Pompey does not accept defeat at Pharsalus. Rather, in an effort to gain support from powers beyond Rome, he makes for Egypt and, unbeknownst to him, his decapitation. As narrated in Lucan's Bellum ciuile, after deliberating in Cilicia with his senatorial advisers (8.259–455), Pompey stops at the island of Cyprus (8.456–9):

tum Cilicum liquere solum Cyproque citatas
immisere rates, nullas cui praetulit aras
undae diua memor Paphiae, si numina nasci
credimus aut quemquam fas est coepisse deorum.

The anonymous panegyrist concludes his prediction of Messalla's future achievements by prophesying that, after his deeds are duly honoured with triumphs, Messalla will be titled the Great (175–6):

ergo ubi praeclaros poscent tua facta triumphos, 175
solus utroque idem diceris magnus in orbe.

Virgil's list of the qualities that are desirable in a brood cow corresponds closely to those in Varro's De re rustica and in the texts which, though later, can be plausibly taken as evidence of an existing tradition. Yet, there is one exception, and it is an exception to which the poet carefully draws attention. Varro's, Columella's and Palladius’ ideal cows all share with Virgil's and with each other hairy ears, very long dewlaps and tail, and other features. However, whereas they all have narrow hooves (ungulis breuibus, Palladius), moderate at most (ungulis modicis, Columella), and certainly not broad (pedibus non latis, Varro), Virgil's cow emphatically has big feet (Verg. G. 3.51–9):

optima toruae
forma bouis cui turpe caput, cui plurima ceruix,
et crurum tenus a mento palearia pendent;
tum longo nullus lateri modus: omnia magna,
pes etiam, et camuris hirtae sub cornibus aures. 55
nec mihi displiceat maculis insignis et albo,
aut iuga detrectans interdumque aspera cornu
et faciem tauro propior, quaeque ardua tota
et gradiens ima uerrit uestigia cauda.

The best shape
for a fierce cow is one which has an ugly head, which has a lot of neck
and whose dewlaps hang from her chin all the way down to her legs;
then let there be no limit to the length of her flank: let everything be big,
even the foot, and hairy ears under in-curving horns,
and I would approve of her being marked with white spots,
either refusing the yoke or sometimes fierce with her horn
and in appearance closer to a bull, and who is lofty in every respect
and when walking sweeps her tracks with the tip of her tail.

The Bellum ciuile has been the subject of three major editions in the past thirty years, attributable to D.R. Shackleton Bailey, R. Badalì and G. Luck. The existence of these three works highlights the resurgence of sustained interest surrounding Lucan as of the 1970s, with the publication of two significant works, Lucan: An Introduction by F. Ahl and the collective volume of Entretiens à la fondation Hardt, yet it also demonstrates the difficulty in establishing the text of the Pharsalia.

Theocritus divides his second Idyll into two roughly equal sections, each punctuated by ten refrains: in the first half, a courtesan named Simaetha describes an ongoing erotic spell that she and her servant are performing and at the same time she enacts it by reciting a series of short similia-similibus incantations; in the second half, she speaks to Selene in the night sky and tells her the story of her brief affair with and betrayal by a handsome young athlete named Delphis. Literary scholars have written much about this poem, but they are more often concerned with the second, confessional half, with its complicated narrative layers and its charmingly naïve and unreliable narrator. Historians of religion and magic, on the other hand, have focussed most of their energies on the first half of the poem, using as comparanda the much later evidence of Roman-era curse tablets (katadesmoi) and late antique magical papyri to make sense of what Simaetha does and says during her long ritual, an approach that was enshrined by Gow in the middle of the last century, when he argued that, because of the conservative nature of these later magical spells, there was little risk of serious anachronism in using them for comparison.

Very shortly before the end of Book 11 of the Aeneid, Turnus, hearing of Camilla's death, is forced to abandon his ambush in order to fall back to the city. Just after he leaves the wooded gorge, Aeneas passes through it unscathed with his company. Both then head toward the city walls. Virgil marks this near miss of the two commanders by an acrostic (Aen. 11.901–7):

ille furens (et saeua Iouis sic numina pellunt)
deserit obsessos collis, nemora aspera linquit.
uix e conspectu exierat campumque tenebat,
cum pater Aeneas saltus ingressus apertos
exsuperatque iugum siluaque euadit opaca.
sic ambo ad muros rapidi totoque feruntur
agmine nec longis inter se passibus absunt.

