The wounds inflicted by Homer's warriors fascinate readers, since they are vividly described and often curious or even grotesque. Commentators have struggled to explain some of them since commentaries began: some of the explanations are more curious than the wounds. Not surprisingly, the commentaries have not usually been graced by a high standard of anatomical or, especially, physiological background knowledge, and are often misleading in these respects. When such knowledge is applied, some wounds which have appeared problematic become realistic, but some which have been accepted as straightforward become problematic.

I shall argue for two complementary theses: firstly that ‘Homer’ was not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name, and secondly that for a century or more after the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey there was little interest in the identity or the person of their author or authors. This interest only arose in the last decades of the sixth century; but once it did, ‘Homer’ very quickly became an object of admiration, criticism, and biographical construction.

Unresolved questions surround Simonides fr. 531, which eulogizes the Greeks who fell at Thermopylae. To what genre do these lines belong, what were the original conditions of their performance, and does Diodorus Siculus, who preserves the fragment, transmit just an extract (as seems most likely) or the complete piece? Commentators even differ as to where Simonides’ lines began: for some the words τŵυ ༐υ Θερμοπὐλαιζ θαυóυτωυ form part of the original composition, for others they conclude Diodorus' prose introduction. In my reading of the fragment, I aim to address some of these puzzles by focusing chiefly on issues that allow for greater certainty: the structure and sentiments of the lines, and the cohesion between the song's contents and the conventions found in near contemporary commemorations of men fallen in battle on their country or polis’ behalf. As the comparative material will suggest, Diodorus’ designation of the lines as an encomion, something ‘properly’ delivered in praise of living men, should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand. Simonides‘ words may have been embedded within a composition as much designed for the purpose of praising, exhorting and inspiring the living as for memorializing the dead.

The Homeric influence on two prominent avian images in the parodos of the Agamemnon—the vulture simile (49–50) and the omen of the eagles and the pregnant hare (109–10)—has long been noted. In 1979 West suggested that the animal imagery also derived in part from Archilochus’ fable of the fox and the eagle (frr. 172–81 West), and his discussion was quickly welcomed and supplemented by Janko's reading of the eagle and snake imagery used by Orestes at Cho. 246–7. Capping this triennium mirabile of critical interest in Aeschylus’ birds of prey, Davies argued that the convincing resemblances between the fable and the Aeschylean passages in West's thesis—the anthropomorphism implied in παίδων (Ag. 50) and δεγπνον (Ag. 137) and the concern of Zeus for aggrieved animals (Ag. 55–6)—derive more generally from the nature of fable rather than from any one particular tale. Thus we have, according to Davies, an example of Aeschylus ‘exploring the resources and familiar modes of expression of a popular and well-known genre’ and transforming it into ‘the purest and sublimest type of poetry’.

29–33. Phaedra's ἒρως must at first (at Athens) have been without betraying symptoms, by contrast with the change at Trozen to symptoms of νόσος (still unexplained) as described in 34–40. We need to be told that explicitly, in preparation (μέν) for 34ff. (ἐπєὶδὲ…) and in conjunction with the potentially revealing foundation of a temple to Aphrodite. We therefore need not only Jortin's ὀνομάσουσιν for ὠνόμαζєν in 33, but also my ἂδηλον for ἒκδηλον (v.l. ἒκδηλον) in 32. The nearby ἒκδηλον in 37 will have played a part in the corruption.

Our only fully extant satyr play begins (Silenus προλογίζει) with the following address to Dionysus and his statue:

At lines 7–10 the description of the sea-battle appears to involve the destruction of the oars of the enemy ship (accepting Page's ῥηγì[κωπ] ος at 9), with the result that the sailors fall over (9–10 suppl. Danielsson). We would expect lines 11–13 to provide some sort of contrast with this description, since εἰ δέ at 11 contrasts with 7 ảλλ’ εἰμέυ, but the exact sense is not quite clear.

Scholarly opinion has been divided over the interpretation of τοîς ἀπò χρησμῶν τι ἰσχυρισμένοις μóνον δὴ τοῦτο ἐχυρῶς ξυμβáν at Thucydides 5.26.3. On one hand, Dover and others maintain that Thucydides emphasizes the oracle's fulfilment, and adopt a somewhat neutral definition for ἰσχυρισαμένοις (‘venture to affirm’), while Marinatos argues that ‘By ἰσχυρισαμένοις Thucydides is diverting attention away from the oracle and instead focusing on those who made claims based on it.’ This paper studies the interpretations of ἰσχυρισαμένοις and will suggest a more precise understanding of the word.

Philoxenus of Cythera's dithyramb, Cyclops or Galatea, was a poem famous in antiquity as the source for the story of Polyphemus' love for the sea-nymph Galatea. The exact date of composition is uncertain, but the poem must pre-date 388 B.C., when it was parodied by Aristophanes in the parodos of Plutus (290–01), and probably, as we shall see below, post-dates 406, the point at which Dionysius I became tyrant of Syracuse (D.S. 13.95–6). The Aristophanic parody of the work may well point to a recent performance in Athens, perhaps the first, and it is hard to identify any more significant reason for mentioning the poem. Previous accounts of the poem have concentrated on two main points, its supposed satirical purpose, and the possibly dramatic nature of its performance, but there has been no attempt to consider these two points in relation to each other, or to assess in detail the value of the source-material. I argue that although there is some evidence to support the satirical reading of the poem, the main value of this tradition is that it reveals Philoxenus' comic treatment of his subject, and that while the Galatea motif has previously been considered the essential element in this comic treatment, it was probably a small part of the plot, perhaps only briefly alluded to. Finally I provide reasons for doubting the prevalent view that the performance included dramatic elements.

Socratic irony is potentially fertile ground for exegetical abuse. It can seem to offer an interpreter the chance to dismiss any claim which conflicts with his account of Socratic Philosophy merely by crying ‘irony’. If abused in this way, Socratic irony can quickly become a convenient receptacle for everything inimical to an interpretation. Much recent scholarship rightly reacts against this and devotes itself to explaining how Socrates actually means everything he says, at least everything of philosophical importance. But the fact that a commentator needs to argue that Socrates is really serious when he disavows knowledge or claims to be the saviour of Athens is by itself sufficient to establish that there is an abundance of what I will call ‘play’ in the Socratic dialogues. The term ‘play’ refers to occasions when Socrates at least appears not to be speaking straightforwardly. ‘Play’ covers cases of real or apparent humour, mockery, teasing, irony, and sarcasm, without differentiation or further elaboration. When left undefined, as often, the phrase ‘Socratic irony’ seems to be used to refer to what I am calling ‘play’.

Plutarch's excerpt of Ctesias' version of the death of Cyrus makes fascinating reading. Although Ctesias has an unenviable reputation among scholars from antiquity onwards for fabrication and self-promotion, his description of the effects of trauma to the temple match well the clinical signs listed in a modern study of such injuries. Since he was a doctor from a family of doctors, this is not surprising, but it does suggest that his account here can be relied upon.

Over twenty years since the influential revisionist studies of Roussel and Bourriot, agreement on a satisfactory theory of the Attic genos seems as elusive as ever. Although they differed on details, these two scholars were agreed in their rejection of the old monolithic account of the genos as aristocratic family whose institutionalized control over state cults and phratry admissions in the historical period was a relic of a wider political dominance. Roussel and Bourriot instead proposed a tripartite model according to which the formal genos-kome—a more or less localized community similar to the later deme, with hereditary but socio-economically diverse membership, and enjoying, as a tighter community well placed to regulate its own admissions, automatic access to the wider phratry—was distinguishable both from aristocratic families, such as the Peisistratidai or Alkmeonidai, and priestly houses, such as the Kerykes and Eumolpidai of Eleusis. Subsequent discussion has moved in several directions. My analysis of the relationship between phratry and genos followed a broadly revisionist line. I found no good evidence for gene controlling the access to phratries of persons who were not genos members and presented a new interpretation of the crucial Demotionidai decrees in which, contrary to prevailing theories, neither of the two groups mentioned in them—the Demotionidai and the House (oikos) of the Dekeleieis—was a privileged subgroup dominating the whole. Rather, I suggested that the Demotionidai were a phratry in process of fission, the Dekelean House a product of this process. Others, however, have taken the debate in the other direction, as it were reprivileging the genos.

Whether its title, ύπέρ τοῦ μ⋯ γεννᾶν is authentic or not, the work transmitted as ‘Book X’ of Aristotle's History of Animals (HA) deals with a wide range of possible causes for failure to conceive and generate offspring. It sets out by saying that these causes may lie in both partners or in either of them, but in the sequel the author devotes most of his attention to problems of the female body. Thus he discusses the state of the uterus, the occurrence and modalities of menstruation, the condition and position of the mouth of the uterus, the emission of fluid during sleep (when the woman dreams that she is having intercourse with a man), physical weakness or vigour on awakening after this nocturnal emission, the occurrence of flatulence in the uterus and the ability to discharge this, moistness or dryness of the uterus, wind-pregnancy, and spasms in the uterus. Then he briefly considers the possibility that the cause of infertility lies with the male, but this is disposed of in one sentence: if you want to find out whether the man is to blame, the author says, just let him have intercourse with another woman and see whether that produces a satisfactory result (636bl 1–13; see also 637b23–4). The writer also acknowledges that the problem may lie in a failure of two otherwise healthy partners to match sexually, or as he puts it, to ‘run at the same pace’ ἲσοδρομῆσαι during intercourse, but he does not go into this possibility at great length (636b 15–23), and he proceeds to discuss further particulars on the female side.

Klaus Alpers has recently recovered from the obscurity of Byzantine lexica the fragments of what appears to be a novel dating from c. A.D. 100, and notable to us, as it was for the Byzantine excerptor, for the elegant verbal borrowings from ancient comedy, always a favourite source of good Attic Greek for the atticists of imperial times. One of these glosses gives occasion to look again at fishing metaphors for erotic business, a subject discussed often enough by scholars, but still perhaps capable of revealing new nuances. These hunting and fishing metaphors are used as one would expect in many non-amatory contexts, but in both love poetry and its allied genres they occur throughout antiquity in such quantity that the metaphorical complexity reaches into very allusive language. Long ago Preston had already pointed out that ‘Figures from hunting, fowling and fishing as parallel to the arts of the meretrix, are very frequent, and are developed at unusual length.’ There was undoubtedly a realistic side to all of this metaphorical hunting. ‘The lover is a fish to be baked, as long he has juice in him’, says the bawd at Plautus, Asinaria 177, and one needs little imagination to realize what plays can be made on such a theme, and indeed were made at all levels throughout antiquity.

An eleventh-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence preserves a short excerpt of a calendar outlining stages in the development of the foetus. It is headed Δαμναστού έκ τού Περί κυουσών καί βρεΦών θεραπείας, ‘Damnastes, from On the Care of Pregnant Women and of Infants’. Though its existence has long been noted, it has not been previously edited or published.

The Chronicle of Jerome states that Gaius Lucilius was born in 148 B.C. and died in 103 B.C. in his forty-sixth year. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996) says that Gaius Lucilius was probably born in 180 B.C. and died in 102/1 B.C.

According to Suetonius, Nero Claudius Drusus, the younger of Augustus' two stepsons, was said to have aspired to win spolia opima, that is, spoils taken from an enemy commander killed in battle. The aim of this paper is to consider what substance there may be in this claim and what light it may throw on Augustus’ relationship with the princes of the imperial family.

On many important aspects of the economic life of the rural population there is little that can be said. The complaint about the lack of secure data regarding the rural population of the ancient world has often been repeated, and there is no reason to restate the remarks about the lack of interest in the ancient sources for this topic. There is a danger, however, that absence of information may lead to an over-simplified picture of what actually happened. It is generally assumed that 80 or 90% of the ancient population was engaged in agriculture and that, conversely, only a small part of the population was engaged in non-agricultural work. Ancient historians have a tendency to treat the various sectors in the economy—commercial farming, subsistence farming, industries, and services (especially transport)—as strictly detached from each others. This is too simplistic a picture. We should not underestimate the importance of the employment of various economic strategies by the ancient farming population. This means that a peasant might also have been from time to time a charcoal maker, muleteer, or textile worker. If so, then agriculture and the non-agricultural sectors were indissolubly connected.

This paper reconsiders certain questions about Ausonius’ two incomplete works on historical themes, Fasti and Caesares, with particular attention to points raised in a recent article by R. W. Burgess. Of the Fasti we have only a few tantalizing snippets, the packaging and not the core: what did the work look like when it left Ausonius? What was its coverage? was it in verse or prose? The Caesares as we have it breaks off in mid-quatrain, at line 139: did it go beyond Elagabalus? What of the evidence in Giovanni Mansionario that Ausonius treated certain imperatores from Decius to Diocletian?