This article argues that the encounter between Andromache and Ulysses in Seneca's Troades engages with the genre of declamation to juxtapose two different discourses surrounding torture: one focussed on torture's connection to truth, the other on its connection to tyranny. It describes how the Greek general Ulysses, convinced of the danger of letting the Trojan prince Astyanax live, threatens his mother Andromache with physical torture in order to ascertain the truth of Astyanax's whereabouts. However, Ulysses is countered by Andromache's rhetoric, through which, the article shows, she depicts herself as the archetypal heroic victim of a tyrant. It discusses how Ulysses innovates with an effective psychological torture in response. The article sets the scenario within the broader rhetorical context and demonstrates how it reflects debate among the contemporary elite about the necessity of, and the risks from, the rising use of torture by the Julio-Claudian emperors, a debate which resonates in the modern era.

This article applies an intersectional approach to Roman invective (and praise) to elucidate how those at the centre of Roman power exploited discriminatory and laudatory ideologies relating to intersections of identity to sway a Roman jury. Analysing the depiction of an unnamed woman in the Pro Scauro shows how Cicero plays upon normalized prejudices to bias the jury against ista Sarda. These internalized prejudices could also be utilized to discredit women with privileged intersectional identities, as demonstrated by Cicero's portrayal of Clodia and Sassia in the Pro Caelio and the Pro Cluentio, a process that helps reify the marginalization of certain identities.

This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted reading, so far neglected by earlier editors, is supported.

Of the many accounts of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a.d. 312 written soon after the conflict, only those of Eusebius of Caesarea have Maxentius cross the Tiber on a bridge of boats to face the forces of Constantine. This detail, it is here argued, suggests that Maxentius may be seen as a latter-day Xerxes, the Persian emperor who, in preparation for his invasion of Greece in 480 b.c., famously spanned the Hellespont with a pair of boat-bridges. The article first reviews the seminal accounts of Xerxes’ feat in Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories, and next discusses the story's long afterlife in subsequent Greek (and Latin) authors, including those of Late Antiquity. Close analysis of Eusebius’ battle narratives in his Ecclesiastical History (9.9.3–8) and in his Life of Constantine (1.38) reveals that their vocabulary echoes the distinctive language used by Aeschylus, Herodotus and later writers in reference to Xerxes’ achievement. The article concludes by exploring the implications of this identification of Maxentius with Xerxes. It exemplifies two venerable tactics in Roman political propaganda: that of portraying a native rival as a foreign enemy and that of mapping the Persian Wars onto contemporary events. As Xerxes rediuiuus, Maxentius is cast as the quintessential barbarian tyrant, an Eastern despot resident in Rome.

This article presents texts recovered by post-processing of multispectral images from the fifth- or sixth-century underwriting of the palimpsest Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Texts identified include the Anonymous II Proemium to Aratus’ Phaenomena, parts of Eratosthenes’ Catasterisms, Aratus’ Phaenomena lines 71–4 and 282–99 and previously unknown text, including some of the earliest astronomical measurements to survive in any Greek manuscript. Codex Climaci Rescriptus also contains at least three astronomical drawings. These appear to form part of an illustrated manuscript, with considerable textual value not merely on the basis of its age but also of its readings. The manuscript undertexts show significant overlap with the Φ Edition, postulated as ancestor of the various Latin Aratea.

This article argues that Panegyricus Latinus XII(9), a speech performed before Constantine in Trier in 313 c.e. following his defeat of Maxentius the previous year, acted as a crucial localized act of communication to the emperor. Through a series of allusions and the careful presentation of his narrative, the orator made a case for the continued political and cultural importance of Trier within the newly expanded Constantinian empire.

This article argues that the text of the Dirae and the Lydia is even more corrupt than current editions give reason to believe, and attempts to emend about a dozen passages.

Nothing is known of the poet Grattius except that he was a contemporary of Ovid. However, certain peculiarities in the text of his Cynegetica suggest that he wrote for public performance, that the poem was presented at ludi scaenici where dancers and singers were performing too, that the Palatine temple of Apollo was probably where the event took place, and that the most likely occasion for it was one of the ‘quinquennial’ games celebrating the defeat of Cleopatra.

This article proposes and interprets a previously undiscussed connection between Horace's Carmen 2.15 and the description of the Corycian gardener at Virgil's Georgics 4.125–48. It argues that this allusion to Virgil sharpens the moral pessimism of Horace's ode. It first considers the circumstantial, general and formal elements connecting these two poems; it then considers how the model of the Corycian gardener brings further point and nuance to the moralizing message of Carmen 2.15 and the way in which this allusion is meaningfully echoed at Carmen 3.16.

This paper suggests a new emendation to the text of the final passage of Pliny's Panegyric, where a small lacuna has long been suspected after substiti.

Emperor Julian's three-book treatise Contra Galilaeos survives solely in those Christian sources that quoted it in order to respond to its forceful attack on Christianity. The bulk of these survivals comes from Cyril of Alexandria's twenty-book Contra Iulianum. The recent publication of the first modern critical edition of Cyril's work creates the occasion for a fresh study of the remnants of Julian's text that can be recovered from it. This is especially true for Books 11–20 of Cyril's treatise that are themselves lost and survive only in quotations in later Greek and Syriac sources. The present article undertakes a reassessment of the Julianic material preserved via the Syriac transmission of Contra Iulianum, including several passages hitherto unknown or ignored in earlier studies of Julian's treatise. It provides the Syriac text and English translation of eight passages and contextualizes them in the wider argumentative aim of Contra Galilaeos.

A recently published fragment of the fourth-century speechwriter Hyperides contains a speech for the prosecution of Timandrus, accused of mistreating four orphans in his care. This article draws out from the fragment three important contributions to our understanding of Athenian conceptions of family relationships, particularly the relationships of marginalized groups: girls and enslaved people. First, the fragment constitutes a rare portrayal of a relationship between two sisters. Second, the fragment clearly articulates the idea that affective family relationships are not a biological inevitability but arise from socialization, a departure from other fourth-century thinking. Third, the speaker applies this statement to enslaved people, claiming that the separation of children from close family members is so cruel that even slave-traders avoid it in their sale of human beings. Though this claim seems to have been untrue except in a very limited sense, its place in the argumentation of the speech assumes broad recognition of the existence and value of family relationships between enslaved people, vivid evidence of the paradox that slave societies recognized the humanity of people they simultaneously insisted were subhuman.

Since a problematic passage in Virgil's Aeneid (10.366–7) shows the same influence of Sallust (Cat. 58–60) as do the dozen lines preceding and following, it should not be deleted, as has been suggested.

Arrian's account of Alexander's brief time at Ephesus (Anab. 1.17.10–12) is shot through with political and factional violence, but he nevertheless concludes that Alexander received acclaim for what he did in the city. But what did Alexander actually do at Ephesus? Arrian offers a list of events that historians have traditionally interpreted as connected to Macedonian intervention in Asia Minor before indicating that Alexander put an end to the violence. This article offers a new reading of this passage by situating these events in the context of fourth-century Ephesus to show how Alexander's actions responded to the local conditions that he encountered.