Despite early imperial portenta being largely ignored in secondary literature, the reports of such incidents demand increased scholarly attention. This paper contends that decoding reports of portents from the early empire can give us fundamental insights into key moments of identity negotiation in this period. This paper will primarily focus on two such reports, signs of divine displeasure reported in Athens and in Camulodunum. This paper contends that within such reports we can glimpse complex and contested issues of identity creation and redefinition at intra-local, trans-local, and global levels.

In many of his comedies, Menander puts on stage the figure of the mercenary soldier. A survey of extant plays confirms that these characters are no lawless brutes but sympathetic figures, good Athenian citizens who act according to the laws and social norms of the polis. Previous scholarship has interpreted Menander's characterization of soldiers as a stylistic innovation from the stock type of the braggart soldier. Instead, I argue that his comedies reflect Athenian popular perception of mercenary service. A comparison with the depiction of mercenaries in Isaeus’ speeches confirms that Athenians did not look down on individuals who chose to serve abroad for money.

In 69 ce, the emperor Vitellius presented to dinner guests his ‘Shield of Minerva’, a platter filled with pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt. Just as Vitellius’ passion for food has been distorted into gluttony, so the Shield of Minerva has been misrepresented as a culinary abomination and the worst of the emperor's excesses. Modern scholarly reception of the Shield owes much to hostile ancient sources, but is also influenced by some modern culinary preferences. Critical reading of our sources reveals the dish as a mix of ingredients carefully chosen for their gustatory and visual appeal and for their political and military symbolism. Vitellius’ association of the platter with Minerva evokes her status not only as a martial deity, but also as a goddess of craft. The Shield of Minerva is revealed to be an intellectual exercise, not a symbol of gluttonous self-indulgence.

In the tale-within-tale ‘Cupid and Psyche’ narrated in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the female heroine Psyche goes through a series of wanderings and tasks as punishments for seeing her husband Cupid's real form out of curiosity. Psyche's curiosity connects this internal tale with the external narratives in Metamorphoses, the protagonist of which, Lucius, shares a similar curiosity that leads to his downfall. While scholars attribute favourable qualities to Lucius’ curiosity despite its negative consequences, they deny the same value to Psyche's curiosity. In this paper, I argue against the condemnation of Psyche's curiosity due to the stereotype of transgressive females. Instead, I propose to view her curiosity as the drive for her awakening, empowerment, and growth, which transforms her into a fully powered agent and leads to her final reunion with Cupid in immortality.

It is known that various members of Constantine's family, of his own generation and the generation before, were Christian. It is often taken for granted that Constantine encouraged or required their Christian faith. However, in fact there is only evidence for Constantine's influence on the faith of his mother Helena. This paper examines the evidence for Christianity in the imperial family before Constantine became publicly Christian, and suggests that some of these women may even have been Christian independently of Constantine's influence.

This article argues that Horace's incorporation of festivals does more than reflect his lived reality and add a Roman veneer to Greek lyric. Horace's festivals weave the poet and his life into publicly shared Roman time. His celebration of private events on public holidays mirrors the kind of penetration of public and private we see in imperial appropriation of the fasti. Just as 28 April, the start of the Floralia, gains new significance with the addition of feriae celebrating the transfer of Vesta's temple to Augustus’ house, so also 1 March comes to signify both the Matronalia as well as the divine rescue of Horace the bachelor. Horace's inclusion of private festivals in his monumentum allows him to create a parallel calendar, one which perhaps competes with the imperial fasti. This exploitation of the fasti plays a key role in Horace's ability to immortalize himself and what he cared most about.

The Cornelii were one of the oldest and most prestigious Roman gentes, extended family kinship groups, in Republican Rome. Various members and branches advertise some kind of connection to Jupiter, Jupiter Optimus Maximus in particular, notably Scipio Africanus, but he was certainly not the only Cornelius to do so. Numismatic evidence has long suggested some kind of claimed relationship between the Cornelii and Jupiter. The Cornelian connection to the religious office of flamen Dialis (high priest of Jupiter) is more proof that their claims to be associated with Jupiter were accepted by Roman society. Some later branches of the Cornelii, notably the Sullae, began to prefer Venus instead, but a connection with Jupiter was still explicable via the genealogy of the Trojan royal house.

