This article offers a new interpretation of the wave which, in the finale of Euripides’ Iphigenia Taurica, prevents the Greek ship from leaving the Taurian land, thus making it necessary for the goddess Athena to intervene. My contention is that the wave is the predictable consequence of the sacrilege which the Greeks are committing by stealing Artemis’ cult statue from the Taurian temple. Therefore, we can detect in IT the same religious offence–punishment–compensation structure that can be found in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. However, unlike in Aeschylus’ tragedy, in IT Athena's final decrees compensate only the goddess Artemis and not the human characters: after deeply suffering as instruments of the divine will, not even in the future will they be allowed to fulfil their desires. Thus, we may say that a supernatural ‘wave’ prevents humans from leaving in accordance with their will.

The Roman triumph is treated by the Augustan poets from a literary and political perspective. Ovid in particular gives it original and ambiguous features. The topic is often presented as the prediction of a triumph, a point of view perhaps inherited from Gallus. Propertius innovates from the Gallan original, and Ovid uses Propertius’ treatment for further innovations. In his exile poetry, Ovid makes further substantial changes to the use of the triumph, which raises pointed questions as to the poet's sincerity in his apparent praise of Augustus and Tiberius.

The surprising absence of violent language from classical Athenian curses is best understood as a rhetorical strategy appropriate for getting the divine powers to enact the curser's desire to harm his or her enemies and to gain an advantage in the particular agonistic context. A contrast with the extravagantly violent language of other contemporary curses, which call for unmitigated catastrophe to befall their targets, shows that the fundamental difference between these curses is the audience that they primarily address, which shapes the nature of the request that is made in the imprecation. Whereas contingent curses primarily address the human community with highly intense rhetoric to deter potential violation, these agonistic curses against rivals request assistance in the rivalry from some power beyond the human community, limiting the extravagance of the request to improve the chance of fulfilment.

Drawing on the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and evolutionary biology, this contribution revisits the meaning of the Homeric formula ὑπόδρα ἰδών, literally ‘looking from below’, which is generally acknowledged as an indication of anger in epic poetry. A detailed examination of the phrase suggests that the facial expression it refers to was originally an inclination of the head while maintaining a fixed gaze ahead, resulting in a view from beneath lowered brows. It is argued that this position of the head serves as a functional preparation for a physical conflict, and consequently that the epic phrase ὑπόδρα ἰδών is not merely a metonym for anger but also a signal of the willingness to resort to violence if the conflict is not resolved by other means. This is also borne out by the contexts in which the formula occurs, since in most cases the speeches introduced with a ‘look from below’ are either followed by violent actions or cause their addressee to retract the offence.

This article examines the relationship between oral traditions of cursing and the oldest Greek curse tablets from Selinous and Himera in western Sicily. As much early Greek writing is thought to record or reflect the spoken word, it is perhaps unexpected that these early Sicilian texts carry few signs of orality or speech. There are no verbs of speaking, incanting, cursing, singing, binding; no deictic language; no metre. Rather, the oldest curse tablets in the Greek world show clear signs of written literacy. Sicilian curse tablets from 500–450 bce employ verbs of writing to curse their victims (ἐνγράφω, ‘I inscribe’; καταγράφω, ‘I write down’; ἀπογράφω, ‘I enrol’), and exhibit textual distortion, scribal symbols, abbreviations, and columnar lists of names – features that ground these texts in the realm of writing. It is suggested that Greek curse practice developed alongside and in response to the spread of legal writing in the late sixth-century law courts of western Sicily.

This paper sketches a taxonomy of Aristophanic puns and explores the strategies employed by ‘faithful’ English translations for rendering such jokes. No pun is untranslatable. At the same time, there is no perfect translation but a range of options, more or less effective for a certain context, audience, and type of pun. The challenges which translators face with Aristophanic jokes, as well as the ingenious solutions they offer on occasions, invite us to reappraise the original puns, whose wittiness is too often denied by scholarship.

Commercial curses indicating an occupation, business, profit, workshops or shops, or targeting individuals identified by a trade number about sixty; most come from Greece and date to the fifth to third century bce. That the texts concern rivalries or conflicts between tradesmen has been the prevailing opinion, though ambiguity in curses that include multiple targets (sometimes with different trades) or family members have led some to maintain that competition may not explain commercial curses best, and instead suggest that the tablets reflect attempts to deal with risk or uncertainty arising from a range of social, legal, or political contexts. Though a steady stream of scholarship detailing economic activity, particularly at non-elite levels, has rightly reoriented the debate about the nature and scale of the ancient economy, and the strategies that craftsmen, merchants, and others engaged in commerce employed to mitigate concerns about risk and competition, the contribution of commercial curses, spells, and oracles has not been a part of the conversation. The curse tablets help further refine our understanding of the ancient economy because of what they reveal about concerns related to competitors, profit, and reputation, and the methods the practitioners used to hinder opponents. Rather than being at odds with commercial competition, those methods which target multiple craftsmen, their families, and others besides workshops, skills, and profit align with strategies of collaboration among ancient craftsmen and merchants and their reliance on social capital, described as social networks and notions of trust, reputation, and the shared norms that supported them.

