This article proposes and interprets a previously undiscussed connection between Horace's Carmen 2.15 and the description of the Corycian gardener at Virgil's Georgics 4.125–48. It argues that this allusion to Virgil sharpens the moral pessimism of Horace's ode. It first considers the circumstantial, general and formal elements connecting these two poems; it then considers how the model of the Corycian gardener brings further point and nuance to the moralizing message of Carmen 2.15 and the way in which this allusion is meaningfully echoed at Carmen 3.16.

This article takes as its starting point the frequency with which Ovid refers to his earlier works in his Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Alongside his treatment of the Metamorphoses in the exile poetry, it is suggested that Ovid refers, on a number of occasions, to his Fasti and the progress he is making on it. He does so by using the incipit of his calendar poem, Tempora; this term is sometimes combined with signa (‘stars’), which are also mentioned in the opening couplet of the Fasti. It is proposed that Ovid's attitude toward his Fasti changes over the course of his exile, during which time he is, at various junctures, editing his calendar, and that some of these changes are discernible in the exile poetry; they result in part from his entertaining the possibility of using his Fasti as leverage in securing a mitigation of his punishment. Poems discussed in detail are Tristia 1.1, 1.7, 2.547–52, 5.3; Epistulae ex Ponto 2.1, 4.8.

Emperor Julian's three-book treatise Contra Galilaeos survives solely in those Christian sources that quoted it in order to respond to its forceful attack on Christianity. The bulk of these survivals comes from Cyril of Alexandria's twenty-book Contra Iulianum. The recent publication of the first modern critical edition of Cyril's work creates the occasion for a fresh study of the remnants of Julian's text that can be recovered from it. This is especially true for Books 11–20 of Cyril's treatise that are themselves lost and survive only in quotations in later Greek and Syriac sources. The present article undertakes a reassessment of the Julianic material preserved via the Syriac transmission of Contra Iulianum, including several passages hitherto unknown or ignored in earlier studies of Julian's treatise. It provides the Syriac text and English translation of eight passages and contextualizes them in the wider argumentative aim of Contra Galilaeos.

In Essay Six of his Commentary on Plato's Republic, the Platonist Proclus offers a defence of the poetry of Homer and attempts to harmonize the Homeric epics, as inspired texts, with the philosophy of Plato as he interprets it. The tendency of late antique Platonists to turn to allegorical reading is well known, but in this instance Proclus interprets Achilles by other means. In particular, he is careful to place Achilles’ actions relative to what he sees as the correct position in the scale of virtues (at the level of the political virtues). In some further remarkable passages Proclus sees Achilles’ ritual activities as a kind of prefiguration of the theurgic practices embraced by the Platonic school of Proclus’ era.

A recently published fragment of the fourth-century speechwriter Hyperides contains a speech for the prosecution of Timandrus, accused of mistreating four orphans in his care. This article draws out from the fragment three important contributions to our understanding of Athenian conceptions of family relationships, particularly the relationships of marginalized groups: girls and enslaved people. First, the fragment constitutes a rare portrayal of a relationship between two sisters. Second, the fragment clearly articulates the idea that affective family relationships are not a biological inevitability but arise from socialization, a departure from other fourth-century thinking. Third, the speaker applies this statement to enslaved people, claiming that the separation of children from close family members is so cruel that even slave-traders avoid it in their sale of human beings. Though this claim seems to have been untrue except in a very limited sense, its place in the argumentation of the speech assumes broad recognition of the existence and value of family relationships between enslaved people, vivid evidence of the paradox that slave societies recognized the humanity of people they simultaneously insisted were subhuman.

According to Plutarch (Sert. 7.1–2) and Sallust (Hist. 1.83–4), a certain P. Calpurnius Lanarius killed L. Livius Salinator, a member of Sertorius’ staff in charge of military operations in the Pyrenees, in the early stages of the Sertorian War (82–72 b.c.). Through the analysis of the verb δολοφονέω in Plutarch's and St. Jerome's use of Sallust's Histories, this article seeks to demonstrate that Lanarius was an exile of the Sullan regime who treacherously assassinated his superior Salinator. The article puts forward the suggestion—not hitherto considered—that Lanarius was one of those proscribed.

This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted reading, so far neglected by earlier editors, is supported.

Critognatus’ speech has long been recognized as heavily by Caesar's hand, although few have questioned whether any speech was delivered by the Arvernian noble at all; and it has long puzzled readers with its contradictory manner and fierce criticism of Rome. But the etymologizing wordplay across several languages demonstrated below (along with other distinctly comical elements) renders it more than likely that both the speech and the speaker are products of the author's imagination. In its Nabokovian mode, it offers a glimpse of Caesar the linguist and introduces a playfulness into the dire situation before Alesia that suggests that the ‘Barley-Muncher’ and his speech should be reconsidered in a different, more humorous light.

Of the many accounts of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a.d. 312 written soon after the conflict, only those of Eusebius of Caesarea have Maxentius cross the Tiber on a bridge of boats to face the forces of Constantine. This detail, it is here argued, suggests that Maxentius may be seen as a latter-day Xerxes, the Persian emperor who, in preparation for his invasion of Greece in 480 b.c., famously spanned the Hellespont with a pair of boat-bridges. The article first reviews the seminal accounts of Xerxes’ feat in Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories, and next discusses the story's long afterlife in subsequent Greek (and Latin) authors, including those of Late Antiquity. Close analysis of Eusebius’ battle narratives in his Ecclesiastical History (9.9.3–8) and in his Life of Constantine (1.38) reveals that their vocabulary echoes the distinctive language used by Aeschylus, Herodotus and later writers in reference to Xerxes’ achievement. The article concludes by exploring the implications of this identification of Maxentius with Xerxes. It exemplifies two venerable tactics in Roman political propaganda: that of portraying a native rival as a foreign enemy and that of mapping the Persian Wars onto contemporary events. As Xerxes rediuiuus, Maxentius is cast as the quintessential barbarian tyrant, an Eastern despot resident in Rome.

