Herodas' Mimiamb 7 has often attracted scholarly attention on account of its thematic preoccupation with the sexuality of ordinary people, thus offering a realistic and exciting glimpse of everyday life in the eastern Mediterranean of the third century b.c.e. In addition, his obscure reference in lines 62–3 to the obsession of women and dogs with dildos has been the focus of long-standing scholarly debate: while most scholars agree that the verses employ a metaphor, possibly of obscene nature, their exact meaning is still to be clarified. In response, this article offers an additional paradigm which stresses the cultural osmosis between the Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the Hellenistic period; in my view, Herodas' peculiar choice of expression could be explained more aptly through this hitherto unnoticed perspective. Despite having frustratingly little information about the poet and his life, his familiarity with the Hellenistic East is often implied in his poetic settings: for example, Cos in Mimiamb 2 and probably locations in Asia Minor in Mimiambs 6 and 7 are considered likely to reflect the places where he lived. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Herodas spent periods of his life in areas of the eastern Aegean where cultural interaction was practically unavoidable. Moreover, his first poem exhibits a certain amount of knowledge and admiration for Ptolemaic Egypt and, although this does not necessarily mean that he lived there, he must have been very familiar with Alexandria and its erudite circles. After all, Herodas, a contemporary of Theocritus who subscribed to his preference for short, elegant poetic forms, shared the latter's interest in the lowly mime, which both of them invested with learned language. Thus, specific motifs, such as the visit of an abandoned mistress to the witches in a desperate attempt to coax back a cruel lover, are treated by both poets and ultimately derive from the literary corpus of mimes by the influential Sophron. Theocritus was also familiar with locations in Cos, an island that appears to have been culturally diverse. One of the foreign communities that increasingly made its presence felt in third-century b.c.e. Asia Minor and the nearby islands of the eastern Aegean was that of the Jews, although the history of particular communities is often difficult to recover. Nevertheless, we do know that as early as the third century b.c.e. ‘various Jewish authors writing in Greek had adopted the prevailing patterns of Greek literature in its many forms, filling them with Jewish content’. The Jews had a prominent and well-documented presence at Alexandria, where their interaction with the Greeks was promoted by the Ptolemies. There, already by the middle of the third century b.c.e., the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) had been translated into Koine Greek by royal request, which probably indicates a sizeable community able to participate dynamically in the cultural interface of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In the following pages, I shall revisit the past interpretations of the aforementioned verses in Mimiamb 7 before arguing that the key to their understanding lies in the interaction of the Greeks with near eastern cultures, particularly the Jews, who seemed to have employed a distinctive metaphor about ‘dogs’ and their perceived sexual habits.

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:

The adjective ἱερός is a central term in Greek religion and is used in various contexts. Generally translated ‘sacred’, it indicates that an object has been conceded to the gods and is now in relation with them (relation of belonging, protection, etc.). It appears frequently in Greek inscriptions in the expression τὰ ἱερά, to designate sacred objects or, in a more abstract meaning, sacred matters.

The Battle of Drepana in 249 b.c. marks the most significant defeat of Roman naval forces at the hands of their Carthaginian opponents during the First Punic War. Attempting to take the Punic fleet in the harbour of Drepana by surprise, the consul P. Claudius Pulcher sailed with his ships from Lilybaeum (a Carthaginian stronghold under Roman siege since the previous year) about midnight, and reached Drepana at dawn. Yet, owing to swift and level-headed counter-measures taken by the Punic commander, Adherbal, the unfolding fight – partly in the harbour, mostly off the shore – turned into a fiasco for the Romans. The consul got away; he returned to Rome, where the Senate instructed him to appoint a dictator. How soon he returned, and by what route, is the question.

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.

Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield. But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions, concedat laurea laudi and concedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (1) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also (2) examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other.

In the beginning, Rome was ruled by kings. Their expulsion heralded the foundation of the Republic, a political system strong enough to withstand both internal and external threats to the state. Among these internal threats was the possibility of an elite man trying to set himself up as a king. Modern scholarship agrees that there were three such attempts to recreate a monarchy in the early Republic: Spurius Cassius in 485, Spurius Maelius in 439 and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus in 385/4. The affectatores regni purposefully courted the plebs in order to gain supreme power. But Roman virtue was too strong; all three men were caught, tried (either publicly or privately) and executed. Their possessions were seized and consecrated to the gods; their families shunned their memory. These attempts to establish tyranny revealed both the fragility and the power of the Republic.

