CEG 1.10 shows striking parallels in language and thought with Euripides’ Suppliant Women 531–6 (c. 423), with both passages describing the departure of the soul into the upper air (aithêr) after death. This article argues that rather than being a commonplace in fifth-century Athens, the mention of this eschatology in Suppliant Women is a deliberate reference to CEG 1.10; and that the significance of this reference is the recontextualization of the lines from CEG 1.10 to describe the battle of Delium (423), thus expressing the war-weariness and disillusion of Athens.

This article offers a critical evaluation of Bernard Williams’s influential account of ancient Greek historiography and the place of ancient Greek thought in the early history of ideas in his last book Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, 2002). It argues that such an evaluation is warranted now not only because Williams’s stance continues to influence how Herodotus and Thucydides are viewed by scholars outside of classical studies; more importantly, it also opens up the field of classical studies itself to a much needed engagement with those ideas from Williams’s influential study that can be productively applied to the study of Herodotus and Thucydides.

The first part consists of a critical appraisal of Williams’s views in light of current classical scholarship on early Greek historiography. The second part makes the case for why Herodotus rather than Thucydides would have served as the better example for Williams to explore the historical conditions and intellectual milieu that led to the emergence of truth and truthfulness as a problem in the Western historiographic tradition. Drawing on recent classical scholarship, the article shows that it was Herodotus, rather than Thucydides, who first conceived of the truth as a problem; that it was him rather than Thucydides who first grappled with sincerity and accuracy as the values that Williams identifies as fundamental to the truth-claims embedded in the historiographic tradition.

The article thus suggests that the history of truthfulness as a relational concept that binds together author and audience in a mutual contract of trust should start with him rather than Thucydides. It shows how Williams’s account of truth as a social value that binds author and audience together in a mutual contract of trust can be productively applied to the study of Herodotus’ Histories. A conclusion focuses on the role that has typically been attributed to the ancient world in genealogical accounts of the history of ideas.

The drinking party at Medius’ in Babylon on 31 May 323 b.c., marking the onset of Alexander’s terminal illness, is explored from contemporary and later texts. Close reading of fragments by Nicobule and Aristobulus, set beside the reticence of the court daybooks (Ephemerides) and the studied vagueness of secondary sources, clarifies in detail the sequence of events. Justin, Plutarch and the author of the Liber de morte Alexandri cast light on the silence imposed by the King’s successors. A narrative emerges of the day itself, the spread of rumour, the two false explanations for Alexander’s death that were successively propagated, and the third explanation, most probably correct, that Aristobulus was first to publish.

Following Janko's suggestion that two trimeters cited at Strabo, Geography 8.6.20 form a couplet from an unknown, possibly Aristophanic comedy, this note explores the resonance and meaning of the third citation contained in the same chapter of the geographer's work. It proposes that this third citation, which relates to a Corinthian hetaira's work at the loom and is possibly from either the same or a different comedy, contains a joke hinting at the Odyssey and alternative traditions regarding Penelope's chastity. This Odyssean echo thematically connects this citation to the comic trimeters, which also contain clear allusions to the Odyssey.

In this note I argue that the generally accepted view that Diodorus preserved a tradition which limited the fourth-century anarchy in Rome to one year is groundless, and that the author’s confused chronology of the Early and Middle Republic strongly suggests that in the source he followed the solitudo magistratuum lasted several years, as in other reports.

This note discusses two places in Statius’ Thebaid (6.22 and 6.224), in which the transmitted text may be improved, and proposes new emendations.

This article reconstructs the system of storage, organization and presentation of written evidence in Athenian courts of the Classical period, with wider implications for the discussion about oral and written culture in Classical Greece and legal professionalism in Athenian democracy. It explores court speakers’ references to an assumed order of documents, their storage in containers called echinoi, and verbal presentation by the court secretary. It is the first systematic analysis of all remarks on storing, organizing and reading documents in the corpus of Athenian oratory, supplemented by other literary and epigraphic sources. Based on the surviving evidence, this article argues for the existence of a developed legal culture that made attempts to facilitate the handling of documents in courtrooms through practical organizational measures, including the speakers’ interactions with court aids, notably the grammateis and hypogrammateis.

One of the tendencies among scribes who transmitted the corpus Philonicum was to divide treatises into smaller units. This article argues that Philo’s De gigantibus and Quod Deus sit immutabilis were originally a single treatise that scribes split in an effort to create thematic unities for each half. Two lines of evidence support this conclusion. There is significant evidence that the two treatises circulated as a single work in antiquity. The most important evidence lies in the titles. Eusebius knew a compound title for a single work and the eighth-century compilers of the Sacra parallela attributed fragments from Quod Deus sit immutabilis to De gigantibus. The second line of evidence is internal. De gigantibus is noticeably shorter than any other treatise in the Allegorical Commentary with the exception of De sobrietate that may be incomplete. More importantly, the work concludes with an internal transitional phrase that introduces the citation that opens Quod Deus sit immutabilis. While Philo creates a bridge between treatises, this is an internal transition marker. For these reasons, we should discontinue following the scribal tradition and reunite the two halves of Philo’s treatise.

This note presents a new supplement for Euripides, Heracles 767.

