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.

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 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.

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 argues that Andocides’ speech On His Return (Andocides 2) makes use of themes drawn from tragedy, including a near-quotation from Sophocles, in order to present the orator as deserving of pity and forgiveness. This neglected speech is therefore an ingenious work of rhetoric in its creation of ēthos and evocation of pathos. Moreover, it is a key document for the development of religious argumentation in the Athenian courts, and for the early reception of Sophocles. This also affects our interpretation of the two extant speeches from Andocides’ later trial in ca. 400, Against Andocides ([Lysias] 6) and On the Mysteries (Andocides 1), which both develop similar tragic themes in new directions.

In a scene of father-son conflict in Aristophanes’ Clouds, father Strepsiades supports his right to be treated well by his son Pheidippides by reminding the boy of how well he was taken care of as a baby. Even before Pheidippides could talk properly, his father catered to his every wish. If he said ‘brū’, his father would get him something to drink, ‘mammā’ would make him get food, and ‘kakkā’ would lead to his being taken outside to relieve himself. These baby-words have always been taken for what Strepsiades claims they were: meaningful and intentional baby requests.

Starting with brū, we discuss ancient and modern interpretations of the passage and contextualize it within the history of ancient and later Western thought about child language. We then propose a new interpretation of brū as the conventional rendition of a universal baby vocalization, what is known as a ‘raspberry’. In performance, this would lead to a mimetic ‘depiction’ in the middle of Strepsiades’ sentence. Finally, we return to the utterances mammā and kakkā to show that there, too, Strepsiades may be demonstrating parental devotion by interpreting the virtually unintelligible and by acting out baby activities that lend plausibility to his mantic performance.

Repetition is a critical issue in interpreting the work of Herodotus. Detlev Fehling, for one, has pointed to recurrence of motif and scene as evidence of the historian’s ‘free invention’. Words that occur twice in Herodotus are an efficient way to consider pressing issues at the centre of how and why Herodotus put together his narrative in the way he has. Pairs where the uses are close together in stories with a lot in common suggest that we may be seeing Herodotus’ ‘habit of presentation’, especially when phrasal repetition is also found. Where pairs are found further apart, the issue of deliberate linkage between discrete episodes may be indicated through the strategic redeployment of a key term. Finally, with Xerxes’ invasion, recurring terms help us to see how Herodotus could operate over large portions of text, deliberately linking one episode to another through the deployment of twice-occurring words, thereby also connecting the whole account of the campaign to the largest project of the History.

This article revisits the question of how the epigraphic culture of the fifth-century BC Athenian Empire impacted on the epigraphic cultures of other communities. Through consideration of the late fifth-century epigraphic cultures of Thasos and Rhodes, it argues that allied communities interacted with the epigraphic manifestations of Athenian authority in different ways, producing diverse epigraphic responses. Further, it argues that the first traces of the shift from the heterogeneity of archaic epigraphic cultures to the epigraphic convergence of the late classical world can be found in the tension between local and Athenian influences in late fifth-century public inscription beyond Athens.

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 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.

A neglected, anonymous and undated epigram on the world map of Ptolemy’s Geography, here critically edited for the first time on the basis of all existing manuscripts, proves a rare case of reception of Callimachus’ Lock of Berenice, with an emphasis on the bonds between geography and astronomy, and with so-called ‘geographical astrology’. It may stem from Late Antique Alexandria.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines how and why the Ptolemies, soon after they succeeded Alexander in Egypt, orchestrated the return of Egyptian statues supposedly stolen by the Persians, drawing on the cultural memory of different population groups: Egyptians and Graeco-Macedonians. First, it argues that the Ptolemies invested energy in searching for Egyptian objects and gods’ statues in the Levant, which they distributed among the temples, though some may have been newly fabricated statues. Second, the study aims to reconstruct what the Ptolemies knew about earlier Greek and Near Eastern traditions of seizing and returning statues, which mixed elements of truth with topoi. This reconstruction serves to explain how meaningful it was to Egyptians and Graeco-Macedonians to bring back statues after each campaign. Finally, comparing the tale of Bentresh, the account of Sarapis’ origin by Tacitus and the Ptolemaic stelae, the article suggests that these narratives highlighted Egypt as the centre of the world with the most powerful ruler, a claim appealing to all its inhabitants.