The idea that the sea is a dangerous and alien element in which one is at the mercy of higher powers, is deeply imbedded in Mediterranean culture, and has many parallels in Greek and Roman literature. From an Epicurean point of view, however, such higher powers belong to the realm of irrational beliefs which could threaten one's ἀταραξία (‘peace of mind’). What counts in Epicureanism is the rational calculus of all factors in order to minimize the influence of τύχη (‘chance’) on one's endeavours. This article explores how the Epicureans thought about the sea and its many dangers. It tries to establish under which circumstances the sage will travel by sea and gives special attention to Diogenes of Oenoanda's letter (fr. 71 + NF 214 + fr. 72 + fr. 70) about the shipwreck of Niceratus and his friends’ failure to minimize the agency of chance.

This article examines scatology in Aristophanes Assemblywomen, and argues that the play sets out to subvert comedy's normal scatological poetics. Old Comedy is usually a genre characterized by corporeal and scatological freedom. The constipation scene in Assemblywomen 311–73 is therefore highly unusual, since, while its language is scatological almost to the point of excess, it spotlights not scatological freedom but scatological obstruction. This article argues that this inversion is expressly linked to the play's reversal of gender roles as part of its ‘women on top’ plot, which is in turn conceived as a direct challenge to Old Comedy's normative poetics. The article further suggests that recognizing the Assemblywomen's less than straightforward relationship to the norms of Old Comedy may help us to reassess how, and indeed whether, we should use Aristophanes’ plays to make conjectures about the genre as a whole.

The article examines the relationship of women and the objects surrounding them in the light of the term ‘affordance’. Coined by psychologist James J. Gibson, the term refers to the potentialities held by an object for a particular set of actions, stemming from its material properties. Through focusing on two case studies in which women use mundane objects (mainly pins and pestles) in violent situations – (a) stories (told by Herodotus and Euripides) about women attacking with pins, and (b) a group of vases representing women attacking with pestles – the article seeks to uncover a fundamental aspect of the engagement of women with the objects surrounding them, as envisioned by the men creating the literature and art. Deprived of almost any access to real weapons, these women are depicted as turning to objects in their immediate environment. Perceiving the affordances of these objects, stemming from their shape and material and the inherent potentialities for action, the women make use of them in acts of self-defence, anger, or revenge.

This article brings together two well known literary readings: the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer, and the interpretation of Ovid, Amores 2.6 as a self-conscious, creative imitation of Catullus 3. It will first offer a further reason to think that Catullus’ contemporary readers understood c.3 as a poem about impotence, and then go on to suggest that Ovid had some fun with this interpretation in his psittacus-poem.

This article focuses on the interrelationship between two events taking place simultaneously in Odysseus’ megaron: Phemius’ performance and the conversation between Telemachus and Athena. I argue that at Hom. Od. 1.298–302 Athena, in her mention of Orestes’ kleos, refers directly to Phemius’ song that Telemachus can hear from where he is sitting. This reading sheds new light on the characters’ receptions of Phemius’ song. Between the well-known contrasting responses of the nearest and the farthest audiences – the suitors’ silence and Penelope's over-reaction – stands Athena's cognitively constructive use of it, by which the goddess attempts to establish a shared understanding with Telemachus, whose kleos is one of the main concerns of her visit to Ithaca.

Stephen Halliwell has, at last, completed his three-volume verse translation of Aristophanes. The first instalment, published in 1997, covered Aristophanes’ ‘longest play, Birds, his sexiest play, Lysistrata, and two works from very near the end of his career, Assembly-Women and Wealth’. Geoffrey Arnott's review of that first volume was positive: ‘H.'s style is lively, modern, and generally effective, closer perhaps in its presentation of the complexities of Aristophanic detail and reference than most of his rivals…He is virtually always accurate without being over-literal, and far more often graphically idiomatic than flat.’ Arnott's assessment was generally favourable, although he did identify some imperfections: ‘errors in detail are few and far between (Birds 244, “marshy greens”, not “rolling hills”; 266, “like a stone curlew”, not “with a waterfall of sound”; Eccl. 1092, βολβoί not “onions”; Plut. 192, μάζα not “bread”)’, and Halliwell ‘would have benefited from having his translation of Birds vetted by an ornithologist, who would have removed the phantasmagorical blue thrush (979), and turned the moorhen (304), siskins (1079), and curlews (1140) into gallinule, chaffinches, and stone curlews’. I confess that I could not possibly have managed that menagerie myself; Arnott, of course, was an accomplished ornithologist. Halliwell's original plan was to deal with ‘the “political” plays from the 420s, Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, and Peace’ in the second instalment, and ‘the comedies on more “cultural” themes, Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Frogs’ in the third. In the event, the sequence of ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ volumes was recast in biblical form: ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last’ (Matthew 20.16). Or, perhaps, vice versa. The format for each volume is, at any rate, consistent: each volume has a substantial introduction, with a bibliography and brief chronology; and each play has its own introduction, together with fourteen or so pages of explanatory notes. As a sample of Halliwell's translation, consider (for example) this taster from Peace (996–1,014):