In sections 4.80 and 4.81 of the Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder describes the peoples living beyond the Danube River in his own day in the later first century c.e.:

At Alexipharmaca 472–5, Nicander compares the sea hare to the cuttlefish and describes the latter's defensive mechanism of ink emission before turning to a symptom of sea hare poisoning, a change of skin colour:

οἷά τε σηπιάδος φυξήλιδος ἥ τε μελαίνει
οἶδμα χολῇ δολόεντα μαθοῦσ’ ἀγρώστορος ὁρμήν.
τῶν ἤτοι ζοφόεις μὲν ἐπὶ χλόος ἔδραμε γυίοις
ἰκτερόεις […]

The phrase ἐγχέλυές τε καὶ ἰχθύες (‘eels and fish’) appears twice in Iliad Book 21, in descriptions of actions involving the river Xanthus:

τὸν μὲν ἄρ’ ἐγχέλυές τε καὶ ἰχθύες ἀμφεπένοντο (203)
the eels and fish dealt with him [sc. Asteropaeus].

τείροντ᾽ ἐγχέλυές τε καὶ ἰχθύες οἱ κατὰ δίνας (353)
distressed were the eels and fish beneath the eddies.

How to inculcate virtue in the citizens of Magnesia by means of the dance component of choreia constitutes one of the principal concerns in the Laws (= Leg.), revealing Plato's evolving ideas about the expediency of music and paideia for the construction of his ideal city since the Republic. Indeed, a steady stream of monographs and articles on the Laws has enriched our understanding of how Plato theorizes the body as a site of intervention and choral dance as instrumental in solidifying social relations and in conditioning the ethical and political self. As one scholar has aptly put it: ‘a city and its sociopolitical character [are] effectively danced into existence.’ Drawing on this recent work, I focus on an enigmatic passage in Laws Book 7 that merits more attention than it has received, in which Plato curiously singles out Bacchic dances from those that are ‘without controversy’ (815b7–d4):

As he draws toward the conclusion of a lengthy string of Roman exempla on the topic of moderatio, a virtue highly regarded by the reigning Emperor Tiberius, Valerius introduces a brief discussion on the challenges he faces in producing the kind of account he wants to create. Unfortunately, for a rare passage in which Valerius speaks about his own work, the text is uncertain: various problems have been identified and different solutions have been proposed, but not, I will argue, ones that satisfactorily recognize the prominence of Valerius’ authorial role here or understand his meaning or pay appropriate attention to the immediate context in which he makes his remarks. I propose a new emendation which helps clarify that the primary challenge concerns the scale and the style of coverage of individual exempla required by the Facta et dicta memorabilia. I will show that Valerius deliberately alludes to his own programmatic remarks in the work's preface, which then illuminate his purpose and practice, both broadly in relation to his mission to record and praise outstanding individuals and more narrowly in providing a transition to a specific exemplum.

Two well-known ancient witnesses report that Aristophanes of Byzantium was responsible for the arrangement of Pindar's poems into seventeen book-rolls according to lyric genres (dithyrambs, hymns, etc.). These witnesses form fr. 381 in the edition of Aristophanes’ fragments by W.J. Slater (Aristophanis Byzantii fragmenta [Berlin and New York, 1986]):

A much-debated question is whether the order of the poems attested by the papyrus can be credited to Aristophanes, since an ordering principle is apparently not to be found in the list transmitted by it. Moreover, there are some disagreements with the list of Pindar's works transmitted by the Vita Ambrosiana, which is generally deemed the most authoritative catalogue of the poet's corpus, on account of its well-recognized criterion of classification: the poems are divided between those for gods (from hymnoi to hyporchēmata) and those for men (from enkōmia to epinikia), and both of these categories of songs are arranged from the most general (respectively, the hymns and the enkōmia) to the most specific (the remaining genres). This catalogue has been thought to reproduce the order established by Aristophanes in his edition of Pindar.

