The aim of this article is to briefly discuss the ingenious interpretations of Od. 13.104 and 11.122–3 that were put forward by Numenius of Apamea. As our understanding of this fascinating second-century forerunner of Neoplatonism has significantly improved over the last years, Numenius’ importance is now generally recognized to be twofold. First, he was instrumental in establishing a framework within which numerous philosophers from Plotinus onwards would operate. Second, he skilfully employed allegoresis for pedagogical purposes, which not only helped to promote his exposition of philosophy, but also stimulated critical investigations into the nature of myth and poetry. In that, however, Numenius’ hermeneutics marks a serious departure from Plato: when embracing allegoresis, Numenius combined Platonism with traditions sympathetic to the practice that Plato himself vehemently repudiated.

The beginning of Pindar's Olympian 10 for Hagesidamos of Lokroi Epizephyrioi, winner of the boys’ boxing contest at the Olympic games of 476 bce, revolves, untypically, around ideas of debt, interest, and repayment:

Τὸν Ὀλυμπιονίκαν ἀνάγνωτέ μοι
Ἀρχεστράτου παῖδα, πόθι φρενὸς
ἐμᾶς γέγραπται· γλυκὺ γὰρ αὐτῶι μέλος ὀφείλων
ἐπιλέλαθ’. ὦ Μοῖσ’, ἀλλὰ σὺ καὶ θυγάτηρ
Ἀλάθεια Διός, ὀρθᾶι χερί
ἐρύκετον ψευδέων                    5
ἐνιπὰν ἀλιτόξενον.
ἕκαθεν γὰρ ἐπελθὼν ὁ μέλλων χρόνος
ἐμὸν καταίσχυνε βαθὺ χρέος.
ὅμως δὲ λῦσαι δυνατὸς ὀξεῖαν ἐπιμομφὰν
τόκος. ὁράτω νῦν ψᾶφον ἐλισσομέναν
ὁπᾶι κῦμα κατακλύσσει ῥέον,               10
ὁπᾶι τε κοινὸν λόγον
φίλαν τείσομεν ἐς χάριν.
8 καταίσχυνε Boeckh : καταισχύνει codd. 9 ὁράτω Fennell : θνατῶν codd. : ὁράτ’ ὦν Schneidewin : ὀνάτωρ Hermann : ἀνάτως (uel ἀνατί) Erbse

The Trojan cycle has been retold and re-envisioned many times from antiquity to modern times. The themes covered by these myths, especially the Homeric poems, have captivated the minds and hearts of poets, historians, authors, and others. Homer's Iliad extoled the grandeur as well as exposed the ugliness and folly of war. These humanistic virtues resonated with various cultures around the world. In this article we examine the reception of the Trojan cycle, especially the Iliad, on the noted manga artist Tezuka Osamu (1928–89). Recent reception theories focus on the creation of a new composition or artefact as part of the reception process; we shall thus discuss the Phoenix: Early Works manga as an example of such reception.

Pindar's odes for Aeginetan victors revolve around two major Aeginetan virtues: inborn excellence (phya) and generous guest-friendship (xenia). The latter virtue is, of course, one of the most pervasive themes in Pindar's poetry, in which the poet's relationship with his patrons is presented in terms of guest-friendship, with the odes themselves as the poet's gift to his guest-friends. As for the former virtue, the Aeginetans’ inborn excellence is implicit in the mythic section of almost all Aeginetan odes, which focuses on the line of Aiakos, the progenitor of two of the greatest Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax. In view of this almost exclusive emphasis, one might be forgiven for assuming that the Aiakidai were the mythical progenitors of the Aeginetans. However, this is simply not true, as Pindar himself was fully aware: in fact, the Aeginetans were a Doric tribe whose ancestry was no more remarkable than that of other Doric cities; at best, they could claim the Aiakidai as their ancestors only metaphorically.

The way in which the Roman army, as a major factor contributing to relative mobility of individuals within the Roman Empire, may be thought of as a driver behind the diffusion and general dynamic of Roman poetry and song, has not sufficiently been explored. Similarly, regionalized approaches to poetry and song as a cultural practice, subject to local, ethnic, social, and cultural variation and change, have not yet been pursued in a research context in which Roman poetry has largely remained a domain of study in upper-class entertainment and intertextuality. Not only is the common approach at odds with a methodology that has long, and successfully, been adopted otherwise in historical and linguistic research: it also excludes the vast majority of surviving poems from the Roman world, the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, from consideration – a body of texts that provides us with information about a cultural practice that, subject to substantial regional variation, literary poets stylized and drove to its artistic extremes.

