ὣς φάτο, τοῦ δ’ ἤκουσε Μέδων πεπνυμένα εἰδώς·
πεπτηὼς γὰρ ἔκειτο ὑπὸ θρόνον, ἀμφὶ δὲ δέρμα
ἕστο βοὸς νεόδαρτον, ἀλύσκων κῆρα μέλαιναν.

A proper understanding of any military establishment is predicated on a sound understanding of the distinctions of its various components, including the relationship of elite units to those of lesser standing. The infantry of Achaemenid Persia has been given increased attention in recent years, especially in my three recent articles on (a) the permanent Achaemenid infantry, these being the 10,000 so-called Immortals (ἀθάνατοι) and the 1,000 Apple Bearers (μηλοφόροι), (b) the κάρδακες, whom I identified as a kind of general-purpose infantry of indeterminate ethnicity, and (c) the defensive equipment of Achaemenid infantry. In these articles, the Persian cavalry, or asabāra in Old Persian, was mentioned in passing, yet a thorough appraisal of elite Achaemenid cavalry is still required. For example, in his overview of Xerxes' army, Barkworth pays particular attention to the elite infantry, but the cavalry is mentioned only in passing, while Shabazi, in his entry on the Achaemenid army or spāda, does not mention elite cavalry at all. In a recent important study, Tuplin looked carefully at the evidence for Achaemenid cavalry and the degree of importance attached to cavalry among the Persians, but only mentioned what might be termed elite cavalry twice – he did not offer any in-depth commentary on their relationship to other cavalry units.

Following the idea first expressed by Heinrich Swoboda, there is a general perception that the meaning of ἀτιμία in Athens eventually evolved from the original ‘outlawry’, when an ἄτιμος was liable to being deprived of his property and slayed with impunity if he returned to the land from which he had been banished, into a certain limitation on civic status, which has often been rendered as a ‘disfranchisement’. Specific outcomes of this later form of ἀτιμία varied depending on the dating and circumstances of individual cases, thereby giving rise to theories of a so-called full – or ‘total’ – and partial ἀτιμία. Still, whether it was viewed as ‘full’ or ‘partial’, this ἀτιμία did not inflict the death penalty. The precise dating of the transformation of ἀτιμία has also been debated, with opinions ranging from pre-Solonian times (L'Homme-Wéry) to the late sixth (Swoboda, Hansen, Manville) or the late fifth century (Scafuro). While the exact dating is unknown, this transformation was definitely over in the fifth century, when inscriptions and literary texts mentioned punishment by ἀτιμία alongside the death penalty and the confiscation of property. Thus, according to Raphael Sealey, ἀτιμία evolved ‘from a more severe to a milder sense’, and Alick R.W. Harrison pointed to the evidence that, by the fourth century, any willing Athenian could seize an ἄτιμος who happened to be in Athenian territory and surrender him to the θεσμοθέται, instead of killing him.

At Euripides' Heraclidae 630, an anonymous character arrives onstage to report the arrival of Hyllus' army, and returns at 928 accompanying the defeated Eurystheus. He is generally identified by editors as a therapōn, following the dramatis personae of the hypothesis. Mastronarde briefly challenges this assumption, stating that ‘he is a soldier, not a servant’. There are, however, four reasons to identify the character as neither a soldier nor a therapōn, but as Hyllus' herald. Although none of these reasons is conclusive on its own, the cumulative weight of the evidence is compelling. This identification contributes to the structural coherence and thematic development of the play, and gains special significance from the play's interest in the representation of absent characters.

Among the many points of interest in N.G. Wilson's admirable new text of Aristophanes is his handling of the closing scene of Lysistrata, and in particular the question of the heroine's role in that scene. In the new OCT we find the short speech 1273–8 ascribed to Lysistrata, while the apparatus notes ‘legato tribuunt quidam’ (in other words, to one of the Athenian males already on stage). The song which follows (1279–90) is also given to Lysistrata, but the apparatus comments ‘quis canat incertum est.’ Finally Lysistrata is presumed to speak the single line 1295 inviting the Spartan ambassador to sing a fresh song.

