The Seleucid Empire was the largest and most ethnically diverse of all the successor kingdoms formed after the death of Alexander the Great. The relationship between the Macedonian dynasty and various subject peoples is therefore a central question of Seleucid historiography. This article focuses on the relations between king and native temples, arguing that temple despoliation was standard procedure for Seleucid rulers facing fiscal problems. I explore various instances in which Seleucid kings removed treasures from native temples under coercive auspices, suggesting that this pattern problematizes recent scholarship emphasizing positive relations between Seleucid kings and native priestly elites.

We come now to the signs of fair weather; and the first five lines are important:

nec minus ex imbri soles et aperta serena prospicere et certis poteris cognoscere signis. nam neque tum stellis acies obtunsa videtur, nec fratris radiis obnoxia surgere luna, tenuia nec lanae per caelum vellera ferri.

By definite signs no less will you be able To forecast sunny, clear, and rainless days After the rain, or know it has set fair. Then seen, the stars' keen brilliance is not dulled; Rises no sunlit moon; no woolly cloudlets Flock over heav'n.

Poem 2 of the Liber Catullianus – the first of the passer poems – was probably the poet's most famous piece. The poem presents a charming and fascinating picture of a Roman matron who is said by the poet to divert her mind from her passion by playing with her pet bird. Of this seemingly innocent picture a peculiar esoteric interpretation was offered in the time of the Italian Renaissance. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Florentine scholar Angelo Poliziano suggested that Catullus had woven an obscene allegory into his poem, and he supported his argument by reference to the sixth epigram of Martial's eleventh book. This epigram is a vulgar poem that ends with the words ‘passerem Catulli’. It will figure prominently in our discussion below. Poliziano only hinted at an indecent meaning. The Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss, in his Observations on Catullus published in 1684, makes the matter explicit. The Greeks, he alleges, often used the names of birds to refer to a man's penis, and similarly passer in poem is ambiguous and at one level represents the poet's penis. By this obscene interpretation, the basic allegory of the poem would be something like this. Lesbia has great familiarity with the poet's male member. She delights in playing with it and in this way seems to satisfy her erotic impulses. The poet by means of similar play would like to take similar satisfaction for himself. He cannot because masturbation gives him no pleasure. According to Voss, this allegory continues in poem 3, the famous dirge for the dead passer. Here, he declares, we should suppose that the poet wishes to represent himself as ‘confectum et exhaustum lucta Venerea et funerata… ea parte quae virum facit’ (‘worn out and exhausted by a physical exertion erotic and deadly in regard to that part which makes a person a man’).

Boni and improbi are political words. Political words change their meanings—as we all very well know today—but they also have histories, which suggest basic, fundamental value-judgements, and whose use reveals as much about the user as about the object to which he refers.

The victories of Pharsalus, Thapsus, and Munda had left Caesar in a position of undisputed authority and, as the year 44 opened, the question in Roman minds must have been how Caesar intended to consolidate and perpetuate his position. His assassination on the Ides of March left his contemporaries with little indication of what political solution Caesar had devised, and left to subsequent historians of the period the intriguing problem of deducing from such evidence as the last few months of Caesar's life provide what his political intentions had been. The initial difficulty of this problem is to free one's mind from the simplifications and, indeed, distortions with which subsequent political thought has reported the critical events of Caesar's last months; for in most of western civilization, particularly the English-speaking portion, the popular impression of Caesar as a tyrant and the conspirators as democrats is almost ineradicable, thanks to the dramatic story of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

To learn that the Greeks knew of no equivalent to the special church music of today might cause some surprise. But, in fact, it was under the auspices of religion that their music in most of its branches was cultivated, its character being as manifold as that of the rites to which it was attached. The music associated with, for instance, the cult of Apollo was restrained, pacific, and harmonious, while the opposite character of turbulence and excitement typified that of Dionysiac worship. These were the classical and romantic strains of Greek music. Although the former approaches the more closely to our own idea of the liturgical style, the one was, to the Greeks, no more inherently sacred than the other.