Isthmian 2 was composed for Xenokrates of Akragas’ chariot victory, probably in 471–470 bc. The winner was dead by the time that the ode was performed, and as a result the recipient of the ode was his son, Thrasyboulos. The victor's family, the Emmenidai, was politically prominent and one of the founding families of Akragas: Theron, son of Ainesidamos and tyrant of Akragas (488–487 bc), was Xenokrates’ brother, and Xenokrates is also commemorated by Pindar in Pythian 6 for his victory at a chariot race (490 bc).

A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1072–7 ce) shows Earl Harold ‘Godwinson’ of Wessex (c. 1022–66), future king of the English (r. 1066), rescuing two Normans from drowning in the quicksand of the River Couesnon as they cross into Brittany on military campaign (see figure 1; Bayeux Tapestry Scene 17). Harold (Bayeux Tapestry Figure 152) is depicted standing more or less upright, upon embroidered lines that represent the waters of the Couesnon. As is typical for the representation of Anglo-Saxons in this, the earlier part of the embroidery, he has a ‘pudding-bowl’ haircut and is moustached. These features distinguish Harold from the Normans he saves, who have the backs of their heads shaven and are without facial hair. Harold carries one of the men ‘piggyback’ and drags the other, who has almost fallen on his back, up by his right hand. The Latin inscription above this scene is brief, but nonetheless tells us most of what we need to know to understand the imagery beneath: hIC VVILLEM DVX ET EXERCITVS EIVS VENERVNT AD MONTE[M] MIChAELIS ET hIC TRANSIERVNT FLVMEN COSNONIS. hIC hARLOLD DVX TRAhEBAT EOS DE ARENA (‘Here Duke William and his army came to Mont St Michel, and here they crossed the River Couesnon. Here Duke Harold pulled them out of the sand’).

In 1941, E. S. Forster wrote a short article, published in this journal, which compiled all of the instances he could identify in the ancient source material that described dogs being used in a military capacity. G. B. A. Fletcher, who had identified a few obscure references that Forster had not cited, responded to Forster's paper later that same year. The purpose of both papers was simply the compiling of a list, a purpose that had been inspired by Forster's interest in the French army's recruitment of dogs on the outbreak of the Second World War. The result was a thorough catalogue of known examples, showing the ancient dog being used for a variety of purposes such as patrol work or observation duties, or being used as combatants or despatch couriers. The primary aim, according to Forster was to ‘make a comparison with modern practice’ – that is, the French practice he had read about; the only exception for which he could find no ancient evidence was what he called ‘Red Cross’ work.

If there was an ‘aristocracy’ in the archaic and classical polis, how was it differentiated from the rest of the polis? There are various possible criteria for differentiating a socio-political elite, notably birth, legal status, education, virtue, power, access to deity, wealth, and performance (or display). European history has left us with a strong association between ‘aristocracy’ and the criterion of birth, which produces a relatively closed elite. As for the ancient Greek polis, however, an excellent recent collection of essays entitled ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity edited by Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees generally rejects earlier assumptions that a hereditary aristocracy is clearly identifiable, and gives some prominence instead to the criterion of display or performance (such as competing in Panhellenic games or erecting an image of an ancestor). My concern is not directly with this interesting controversy, but rather with a historical process that is almost entirely omitted by ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity (and by most other discussions of Greek aristocracy), namely the monetization of the polis that was made pervasive by the invention of coinage and its rapid spread in Greek culture from the early sixth century bce.