Plato makes explicit references to Corybantic rites in six of his dialogues, spanning from the so-called early Crito to the later Laws. In all but one of these an analogy is established between aspects of the Corybantic rites and some kind of λόγος: the words of the poets in the Ion, Lysias' speech in the Phaedrus, and the arguments of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, the personified Laws and Socrates in the Euthydemus, Crito and Symposium respectively. Plato's use of Corybantic analogies is thus quite extensive. Indeed, according to Ivan M. Linforth, whose 1946 article is still the most rigorous treatment of our sources on Corybantic rites in classical Athens, Plato is our ‘principal witness concerning Corybantic rites and their function’.

The people of classical Athens did not regard suicide as a crime committed by the victim. Instead, the Athenians regarded suicide as a crime committed by the instrument that the victim used, or by the victim's hand as opposed to the victim himself. This non-human agent was culpable, just like non-human agents were blamed for accidental deaths. Although suicide victims were innocent, inanimate agents were guilty. In Sophocles' Ajax, for example, the sword that the hero turned upon himself was blamed for his death. The Athenian response to suicide was more about objects than it was about people.

In this paper, I intend to explore three examples of ekphrasis – narrative scene painting – in Demosthenes 18 and 19: the first is Demosthenes' depiction of the announcement in Athens of the capture of Elatea by Philip (18.169–73), while the second and third are descriptions of Aeschines' (allegedly) failed theatrical performances (18.262 and 19.337–8). Scholars have paid insufficient attention to these descriptive accounts: there have been a few limited discussions of 18.169 in commentaries but, otherwise, the use and purpose of these accounts as part of Demosthenes' rhetorical strategy have not been widely appreciated. This article aims to show that ekphrasis, when skilfully deployed as in Demosthenes 18 and 19, is a powerful weapon in the speaker's arsenal that merits thorough investigation. By instructing the audience as to what and how to think, imagine and remember, orators seek to engage the audience, elicit their verbal or non-verbal reaction in the law court, create a certain disposition in them towards the litigants, stir up and manipulate their emotions, and thus affect their verdict.

Diogenes Laertius' list of Aristotle's works includes a Homeric Puzzles (Ἀπορημάτων Ὁμηρικῶν) in six books (5.26, no. 119), as does the list in the biography of Aristotle attributed to Hesychius (no. 106). This latter also includes a Homeric Problems (Προβλημάτων Ὁμηρικῶν) in ten books (no. 147), which appears to be the same as an item in the biography (extant in Arabic) attributed to Ptolemy al-Gharib (no. 104). The later and more derivative Vita Marciana attributes to Aristotle a Homeric Questions (Ὁμηρικὰ ζητήματα). The only other reference to the title of such a work by Aristotle is from the anonymous Antiatticista, a second-century a.d. lexicon (s.v. βασίλισσα): ‘They say Alcaeus the comic poet and Aristotle in Homeric Puzzles said this.’ Finally, Poetics 25 – which begins περὶ δὲ προβλημάτων καὶ λύσεων – is a summary, with examples, of just such a work, and a description of how to undertake such an inquiry.

In the Politics, Aristotle maintains, contrary to his predecessors, that there is a distinctive mode of authority that husbands should exercise over their wives. He even coins a word for it: γαμιϰή, ‘the marital art’ or ‘marital rule’ (Pol. 1.3, 1253b8–10; 1.12, 1259a37–9). Marital rule is supposed to differ from the authority that fathers have over their children and from the kind of rule that citizens exercise over one another. Yet it is not clear whether there is any conceptual space between political and paternal rule for marital rule to occupy. Where fathers rule and children are ruled, citizens take turns ruling and being ruled. Husbands, however, either share their rule with their wives, or they do not. If they do not, then marital rule seems indistinct from paternal rule; if they do, then it seems indistinct from political rule. To add to the confusion, Aristotle says that husbands properly rule their wives politically, but without alternating in positions of ruling and being ruled. On its face, this idea seems flatly contradictory. Political rule just is shared, reciprocal rule, and so if the husband rules permanently and his wife is merely ruled, then his rule cannot be political. So Aristotle's own description of marital rule appears inconsistent, and in any case it is difficult to see how marital rule could have the distinctive character that he insists it does.

