Questions about authorship have plagued the corpus of Demosthenic orations since antiquity. In particular, scholars often assign certain speeches (usually 46, 49, 50, 52, 53 and 59; sometimes also 47 and 51) to Apollodorus, son of Pasion. We apply an innovative approach to the problem, using morphosyntactic information from dependency treebanks. From the treebank annotation we create input data for various well-established computational approaches to authorship attribution. The usefulness of the input data is first tested with clustering algorithms. We then make finer distinction with a logistic regression classifier. All steps are explained in detail for the benefit of those unfamiliar with computational stylometry. In broadest terms, our results are remarkably consistent with the common opinion about the orations, identifying 49, 50, 52 and 53 as written by a single author, who was not Demosthenes (presumably Apollodorus). We also discuss syntactic traits that are peculiarly ‘Apollodoran’ or ‘Demosthenic’. However, we demonstrate that the data point away from both authors for Dem. 46 and 51, while conclusions about 47 and 59 are ambiguous.

This article asks why women are ignored in debates about ancient economies and suggests a way forward. It argues that women performed a wide variety of diverse economic activities, though this is not particularly discernible from the scholarly literature, which mostly casts them as patrons or prostitutes and, despite the household being a basic economic unit to which women contributed, generally considers economic actors as male by default. However, by drawing on feminist economics, social history and gender studies, it is possible to reframe women’s varied activities in ways that acknowledge their labour, spotlight female agency, challenge the (gendered) categories of analysis and discourses that are predominantly used within ancient history, and recentre questions relating to the structures of inequality created by ancient economies. Three case studies explore some of the problems and raise new questions: Z3, a building in the Kerameikos the function of which is debated, the contribution of tax-farmers to sacrifices on Kos and the water supply in Athens. That is, this article argues that examining how ancient economies were gendered is a profitable way to think about both economic history and gender history.

This article presents and analyses new evidence for how Simplicius made use of Alexander of Aphrodisias for his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Alexander’s commentary on the Physics is lost to us (except for scholia on Physics IV–VIII), but, as argued in section II of this article, we have a slightly abridged version of Alexander’s commentary on Physics II 3 in the form of his commentary on Metaphysics V 2 (Aristotle’s Physics II 3 and Metaph. V 2 are more or less identical). This allows a comparison of Alexander’s and Simplicius’ commentaries on the same Aristotelian text. In section III, it is shown that Simplicius relies much more extensively on Alexander than his explicit references indicate. In section IV, it is shown that (a) when Simplicius refers to Alexander disapprovingly, he reports reliably what Alexander said, but that (b) when Simplicius refers to Alexander approvingly and as an authority in support of his own view, he provides a tendentious interpretation of Alexander’s argument. My results help to evaluate Simplicius’ reliability as a witness to the many works of ancient philosophy for which he is our only source.

Is an account of hair or nails as negotiable as one of the Demiurge? It should not be. The aim of this paper is to supplement existing interpretations of Timaeus’ eikōs logos in order to provide well-grounded answers to this and similar questions. More specifically, I shall demonstrate that Timaeus’ account cannot be confined to a single epistemological field, namely that of unstable likeliness, because it exhibits a much more nuanced and graduated structure, just as do the realities it deals with, and, as a whole, leaves minimal room for refutation and scepticism.

In premodernity, a time when human milk was the only safe means of infant nutrition, and in societies, such as those of classical antiquity and early Byzantium, where breastfeeding was considered servile work, wet-nursing was both a necessary and widespread occupation. Despite the social demand for the profession, public discourses around wet nurses were mostly negative, while their work was treated with both admiration and scorn. In an attempt to understand ancient and early Byzantine approaches to the wet nurse, this article takes a matricentric perspective. It investigates various discourses (rhetorical, moralist, philosophical, theological, hagiographical, medical and contractual) which establish the wet nurse as an essential part of the institution of motherhood, as a social and moral category whose work, way of life and behaviour are constantly defined, controlled and regulated. These discourses nevertheless tell us much more about the anxieties and preoccupations of the societies that produced them and much less about actual contemporary wet nurses. The choice of an investigation encompassing antiquity up to early Byzantium, an extension rarely seen in existing studies, further illuminates the mechanics and dynamics of the ideologies around the wet nurse, as these are preserved or evolve in time.

