This article addresses a problem that is rapidly advancing to the status of a new Homeric question: the relationship between Greek epic and the narrative traditions of neighbouring Near Eastern cultures. The present situation recalls the debates that raged over the issue of oral poetry not so long ago. The formula used to be the central object of contention, now it is the ‘Near Eastern parallel’. Today there are so many parallels on record that it is hard to keep track. Yet, as with the formula, the number of known parallels seems to bear little relation to their usefulness. Now as then, problems of the most basic kind abound. What, for a start, is a Near Eastern parallel? And why should we care if someone pointed one out to us? Questions such as these are only just beginning to be asked in earnest.

As with the oral-traditional hypothesis, the Near Eastern hypothesis concerns the whole of Greek literature. But the problem has crystallised around epic, and so it is epic that concerns me here. In the first part of my paper, I sketch out briefly what I see as some of the parameters of the present impasse. In the second half, I suggest a framework for future study that enables us to see what we have come to call ‘Greek epic’ as one regional offshoot of the broader Near Eastern genre of cosmic history. In order to illustrate my claim, I look at one of the more notorious parallels between Greek and Near Eastern literatures: the problem of mortality as developed in the Iliad and the Poem of Gilgamesh. I argue that the full implications of the issue are better understood within the overall framework proposed in this article.

I would like to consider the Greek poet Machon, whose extant fragments pose a problem of genre that opens out to a historical problem. At issue is the historical – or at least historicising – reading of literary texts. Machon, who hailed from Corinth or Sicyon, wrote comic dramas and Chreiai, anecdotes and witty sayings of Athenian musicians, parasites, and courtesans. All that we have of Machon, and almost all that we know about him, comes from Athenaeus in his discursive, encyclopaedic Deipnosophistai (written in the 2nd or 3rd c. CE). Athenaeus quotes nearly 500 lines of Machon's verses – almost all of it from the Chreiai, as well as two very brief fragments from his comedies. As a writer entirely preserved in another author's work, Machon has languished in almost complete obscurity, although his fragments have been scrupulously edited and annotated by A. S. F. Gow.

They are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years – a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilisation to what it is at present, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem that the study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it.

But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language – to do so with fluency being the mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people know their own affairs best.

The last serious challenge faced by the Argonauts in Book 4 of Apollonius is Talos, a gigantic creature of bronze who keeps them from making a sorely needed landing on Crete. Exhausted from several days of uninterrupted rowing, Jason and his heroes despair of circumventing the brute. Medea, however, has a plan. With an extraordinary mental effort, she concentrates an immense rage in her face and eyes; this anger magically befuddles the giant, causing him to lose balance, scrape his ankle (the one vulnerable spot on his brazen body), and topple to his death. This is the final act of witchery performed by Medea in the Argonautica, and it is qualitatively different from her previous feats. Medea abandons the box of drugs and potions that have up to this point facilitated her magic, and casts a spell by ‘setting her mind to evil’ (θ∈μένη δὲ κακὸν νόον, 1669); the spell's effects are immediate and devastating. The reader is left with a vivid impression of Medea as a powerful sorceress, with magical capacities not necessarily expected in the shy young enchantress of Book 3. The Talos episode thus plays an important role within the epic as a whole, by gesturing to the larger story beyond it (best known to us, as to Apollonius, from Euripides' Medea) and to the yet more terrible powers Medea will reveal in time.

In 395 BC, after just under a decade of (nominal) peace between Athens and Sparta, the Corinthian War broke out, and, for the first time since the end of the Peloponnesian War, forces of Athenian cavalry were despatched to fight on behalf of their own city. The surviving historical narratives of the events at Haliartus in that year, and at Corinth and Coronea the next, are often incomplete, inconsistent, or both; the detail of what contribution – if any – was made by the cavalry to the campaign is no exception to that pattern. My aim in what follows, however, is not to attempt to reach the truth of what really happened in those engagements, but rather to look at a small group of material produced by and about members of the cavalry forces involved in the campaign, and to explore some of the ways in which the military exploits of this stereotypically rich and élite section of Athenian society are represented in the city – especially in contexts with particularly democratic associations. In doing so, I want to investigate the idea that Athenian attitudes to the cavalry undergo a significant, and hostile, shift at the end of the Peloponnesian War: the claim, that is, that the cavalry had always been a distinct group in Athens, but, in the 390s, that distinction comes in the form of infamy rather than fame. But I also hope to demonstrate the necessity of adopting a more nuanced approach to the study of the formation of these (positive or negative) attitudes: the image of the cavalry is shaped by the views of those outside that class, but also by the cavalry themselves; moreover, the cavalry are not necessarily simply reactive in their self-presentation, but can be allowed a more proactive role in the shaping of their own self-image.

