This article responds to Laura A. Marshall’s argument that Socrates does not compare himself to a gadfly in Plato’s Apology but rather to a spur on the side of a horse directed by Apollo. In revisiting the evidence for the canonical reading, this article argues that ‘gadfly’ or some other irritant insect is the only plausible translation for μύωψ in the Apology. Scrutinizing the source of the contemporary notion of the Western philosopher is pressingly important—not only for its own sake, but because the ‘spur reading’ has made its way into public circles and even the Cambridge Greek Lexicon.

This article deals with a well-known crux in Juvenal (6.195). Previous conjectures are discussed before a new emendation is proposed.

This article discusses the horse imagery related to the winds in the storm episode at the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid. A close analysis of Aen. 1.50–86 brings to light the pervasiveness of this imagery, only partly noticed by scholars, who have regarded it as metaphorical (§1). It is here suggested that the winds released by Aeolus could instead be considered as real horses. A reassessment of the ancient literary—and, briefly, iconographic—evidence of the depiction of the winds as horses, horsemen or charioteers is proposed; Virgil fits into a long-standing tradition of Homeric ancestry, which represents the winds as horses (§2). This allows a better understanding of the narrative dynamic which in Aeneid Book 1 opposes Aeolus to Neptune, the god of the sea as well as of the horses; moreover, the equestrian (and circus) imagery evoked by Virgil contributes to the political and cosmic significance of the tempest episode (§3).

The article argues for an emendation in Plin. HN 9.126. Modern editors are accustomed to print the text cum testa uiuas, adopting J. Hardouin’s conjecture for cum terra uitis, the reading transmitted in most manuscripts. Nevertheless, the overlooked manuscript reading contritis conchis allows us to deduce a palaeographically neater solution contritis if conchis is considered a gloss which entered the text.

The poetic investiture scene in Quintus’ Posthomerica (12.308–13) is the only passage in which this epic’s narrator speaks about himself in the first person. These lines have often been commented upon from an intertextual and metaliterary perspective, but the specificity of the geographical markers mentioned by Quintus has not been adequately explained. This article proposes that Quintus places his Homer specifically at the site of the old city of Smyrna, which is not the same as that of the Roman (and modern) city. Other elements of the investiture scene allude precisely to the legend which, in the Imperial age, ascribed to Alexander the Great the relocation of the city from its old site, nearer the Hermus river, to the new, near the Meles. Local legends and traditions help to explain several details of the investiture, from its placement in the precinct of a temple to the presentation of Quintus’ young Homer as a shepherd. The article also explores the ideological implications of the poem’s return to the distant, pre-Ionian past of Smyrna and its appeal to the city’s ancient history and legends, from the suggestion that Quintus may be de-Romanizing his poem to the relevance of Homer in a rapidly Christianizing third-century Smyrna.

This article re-examines the A-scholia to Homer, Iliad 11.101 (= SH 701 = Posidippus 144 AB) and their reinterpretation of the term sôros, which designates the location where Aristarchus discovered the ‘Bêrisos epigram’ of Posidippus. The article challenges the prevailing and widely embraced hypothesis positing that sôros serves as the title of a lost collection of Hellenistic epigrams.

This article argues that Aristotle’s Protrepticus was a dialogue. The argument is based on the internal evidence of the text itself, which is compared to the remains of Aristotle’s dialogues. Such a comparison offers the strongest possible argument in favour of Protrepticus being a dialogue, given the present state of our evidence.

By offering a fresh reading of several partially overlooked passages from Aristotle’s Metaphysics Μ and Ν, this article argues that the identification of Forms and ideal numbers in Plato is not presented as Aristotle’s own reconstruction. Instead, Aristotle sets forth what he takes to be Plato’s views. This reading enhances not only our understanding of the Academic debates with which Aristotle engaged but also his status as a historian of philosophy.