Herodas' Mimiamb 7 has often attracted scholarly attention on account of its thematic preoccupation with the sexuality of ordinary people, thus offering a realistic and exciting glimpse of everyday life in the eastern Mediterranean of the third century b.c.e. In addition, his obscure reference in lines 62–3 to the obsession of women and dogs with dildos has been the focus of long-standing scholarly debate: while most scholars agree that the verses employ a metaphor, possibly of obscene nature, their exact meaning is still to be clarified. In response, this article offers an additional paradigm which stresses the cultural osmosis between the Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the Hellenistic period; in my view, Herodas' peculiar choice of expression could be explained more aptly through this hitherto unnoticed perspective. Despite having frustratingly little information about the poet and his life, his familiarity with the Hellenistic East is often implied in his poetic settings: for example, Cos in Mimiamb 2 and probably locations in Asia Minor in Mimiambs 6 and 7 are considered likely to reflect the places where he lived. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Herodas spent periods of his life in areas of the eastern Aegean where cultural interaction was practically unavoidable. Moreover, his first poem exhibits a certain amount of knowledge and admiration for Ptolemaic Egypt and, although this does not necessarily mean that he lived there, he must have been very familiar with Alexandria and its erudite circles. After all, Herodas, a contemporary of Theocritus who subscribed to his preference for short, elegant poetic forms, shared the latter's interest in the lowly mime, which both of them invested with learned language. Thus, specific motifs, such as the visit of an abandoned mistress to the witches in a desperate attempt to coax back a cruel lover, are treated by both poets and ultimately derive from the literary corpus of mimes by the influential Sophron. Theocritus was also familiar with locations in Cos, an island that appears to have been culturally diverse. One of the foreign communities that increasingly made its presence felt in third-century b.c.e. Asia Minor and the nearby islands of the eastern Aegean was that of the Jews, although the history of particular communities is often difficult to recover. Nevertheless, we do know that as early as the third century b.c.e. ‘various Jewish authors writing in Greek had adopted the prevailing patterns of Greek literature in its many forms, filling them with Jewish content’. The Jews had a prominent and well-documented presence at Alexandria, where their interaction with the Greeks was promoted by the Ptolemies. There, already by the middle of the third century b.c.e., the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) had been translated into Koine Greek by royal request, which probably indicates a sizeable community able to participate dynamically in the cultural interface of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In the following pages, I shall revisit the past interpretations of the aforementioned verses in Mimiamb 7 before arguing that the key to their understanding lies in the interaction of the Greeks with near eastern cultures, particularly the Jews, who seemed to have employed a distinctive metaphor about ‘dogs’ and their perceived sexual habits.

The adjective ἱερός is a central term in Greek religion and is used in various contexts. Generally translated ‘sacred’, it indicates that an object has been conceded to the gods and is now in relation with them (relation of belonging, protection, etc.). It appears frequently in Greek inscriptions in the expression τὰ ἱερά, to designate sacred objects or, in a more abstract meaning, sacred matters.

The Battle of Drepana in 249 b.c. marks the most significant defeat of Roman naval forces at the hands of their Carthaginian opponents during the First Punic War. Attempting to take the Punic fleet in the harbour of Drepana by surprise, the consul P. Claudius Pulcher sailed with his ships from Lilybaeum (a Carthaginian stronghold under Roman siege since the previous year) about midnight, and reached Drepana at dawn. Yet, owing to swift and level-headed counter-measures taken by the Punic commander, Adherbal, the unfolding fight – partly in the harbour, mostly off the shore – turned into a fiasco for the Romans. The consul got away; he returned to Rome, where the Senate instructed him to appoint a dictator. How soon he returned, and by what route, is the question.

Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield. But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions, concedat laurea laudi and concedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (1) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also (2) examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other.

In the beginning, Rome was ruled by kings. Their expulsion heralded the foundation of the Republic, a political system strong enough to withstand both internal and external threats to the state. Among these internal threats was the possibility of an elite man trying to set himself up as a king. Modern scholarship agrees that there were three such attempts to recreate a monarchy in the early Republic: Spurius Cassius in 485, Spurius Maelius in 439 and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus in 385/4. The affectatores regni purposefully courted the plebs in order to gain supreme power. But Roman virtue was too strong; all three men were caught, tried (either publicly or privately) and executed. Their possessions were seized and consecrated to the gods; their families shunned their memory. These attempts to establish tyranny revealed both the fragility and the power of the Republic.

