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.

In Essay Six of his Commentary on Plato's Republic, the Platonist Proclus offers a defence of the poetry of Homer and attempts to harmonize the Homeric epics, as inspired texts, with the philosophy of Plato as he interprets it. The tendency of late antique Platonists to turn to allegorical reading is well known, but in this instance Proclus interprets Achilles by other means. In particular, he is careful to place Achilles’ actions relative to what he sees as the correct position in the scale of virtues (at the level of the political virtues). In some further remarkable passages Proclus sees Achilles’ ritual activities as a kind of prefiguration of the theurgic practices embraced by the Platonic school of Proclus’ era.

This paper argues that Lycophron's Alexandra follows earlier texts in presenting challenges to Agamemnon's power as metaphorical re-enactments of primordial theogonic conflicts between Zeus and the forces of chaos. The Alexandra figures Agamemnon as Zeus and portrays Achilles, Clytemnestra and Cassandra as chthonic monsters opposed to the Olympian order. Employing intertexts with epic and tragedy, the poem highlights these figures’ symbolic antagonism with Agamemnon–Zeus and their connections to each other. It presents a radically resystematized vision of the cosmos that champions the chthonic, the disordered and the feminine over the Olympian, the ordered and the masculine. Cassandra uses this backdrop to reinterpret her own story, inserting herself into the cosmogonic narrative as a resister of Olympian patriarchy who triumphs over masculine domination.

An argument in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations (Tusc. 1.39–49) defends psychic immortality by reference to the physical constitution of the soul. This article argues that this ‘Physical Argument’ should be interpreted as a reception of Plato's doctrine of the soul within the philosophical paradigm of the Hellenistic era. After analysing the argument, it is shown that Cicero's proof recasts elements of Plato's Phaedo, in particular the kinship between the soul and the heavens and the soul's essentially contemplative nature, within a corporealist cosmology. The article also argues that Cicero formulates his argument to oppose the Stoic view that the soul's survival after death is only temporary. The Physical Argument emerges as a modernization of Platonic thought, putting Plato into dialogue with contemporary Hellenistic philosophy. Cicero, too, emerges as a more adept philosophical author than is often supposed.

In a passage from Apollodorus’ Against Neaera ([Dem.] 59.113), the manuscripts have unanimously transmitted the feminine plural genitive of ‘citizen’, πολιτίδων. Since Reiske's 1770 emendation, however, editions of the text have printed the considerably more common masculine form, πολιτῶν. Emphasizing the importance of female citizenship in Athens, this note proposes restoring the manuscript reading of the text.

This article addresses the view that Cicero's Pro Roscio Amerino contains ‘criticism’ of Sulla (the ‘anti-Sulla’ thesis). It argues that there is no evidence of criticism, that Cicero had no incentive to criticize Sulla, and that his attack is aimed solely against Chrysogonus. In particular, the article draws attention to the methodological implications of the ‘anti-Sulla’ thesis, arguing that it is unsound to second-guess Cicero's meaning, to project ‘sarcasm’ onto his words, or to suggest post euentum rewrites; these views, it is argued, owe more to preconceived scholarly notions of Sulla as a tyrant than to actual indications in the text. In addition, the notion that the speech was ‘courageous’ or ‘political’ is challenged, with emphasis being placed on the identity of the nobiles supporting Cicero: these Sullans had nothing to fear from Sulla but, equally, there is little reason to suppose that they were trying to attack him.1

All modern critics have read verses 128–36 of Pseudo-Scymnus’ iambic Periodos to Nicomedes (c.133–110/109 b.c.e.) as a description of the personal autopsies of the author. However, close analysis of both the literary dynamics of the poem and the syntax of the lacunose text that precedes this passage shows that this cannot be the case. This article proposes that Timaeus of Tauromenium (c.350–260 b.c.e.) is a superior candidate for the referent of these lines, and offers a coherent approach to emending the manifestly corrupt text. This reinterpretation makes better sense of the extant text of the Periodos, and allows these verses to be read as a second-century witness to Timaeus’ autoptic prowess.