This article argues that the encounter between Andromache and Ulysses in Seneca's Troades engages with the genre of declamation to juxtapose two different discourses surrounding torture: one focussed on torture's connection to truth, the other on its connection to tyranny. It describes how the Greek general Ulysses, convinced of the danger of letting the Trojan prince Astyanax live, threatens his mother Andromache with physical torture in order to ascertain the truth of Astyanax's whereabouts. However, Ulysses is countered by Andromache's rhetoric, through which, the article shows, she depicts herself as the archetypal heroic victim of a tyrant. It discusses how Ulysses innovates with an effective psychological torture in response. The article sets the scenario within the broader rhetorical context and demonstrates how it reflects debate among the contemporary elite about the necessity of, and the risks from, the rising use of torture by the Julio-Claudian emperors, a debate which resonates in the modern era.

This article addresses the view that Cicero's Pro Roscio Amerino contains ‘criticism’ of Sulla (the ‘anti-Sulla’ thesis). It argues that there is no evidence of criticism, that Cicero had no incentive to criticize Sulla, and that his attack is aimed solely against Chrysogonus. In particular, the article draws attention to the methodological implications of the ‘anti-Sulla’ thesis, arguing that it is unsound to second-guess Cicero's meaning, to project ‘sarcasm’ onto his words, or to suggest post euentum rewrites; these views, it is argued, owe more to preconceived scholarly notions of Sulla as a tyrant than to actual indications in the text. In addition, the notion that the speech was ‘courageous’ or ‘political’ is challenged, with emphasis being placed on the identity of the nobiles supporting Cicero: these Sullans had nothing to fear from Sulla but, equally, there is little reason to suppose that they were trying to attack him.1

Apuleius tells us of his own popularity as a writer, and yet both the literary and the material records are silent about his works for almost one hundred and fifty years after his death. Various attempts to identify allusions to his works before Lactantius and other fourth-century authors have proven unconvincing. This article suggests that there is a clear allusion to the Metamorphoses in Tertullian's treatise Aduersus Valentinianos (beginning of the third century). Tertullian uses Apuleius to denigrate the Valentinians and to assimilate the name of one of their gods to the braying of an ass.

Since a problematic passage in Virgil's Aeneid (10.366–7) shows the same influence of Sallust (Cat. 58–60) as do the dozen lines preceding and following, it should not be deleted, as has been suggested.

This article argues that the text of the Dirae and the Lydia is even more corrupt than current editions give reason to believe, and attempts to emend about a dozen passages.

At the climax of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad, Achilles ponders whether to kill the king (1.191). The first half of the line, however, has received little attention, but the various interpretations that have been put forth have been unconvincing. This article proposes an interpretation that reveals an Achilles at least momentarily contemplating fomenting a revolt on the part of the army against Agamemnon's authority.

This note proposes to emend the problematic preserved reading ad cuius mensae sacra (Val. Max. 4.2.3) to ad Iouis mensae sacra.

Through a detailed analysis of Xenophon's defence against a charge for hybris among the Ten Thousand, this paper discusses violence, reputation and hierarchy in Greek military and social contexts. Contrary to other recent treatments of the episode, the study highlights the centrality of honour/shame dynamics and of desert in establishing and upholding social order, showing that these notions are found consistently in numerous examples as early as Homer. Addressing the apparent lack of strict discipline in Greek armies, the paper concludes that shame and peer pressure had a strong normative power in acknowledging and reconciling personal claims and common interests within a group.

This note argues that repeated uses of onus ‘burden’ in Plaut. Asin. 591–745 pun on Greek ὄνος ‘ass’ and, in so doing, activate a network of other puns and hints at the play's title, asses (the animal), and both homoerotic and anal sex.

Our extant texts never give a fully comprehensive or representative impression of classical literature. Fragments are valuable because they tell—or hint at—a different story. They represent vestigial traces of a counterfactual alternative version of literary history, and they offer tantalizing glimpses of voices or varieties of human experience that were (accidentally or deliberately) excluded from the classical canon. To ‘think fragmentarily’ is to think beyond the canon and to question traditionally dominant modes of thought. This article uses a neglected fragment of Damoxenus (fr. 3 PCG) as a case study for ‘fragmentary thinking’. This extraordinary fragment reveals that Damoxenus’ comedy dramatized a homosexual love story, in sharp contrast to the familiar heteronormative marriage plots of Menander and other Greek and Roman comic playwrights. Careful examination of a single fragment can prompt us to re-examine conventional scholarly narratives of sexuality in New Comedy.

While it is no secret that Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica explores civil-war themes at great length, the conflicts arising on the island of Peuce between the Colchians and the Argonauts and within the Argonautic party itself in the epic's final book (8.217–467) have been overlooked in critical studies of Valerian civil war. This article argues that Valerius presents the conflicts on Peuce as examples of civil war—emphasizing the bonds of kinship between the conflicting parties and illustrating effects of this discord using imagery of stasis and cosmic dissolution associated with civil war in the wider Latin literary tradition—and thus invites reflection on the development and manifestation of internecine strife within the Argonautica.