Blend all us Greeks,
As we once used to be,
In an essence of friendship, and mix our minds
In a milder spirit of sympathy.
Allow our market to teem with goods:
From Megara bring us heads of garlic,
Early cucumbers, apples, pomegranates,
Fancy cloaks for slaves to wear.
From Boiotian traders we'd like to see
Geese, ducks, wood-pigeons, and wrens,
As well as baskets of Kopaic eels.
Then may we all crowd round these baskets
And buying our food get into a jostle
With Morychos, Teleas, Glauketes,
And numerous other gluttons. And next
May Melanthios come to the market too late,
When the eels are all sold: let him ululate,
Then sing a solo from his Medea,
‘I'm doomed, I'm doomed, now quite bereft
Of a female embedded in beetroot’.

In Catullus 50, after an enjoyable day writing poetry with Licinius Calvus, the poet warns his friend not to ignore him lest Nemesis punish him for it, ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te (‘lest Nemesis demand punishment from you’). It will be proposed in this article that, in keeping with neoteric ideals, Catullus is playing on the phrase a te to create a bilingual pun on the Greek word ἄτη ‘delusion’, ‘mental blindness (often divinely sent)’.

As always, it is hard to do justice to the many intriguing books that came out over the past months. I will try to give an overview of at least a few of them, from Republican literature over two imperial ‘Classics’, the Aeneid and the Fasti, over Ps.-Quintilian's Declamations and Apuleius, fourth and fifth-century commentaries, all the way to a lesser-known work from the fifteenth century. Let us start, however, with an exciting volume on ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’, edited by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley. In their introduction, the two editors sketch out the relationship between law and literature, emphasizing the points of contact and the intricate relationship between the two. While the Law and Humanities movement, they argue, has been so far strongly focused on law, with literature playing an ancillary role, Ziogas and Bexley aim to redress that balance ‘by showing how literature anticipates, imitates, supplants or complements law's role in constituting rules and norms’ (3). The contributions in the volume cover a wide range of authors, from Naevius, Plautus, and Terence to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. With her discussion of the role Latin literature played in shaping Roman concepts of legality, in the absence of a codified constitution, Michèle Lowrie provides a very good starting point to the volume, one that a couple of other contributors keep referring back to. There is a chapter on the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo by Matthijs Wibier, Nora Goldschmidt traces the emergence of the Foucauldian author function in the interaction between law and literature in third-century bc Rome, and John Oksanish argues that Cicero, in De oratore (‘On the Orator’), adopts the theoretical and terminological frameworks of Roman property law to authorize the orator's power over various domains, a strategy also adopted by Vitruvius, to mention just a few of the topics covered. The concluding paper is a thought-provoking piece by Nandini Pandey, comparing Roman and American legal and literary practices around freedom, opportunity, and (in)equality.

This article seeks to offer some considerations on Telemachus’ journey to Pylos and Sparta (Hom. Od. 1–4), interpreting it in the light of his social position as heir of a basileus. Can the beginning of the Odyssey represent a sort of formation for the young prince? And how does the text support this reading? After a brief review of the features of a Homeric basileus, it will be argued that the narrative presents the growth of Telemachus as that of a young prince who needs to comply with those features, and become acquainted with the heroic world he lives in at peace.