Many attempts have been made to define the precise philosophical outlook of Ovid's account of cosmogony from the beginning of the Metamorphoses, while numerous different and interconnected influences have been identified including Homer, Hesiod, Empedocles, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius and Virgil. This has led some scholars to conclude that Ovid's cosmogony is simply eclectic, a magpie collection of various poetic and philosophical snippets haphazardly jumbled together, and with no significant philosophical dimension whatsoever. A more constructive approach could see Ovid's synthesis of many of the major cosmogonic works in the Graeco-Roman tradition as an attempt to match textually his all-encompassing history of the universe that purports to stretch from the first beginnings of the world up to the present day (Met. 1.3−4). Furthermore, if the beginning of the Metamorphoses is designed to be both cosmologically and intertextually all-encompassing, it is surprising that the influence of arguably the major philosophical work on cosmogony from the ancient world, Plato's Timaeus, remains to be evaluated.

Scholars of the ancient world are increasingly recognizing the importance of ancient collections for our understanding of antiquity. In his afterword to Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (2015), Jaś Elsner argues that much of our knowledge of antiquity is based on collections assembled within the ancient world, and that the study of these collections provides us with a unique opportunity to uncover the mentalities of the people whom they surrounded. Pointing out that they ‘packaged the past and the present for its own needs, much as modern museums do now’, Elsner argues that ancient collections may be approached as ‘significant engine[s] for social and cultural self-definition’.

In his Res Gestae, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptian city of Thebes and the obelisks that can be found there. There is an unusual passage in which he describes hieroglyphic writings. He goes on to show, through two examples, how hieroglyphs might seem bizarre, but in fact contain their own logic which can be explained (Amm. Marc. 17.4.10–11, translation mine):

In ancient literature and religion, Hercules—in common with many other deities—is frequently associated with particular trees or types of tree. There are tales connecting him with the wild olive, laurel and oak, but his most prominent and frequent arboreal link is with the poplar (populus Alcidae gratissima, ‘the poplar is most delightful to Hercules’, Verg. Ecl. 7.61), an association mentioned twice in the Hercules-heavy first half of Aeneid Book 8 (276, 286). The festival of Hercules celebrated by Evander and his people takes place just outside the city within a ‘great grove’ (Aen. 8.103–4) of unspecified species, in an area surrounded by less defined expanses of trees. Trees crowd the banks of the Tiber, leaning out for wonder as Aeneas’ fleet passes by (Aen. 8.91–2) and soon uariisque teguntur | arboribus, uiridisque secant placido aequore siluas (‘[the Trojans] are covered by different trees and cut their way through green woods on the calm water’, Aen. 8.95–6); looking up through the sacrificial smoke on the altars, Pallas and his friends are initially frightened ut celsas uidere rates atque inter opacum | adlabi nemus (‘as they saw the tall ships glide towards them through the dark grove’, Aen. 8.107–8). When Evander later shows Aeneas around, the emphasis on trees recurs, with the huge grove destined to become Romulus’ Asylum (Aen. 8.342), and the bramble- and god-haunted woods of the Capitol (Aen. 8.347–54). Later, Aeneas and his men camp in a vast grove of Silvanus, as Venus approaches to bring her son his new shield (Aen. 8.597–607).

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.

Similarities between ancient Greek philosophy and Indian philosophy have long been recognized and are usually ascribed to East-West contact. However, when similarities are recognized between Greek and Indian poetic diction or, more generally, between the myths and the poetry of the two cultures, they are often ascribed to Indo-European common origin; and one asks whether the same explanation could apply in philosophy. The two types of explanation are not incompatible, for a remote common origin could have been followed by one or more periods of interaction. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing how far an explanation of common origin can be pressed before falling back on the explanation of contact.

Ἠλ. ὑμᾶς δὲ κωκυτοῖς ἐπανθίζειν νόμος,150
παιᾶνα τοῦ θανόντος ἐξαυδωμένας.
Χο. ἵετε δάκρυ καναχὲς ὀλόμενον
ὀλομένωι δεσπόται
πρὸς ῥεῦμα τόδε κεδνῶν κακῶν τ’
ἀπότροπον, ἄγος ἀπεύχετον155
κεχυμένων χοᾶν.
κλύε δέ μοι σέβας, κλύ’, ὦ δέσποτ’, ἐξ
ἀμαυρᾶς φρενός.
ὀτοτοτοτοτοτοῖ⋅
ἴτω τις δορυσθενὴς ἀνὴρ160
ἀναλυτὴρ δόμων †Σκυθιτά τ’ ἐν χεροῖν
παλίντον’ ἐν ἔργωι† βέλη ’πιπάλλων Ἄρης
σχέδιά τ’ αὐτόκωπα νωμῶν ξίφη.