An examination of the idealized image of Rome before 146 b.c. constructed in the Jugurtha (Jug.) reveals that despite the narrator's own stated opinions, his depiction of it is perverse and unhistorical. The narrator's value judgements are unappealing, his archaizing affected, his history plainly wrong: these are serious interpretative problems. Is this an attempt, as in the dialogues of Cicero, to re-educate the moral intuitions of his day by means of a fictitious past? Perhaps; but narratological analysis of the relevant sections suggests another solution, an extrapolation to the narratorial persona of the technique of ironic subversion used in the speeches. The key to understanding the depiction of Rome before 146 lies in the identification of political and historical discourse and the consequent extension to the latter of the factionalization characteristic of the former. The problematic aspects of the depiction of Rome before 146 empower the reader to articulate a critique of faction; the text needs to be surmounted to be understood.

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.

Odes 4.2 ostensibly looks forward to two public events lying at some indeterminate point in the future, Augustus' return from campaign in Gaul, and a triumph over the Sygambri. The celebrations anticipated for these occasions frame the second half of the ode; but they do not supply its dramatic setting or timing, and the latter is evidently associated with the period following Augustus' departure for Gaul in summer 16 b.c., or at any rate with a time when the Sygambri were felt still to present an armed threat. The dramatic date need not however be identical with the time of writing, and it should not be assumed that Odes 4.2 was composed in 16. Indeed, as will be seen (below, Section 6), it is most likely to be the retrospective product of a later period, around the time of Augustus' eventual return in July 13. On this view, the poem does not look forward to future events, but back to the time of Augustus' departure.

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.

Tristia 3.3 purports to be a ‘death-bed’ letter addressed by the sick poet to his wife in Rome (3.3.1–4), in which Ovid, banished from Rome on Augustus' orders, foresees his burial in Tomi as the ultimate form of exilic displacement (3.3.29–32). In order to avoid such a permanent form of exclusion from his homeland, Ovid issues instructions for his burial in the suburbs of Rome (3.3.65–76), dictating a four-line epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb (3.3.73–6). However, despite the careful instructions he outlines for his burial and physical memorial, Ovid asserts: maiora libelli | et diuturna magis sunt monumenta mihi (‘my little books are a greater and more long-lasting monument for me’, 3.3.77–8), expressing his belief in his continued poetic afterlife. Scholars have seen this poem's concerns as above all literary, concentrating on Ovid's exploitation and development of elegiac and Augustan models which also treat the themes of death and poetic immortality. However, although Ovid's portrayal of what purports to be personal experience draws extensively upon earlier poetry, and, as we shall see, the poem gains much of its power from its engagement with the tradition that poetry alone can memorialize, previous studies have failed to analyse how Ovid consistently plays up the element that marks him out from the predecessors who had imagined their own deaths and poetic afterlives: that is, his status as an exile. Ovid's insistence on burial in his native land – from which he had been excluded in life – and his assertion of his poetic immortality in a poem which repeatedly stresses his exilic status, thus take on a markedly political angle, which had been absent or more muted in the models he exploits.

In contemporary onomastics the usage of the full name – given name and surname – lends a certain formality or seriousness to an utterance. It is often assumed that such pragmatics in the employment of names may be easily transferred to the ancient world, but we should none the less confirm our assumptions with textual evidence. This paper will present evidence from the letters between Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Cornelius Fronto which demonstrates not only that the fuller Roman name was used for formal occasions, but also that it could, as in the contemporary world, be employed in an ironic, mock-formal manner to intimate rather the opposite of formality, friendship.

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.

There are presently two modern critical editions of Proclus' commentary on the Parmenides. One, the edition of the Oxford Classical Texts, was completed under the auspices of Carlos Steel in 2009. The other, the Budé edition, under the editorship of Concetta Luna and the late Alain-Philippe Segonds, followed soon after, with the third of the first three books of the commentary having appeared in the early 2012. This most recent two-part volume of the Budé addresses, for the final time it seems, the Budé's criticisms of the OCT edition. The first volume could be well described as a long philippic against the OCT and its editor and contributors, going well beyond the tone of measured academic discourse. Relentlessly, it imprecates the readings of the OCT, the length and tone of which criticisms will not weather time well. However, there is one disagreement between the two editions, perhaps the most textually significant one and certainly the largest, which is noted as a part of a comprehensive list by the Budé, but no discussion ensues. This is all the more curious because Steel had, in a separate article, directly raised objections to their solution to this passage. Why in this single case is the Budé suddenly so taciturn?