This article examines the different editions of Dido Sotiriou's first novel Οι νɛκροί πɛριμένουν, whose first edition was published in 1959 and the definitive edition, one hundred pages shorter, in 1971, when the military junta ruled Greece and strict censorship was being exercised. The first edition depicts details of the resistance movement against the Axis powers, whereas this has been cut from the definitive edition, which ends just as Greece enters the war against Italy. It will be argued that the revisions, on the one hand, address criticisms of the first edition, in an attempt to improve the novel. On the other hand, the omission of descriptions of resistance against a tyrant (something the colonels resented, for fear of comparisons being drawn to their regime) and the shifting depiction of identities of two main characters, from one that is stable (1959 edition) to one that is subtly performative (1971 edition), also inform discussions of censorship and identity during the years of the military regime.

This piece originated as an article in In Medias Res on 31 May 2019 and has been updated for the Journal of Classics Teaching. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from the editors at In Medias Res and The Journal of Classics Teaching on earlier drafts of this essay. Their suggestions helped produce a superior piece.

This paper presents the methodology and overall outcomes from the Training in Action project (TinA), funded by the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund between 2017 and 2019, which has built capacity among 72 employees of the Department of Antiquities of Libya (DoA) and the Institut National du Patrimoine de Tunisie (INP). It highlights the integrated and comprehensive nature of the training based on an innovative approach designed to increase value and impact. The integrated methodology, combining documentation, conservation and management, serves as a reproducible and sustainable model for other capacity-building projects. TinA was developed and carried out collaboratively by academics at Durham University, King's College London and University College London, and in partnership with the DoA and INP.

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

This paper provides description and context for some of the discoveries made by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales during aerial reconnaissance in the drought conditions of the summer of 2018. New discoveries include two marching camps, three auxiliary forts and a remarkable series of stone buildings outside the fort at Pen y Gaer. The photographs also clarify the plan of several known villas as well as identifying some potential villa sites and enclosure systems of probable Romano-British date in south-eastern, south-western and north-western Wales. The recognition of a new road alignment south of Carmarthen is suggestive of another coastal fort at or near Kidwelly.

Scholars have long grappled with the nature of Heracles’ νόσος and his consequent feminization in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (= Trachiniae). Despite being triggered by a poisonous garment, which acts by means of magic incantation, the evolution of Heracles’ symptoms is described as a clinical case. Yet, making sense of his feminization from a scientific perspective has proven hard. In this paper, I investigate the symptoms experienced by Heracles, which Sophocles generically refers to as νόσος. The first part focusses on Sophocles’ description of erôs as a disease in Trachiniae. I then move on to dividing Heracles’ symptoms into two categories, which I will call νόσος1 and νόσος2. The erotic passion for Iole which Heracles naturally experiences in the first part of the tragedy will be denoted by νόσος1, whereas νόσος2 will refer to the magic-induced symptoms from which he suffers in the second and final part. In the final section of the paper I will seek to provide a scientific explanation for νόσος2 and, ultimately, to describe the medical reasons behind Heracles’ feminization.

Pindar's odes for Aeginetan victors revolve around two major Aeginetan virtues: inborn excellence (phya) and generous guest-friendship (xenia). The latter virtue is, of course, one of the most pervasive themes in Pindar's poetry, in which the poet's relationship with his patrons is presented in terms of guest-friendship, with the odes themselves as the poet's gift to his guest-friends. As for the former virtue, the Aeginetans’ inborn excellence is implicit in the mythic section of almost all Aeginetan odes, which focuses on the line of Aiakos, the progenitor of two of the greatest Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax. In view of this almost exclusive emphasis, one might be forgiven for assuming that the Aiakidai were the mythical progenitors of the Aeginetans. However, this is simply not true, as Pindar himself was fully aware: in fact, the Aeginetans were a Doric tribe whose ancestry was no more remarkable than that of other Doric cities; at best, they could claim the Aiakidai as their ancestors only metaphorically.

A substantial number of passiones (some forty) of Roman martyrs was composed at Rome and its environs between the early fifth and late seventh century (c. 425 – c. 675). Although these texts have hitherto been neglected by students of the Latin language (not least because they are only available in early printed editions dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, none of which are easily accessible), they provide a valuable witness to changes in the language during that period, when, as a reflex of developments in the spoken language and of deterioration in educational standards, written Latin began to exhibit a rightward shift of verb satellites (change to VO-order in main clauses, placement of the infinitive after the modal auxiliary, placement of the dependent genitive after its noun etc.), as well as a number of associated linguistic features. These changes are illustrated by statistical analyses, the results of which are presented in accompanying tables.

In this article, the authors present a first edition of the recently found inscription TÜRKMEN-KARAHÖYÜK 1, propose an eighth-century dating and explore some of the consequences of this date for the group of inscriptions mentioning Hartapu, son of Mursili.