The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (CGCG) arrived just too late for mention in the last batch of reviews, but the wait has turned out to be providential: I've now had time to use CGCG as my reference grammar for undergraduate teaching. I must confess that I do not like teaching grammar, and am not very good at it; and, by happy chance, I have not been called upon to teach grammar for a surprisingly large number of years. So being assigned to teach a grammar class at short notice was a mildly traumatic experience. But at least it has made it possible for me to become familiar with CGCG in practice. The authors’ suggestion that ‘CGCG’s coverage is such…that it could be used in the context of undergraduate and graduate language courses’ (xxxii) is carefully formulated: it could be. But the undergraduate class that I have been teaching would, I am sure, have been intimidated by the mass of grammatical detail if confronted with CGCG in the raw. I can, however, testify that at least one reluctant, out-of-practice language tutor has found the volume amazingly helpful in planning grammar classes. The clarity and logic of its presentation and explanations, its well-chosen examples, and its carefully designed aids to navigation (table of contents, cross-references, index) are virtues that I do not normally associate with texts on grammar: or, at any rate, not in the same degree. CGCG’s virtues will make it an invaluable resource for advanced students, and for tutors. For a surprisingly reasonable price, purchasers get 300 pages of phonology and morphology and 350 pages of syntax, plus 90 excellent pages on textual coherence, covering particles, and word order. ‘Still’, as the authors modestly observe, ‘there are many subjects about which we might have said much more and some about which we have said almost nothing’ (xxxii).

In the first half of the ode (1–8) Horace prays to Faunus and guarantees him an annual sacrifice. Nisbet and Rudd describe the prayer as a ‘summons’ and identify it as ‘kletic’, but this cannot be right, since in the same breath the god is asked to depart no less than to come (3–4: lenis incedas abeasque… | aequus). The fact is that lenis incedas does not mean ‘may you progress and be gentle about it’ but ‘may your progress be gentle’, just as abeasque…aequus means ‘and may your departure be favourable’. Horace is neither summoning the god nor sending him off: Faunus’ visit is taken for granted, which is hardly surprising since we were told in 1.17.1–2 that he visits Horace's estate ‘often’ (saepe). It is the manner of his visit for which the annual sacrifice constitutes the quid pro quo.

Cicero has a unique place in the history of Latin. A political and intellectual figure elevated to iconic status both by his own efforts and by posterity; author of more extant prose – dozens of speeches, the treatises philosophical and rhetorical, and nearly a thousand letters – than any other pagan Roman; model of good style and set-text author par excellence, from antiquity to modernity. So far, so uncontroversial. But when and how did he acquire this place atop the canon? It's a question that Caroline Bishop, Thomas Keeline, and Giuseppe La Bua have each asked, and one to which they offer some interestingly different answers.

Readers of Greece and Rome will notice that some of the Review sections are either shorter than usual or are missing entirely in this issue. This is due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and the measures that governments and universities in the UK, Greece, and USA, where our reviewers are based, were forced to undertake. In some cases, the shutdown of university buildings happened quickly, and colleagues were left with only limited access to their books and offices, or with no access whatsoever. We very much hope that the next issue of Greece and Rome will go into production in better circumstances, and thank our readers, reviewers, and authors for their unwavering support.

Academics have a professional need to be published; publishers have a commercial incentive to create demand. In recent years these convergent interests have released a flood of edited volumes, not all of which can demonstrate a compelling claim to intrinsic or lasting scholarly importance. So it is reassuring to be reminded that a publishing house that contributes liberally, if not recklessly, to the flood continues to produce heavyweight volumes of unquestionable scholarly importance. Consider, for example, the new edition of the Thucydides scholia, on which Alexander Kleinlogel worked from 1960 until a few months before his death on 1 January 2007. The complex task of bringing his material to publishable form was undertaken by Klaus Alpers; illness prevented Alpers from steering the volume through its final stages, which were overseen by Stefano Valente. The introduction comprises 202 pages (the chapter on transmission is incomplete, breaking off after four pages); the lavish edition of the scholia vetera occupies 705 pages. The material for a projected second volume containing the scholia recentiora was not left in a publishable state, except for the Lexicon Patmense, which is included as a forty-eight-page appendix to the present volume's introduction. Reviewing Karl Hude's Teubner edition of the scholia, published in 1927, H. T. Deas concluded: ‘obviously this is work which will not require to be done again. Indeed, were it not a praiseworthy task for the sake of completeness, one might be permitted to doubt whether it was worth doing at all’ (CR 42 [1928], 145–6). That reminder of the extremes of fallibility should strike terror into every reviewer's soul.

Pride of place in this review goes undoubtedly to Sally Humphreys’ monumental study of kinship in ancient Athens. A work in progress for four decades, it is finally published in two volumes of almost 1,500 pages. The book's coverage is vast: the first volume focuses on interactions among kinsfolk (legal, social, economic, and ritual), while the second volume explores the various Athenian corporate groups which employed kinship as their organizing principle (phratries, gene, tribes, and trittyes) and provides an exhaustive discussion of kinship networks attested across all Athenian demes. As a result of its size and encyclopaedic coverage, I suspect that most readers will approach this work in a piecemeal fashion, looking for a particular phenomenon or searching for a particular kinship network; the lack of a detailed introduction or conclusions – features that would have been essential in a work of this size and ambition – does not help in this respect. But this work needs to be assessed as a whole, for three main reasons. The first is that households were the main organizing units of Athenian society, while most Athenian groups were organized on a kinship principle. Their roles were crucial, and they need to complement the social models of Athenian society we employ, alongside class and status. The second reason is that Humphreys makes a very good job of exploring the various contradictory tendencies at work in how Athenian kinship operated: the interests of male heads; of wives, children, and relatives; of wider kinship networks; and of the political community. The third is the combination of literary, epigraphic, and material evidence of Athenian kinship, which reveals in often impressive ways the contradictions and gaps of our various sources: not only will this work be essential reading for those working on Athenian oratory, archaeology, or economy, but its accumulated detail offers the basis for writing a novel history of Athenian society. Of course, a work gestated for forty years will also show the unavoidable flaws of its piecemeal construction; but these are largely of secondary importance, compared to the value of the end product.

Some questions never go out of fashion. My main focus in this issue is the spread of Roman power across the Mediterranean, with multiple new publications appearing on this oldest of subjects. First up is Dexter Hoyos’ Rome Victorious. This work of popular history aims to cover what Hoyos dubs in his subtitle The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire, though that is rather an odd choice, since Hoyos stresses that Rome's imperial efforts did not always succeed. Hoyos walks us through the unification of Italy and the acquisition of the Republican provinces in the first two chapters, taking the narrative up to the death of Caesar in 44 bc. The next two chapters consider the consequences of those conquests: what a province actually meant, how it was controlled, and the effects both on the new territories’ inhabitants and on Rome's social and political make-up. In Chapter 5, Hoyos turns to the extensive imperial efforts of Augustus and those around him; those of his successors over the next two centuries are dealt with in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 surveys the shifting make-up of the Romans as a result of their conquests, focusing on the spread of citizenship and the changing origins of senators, generals, and artists. Chapter 8 looks at legitimate and illegitimate rule in Rome's provinces, Chapter 9 considers both Rome's self-reflexivity on imperial questions and the view from those regions themselves, and Chapter 10 bolsters the latter by treating concrete resistance to Rome. Chapter 11 looks at the degree to which the provinces became Roman.

First up, a brace of major Teubner editions. Marcus Deufert's De rerum natura marks a significant moment in Lucretian studies. I suspect that most people, at least in the Anglosphere, are still using Cyril Bailey's venerable Oxford Classical Text (revised in 1922) for everyday reading, if not the equally antique Loeb (W. D. Rouse, 1924). In broadest outline, text-critical views haven't changed much since: a ‘closed’ tradition, in which two Carolingian manuscripts rejoicing in the workaday names Oblongus and Quadratus are prime witnesses, but often problematic ones; a mass of manuscripts from Renaissance Italy, which editors consult primarily for conjectures. But the last century has seen plenty of important work, and Deufert can report more precisely on the various corrections made in O and Q; affirm that all Italian manuscripts descend from O, and give them a stemma; pan many more humanist conjectures; wade in the muddy river (xxi) of modern interventions; and offer his own solutions to, or non liquet on, textual problems small and large. The result is a text with plenty of novelties (and many questions left open), and an edition with a very different look.

Mosaics have not fared well in the hands of classical archaeologists. Modern viewers have traditionally treated them as panel-paintings laid out on the floor: consider how mosaics are frequently displayed on museum walls, for example, or how book reproductions perpetuate the ideal of a ‘vertical’ bird's-eye view. Scholars, too, have been quick to identify mythological subjects, homing in on ‘figurative’ motifs. But we still lack an adequate framework for approaching more ‘ornamental’ components – or for challenging that segregation in the first place.

‘An anonymous product of an impersonal craft’: that is how Rhys Carpenter characterized Greek sculpture in 1960, and it's an assessment that has long dominated the field. Carpenter was challenging the traditional workings of classical archaeology, not least its infatuation with individual ‘masters’. While responding to past precedent, however, his comments also looked forward in time, heralding a decidedly postmodern turn. From our perspective in 2020, six decades after his book was first published, Carpenter can be seen to anticipate what Roland Barthes would dub the ‘death of the author’: ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author’, as Barthes put it.