The relevance of Pindaric myth to its literary and historical context is a problem presented by many of Pindar's odes. In the case of Pythian 4 it is the plea for the return of Damophilus that has proved difficult to relate to the myth of the Argonautic expedition – so much so, that some scholars have denied that any connection exists between the myth and this part of the ode. Those who seek to establish a correlation between the myth and the plea have, for the most part, considered parallels between the relationship, circumstances, and character traits of Jason and Pelias and those of Arcesilas and Damophilus. The limitations, however, of looking for exact correspondence are generally acknowledged. Carey in particular postulates that Pindar ‘simply presents in the myth a number of themes, any or all of which may be applied to the situation in Cyrene’. It is the contention of this article that the theme of hospitality, as it develops in the myth, is central to understanding the relevance of the myth to the plea for Damophilus.

In 1936, T. B. L. Webster argued that Sophocles' Trachiniae has strong allusions to Aeschylus' Agamemnon, particularly in the characters of Deianeira and Clytemnestra. Once identified, it is easy see: each kills her husband as he returns from battle, and in each case the death contains an element of entrapment. Heracles' poisoned robe indeed seems deliberately to reflect the famous net used to entrap Agamemnon: Heracles' description of it (οἷον τόδ᾽ ἡ δολῶπις Οἰνέως κόρη / καθῆψεν ὤμοις τοῖς ἐμοῖς Ἐρινύων / ὑϕαντὸν ἀμϕίβληστρον, ‘…this woven garment of the Erinyes which the treacherous daughter of Oineus fastened on my shoulders’; Trachiniae 1050–2) is similar to Aegisthus' words near the end of Agamemnon (ἰδὼν ὑϕαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων / τὸν ἄνδρα τόνδε κείμενον ϕίλως ἐμοί, ‘…seeing this man lying in robes of the Erinyes, to my joy’; 1580–1). Even if the direct verbal allusion fails to resonate with an audience, it seems unlikely, given the high level of audience competence, that audience members would not make the thematic connection. It is almost impossible to deny, therefore, that in Deianeira Sophocles was writing a deliberate response to Clytemnestra and contrasting the accidental murder caused by a loving wife with the carefully planned murder by a bitter wife.

In his Poetics Aristotle argued that the chorus being one of the actors, as in Sophocles, was its finest function, while he criticized Euripides' choruses for not being part of the whole and not sharing in the action. Aristotle also mentioned that in the work of other tragic poets (probably from the late fifth century onwards) the chorus's odes stood outside the context of the dramatic myth, and named these odes embolima, ascribing their origin to Agathon (who was active in the last quarter of the fifth century bc). So we should not assume that in Aristotle's view Euripides was responsible for paving the way for the practice of the embolima. However, it is at least certain that, in his opinion, Euripides' choral odes were less dependent upon the dramatic plot than those of Sophocles.

Before the Persian Wars the Greeks did not rely on public finance to fight each other. Their hoplites armed and fed themselves. But in the confrontation with Persia this private funding of war proved to be inadequate. The liberation of the Greek states beyond the Balkans required the destruction of Persia's sea power. In 478 bc Athens agreed to lead an alliance to do just this. It already had Greece's largest fleet. But each campaign of this ongoing war would need tens of thousands of sailors and would go on for months. No single Greek city-state could pay for such campaigns. The alliance thus agreed to adopt the Persian method for funding war: its members would pay a fixed amount of tribute annually. This enabled Athens to force Persia out of the Dardanelles and Ionia. But the Athenians also realized that their military power depended on tribute, and so they tightened their control of its payers. In so doing they turned the alliance into an empire.

When Alexander III of Macedon set out on campaign against the Persian Empire in 334 bc, he had little previous experience to draw on in devising the route to follow. Xenophon had covered some of the ground, but his written account took the route in reverse and was notably full of crisis management and extemporizing: it is doubtful whether Alexander made much use of it. Herodotus had described the basic topography of the Persian empire over a century before, but not in much detail. This article considers the kinds of information that Alexander had to draw on in planning his route, and the ways in which he, and Xenophon before him, acquired the information they needed on the way.