An examination of the idealized image of Rome before 146 b.c. constructed in the Jugurtha (Jug.) reveals that despite the narrator's own stated opinions, his depiction of it is perverse and unhistorical. The narrator's value judgements are unappealing, his archaizing affected, his history plainly wrong: these are serious interpretative problems. Is this an attempt, as in the dialogues of Cicero, to re-educate the moral intuitions of his day by means of a fictitious past? Perhaps; but narratological analysis of the relevant sections suggests another solution, an extrapolation to the narratorial persona of the technique of ironic subversion used in the speeches. The key to understanding the depiction of Rome before 146 lies in the identification of political and historical discourse and the consequent extension to the latter of the factionalization characteristic of the former. The problematic aspects of the depiction of Rome before 146 empower the reader to articulate a critique of faction; the text needs to be surmounted to be understood.

Odes 4.2 ostensibly looks forward to two public events lying at some indeterminate point in the future, Augustus' return from campaign in Gaul, and a triumph over the Sygambri. The celebrations anticipated for these occasions frame the second half of the ode; but they do not supply its dramatic setting or timing, and the latter is evidently associated with the period following Augustus' departure for Gaul in summer 16 b.c., or at any rate with a time when the Sygambri were felt still to present an armed threat. The dramatic date need not however be identical with the time of writing, and it should not be assumed that Odes 4.2 was composed in 16. Indeed, as will be seen (below, Section 6), it is most likely to be the retrospective product of a later period, around the time of Augustus' eventual return in July 13. On this view, the poem does not look forward to future events, but back to the time of Augustus' departure.

Tristia 3.3 purports to be a ‘death-bed’ letter addressed by the sick poet to his wife in Rome (3.3.1–4), in which Ovid, banished from Rome on Augustus' orders, foresees his burial in Tomi as the ultimate form of exilic displacement (3.3.29–32). In order to avoid such a permanent form of exclusion from his homeland, Ovid issues instructions for his burial in the suburbs of Rome (3.3.65–76), dictating a four-line epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb (3.3.73–6). However, despite the careful instructions he outlines for his burial and physical memorial, Ovid asserts: maiora libelli | et diuturna magis sunt monumenta mihi (‘my little books are a greater and more long-lasting monument for me’, 3.3.77–8), expressing his belief in his continued poetic afterlife. Scholars have seen this poem's concerns as above all literary, concentrating on Ovid's exploitation and development of elegiac and Augustan models which also treat the themes of death and poetic immortality. However, although Ovid's portrayal of what purports to be personal experience draws extensively upon earlier poetry, and, as we shall see, the poem gains much of its power from its engagement with the tradition that poetry alone can memorialize, previous studies have failed to analyse how Ovid consistently plays up the element that marks him out from the predecessors who had imagined their own deaths and poetic afterlives: that is, his status as an exile. Ovid's insistence on burial in his native land – from which he had been excluded in life – and his assertion of his poetic immortality in a poem which repeatedly stresses his exilic status, thus take on a markedly political angle, which had been absent or more muted in the models he exploits.

In contemporary onomastics the usage of the full name – given name and surname – lends a certain formality or seriousness to an utterance. It is often assumed that such pragmatics in the employment of names may be easily transferred to the ancient world, but we should none the less confirm our assumptions with textual evidence. This paper will present evidence from the letters between Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Cornelius Fronto which demonstrates not only that the fuller Roman name was used for formal occasions, but also that it could, as in the contemporary world, be employed in an ironic, mock-formal manner to intimate rather the opposite of formality, friendship.

There are presently two modern critical editions of Proclus' commentary on the Parmenides. One, the edition of the Oxford Classical Texts, was completed under the auspices of Carlos Steel in 2009. The other, the Budé edition, under the editorship of Concetta Luna and the late Alain-Philippe Segonds, followed soon after, with the third of the first three books of the commentary having appeared in the early 2012. This most recent two-part volume of the Budé addresses, for the final time it seems, the Budé's criticisms of the OCT edition. The first volume could be well described as a long philippic against the OCT and its editor and contributors, going well beyond the tone of measured academic discourse. Relentlessly, it imprecates the readings of the OCT, the length and tone of which criticisms will not weather time well. However, there is one disagreement between the two editions, perhaps the most textually significant one and certainly the largest, which is noted as a part of a comprehensive list by the Budé, but no discussion ensues. This is all the more curious because Steel had, in a separate article, directly raised objections to their solution to this passage. Why in this single case is the Budé suddenly so taciturn?