There are numerous historical reconstructions of the lead-up to the Battle of Gaugamela, albeit often as a short prelude to the battle itself. The focus tends to be historical reality, with the extant sources blended to produce a probable sequence of events. Such narratives have their place, but the process masks the details provided by specific sources. This article analyses Arrian's representation of events to understand his narrative better. Particular attention is paid to his chronological ‘mistake’, specifically the loss of a day which is usually just corrected by commentators. I suggest that this was not an error at all, but a deliberate construct. I show that Arrian manipulates ‘narrative time’ by using the night in order to blur historical time, and how this creates a framework within which Arrian carefully constructs his Alexander–Parmenio exchanges. The construct of the adviser, the use of night imagery, and the select use of terminology (kleptein) are utilized by Arrian in order to maintain his heroic image of Alexander and to conceal any strategies of deception.

This article examines the ritual contexts of two recent discoveries of materia magica in complex and carefully excavated archaeological sites, and situates the prayers found there within the wider range of prayer in traditional Roman religion. Both the texts found in the so-called ‘magician's cellar’ in Chartres and those on the lead tablets found behind the temple of Magna Mater in Mainz date to the first century ce and are thus among the earliest surviving magical texts in the West. Despite the usual assumption that many magical rituals migrated from east to west across the Mediterranean and then up into western Europe, it shows how these two early caches of magical text reflect, in fact, the pattern and style of early Latin votive formulae, as well as traditional Roman prayers, like those of the Arval Brethren, and traditional Roman rituals.

Artefact collections are a key means for many people to interact with classical antiquity. The physicality of objects easily appeals to the imagination, evoking associations between the object and the viewer's experiences. Reception of artefacts is thus multilayered, even regarding what may seem to be very simple objects, such as ancient glass vessels uncovered and collected around the middle of the nineteenth century. Drawing on research into the Damon Collection (Canterbury Museum, New Zealand) this study explores Victorian reception of Roman glass, demonstrating the many and often complex ways in which objects of utilitarian origin in classical antiquity gained new meaning and surprising popularity among a broad public. Glass vessels were receptacles for ideas and the imagination, from adventure to questions of religion and empire. In particular, vessels identified as ‘lachrymatories’ became a very personal empathetic link to the classical past, with influence on popular imagination enduring to the present day.

This article deals with curse tablets against thieves, also known as ‘prayers for justice’. In the first part, I offer a short introduction to the topic and the scholarly debate surrounding the definition of this type of inscription, concluding that a more emic approach can help us understand the complex nature of a technology that, far from being monolithic, evolved over time and space. In the second part, I compare the literary and epigraphic evidence (in Greek and Latin), pointing out the similarities and differences between our different sources of information. Finally, I turn to the handful of Latin curse tablets from Roman Britain in which the stolen object's value is divided between the principal and the invoked gods. In my view, this type of transaction should be analysed as a new take on the more traditional votum, in which legal concepts such as obligatio or ownership also play an important role. By establishing an almost contractual agreement with a deity, practitioners obtained not only divine assistance but also tangible evidence of the god's participation.

Greek comedy, especially New Comedy, contains many incidental descriptions of domestic interiors. This article argues that such descriptions constitute a valuable and overlooked source of evidence for historians of the classical Greek house; they are also of interest to literary critics in that they contribute to the thematic and conceptual meaning of the plays. The article presents and discusses all the surviving comic evidence for houses, including many previously neglected comic fragments, as well as a key scene from Menander's Samia which is more detailed than any other surviving literary depiction.

This paper looks at our term ‘curse tablet’ in the light of the Greek distinction between ἀραί (‘curses’) and κατάδεσμοι (‘binding spells’). It analyses the role of cursing in Greek culture and sketches a short history of research that led German and Anglophone scholars to coin a modern terminology that disregards the ancient distinction.

This article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the particularities of specific tablets or groups of tablets. This article argues that, if human and object agency are taken into account, it is possible to explain both the discontinuities in the history of curse tablets and also the shape of their thousand-year history. Curse tablets emerge as a technology the affordances of which allowed it to be put to many uses in many different social locations formed by the complex and shifting cultural contours of antiquity.

Lucian figured twice in the previous set of reviews, for better (Peter Thonemann's scintillating Alexander, or the False Prophet) and for worse (a posthumous completion of Diskin Clay's True History marred by a slew of editorial errors). Now Joel Relihan has furnished us with a trilogy of Menippean fantasies: Menippus, or The Consultation of the Corpses; Icaromenippus, or A Man above the Clouds; and The Colloquies of the Corpses (Dialogues of the Dead). Relihan's brief reflective Foreword reminds us that his deep and long-cultivated knowledge of the tradition of Menippean satire extends well beyond the Lucian of the second century. A slightly longer General Introduction explains the specific goals and general principles of Relihan's translation. Then each of the three Lucianic texts is given its own (longer and illuminating) introduction, with footnotes providing a modest commentary. It soon becomes clear that Relihan's ideal interlocutor is not Lucian but Menippus the Cynic. Lucian's subordinate status becomes even clearer when Relihan makes reference to ‘Lucian's evolving (in fact, ever more constricted) understanding of the potential of the person, productions, and purposes of Menippus the Cynic’ (xiv, my emphasis). Relihan's seven-page Afterword is still more disparaging: ‘Lucian drained the blood out of Menippus’ (156). His conclusion is that ‘Menippus in Lucian is good for telling Menippus stories but, after a while, Menippus needs to be put in his place and left there’ (159). On the assumption that the Menippus in question is not the Cynic but Lucian's Menippean puppet, I concur. And as I worked my way through the thirty vignettes of The Colloquies of the Corpses I realized that I was confronted with an entirely unexpected phenomenon: Lucianic tedium.