In 167 BCE, L. Aemilius Paullus celebrated a triumph in Rome following the defeat of King Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna in the previous year. All of the accounts of the procession enumerate the incredible volume of booty that was paraded into Rome—wagons loaded with shields, weapons, statues of gods and men, golden bowls, livestock, luxury goods. Perseus himself, the defeated king, marched in this procession, as did his two sons and a daughter. Plutarch writes that ‘the children of Perseus were led along as slaves’: τὰ τέκνα τοῦ βασιλέως ἤγετο δοῦλα (Aem. 33.6), and that they were accompanied by their tutors who wept, taught the royal children to beg, and stretched out their hands to the Romans, who are here called ‘spectators’ (θεατάς, ib.). Perseus himself comes next, dressed in the black of mourning. Plutarch goes on to give a psychological picture of Perseus—he is dumbstruck and gaping, unable to process how his life had been turned upside down (34.1). Because Perseus could not face suicide, Plutarch says, ‘he converted himself into part of his own spoil’ (34.2).

The production and publication of new research on the Cretan Early Bronze has accelerated tremendously in recent decades. This article aims to present the highlights and main trends of the last 15 years: the sites, excavations, research projects and main publications. Moreover, it explores how the new data interlink with the extremely large body of information available from more than 100 years of archaeological studies on Crete. The aim of such a review is to identify patterns of research, popular themes and the strengths and weaknesses of the data recovered, and to consider the place of Early Bronze Crete in current trends in the fields of Mediterranean Prehistory and archaeology more broadly.

New fieldwork at Ur has begun to investigate urban scale, city organization, and the environment of the city's hinterland. Analysis of new sources of declassified aerial and satellite imagery from the 1950s and 1960s, recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photos, and a systematic surface collection show that Ur may have expanded to between 120–500 hectares in size during its later periods of habitation, far larger than the sixty hectare maximum size previously estimated. Traces of buried architecture visible in the UAV photos and topographic models generated from UAV photos allow for the generation of hypotheses about the city plan of Ur during the Late Larsa/Old Babylonian and Neo Babylonian periods. Relict watercourses mapped in the vicinity of the main mound indicate how the city might have been supplied with water in some periods. Alongside this site-based work, historical aerial and satellite imagery provide an updated picture of ancient hydrology, environment, and settlement patterns around Ur.

This paper investigates how Gregory of Nazianzus imitates and responds to the Greek literary tradition in the autobiographical poem ‘On his own affairs’ (2.1.1). Through six case studies, it contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of Gregory’s literary merit. With learning, wit, subtle humour and faith, Gregory adapts and reinvents earlier poetry to express Christian themes. Imitation is at the heart of his poetic technique, but his imitations are never straight-forward. They include imitating both Homer and other poets’ imitations of Homer, learned word-play and combining references to non-Christian literature and the Septuagint. Gregory’s references add nuance to ‘On his own affairs’ and give pleasure to readers trained to judge poetry by comparing it to earlier poetry, especially the Homeric epics. They also demonstrate the breadth of his scholarship, which extends to Homeric variants, Platonic epigrams and the entirety of the New Testament and Septuagint. Above all, Gregory insists that he is a rightful participant in a living poetic tradition. He writes Greek poetry for the fourth century AD, just as Oppian did in the second century and Apollonius and Callimachus did in the Hellenistic period.

The appearance of loom weights at a number of southern Aegean sites in the Middle and early Late Bronze Age is indicative of the adoption of a new weaving technology: the use of the warp-weighted loom. The specific type of loom weight (discoid) recovered is a Cretan form, and this evidence of Cretan influence is also seen in a wider range of material culture features at these settlements during this period. Weaving is a complex skill and learning requires contact between novice and expert practitioner over an extended period of time; the introduction of a new weaving technology therefore raises the question of how the necessary technical knowledge and know-how was transferred from one individual or community to another. The archaeological indicators of this new technological practice, the loom weights themselves, are objects that very rarely travel, except with their owners; the presence of loom weights manufactured from non-local ceramic fabrics at some of the southern Aegean sites can therefore provide a window into the patterns of mobility through which the new technology is likely to have spread. Both in the Bronze Age and subsequent Archaic and Classical periods, weaving was closely associated with women. Loom weights thus constitute archaeological markers for the craftswomen who used them. This paper explores the insight they can offer into female networks of teaching, learning and craft practice in the second millennium bc.

This article investigates the physical parameters of Athenian democracy. It explores the collective-action problems that these parameters caused and settles debates about them that R. G. Osborne famously provoked. Classical Athens was ten times larger than an average Greek state. Fourth-century Athenians were ten times more numerous. These parameters significantly contributed to the success of Athenian democracy. Athens could field more combatants than almost every other Greek state. With such huge manpower reserves individual Athenians had to fight only every few years. Nevertheless, this huge population also caused collective-action problems. Attica's farmers could not grow enough to feed them. The Athenians never had adequate personnel nor recordkeeping centrally to administer so many citizens over such a large territory. Yet they found effective means at home and abroad to overcome these collective-action problems.