In addition to the acrostic–telestic combination natu ceu aes ‘from birth like bronze’, Catullus poem 60 contains the earliest attested Latin mesostic (mi pia ‘dutiful to me’), which runs down its caesuras. The use of pius anticipates the language of aristocratic obligation that is used of Lesbia in the epigrams and is perhaps also a wordplay on the praenomen of Clodia’s father, Appius. The complex acrostics and the syntax of mi pia, along with the setting of poem 59 (in sepulcretis), suggest that poem 60 can be read as a literary epitaph. Additional closural elements in the poem include an allusion to Callimachus and a sphragis in the form of a play on the author’s name.

In recent years there has been a marked escalation in the study of Graeco-Roman associations. Useable data for recreating associational groups usually derive from the inscriptions embedded in stone monuments that have survived in the material record. Because data of this kind usually originate from groups with middling economic resources, it is imperative to focus particular attention on any data emerging from groups lower on the socio-economic scale. The second-century b.c.e. papyrus fragments of SB 3.7182 from Philadelphia in Egypt are a prime resource in this regard, surfacing from what must have been one of the most inconspicuous of associations. This article offers a detailed investigation of the general prosopography of the low-level association comprising a few enslaved men. It proposes that ten meetings are evident in the heavily damaged associational ledgers; that the association consisted of enslaved members of three distinct households; that a subscription or epidosis was collected at one meeting; and that we get a rare glimpse of low-level generosity enacted within the association in relation to the payment of membership fees, as well as an extremely rare glimpse of the agency of the enslaved.

This paper offers a new perspective on a well-known topic: Seneca’s quotations from the Aeneid in his Moral Epistles. It takes as a starting point the commonly held view that Seneca uses Virgil, sometimes altering the text, sometimes decontextualizing it, to support his Stoic ideas, but without implying that this was originally in Virgil’s mind. An analysis of both the content and the form of the quotations shows that Seneca uses them not only to convey Stoic ideas but also to provide a narrative. Regarding the content, Seneca avoids descriptive passages, preferring instead passages focussed on a few key concepts: virtue and fighting, god and fate, death. These are at the same time the main themes of the epic poem and those of the Moral Epistles. The distribution of the themes throughout the collection and the contextualization of the quoted Virgilian lines reveal a narrative behind Seneca’s choices, which in the beginning aims at improving one’s virtue and then proceeds, toward the end, to an acceptance of death. As the author of his Epistles, Seneca uses the quotations from the Aeneid to describe his coming to terms with death. This is further stressed by the frequency of dialogic exchanges among the quoted lines: given the overlap between the fictive dialogue of the letter (author/reader) and that of the quoted lines, there is an identification of the two epistolary characters with the epic ones, and this contributes to Seneca’s self-portrayal as a master of philosophy and as an old man facing his approaching end.

This article explores Lucian’s treatise, How to Write History, in the context of ancient rhetorical and literary theory. While situated within the domain of historiography, the treatise prioritizes issues related to literary composition, such as the linguistic register and content selection deemed fitting for the historical genre. Through comparisons with critics and theoreticians like Aristotle and Demetrius, this study re-evaluates Lucian’s instructions for preface writing and other stylistic guidelines throughout the work. The conclusions highlight Lucian’s innovative approach to historical composition, influenced by rhetorical and literary theory yet reshaped to fit his vision of history and its purpose. Additionally, the examination reveals Lucian’s strategic use of rhetorical and literary theory in critiquing not only writing style but also issues intrinsic to history.

Ancient writers, including philosophers such as Aristotle, often depict friendship as a source of pleasure; by contrast, in his Laelius de amicitia, Cicero describes such relationships as sweet and delightful, but never connects them with uoluptas, which for him is a largely negative term reserved for Epicurean doctrine. This paper argues that there is more to this pointed use of language than Cicero’s well-known dislike of Epicureanism. Considering first the Latin philosophical vocabulary of pleasure and then the vexed question of what exactly qualifies as pleasure according to the Epicurean system, the paper makes the case that Cicero believed (probably correctly) that the pleasures of friendship as conceived of by himself and many ordinary language-users would not in fact qualify as instances of Epicurean uoluptas. If, as Epicurus appears to have held, all pleasures are either bodily or mental, and all mental pleasures are derived from bodily ones, then many activities experienced as pleasurable in and of themselves—including many traditional elements of friendship—are not in fact Epicurean pleasures.

This article demonstrates the importance of the Seven Sages to the rhetorical projects of Xenophon and Plato. Though Aristotle represents Socrates as the first to turn philosophy towards ethics, Xenophon and Plato present us with a Socrates who inherited elements of earlier Greek moral thought, and particularly the thought of the Seven Sages. Xenophon’s Socrates shares important features with the Sages, such as his ‘usefulness’ to his friends. In a passage unparalleled in other Socratic literature, he reads and teaches with texts that, as this article proposes, were written by the Sages. The Xenophontic Socrates’ respect for (and affinity with) the Sages constitutes an attempt to vindicate Socrates from his reputation for strangeness. Plato, by contrast, fashions the Sages after Socrates. In defiance of traditions attesting their political involvement, Plato makes the Sages, like Socrates, apolitical. Elsewhere, he anachronistically likens their gnomic utterances to Socratic elenchus. In all Platonic passages that mention the Sages, Plato assimilates the Sages’ activity with Socrates’ methods against those of the sophists. For Plato, then, Socrates’ alignment with the Seven Sages places the weight of tradition on the side of philosophy and against sophistry.