Aratus' striking mythical digression (96–136) in the Phaenomena on the constellation of the Maiden (Παρθένος), whom he identifies with the virginal Justice (Δίκη), stands out against the preceding technical description of star groups. The passage has unsurprisingly received the frequent notice of critics, with particular attention paid to the episode's relation to and refashioning of the Myth of Ages in Hesiod's Works and Days 106–201: one tale that circulates among men, so the narrator informs us (λόγος γε μὲν ἐντρέχει ἄλλος | ἀνθρώποις, 100–1), has the constellation qua Dike live among men and women in a Golden Age (101–14), withdraw to the mountains but still visit humans in a Silver Age (115–29), and then withdraw permanently to the sky (where, however, she is still visible) in a Bronze Age (129–36).

A passage of Clearchus' Περὶ γρίϕων (‘On riddles’), quoted by Athenaeus (10.454f–455a), preserves five lines from a Hymn to Pan by the early Hellenistic poet Castorion of Soloi, at the same time providing the reader with a clue to the puzzle that this fragment – according to the poet's own words – conveys:

When I started writing these reviews I presaged aggravated grumpiness in reaction to proliferating guides, handbooks and companions (G&R 52 [2005], 250). Subsequent experience has disconfirmed that prediction. I am not quite megalomaniac enough to believe that my threat cowed editors into raising their standards, nor modest enough to believe that my own standards have been subverted by mere habituation. Perhaps, then, proliferation itself has raised standards by increasing competition. However that may be, the current crop illustrates two ways in which specimens of the genre can earn their keep. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy achieves success by combining consistent excellence on the part of the contributors with a well-conceived and well-executed editorial plan. Martin Revermann's introduction is a model of how it should be done: he sets out the agenda (approaching the Greek comic tradition as a continuum, and moderating as far as possible the Aristophano-, Menandro-, and Athenocentricity of our evidence) and provides an overview, giving lucid summaries of individual chapters that also highlight their interconnections and their contributions to the overall structure (‘Setting the Stage’, ‘Comic Theatre’, ‘Central Themes’ ‘Politics, Law and Social History’, ‘Reception’). Andreas Willi, on ‘The Language(s) of Comedy’, does an especially fine job on a difficult brief; I was also impressed by Ralph Rosen's thoughtful essay on the ‘comic hero’ (a category with which I feel uncomfortable). But, in singling out those two for mention, I do not mean to detract from the high quality sustained throughout.

This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’ are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his own Greece & Rome subject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan's Bellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’. Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus the Bellum civile makes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

This review commences with two important recent books on archaic Greek history. Hans van Wees sees fiscality as a main aspect of the development of Greek communities in the archaic period. He explores the trajectory of Greek, and more specifically Athenian, fiscality in the course of the archaic period from personal to institutional power, from informal to formal procedures, and from undifferentiated to specialized offices and activities. Van Wees argues convincingly that navies based on publicly built and funded triremes appeared from 530s onwards as a Greek reaction to the emergence of the Persian Empire; the resources for maintaining such navies revolutionized Greek fiscality. This means that the Athenian navy emerged decades before its traditional attribution to the Themistoclean programme of the 480s; but this revolution would have been impossible without the gradual transformation of Athenian fiscality in the previous decades from Solon onwards, as regards the delimitation of institutional and specialized fiscal offices, such as the naukraroi and kolakretai, and the creation of formal procedures of taxation like the eisphora. This is a very important book that should have significant repercussions on the wider study of archaic Greece and Athenian history; but it also raises the major issue of the nature of our written sources for archaic Athens. While van Wees's use of the sources is plausible, there does not seem to be any wider principle of selection than what suits the argument (very sceptical on the tradition about Solon's fiscal measures, or Themistocles’ mines and navy policy; accepting of traditions about Hippias’ and Cleisthenes’ fiscal measures). We urgently need a focused methodological discussion of the full range of sources and the ways in which tradition, anachronism, ideology, and debate have shaped what we actually have.

I begin this review with a mega biblion that will be hugely welcomed by Roman historians of all stripes: Tim Cornell and his team's long-awaited new edition of the fragments of the Roman historians, featuring more than one hundred Roman writers of history, biography, and memoir. Cornell and his team have replaced the long-outdated edition of Hermann W. G. Peter with a state-of-the-art three-volume work. The first volume provides an excellent and comprehensive guide to the authors; the second features the parallel texts themselves, alongside new translations; the final volume comprises the commentary, plus the necessary concordances and indices. The clear layout makes it easy to match up the introductions to each author, their testimonia and fragments, and then the related commentary. The selection and presentation of the Roman authors is careful: the introduction describes the aim to present all that is known about the authors and their work but also emphasize ‘the limits of our knowledge’ (7). This is clearly a more conservative selection than before (and rightly so; the thirty-six Historia Augusta ‘historians’, for instance, are relegated to their own appendix). The coverage is broadly chronological, ending in the third century (which is of course slightly disappointing for those interested in the rich body of late Roman historiography). This is clearly a landmark achievement, and it is especially to be welcomed that it is unusually user-friendly, for students as well as for scholars. Another point might be of interest: out of the 111 Roman authors (or groups of authors) featured there is but one woman: Agrippina the Younger (no. 77), whose memoirs were cited by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder. Of the ten historians involved in this project, incidentally, just one is a woman. These figures have led me to consider the gender ratio of the books under review this time and the results are striking: out of the sixteen books under review, just three have female authors.