Characters, though not under that title, began like many other things with Homer. A δειλός is typified in Iliad xiii and the Catalogue of Ships has brief descriptions of the leaders of the various contingents. Ajax the Lesser, for example, ὀλίγος μὲν ἔην, λινοθώρηξ,/ ἐγχείῃ δ' ἐκέκαστο Пανέλληναςκαὶ'Αχαιούς. Or Nireus, ‘the best-looking man that went to Troy, excepting the blameless Achilles’: ἀλλ' ἀλαпαδνὸς ἔην, пαῦρος δέ οἱ εἳпετο λαός. Best known, and in contrast to Nireus the handsome, is Homer's portrayal of Thersites (αἴσχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑпό λιον ἦλθε) with full supporting details of his figure. The physical oddities of Pittakos the sage were emphasized in verses by Alkaios: Herodotos, through Otanes the Persian in Book iii, depicted the nature of a tyrant. This recalls ὁ τυραννικός of Plato Republic iv. 573 c as well as his political descriptions of men and constitutions in Book viii.7 Aristotle also pictured tyrants (Politics 1313b): as well as (for ethics) a χαῦνος, (for rhetoric) a young man and an old, and the germ of the later portrait Character is seen in Thucydides already (Themistocles, i. 138. 3). But the truest pre-Theophrastan Character is that of Philokleon in the Wasps—the lover of the courts, φιληλιαστής.

There is some ancient evidence, and much more modern conjecture, about the existence of Medizers in Athens during the period 508–480 B.c. The present article attempts to take further the clarification of the term Medism which was begun by A. W. Gomme, and to suggest that there has been too uncritical an acceptance of the label in many, if not most, of the cases to which it has been applied.

People wonder at this stone [the magnet]. Indeed it often makes a chain of rings hanging from itself. For you can sometimes see five or more rings hanging down one after another swaying in light breezes, when each hangs down from another, clinging underneath it, and each feels from the other the force and attraction of the stone; so much does its force penetrate and have its effect. … It also happens sometimes that the nature of iron withdraws from this stone, and will flee it and follow it in turn. I have even seen iron rings leap up, and at the same time iron filings seethe in bronze bowls when a magnet has been put underneath, so eager to escape the stone is iron seen to be.

Various attempts have been made, over the years, to assess the character of Dido, and explain her presence in, and extraordinary influence on, the Aeneid. Some critics have seen her as the heroine of an Aristotelian tragedy; others believe that Virgil emulated Pygmalion, and fell in love with his own creation; the most perverse of all call her a digression, a fatal flaw in the construction of the poem, and one which irretrievably weakens our view of Aeneas himself.

The true site of the oracle of Dodona was discovered only in comparatively recent years. Christopher Wordsworth was the first to identify it, and the Greek archaeologist Carapanos the first to explore it. It lies to the south-west of Ioannina, at a spot most easily accessible from the coast of Thesprotiaby way of the valley of the Thyamis (Fig. 1). It is reached today by a branch road some ten miles to the south of loannina. The long, narrow valley in which it stands is completely dominated on its western side, and for much of the day overshadowed, by the almost precipitous mountain Tomaros (Olitzika), which rises to a height of 6,500 feet. This mountain bears a chain of craggy peaks, and its flank is scarred with gorges and torrents, fed by the snow which lasts some four months of the year on the upper slopes. The climate of the district is severe and well substantiates Homer's description of Δωδώνη δυσχωί-μερος. The valley is remarkable for its violent thunderstorms, which bring torrential rain to fill the mountain cataracts in the summer, and its soil is thus unusually swampy. The foothills of Tomaros are covered with pine trees, while in the plain below a few rather ragged oaks are still to be seen. The rivers of the district are the Acheron and the Kokytos, both associated with the underworld; and not far away is the Acheloos which makes its way down into Akarnania. (See Pl. VI.)

One of the most abhorrent events of Nero's reign, as viewed at the time and by commentators thereafter, was the premeditated murder of the emperor's mother Agrippina in March AD 59, which some have felt marked the end of the ‘five good years’ of Nero's reign, the quinquennium Neronis. The murder took place, not in Rome as many others that disfigured the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but on the Bay of Naples, more particularly on the Gulf of Pozzuoli at or near the resort of Baiae, modern Baia.

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.