The short treatise De mundo, transmitted with the Aristotelian corpus, has attracted scholarly attention in recent years for its linguistic, rhetorical, historical and philosophical features. This article focusses on the dialectic dimension of De mundo, which has hitherto been underexplored and restricted to its anti-Stoic aspects. The article argues that De mundo engages also with other rival visions of philosophy and conceptions of the cosmos, in some cases explicitly, in others implicitly, but always tactfully, without naming names, and in strict avoidance of open polemic. After reviewing five instances of explicit criticism in De mundo, in Sections 1 and 2 of the article, and five instances of implicit criticism in Section 3, Section 4 points to a general pattern that can be discerned in the author’s lines of criticism. Additionally, Section 4 considers why the author proceeds in the way he does and what this tells us about the author and possible dates of composition of his work.

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.

This article examines the two families of denominative verbs from the semantic field of atimia: atimaô/atimoô and atimazô. By analysing their use in the Attic orators and other major prose texts from the Classical period (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle), the article shows that these verbs were consistently employed in differentiated, well-defined ways: atimaô/atimoô for ‘effecting an actual loss of status’, and most normally for ‘imposing the legal penalty of atimia’ (especially in the orators), and atimazô for extra-legal examples of ‘dishonour’. This distinction is in part reflected also in the ratios of verbal aspect for the two families, with atimaô/atimoô being used mostly in aorist and perfective forms and atimazô mostly in imperfective forms.

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.

A motif in the Cypria is sometimes explained as borrowed in the seventh century from the Akkadian epic Atra-ḫasīs, sometimes as inherited from a third-millennium Indo-European poetic tradition surviving also in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. These explanations seem incompatible, but they are not. Narrative traditions often cross linguistic boundaries through multilinguals, and linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that some speakers of Proto-Indo-European were also speakers of Semitic languages. Indo-European and Ancient Near Eastern comparative approaches are therefore halves of a single enterprise: the Cypria, Mahābhārata and Atra-ḫasīs belong to a Eurasian-Steppe tradition, and must be read together.

This article is a study of Valerius Maximus’ understanding and rewriting of late republican history through his portrayal of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in chapter 6.2 of the Facta et dicta memorabilia. In chapter 6.2, ‘on the freely spoken and freely done’, Pompeius is mentioned in six consecutive exempla as the addressee of public criticism in episodes set between the 60s and 51 b.c. By offering a close reading of this chapter and by investigating its organizational criteria and themes, particularly Pompeius’ power, his silence and libertas, this article argues that Valerius aims to display how crucial the years of the ‘first triumvirate’ were in the development towards an inevitable autocracy. It suggests, moreover, that Valerius envisions the Facta et dicta as a work closer to historiography than usually appreciated.

Scholars have regularly debated the question of how the Galli, priests of Magna Mater/Cybele, fit into the Roman social milieu. Several have argued (citing Domitian’s legislation) that membership of the Galli was restricted to foreign citizens, whilst others have argued that the chief priests—the Archigalli—were Roman citizens, while the ‘lower’ Galli were non-citizens, thus separating the Galli and the Archigalli within the Cybele cult. These views remain prevalent in modern discussions on the cult, and have not undergone significant scrutiny or analysis. By assessing these views as well as the existing material and literary evidence for the Galli, this article argues that the Archigalli and the Galli were indistinct in terms of behaviour and affiliation. Moreover, this article uses archaeological and literary evidence to suggest that the Galli most likely included Roman citizens among their members, contrasting with the prevailing view of them as foreign residents in Rome.

This article deals with a complicated philological problem in section 133 of Epicurus’ Epistle to Menoeceus. There is a lacuna in the text; various supplements have been proposed, but the resulting syntax remains anomalous. This article argues that the interpretation of the syntax which underlies all the most influential supplements proposed to date, from Usener to Sedley and beyond, should be rejected. A new suggestion is put forward, based on a different syntactical interpretation and on a careful new analysis of the readings preserved in MS P.

A conjecture in Birds 786–8.

This article examines a report in Dio of a vow made by Augustus in response to a prophecy. It establishes the setting as a festival for the Magna Mater rather than ludi magni, as has recently been suggested. Based on calendar entries and a passage from Ovid, the article then associates the content of the vow with altars of Ceres and Ops established in 7 c.e.