The influence of Greek poetry on Latin poetry is well known. Why, then, is the reciprocal influence of Latin poetry on Greek not so readily discernible? What does that reveal about Greek–Latin bilingualism and biculturalism? Perhaps not very much. The evidence that Daniel Jolowicz surveys in the densely written 34-page introduction to his 400-page Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novel amply testifies to Greek engagement with Latin language and culture on a larger scale than is usually recognized. That this engagement is more readily discernible in Greek novels than in Greek poetry is no reason to dismiss the evidence that the novels provide. On the contrary, the seven main chapters provide ‘readings of the Greek novels that establish Latin poetry…as an essential frame of reference’ (2). In Chapters 1–3 Chariton engages with the love elegy of Propertius, Ovid and Tibullus, with Ovid's epistolary poetry and the poetry of exile, and with the Aeneid. In Chapters 4–5 Achilles Tatius engages with Latin elegy and (again) the Aeneid, and also with the ‘destruction of bodies’ (221) in Ovid, Lucan, and Seneca. In Chapter 7 Longus engages with Virgil's Eclogues and the Aeneid. The strength of the evidence requires only a brief conclusion. Jolowicz's rigorously argued and methodologically convincing monograph deserves to be read widely, and with close attention.

There have been very many exciting books on Latin literature in the past six months; here is at least a small selection. J. N. Adams presents an impressive volume on asyndeton in Latin literature. Based on a thorough examination of different types of asyndeta, with a special focus on asyndeta bimembria (‘asyndeta with two members’), Adams discusses ‘grammatical’ and semantic types of asyndeta, as well as their characteristic structural patterns, followed by a discussion of genres and texts, from laws and prayers over asyndeta from texts of the early Republic to the Augustan period. For historiography, Tacitus’ Histories and Annals are included as well. In the course of his discussion, Adams debunks some long-held beliefs about Latin asyndeta, which, he shows, are not predominantly a feature of sacral or legal language, as has often been claimed. He also argues that asyndeton, rather than evoking speed or rapidity, may instead invite a reading that is slow and deliberate, with meaningful pauses between the individual words (that most famous Latin asyndeton, which is printed on the dust jacket and discussed on 77–8, veni, vidi, vici [‘I came, I saw, I conquered’], works very well as an example).

This review commences with three very important recent works that raise an important question: how is it possible that we should have to wait until 2021 to have works devoted to these fundamental subjects? First, Athens is, for better or worse, at the very centre of what we understand and practise as Greek history; yet there are hardly any books that attempt to give an overview of Athenian political, social, economic, and religious history alongside its material and visual culture. It is probably no longer possible for a single scholar to write such a book; but the fact that, despite the surge of companions and handbooks of all sorts over the last fifteen years, there has been no Companion to Athens until now, raises some very interesting questions. Second, Greek economic history has experienced an explosion of publications over the last fifteen years, which have constructed new approaches, examined new questions, and utilized new forms of evidence in innovative ways. How is it possible that there has been no systematic attention paid to the most fundamental institution of Greek economies, that of the household? Finally, the Hellenistic period is one of the most vibrant fields of Greek history, but why are there almost no volumes devoted to Hellenistic social history, in particular given the substantial number of available sources? I will comment below on the contribution of these three works, but pondering on these questions, and trying to identify other huge black holes in the study of Greek history, has a value of its own.

The second volume of Harm Pinkster's Oxford Latin Syntax is a stunning achievement and an admirably thorough account of the Latin ‘complex sentence and discourse’. Far from restricting itself to classical prose, the work covers Latin texts from c. 200 bc to c. ad 450, in both poetry and prose. Overall, I was struck by the good balance that Pinkster maintains between presenting Latin syntax in a systematic and well-structured way and leaving enough room for the portrayal of the Latin language as a dynamic phenomenon, in which the frequency of and predilection for certain linguistic constructions keeps changing and the ‘correctness’ of certain expressions is a matter of time and context. Equally salutary are Pinkster's reminders of the role that intonation must have played in the production and reception of Latin – and of what we lose by no longer having access to it. Throughout, Pinkster gives due consideration to the fact that it is often hard to securely classify a grammatical phenomenon, but that several analyses might be possible. Similarly, where appropriate, the importance of the larger interpretive context of a sentence for understanding and classifying its grammatical phenomena is acknowledged as well – which is a great achievement in a monumental work that quotes a wealth of examples from such a wide range of Latin texts.