When Mardonius sailed along the coast of Asia and arrived in Ionia, something happened that will seem very wondrous to those Greeks who find it impossible to accept that Otanes proposed to the seven Persians that Persia ought to have a democratic government: for Mardonius suppressed all the Ionian tyrannies and established democracies in the cities. (Herodotus 6.43.3)

One of the reasons why the past three decades have been an exciting time for historians of Epicureanism has been the revival of work on the Herculaneum papyri – very much a team effort. But another equally good reason has been provided by a remarkable solo act, Martin Ferguson Smith's pioneering work on the second-century AD Epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda – the largest of all Greek inscriptions to survive from the ancient world, a key text in the history of Epicurean philosophy, and an extraordinary snapshot of the (literally) monumental scale on which philosophical evangelism could be practised in the Roman empire.

Smith has, almost single-handed, discovered and edited well over 100 new fragments of the inscription. This enabled him in 1993 to publish his comprehensive edition of the augmented inscription. But that was not the end of his labours. Returning to the site of Oenoanda, he has unearthed a substantial body of new ‘new fragments’, and has hopes of uncovering more in future seasons. A recent batch was published in a 1998 article. In this paper I want to consider just one of them, New Fragment 128, which fills a hole in the existing fr. 33 of Smith's edition. Thanks to this discovery, Smith has been able to supply the line-ends of the missing col. IV, and likewise to join the previously lost line-beginnings of col. V to the already surviving line-ends of that column. In addition, he has been able to make very convincing improvements to his previous readings of column III.

In a paper published nearly fifty years ago, Piero Scazzoso traced what he took to be a pattern of mystery allusions in the Georgics. Reflections of telestic initiation and allied concepts of resurrection and salvation were then identified in the Orpheus and Aristaeus episodes in Book 4. Later studies in this area focused variously on the first proem, on Eleusinian references in the ‘farmer's arma’ (1.162–8), on the role of Proserpina, and on the ‘mystic’ beatitudes at the end of the second book. Most recently, Llewelyn Morgan has offered an analysis of the relevance of mystery cult to understanding Vergil's conception of the physical universe and its underlying principles, again with particular reference to the fourth book.

With the benefit of this considerable body of work, we are well placed to ask whether Roman readers' understanding of the poem could have been enriched by acquaintance with telestic concepts and procedures. Christine Perkell detected the ‘primacy of mystery’ in the tension between the poet's didactic praecepta and his aspiration to god given knowledge, a reading which might encourage more extended enquiry into the revelatory character of the Georgics.

To coin a phrase, lots of Virgil line our pockets and purses. Real money may be a matter of digits on a credit card over the internet, but cultural identity is still summed up for a vocal minority of English in terms of heavy metal. The pound, that vestige of the ￡ibra (Schillings und Denarii). Here is a post-modern coin's paean to its own nature: round each rim runs the ￡egend:

DECVS*ET*TVTAMEN

So ￡ong as the ￡ettering is ￡egible, the pound is ￡egal currency. And so it proclaims: this inscription tells us its function, ‘ornament’ + ‘defence’, as Dryden would put it. This 3-D epigraphy is worth its weight in cash – it is the pound's ‘grace plus protection’. In fact, it works towards hendiadys (my favourite rhetorical figure, for some reason: ‘twofathepriceofone’; any ‘one-in-two’ cleft), since the single band running ceaselessly and unbroken 360° around the rim is at once the glory of the unit of exchange and the safeguard it is banking on. Credit where credit is due, these are the two sides of the coin's identity. Its realm must still be the Rome from Rome of pre-Commonwealth Britannia, for brass is brass, and never lies – in Anglo-￡atin.