This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

One of the less expected treatises included in Plutarch's Moralia consists of the nine books of ‘Table-talk’ or topics suitable for discussion by the participants at the strictly male and private drinking party or symposium (612Cff.) But even when the association of symposium and the erotic is acknowledged or we note the interest of ancient philosophers in the general area of eugenics (e.g., Arist. Pol. 1334b29 ff. and Plutarch on the Spartan marriage, Lye. 15.3–9) or we identify the type of prejudice which later led Christians to believe that a child conceived on a Sunday will be a leper or epileptic, the sixth question analysed in Book 3, ‘the right time to make love’ (653Bff), is perhaps considerably more surprising. The conclusion eventually reached, however, will occasion no alarm: the right time for men and women to sleep together would appear to be at night when it is dark (cf. 654D–E) – after all, we are busy and preoccupied throughout the day and are not animals like the cock eager for sex first thing in the morning. But in the evening we are relaxed and at our ease, and so the time is right provided, of course, we have neither eaten nor drunk to excess. This is hardly a conclusion, however, to be warmly welcomed by the sexually liberated for whom intercourse is there to be enjoyed wherever, and at whatever time of night or day, excitement mounts. But when it comes to sex, Plutarch is no revolutionary keen to experiment.

The late Professor H. A. Harris, who made many contributions to this journal, has added much to our knowledge of Greek and Roman athletics. Like Gardiner before him, he valued highly the opinions of modern athletes and was proud to be considered in their ranks; but it is difficult for a scholar (even when athlete) fully to understand all the intricate fields of sporting endeavour. Harris is so clearly right in his discussions of many fields of athletics that one is reluctant to take issue with his interpretations in a few areas, but he was unfortunately not fully versed in some of the ‘heavy’ events, as discus throwers have seen. In the case of weightlifting Harris discounts many of the ancient achievements without an adequate discussion of their feasibility. Since it has become almost fashionable for modern scholars not to take seriously these recorded feats, it is worth while to review them in the light of modern weightlifting—a comparison which has not been closely examined before—and to discuss the various lifts and training techniques of the ancients.

It is essential for us to question our own views and those of our predecessors on the status of women in ancient Athens. With few exceptions these views display a kernel of prejudice and a pulp of misunderstanding, skinned over with the bloom of evasiveness. It is, indeed, odd to observe how inquirers into the social framework of Greek society have been misled, and how few classical scholars have attempted to give the lie to the extravagances spread abroad concerning the alleged attitude of Athenians to their womenfolk. Temptation to write up a violent contrast between the daily lives of Spartan and Athenian women was great, and in the last century other half-conscious feelings helped a false presentation. Again and again it has been said or implied that Athenian married women lived in an almost oriental seclusion, and that they were looked on with indifference approaching sometimes to contempt. Quite recently it was alleged in a broadcast that the Athenian social system relegated women to the condition of squaws, the matron being little more than a domestic servant. ‘As wives and mothers’, said the speaker, ‘Athenian women were despised.’ Literary passages have in the past been torn from their context as evidence for this, and the inferior legal status of women has been stressed. There are, however, important exceptions among scholars, of especial value being an essay by Professor A. W. Gomme, and a long section in The Greeks by Professor H. D. F. Kitto, whose remarks on truncated quotations from Aristophanes and Xenophon are very illuminating. Anyone interested in the question is advised to read again pages 219–36 in that little volume, as most of what follows simply strengthens what Kitto has written. In a variety of religious festivals women took conspicuous parts, and with the festivals we may put the theatre, because Athenian women formed a part of the audience, as is admitted in the last edition of Haigh's great work.

It is a question worth the asking, at what season in his life a man comes to the writing of history, with what equipment for the task, and under what impulsion. Cornelius Tacitus did not discover his vocation until he had passed the age of forty. Was that late or early? Late, in the opinion of some scholars, late and almost anomalous. Gaston Boissier avowed his surprise on the first page of his Tacite, a book published just over fifty years ago, and held in merited esteem for its combination of elegance and judgement. And, more recently (in 1947), Ernst Kornemann, the last survivor of that notable company, the pupils of Theodor Mommsen, affirmed it as an axiom that Tacitus came late to history.

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.

The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.