Well over a decade ago now, John Moles drew attention to the fact that the words of Clytemnestra at Aesch. Ag. 1388ff. included some striking sexual imagery that had gone unnoticed. To summarize a rich and detailed discussion, he said: ‘Clytemnestra represents the dying Agamemnon as having an ejaculation of dark blood—and herself as rejoicing in reciprocal climax as her husband bespatters her—with his blood’. My purpose here is to draw attention to two more examples of this kind of language to be found in close proximity to the foregoing.

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating.1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge.2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses, and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius, but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right.3

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system.

Both and are guaranteed by the London scholia (Pfeiffer vol. i, p.3), so the gap is reduced to the tantalizingly small one of a monosyllabic feminine noun in the accusative case, most probably of four letters. The number of possibilities cannot be unlimited. My own suggestion must necessarily remain in limbo in the present state of our knowledge concerning the poet or poets whom Callimachus is talking about, but at least it seems to me less bizarre than other restorations currently in the field.

My inverted commas are intended; I mean, of whom are Schwartz and Jacoby thinking when they say that the History which was called Kratippos' was a forgery of the second or of the first century B.C. ? The reason for the question is this: most forgeries are of the form, ‘Here is an epigram by Simonides, a new chapter by Thucydides’; or ‘I, a humble scholar or an unknown person, X, have discovered the lost books of Livy, or a hitherto unknown painting by Vermeer, or a privately printed edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese’; that is, the work forged is said to be by a famous person, the discoverer a relatively obscure one. Schwartz and Jacoby, however, say, or imply, that ‘Kratippos’ was the name of the forger, a man who lived, probably, in the first century B.C., and who deceived Dionysios of Halikarnassos (de Thuc. 16) and Plutarch (de glor. Ath. 345d ); but what did he assert that his history was ? Did he say, ‘I, Kratippos, have discovered a lost history dating from a generation after the end of the Peloponnesian war which is a continuation of Thucydides; authorship unknown’? Clearly not, for Dionysios says, and Plutarch quite plainly implies, that they took ‘Kratippos’ to be an author of the early fourth century.

This paper will discuss the behaviour of and in the Homeric poems. These words are allotted a variety of different ‘meanings’ by the lexicographers. For example, LSJ s.v. I. pray, II. vow, III. profess loudly, boast, vaunt; s.v. I. prayer, II. boast, vaunt, or object of boasting, glory; s.v. I. thing prayed for, object of prayer, II. boast, vaunt. I shall, of course, discuss the whole range of these words; but I begin with some observations on ‘prayer’.

It may appear at first sight that ‘prayer’ is a simple word, with only one conceivable ‘meaning’, which must have that ‘meaning’ in any language. We might suggest that ‘request addressed to a god’ is an adequate representation of that ‘meaning’, and that when we have rendered (say) by ‘pray’ in what appear to us to be appropriate contexts we have conveyed the full sense of the original.

The character of Hippolytus, as it is drawn by Euripides, usually receives but half-hearted praise. His coldness, inherited, no doubt, from his Amazon mother, and his consciousness of virtue, inevitably allied to priggishness in the eyes of a society which tolerates any extreme of self-depreciation, are not attractive. It is, perhaps, more surprising that no surprise seems to be provoked by the dramatic portrayal of a disposition unique in Greek literature. The association of holiness with a life of celibacy is so familiar from the history both of Christianity and of other faiths that it seems natural to us that one who aspires to the highest purity, like Hippolytus, should allow no place in his life for sex. Hippolytus is pure, we are apt to imagine, for the same reason that a monk is pure, because such purity is pleasing to the god whom he serves and favourable to the life of the spirit.

‘The reading of the MSS, and not the Renaissance correction e, is certainly what L. wrote.’ So Kenney in his edition of Lucretius 3.1 I believe that he is right, but that the case for o (apart from manuscript authority) rests on different grounds from those which he adduces.

Kenney quotes D.A. West 's statement that e is ‘not worthy of the precise and vivid imagination of this poet’, and himself finds it anaemic by contrast with the sonorous o.2 These are subjective judgements. One can only reply by expressing disagreement and pointing out that e has seemed unexceptionable to the numerous editors who have printed it and have preferred it to o (which Lachmann thought valde ineptum).

Since the publication of our article on Thucydides and the Plague of Athens, Dr Heinrich von Staden of Yale University has kindly drawn our attention to a paper by Eby and Evjen suggesting that the Plague was glanders. We do not think that this diagnosis can possibly be correct, though there are undoubtedly some points in its favour. The authors have argued their case as persuasively as possible, and the proposal has sufficient merit to deserve a serious reply.

