According to the Hellenistic grammarian Hellanicus, Homeric θήλϵας was accented θηλέας, a proposal rejected by Aristarchus, who considered it to be Doric, taking it to be the masculine/common form of the third declension. Hellanicus’ reading might have been considered Doric by Aristarchus because of its curious paroxytone accentuation, since a main feature of Doric is the placement of the accent a mora closer to word-end. The notion that Hellanicus’ θηλέας was Doric may however be only an interpretation by Aristarchus, as per van Thiel’s framework for interpreting the readings of grammarians active before Aristarchus. If so, we would be dealing with a commentary reading: Hellanicus was remarking on how the adjective ought to be accented, but was not. This way, he shows he knew the vulgate reading with retracted accentuation as later grammarians did.

This article revisits a long-abandoned position that, contrary to the developmentalist view, Aristotle’s lost dialogue, the Eudemus, argued for the immortality of intellect, not for the Platonic view of the immortality of the soul as a whole. It does so by providing evidence for the presence of Aristotle’s lost writings in the Church Fathers, a period often overlooked in the study of the reception of Aristotle’s lost writings. After discussing the debates in the secondary literature on Aristotle’s view of immortality in the Eudemus, it shows that Tertullian’s De anima 12 should be considered a fragment of the central argument for the immortality of intellect in Aristotle’s Eudemus. The conclusion is based not only on the fact that Tertullian’s summary of Aristotle’s view cannot be derived from any of Aristotle’s extant writings, but also on similar reports regarding the separability of intellect from soul found in Origen and Clement of Alexandria. The article thereby demonstrates the influence of Aristotle’s lost writings in the Patristic period and their importance as reporters of Aristotle’s lost works.

This article offers principles to be followed when editing οὔκουν and οὐκοῦν. The distinction between these words is supported by the ancient grammarians, but manuscript readings oscillate to such a degree that modern editors often do not trust them. The most common principles thus far available are those established by Kühner–Gerth and Denniston. Some are so subjective, however, that editors do not always agree on the accentuation of a non-negligible number of instances. This article takes into account the pragmatic contexts in which the particle is used in Attic drama to effect a distinction by applying a conversation analytic methodology to their interpretation. All instances appearing in the extant plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes have been analysed.

In Iambus 6 Callimachus describes Phidias’ statue of Zeus to a friend of his about to leave for Olympia. However, as can be inferred from the Diegesis and the fragmentary text of the iambus, the poet does not elaborate on the statue’s iconography, nor does he mention the impression which it made on the viewers within the temple setting. Instead, he focusses solely on its measurements and technical details. This article sheds new light on this much-debated poem by exploring its playful and humorous tones within the broader context of Callimachus’ poetical and aesthetic principles. It argues that Callimachus deliberately avoided providing a literary ekphrasis of Phidias’ Zeus akin to other known examples of Hellenistic ekphrasis and to other ekphraseis of divine statues which Callimachus offered in the Iambi and the Aetia. By doing this, he avoided crafting a too loudly resounding poem, thereby adhering to his own poetical and aesthetic credo.

Since the 1970s progressively more translators, in several European languages, have abandoned the traditional translation of ὁ βουλϵύσας at Physics 194b30 as ‘the adviser’ for a different one: ‘the deliberator’. The latter translation has never been defended, and is, as this article will argue, indefensible—the active of βουλϵύω is never used in classical prose in this sense. Furthermore, this translation obscures what may be a philosophically significant feature of the passage: the fact that all of the other examples of efficient causes Aristotle gives here, in what is his canonical account of the four causes, are cases where what causes something to move is distinct from the thing it causes to move (the father causes the child’s gestation, the builder causes the lumber’s turning into a house). An Aristotelian deliberator, on the other hand, while arguably an efficient cause, is the cause of their very own action. At least one ancient commentator, Simplicius, thought that Aristotle had good reasons to restrict his examples to causes distinct from what they set in motion. Both the traditional translation and the variant of it for which I shall argue, ‘the one who made the proposal’, fit this model.