This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus. By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which the φαλληφόρια of the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian delegates’) become the subject of a φαλλοσκοπία by the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever.

Burnet's text at Pl. Ti. 55c7–d6 is at least questionable, and opting for a different reading at 55d5 (θεός instead of θεόν) would shed light on an intriguing argumentative aspect of Plato's cosmological account: God confirms the metaphysical reasons why there is just one perfect world.

This note adduces corroborating evidence for Skutsch's ascription of Enn. Ann. 5 to a description of the water cycle in the speech of Homer in the proem to the Annales. Despite the flawed argumentation in Skutsch's presentation and despite a general reluctance among scholars to endorse his ascription, this note argues that his solution should remain part of the scholarly discussion, not least because there are aspects of Skutsch's argument that remain uncontested and because Lucretius seems to endorse this location of the fragment in the original Annales.

This piece explores possible reasons for Lucilius’ suggestive reference to worms, emblemate uermiculato, in the famous comment (about speech arranged akin to mosaics) which has survived from Book 2 of the satirist. The fragment can be set metatextually amid other extracts of Lucilius to show the poet's agency and skill, considered as having influenced aspects of its own afterlife (especially in Hor. Sat. 2.4) and appreciated in its historical context as a hit at Publius Mucius Scaevola, who died from phthiriasis.

This article deals with the structure of Appian's Mithridateios. All the manuscripts begin with two chapters (now numbered 118 and 119) that, in his 1785 edition of Appian, Johannes Schweighäuser argued could not represent the opening of the work: a folio had been removed from its proper place towards the end of the work and mistakenly placed at the beginning. All editors followed Schweighäuser until recently, when there has been a tendency to accept the manuscript order of chapters. This creates a very different start for the work, meaning that it begins with the Greek words ὧδε μέν, an impossibly compressed way of saying ‘The following book sets out how …’. By examining the issues involved, particularly the language of Appian and his general practice in structuring the separate works of his Roman History, this article seeks to demonstrate that the Mithridateios cannot have begun as the manuscripts set out. It also argues, however, that the two chapters in question do not fit well at the end of the work, either; and that the reason for this, and for the displacement of the chapters in the first place, is the repetitive summary material at the end of the work. In chapters 118 and 119, it is argued, Appian has used different source material without integrating it properly with what preceded and followed, thus leading to an untidy ending. This was made more orderly by removing chapters 118 and 119 and putting them at the beginning.

This article aims at proposing a solution to one of the well-known textual cruces in Lucretius’ De rerum natura. After a brief survey of the suggested emendations, the author will shed some fresh light on Manning's gratus, which recent editors have curiously neglected. The idea that the old man should retire from life with thanks is not uncommon among classical writers. In addition, parallel expressions are also found in Epicurus’ own words. This article concludes that gratus is what we would expect in the last line of Nature's admonition in De rerum natura and, therefore, the most probable emendation.

This note offers a new emendation in the Ciris. The author suggests that the text of line 118 should read: deicere et indomita Minoa retundere mente.

This short note attempts to shed light on some of the surgical procedures referred to in Martial's epigram 10.56 by consulting pertinent Graeco-Roman medical texts. A fuller understanding of one such intervention (treatment of infected/inflamed uvula) supports Martial's text as transmitted.

This article argues against the long-enduring practice of Josephan scholarship to treat the terms τύραννος (‘tyrant’) and λῃστής (‘brigand’) as a collocation, or as undistinguished terms of invective employed by Josephus against various Jewish antagonists in his Bellum Judaicum (= BJ). Towards this aim, the article first examines the frequency in which these two terms appear together throughout the text of the BJ, before turning to a critical examination of particular passages that feature the terms, in order to prove that they are, in fact, not used as undistinguished terms of invective but as terms pertaining to two distinct classes of people: renegade aristocrats vying with their peers for absolute power (the ‘tyrants’) and their gangs of foot soldiers comprising men from the lower classes (the ‘brigands’). The article concludes that Josephus used these terms in this manner in order to convey to his readership, which largely consisted of Roman aristocrats, that the ringleaders of the Judaean revolt which raged between a.d. 66–73 were akin to renegades who periodically wreaked havoc on Rome's own aristocracy, often with devastating consequences for class and country alike.

This article considers two passages in which either the sky (Plin. HN 17.74) or the sun (Manilius 2.941) is described as ‘green’; it argues that in both cases such a colour epithet is out of place and proposes to correct uiridi caelo to nitido caelo in the former case, and uiridis … Phoebus to rutilus … Phoebus in the latter.

This article argues for an allusion in Virgil's Eclogue 4 to one of Pindar's victory odes (Olympian 6). It will be suggested that this Pindaric pretext is viewed by the Latin poet through a Callimachean perspective which adds to it further layers of significance. Consequently, the evidence will be discussed for reading the allusion in terms of royal ideology which places Virgil's poem in the tradition of Hellenistic ruler-encomia.