The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann once met, in London, the poet Alfred Tennyson – who, though he saluted Mount Ida tenderly, never travelled much south of the Dolomites. In the course of conversation, Schliemann remarked: ‘Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, is no bigger than the courtyard of Burlington House’. ‘I can never believe that’, Tennyson replied. Most of us, I dare say, would understand Tennyson's disbelief – and agree, accordingly, with the sentiment that Troy the site is not a marvellous ‘visitor experience’. The location may be broadly evocative – for those imaginatively predisposed to survey a landscape of epic combat. Yet the excavated remains are rather underwhelming, and difficult to comprehend. The huge trench cut through the Bronze Age settlement by Schliemann, and the resultant spoil heap left on the northern edge of the citadel, certainly contribute to a sense of confusion. But that aside, the multiple layers of habitation, from c.3000 bc until Byzantine times, customarily represented like a pile of pancakes in archaeological diagrams, will test even those pilgrims arriving with some expertise in ancient construction methods. Choice finds from the city are lodged in remote museums; and the substantial extent of Troy in Hellenistic, Roman, and possibly earlier times, indicated mainly by geophysical prospection, is hardly discernible. So archaeologists, post-Schliemann, have to work hard to make the ‘Trojan stones speak’ – at least if they also wish to avoid the charge of being obsessed (as Schliemann notoriously was) with establishing some kind of historical reality for Homer's epic. The late Manfred Korfmann, director of the international excavations at Troy since 1988, produced an enthusiastic guidebook. Now his colleague C. B. Rose has made a one-volume synthesis of the results so far, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. This will be particularly welcome for students unable or unwilling to access the annual excavation journal, Studia Troica. But novices, I fear, may soon despair of grasping the phases of stratification and ceramic assemblage more often cited by the author than explained (e.g. ‘LH III2a/VIh’). And any reader seeking new answers for old questions about the site's relationship to ‘the Trojan War’ should prepare for disappointment. Much of the evidence for Troy in the late Bronze Age – the period of c.1250 bc, generally reckoned to correlate with events transformed into epic – remains elusive: where, for example, are graves comparable to those of Mycenae? On the other hand, the lesson of the multi-period approach is that Troy the historical city largely constructs its identity upon Troy the mythical citadel – as does the Troad region. So Rose does well to devote an entire chapter to the remarkable archaic sarcophagus recovered in 1994 from a tumulus in the Granicus valley, with scenes of the sacrifice of Polyxena, Hecuba's attendant distress, and some kind of celebration. The iconography here may not be easy to relate to the gender of the deceased (a middle-aged man, according to osteological analysis). Yet it makes a visual statement about the sort of mythical bloodline to be claimed in the region: and, in due time (for Rose's survey is chronological), we will see the epigraphic and monumental evidence for similar ancestral claims by members of the Julio-Claudian clan.

Twelves Voices from Greece and Rome by Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke sounds like a title specially commissioned by this very journal, though, alas, we can claim none of the credit! The collaboration arose out of a BBC Radio 3 series on classical literature in collaboration with the Open University and should have a broad appeal. Of the twelve voices six are Greek, six Latin: for the poets, Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Horace; for the tragedians, Euripides; for the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, Caesar, Tacitus; with Cicero for the orators (and philosophers…) and Juvenal for the satirists, paired with the final ‘voice’ in the collection: Lucian (a striking sign of the growing interest and marketability of Second Sophistic and Imperial Greek authors). This is a stimulating and enjoyable read, which carries one swiftly along. It is not a didactic regurgitation of literary and cultural history (though the final section on ‘Translations and Further Reading’ gives all the references one needs for further research) but a celebration of the continuing relevance of the Classics: