Three famous sophists are referred to together in the Apology of Sokrates as still practising their enviably lucrative itinerant profession in 399 b.c. (not, by implication, I in Athens): Gorgias of Leontinoi, Prodikos of Keos and Hippias of Elis. The last of these was the least well known to the Athenian demos, having practised mainly in I Dorian cities. There is no extant reference to him in Old Comedy, but we can assume that he was sufficiently famous – especially for his fees (possibly the highest charged by any sophist) – to justify his inclusion as the third of this ‘triad’; cf. the triad Protagoras – Hippias – Prodikos in the Protagoras, considered further below. Gorgias was by now a grand old man of about ninety (with more than a decade of active life still ahead of him), the last survivor of the first generation of fee-taking educators, associated first and foremost in the popular mind with the suspect arts of political and forensic persuasion. Prodikos and Hippias were probably in their sixties.

In the best Menippean tradition the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius is peppered with quotations from different authors, most notably from the works of Homer. The quotations are generally spoken by Philosophy, and are used to articulate the narrative, e.g. at 1. 4 we find a line from Iliad 1. 363 whose application to the f present situation is immediately comprehensible, and would have been appreciated by the average reader. Another similar quotation is that of Iliad 12. 176: ⋯ργαλ⋯oν δ⋯ με ταȗτα Өε⋯ν ὣς π⋯ντ' ⋯γoρε⋯ειν at 4. 6. 53. Such uses are very simiar to what one, finds in the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca, albeit there used for comic effect. There are also snippets of popular wisdom in the form of an old proverb – though it is one with Menippean associations – and a Pythagorean maxim.

There is a suspicion in the minds of a number of Virgil's modern commentators that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave, and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis (who may be the Iollas of line 57) is his master too.1 It is the purpose of this note to show that the suspicion is baseless.

None of the ancient commentators appears to know of such an interpretation. This should be significant in that they probably shared the poet's assumptions about literary decorum. We can gather how Virgil viewed the function of slaves in poetry of an exalted genre by looking at the Aeneid and the Georgics. The essential considerations were set out by W. E. Heitland in Agricola (1921), pp. 218-41. Virgil was less ready to introduce slaves into his epic than Homer had been. More startling is the complete silence of the poet in the Georgics on the use of slave labour in contemporary farming. Literary decorum induces this reticence; slaves are too mean to have a voice or place in epos. How do matters stand with pastoral?

The proverbial obscurity of the Alexandra discourages conjecture, and Lycophron's editors have not been given to bold emendation. It may indeed seem that much has been suffered to pass unquestioned which no-one would think tolerable if it stood in the MSS. of Aeschylus, whose style Lycophron clearly sought to emulate. Yet despite the prophetic form of his Rahmenerzählung his manner of expression is far removed from the deliberate opacity, all too often accompanied by defective grammar (and, where appropriate, defective metre), characteristic of genuine apocalyptic prophecy, whether bona fide or post eventum, nor does the appeal of this rather bookish poetry lie in that power to enlist our sympathies for impossible dreams and lost causes beside which animadversions on syntactical abnormality seem stony-hearted.

In his Vita Galbae (7) Suetonius informs us that after Gaius' assassination Galba was urged by some to attempt to seize power but declined to do so. Consequently he was much favoured by Claudius, and held in such high regard (‘tantae dignitatis est habitus’) that when Galba was smitten by a sudden, though mild, illness, the emperor postponed the expedition launched against Britain in A.D. 43: ‘ut cum subita ei [sc.Galbae] valetudo nee adeo gravis incidisset, dilatus sit expeditionis Britannicae dies’. The reference to the postponement is clear and unequivocal, and contains nothing scurrilous or titillating that might have persuaded Suetonius to fabricate it. It does not, accordingly, seem unreasonable that modern commentators should, on the basis of this passage, record that Galba was present in Britain in A.D. 43.

Commentators on Epode 11 generally begin by comparing the opening couplet with Archilochus (frg. 215 West): κα⋯ μ' οὔτ' ἰ⋯μβων οὔτε τερπωλ⋯ων μ⋯λει, and sometimes also Catullus 68. 1–40. In both of these the poet explains that grief at the death of a loved one has expelled all desire to compose verses. According to the comparison, Horace, in 1–2, is stating that the onset of love (‘amore percussum gravi’, 2) has, similarly, so absorbed his attention that he cannot write verse. The translation will then run ‘Pettius, I have no pleasure any longer in writing verse, smitten as I am with a heavy love’.

Martial wrote about himself and his participation in the everyday life of Rome more than any other extant poet of the post-Augustan Principate. More particularly, dozens of his epigrams describe the life of the ordinary client and his treatment by great and often arrogant patrons. Unfortunately for social and literary historians, however, Martial was writing satirical epigrams, not autobiography. Consequently, his poetry cannot be taken at face value as a direct reflection of Roman life. With regard to literary patronage, the difficulties of interpretation have allowed modern scholars to reach diametrically opposed conclusions. One editor and commentator baldly labelled Martial ‘a chronic beggar’ who ‘despite his numerous friends and the many patroni to whom he paid court,…dragged on a hand-to-mouth existence’. In a recent and more detailed study, on the other hand, Martial is portrayed as a man of independent means, who looked to his powerful amici not for financial support so much as for help in publicizing his work and for protection in literary squabbles.

