have heard Thyrsis' prayer and are now inspiring his song.

Fraenkel dismissed Epode 11 with the statement that it ‘is an elegant piece of writing, but there is little real life in it’. By this ambiguously expressed comment he did not mean that the poem fails to ‘come alive’, but that it is artificial: he saw the poem as little more than an assembly of themes and motifs which recur in other genres, especially epigram and elegy. This has also been the perspective of some other twentieth-century scholars: Georg Luck's self-styled ‘interpretation’ of the poem consists largely of a numbered list of thirteen motifs which the epode has in common with elegy and which in Luck's opinion were derived by Horace from Gallus. Alessandro Barchiesi, on the other hand, capitalizes on the perceived elegiac motifs in order to see the poem as a dynamic fusion of elegy and iambus. As for commentators, although older representatives seem to have regarded Epode 11 as generally self-explanatory, the poem receives increasing attention from Cavarzere, Mankin and Watson, the last of whom originally discussed some of its problems in a paper published twenty years earlier. Yet various problems still remain, and in this paper I propose to re-examine lines 1–6 and 15–18 in the hope that a clearer view of the epode as a whole may emerge.