Our purpose is protreptic, to broach a subject neglected by researchers and consequently by commentators on Plautus and Terence.1 We mean the relation of rhythm and dramatic meaning in the ordinary stichic iambo-trochaic metres. It is of course a longstanding convention that a commentator writing in usum scholarum will include some account of the basic rules of scansion and prosody and a conspectus metrorum of sorts. Ambitious efforts may be made to analyse the polymetric songs in Plautus, if to label cola is analysis; but there are notorious difficulties in this, for the songs are astrophic and polymorphous, the colometry is uncertain, and it cannot be said that we fully understand the range or relationship of the elements out of which the songs are constructed, or that the rules of prosody in the cantica have been definitively established. Under the circumstances it is understandable that commentators refrain except in the most general terms from relating rhythm to dramatic context in the songs. But it is different with the iambo-trochaic metres. We are on firmer ground here, and there is more of it. Commentators will draw attention to aspects of the playwright's diction such as alliteration, assonance, triadic expression, hyperbaton, and so on, by which emphasis and dramatic ‘colouring’ may be indicated. But very little attention is given to the dramatic and tonal implications of the texture of the iambo-trochaic metres as used for whole scenes or in particular exchanges. This is a pity, because Plautus and the tragedians and even Terence can be shown to have exploited the latitude of realization allowed by ‘the rules’ to underpin the sense of a passage or an exchange.

This couplet has escaped critical attention, even though it contains two anomalies. First the combination ut iam has lost its normal meaning ‘even granted that’ (e.g. Ars 1. 346 ut iam fallaris tuta repulsa tua est) and must be split into its two elements and iam translated as though it were tandem. Second, the reflexive adjective is used in a dependent clause to refer to the subject of the main-clause verb: though there is no reason why Ovid should not have used this licence for metrical convenience.

In the Classical Quarterly, xlix (July–October 1955), Mrs. A. D. Ure mentions a Corinthian pyxis which had been previously published by her in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, lxix. 19 f. (Figs. 2a and 3). This vase, at first believed to be of Boeotian origin, appears to come from Corinth, as subsequently shown by Mrs. Ure in J.H.S. lxxii. 121. Its subject is quite well known, consisting of an unbearded figure dressed in a fawn-skin with two horns growing from its head, and sitting on what very probably is a heap of corn. In his right hand he is holding a staff thickened at the head, and in his left a stick terminating in forklike prongs. The figure is flanked on the right by a small animal (pig) and on the left by a basket of fruit.

The poet Philitas was so thin, they say, that he had to wear lead weights on his shoes to avoid being blown away by a gust of wind. We have two versions of the anecdote. First Aelian, Varia Historia 9.14:

The tale of Gyges' ring narrated by Cicero at De officiis 3.38 is of course originally found, and acknowledged as such by Cicero, in Plato (Resp. 359c–360b). I would like in this paper to address two questions about Cicero's handling of the tale – one historical, one philosophical. The purpose of the historical question is to evaluate, with respect to the Gyges narration, Cicero's quality as a reader of Plato. How well does Cicero understand the role of the story in its original Platonic context? The motivation for the question is that, at first blush, Cicero seems to have badly misunderstood it. I shall argue that the appearance is illusory, and that Cicero understands the tale's Platonic provenance perfectly well. Now it should be noted that the question of Cicero's grasp of the tale's purpose in Plato is distinct from the question whether Cicero himself puts the story to the same or a different use than Plato did. I shall suggest that while there are striking points of contact between the two treatments, on one crucial feature – namely the tale's ostentatiously far-fetched nature – Cicero is instructively more explicit than Plato.

The links between Eileithyia, an earlier Minoan goddess, and a still earlier neolithic prototype are, relatively, firm. The explanation is as simple as it is important. The continuity of her cult depends upon the unchanging concept of her function. Eileithyia was the goddess of childbirth; and the divine helper of women in labour has an obvious origin in the human midwife. To Homer she is ‘goddess of the pains of birth’. When Leto gave birth to Apollo in Delos, was in attendance, and so were a number of other goddesses who bathed the god-child and wrapped him in his swaddling-clothes.

When a poet's work survives only in fragments our judgement of its merit is bound to be strongly influenced by the arrangement given to the fragments by their editors. And yet some superficial indication of the subject-matter is not infrequently seized upon as though it were a sound basis for so responsible an operation, and horror uacui proving stronger than amor ueri, stronger even than desiderium noua docendi, the ill-founded solution is passed on from one edition to the next although it may be wholly out of character with the author's style and may make a great poet appear a wretched hack. An example of this was given in C.Q. N.S. X (1960), 188 f., where the traditional attribution of a commonplace statement to a speech which called for the very opposite of a commonplace was shown to be mistaken. The standard interpretation of the fragment to be discussed here is no less striking as an instance of injustice done to the poet, even more liable to expose him to ridicule, and perhaps of wider interest as a specimen of stylistic indications unduly neglected.

An inscription found in the theatre of Hierapolis(Pamm UKkale)in Phrygia and recently published is of interest both in itself and because it may help to elucidate a passage of Arrian′sDiscourses of Epictetos.

In Lucan′s second book, an old man looks back to the atrocities perpetrated in the civil strife of the eighties, chiefly on the return of Marius and Cinna to Rome in late 87 and on that of Sulla in 82 (lines 70–233). The episodes that Lucan briefly refers to are all otherwise known, and there seems no particular reason to assume that he is not drawing on Livy as his principal source, as he does for the events of his main narrative, the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. The scholia to the passage may be a different matter.

One of the most famous allegations made against the emperor Caligula was that he had intended to appoint his favourite horse, Incitatus, as consul. While Suetonius and Cassius Dio both preserve this allegation, neither explains the basis for it, what exactly Caligula had said or done to lead those about him to believe that this is what he had intended to do.