I commence this review with a number of important works in Greek social history. As I commented in my last review for this journal, the study of labour is among the biggest holes in current research in Greek history. An important contribution towards filling this gap is the Cultural History of Work in Antiquity, edited by Ephraim Lytle. The volume gives an excellent overview of how work is represented and discussed in both literary and archaeological sources; at the same time, it situates work and workers within four important contexts: the structures of ancient economies and the level of trade and specialization determined demand in urban and rural labour; the changing form of workplaces determined the division of labour among workers; different forms of work developed highly divergent workplace cultures; finally, practices and organizations for the transmission of skills and knowledge were of critical importance. Work and workers are then placed within wider contexts: chapters explore the role of mobility in ancient labour markets, and how political communities and attitudes about different forms of work affected workers. Finally, work is profitably juxtaposed to leisure practices and ideas. Perhaps the strongest point of most chapters is their attention to regional diversity and historical change: the volume sets the groundwork for ultimately producing a dynamic narrative of the history of work in antiquity.

If you cast your mind back to 2016 you may (or may not) recall Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis: a substantial volume, comprising thirty-two chapters in 754 pages of text, together with twenty-six pages of preliminaries, seventy-seven pages of bibliography, and forty-one pages of indices. Prudent readers should be cautious when handling a blockbuster volume on this scale; the risk of dropping one and a half kilos of scholarly text on one's foot is not to be treated with careless abandon. There is, then, something to be said in favour of less demanding but more accessible starting points for the exploration of the Nonnian landscape. For most readers, Robert Shorrock's The Challenge of Epic. Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca (2001) and The Myth of Paganism. Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (2011) would provide a more readily accessible resource. Admittedly, accessible guidance is not easy to find when it has been swamped by a tsunami of impressive editorial scholarship: for example, Konstantinos Spanoudakis, Nonnus of Panopolis in Context; Camille Geisz, A Study of the Narrator in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Storytelling in Late Antique Epic; Herbert Bannert and Nicole Kröll's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II. Poetry, Religion, and Society; and Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska's Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III. Old Questions and New Perspectives. As for Nonnus’ Paraphrase of John's Gospel, I confess that I have barely had time to glance at it in its entirety. Perhaps I should have been paying more selective attention to Nonnus, and less to everything else.

Do you want to hear something worth knowing? If so, you're in luck, because Pliny the Elder has 20,000 such nuggets ready for your delectation. Even better, one of the elder statesmen of Roman history, Richard Saller, has provided a fresh study of them in his new book, Pliny's Roman Economy. Saller is famous for publications that have painted in broad brush strokes the landscape of Roman economic and social history as we now understand it. Here, instead, he offers a brief, focused study of a single author, albeit one whose Natural History is of extraordinarily ambitious scope. Published in ‘The Princeton Economic History of the Western World’ series, this is a book for both classicists and economic historians with a focused aim: to use Pliny to intervene in the long-standing debate over whether the Roman imperial economy enjoyed sustainable growth in the first two centuries ce (behind which lurks, as Saller notes, the more existential question as to whether the oppression of the Roman imperial project came with benefits). This question arises from a controversial methodological contention – that scholars’ efforts to develop sophisticated proxies to enable quantitative assessment of ancient economic growth (now largely associated with New Institutional Economics) have so far failed, and thus that we should return, at least in part, to more traditional use of literary sources: ‘at this point none [of those proxies] is reliable enough to justify neglecting our aristocratic authors’ (3). Pliny is particularly interesting here because eighteenth-century encyclopaedias have been seen (in part by the series editor, Joel Mokyr) as part of a culture of innovation that in turn fed the pronounced economic growth of that period.

Let me start with a fascinating volume that Paolo Felice Sacchi and Marco Formisano have edited on Epitomic Writing in Late Antiquity and Beyond, the first volume in the new series sera tela, devoted to ‘Studies in Late Antique Literature and its Reception’, edited by Marco Formisano. This inaugural volume gets the new series off to a very good start. Sacchi and Formisano offer a new approach to epitomic writing, seen as a typical product of late antique literary culture. The aim of the volume is to focus not so much on what is lost and cut out in the process of condensation, but on the value of the epitomic as a hermeneutic category as well as on its aesthetic value, both textual and visual. The individual contributions follow this editorial lead admirably closely, examining the interplay of repetition, fragmentation, dismemberment and re-composition, cutting and re-uniting, and defamiliarization, and showing how epitomic writing can be playful and entertaining, how it can represent a sophisticated act of interpretation, and serve as a ‘tool for investigating the very borders and paradoxes of language’ (12), even for conveying a spiritual experience.