Why does Catullus in his eleventh poem tell Furius and Aurelius to take an unpleasant message to his girl-friend? After all, in the eighth poem he imagines himself able to do the job alone: ‘uale puella’ (12). Has his courage just evaporated? Or is it that he wants to put his messengers, whom he perhaps does not like, in an awkward position (so Baehrens, and more tentatively Fordyce)? Kroll is not sure why the poet chooses intermediaries. Some think they came in the first place from the girl, who wanted reconciliation, and that this poem is Catullus' response. But the poet is usually able to make it plain, as in poems 7 and 85, that he is replying to a question (cf. Prop. 2.1 and 31); here that standard device is missing, and should not be introduced. This note offers a new solution to the problem, and identifies the imagined situation in such a way that the eleventh poem can be seen to be in harmony with the poet's attitude to his idealised love-affair.

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: (i) The Plague was a disease (or combination of diseases) which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, (ii) It still exists in some remote place or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, (iii) It became extinct, (iv) It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility (iii) or (iv). But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’.

The collection and disposal of rubbish and waste and the maintenance of a decent standard of hygiene was as much a problem for ancient city authorities as for modern town councils. The responsibility for the removal of waste would often be dependent upon the nature of the rubbish and the facilities which city authorities offered. Thus early in the fourth century B.C. the agoranomic law from Piraeus prohibited individuals from piling earth and other waste on the streets and compelled the offender to remove it. The astynomic law from Pergamon, which probably dates originally to the Hellenistic period, similarly forbade the dumping or piling up of earth or the mixing of mortar on the streets of the city. As one of Demosthenes' speeches indicates, the effect of dumping rubbish indiscriminately was to raise the level of the road surface, which consequently restricted access and endangered adjacent property. Excavation of a triangular hieron to the south west of the agora at Athens further illustrates the results of dumping. Here it was found that, between the construction of the hieron in the late fifth century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century B.C, the road surface on its northern side rose more than half a metre and covered the lower part of the wall of the hieron and its boundary marker. The accumulated fill included a deep layer of marble chips, which had been dumped in the area by marble workers. The laws from Piraeus and Pergamon were thus designed to keep streets passable, protect adjacent buildings, and safeguard pedestrians.

Since Epigonus spent most of his life in Sicyon, it seems likely that Lysander was himself one of the associates of Epigonus that the passage mentions. This would place him in the latter part of the sixth century. But we have no further information about Lysander, and nothing of what is known of Epigonus is any help in the interpretation of the present account. Some innovations in kithara-playing are being credited to Lysander, but what they are is far from clear.

In Book K of the Metaphysics Aristotle raises a problem about a very persistent concern of Greek philosophy, that of the relation between the one (τ⋯ ἓν) and the many (τ⋯ πλ***θ***), but in a rather peculiar context. He asks: ‘What on earth is it in virtùe of which mathematical magnitudes are one? It is reasonable that things around us [i.e. sensible things] be one in virtue of [their] ψνχ⋯ or part of their ψνχ⋯, or something else; otherwise there is not one but many, the thing is divided up. But [mathematical] objects are divisible and quantitative. What is it that makes them one and holds them together?’ (1077 a 20–4).

In 1928, Friedrich Solmsen argued that Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was largely composed before the Prior Analytics. Ross rejected Solmsen's position in 1939, and a rather lengthy series of rebuttals and counter-attacks between the two scholars followed. Quite recently, Jonathan Barnes has revived this issue with arguments in favour of something very close to Solmsen's thesis: that Aristotle first developed a theory of demonstration (‘apodeictic’) before he had worked out the syllogistic, and that the Posterior Analytics was originally conceived against this background. Subsequently, when Aristotle formulated a syllogistic, he is supposed by Barnes to have revised or added to the contents of the Posterior Analytics so as to make syllogistic the logic of Aristotelian science. Thus, Barnes says: ‘the syllogism is in fact an incidental adjunct to the theory of demonstration: the theory can be formulated without reference, explicit or implicit, to Syllogistic, and it could have been discovered by someone who knew nothing whatever about the Syllogism’ (pp. 33–4).

The relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States seems to embody most fully the type of the ‘special relationship’ today. It is a relationship founded ultimately (and now of course remotely) on biological kinship, structured by mutual economic and strategic interests and cemented by a sense of political and ‘spiritual’ affinity. At least the broad contours of such contemporary ‘special relationships’ are sufficiently clear. This is far from being the case with those of the Archaic and Classical Greek world, for two main reasons. First, and more decisively, our sources for the history of that world – literary, epigraphical, archaeological – are normally scrappy, discontinuous and variously slanted. Second, and only in part because of the nature of the evidence, the workings of all ancient Greek interstate relationships, whether ‘special’ or not, are in principle controversial. For in the absence of governments and parties in the modern sense it is frequently impossible to explain confidently a particular foreign policy decision taken by a Greek state. A fortiori it is in principle even more difficult to describe and account for ‘special’ relationships between states that apparently transcended purely immediate, local and narrowly self-interested considerations.