This article is a commentary on a recently discovered testimony to Onesicritus, in which the writer speaks about his role as participant in the expedition of Alexander. It will be argued that the ideological backdrop of the testimony was Alexander’s claim to universalism, which was intended to be a response to the ancient Near Eastern discourse on empire. Alexander adopted ideological concepts of successful rulership used by the Achaemenids in order to stabilize control in Asia. For this purpose, he claimed to have carried his conquest to the Ocean, which implied universalism. That claim was the main theme in Onesicritus’ account and established the literary atmosphere in which the writer determined his role during the navigation of the Indian Ocean.

This essay uses one difficult sentence from Pindar’s Olympian 2 as a jumping-off point to address larger issues about the relationship between literature and belief. Section II tackles Pindar’s judgement of the dead (56–60) and argues that this passage is better understood as an instance of unusual particle usage rather than as an elliptical expression of recondite doctrine. Here the posthumous fate of humanity is decided on the grounds of ethical conduct. Section III discusses the unfinished conditional beginning in line 56 and probes the connection between eschatological knowledge and pragmatic action. Scholars have focused on the unusual details of Pindar’s eschatology, but its overarching practical thrust is to reinforce a conventional ethic. Section IV examines the knowledge of the future mentioned in line 56 and other gestures towards privileged knowledge. Scholars have considered Olympian 2 an ‘intimate’ text intended for a select audience, but there is reason to think that this epinician aimed at a panhellenic reception. Combining motifs from various sources, Pindar creates a unique vision of the afterlife that is capable of transcending doctrinal labels and appealing to many. Section V briefly concludes by considering how this poem works as both a victory ode and a religious text. Pindar’s ode is not a ‘corrupt paraphrase’ of anything else; the text creates a world of its own and inscribes core epinician values into the very architecture of the cosmos.

It is widely agreed that Thucydides’ Melian dialogue presents the Athenian invasion of Melos, and the Athenian justification, in a negative light. Attention tends to focus on the immorality of ‘the rule of the stronger’ that the Athenians present in the dialogue. This essay argues that another feature of the dialogue triggering negative judgements of the Athenians is their criticism of the Melians’ resistance: it is voiced by the Athenians themselves and therefore provokes in readers a ‘speaker-relative’ normative judgement of the Athenians. Philosophers have explored how our normative judgements about statements often depend on the speaker. Because the Athenians have deliberately put the Melians into their perilous situation, and because part of Athenian self-mythology was heroic resistance against overwhelming numbers in the Persian Wars, Athenian criticism of the Melians is hypocritical and applies an asymmetrical ethics to the Athenians and the Melians. Reaction against these features of the dialogue exacerbates the moral abhorrence of the Athenians felt by many readers. Hence I disagree with Bosworth’s view of the dialogue as primarily critical of the Melians. Instead we see Thucydides here condemning not only the Athenian imperial project but also the rhetoric used to defend and sustain it.

This article revisits the mainstream scholarly view that the Greek Hestia is the least anthropomorphic deity among the Olympians, an idea that owes much to a short reference to her in Plato’s Phaedrus. The analysis is based on textual and visual sources from the Archaic period: I first review two references to Hestia in early hexameter poetry, in Hesiod’s Theogony and in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, before turning to the depiction of her in two early Attic black-figure vases, the Sophilos dinos at the British Museum and the François vase, which have been neglected in discussing Hestia’s anthropomorphic nature in early Greek thought. While the study of individual Greek gods has returned to the fore in the field of Greek religion in the last 20 years, it seems that not enough has changed in the current conceptualization of Hestia.