Should citizens have equal say regarding the running of society? Following the principles of democracy, and most of political philosophy: yes (at least at a fundamental level, thus allowing for representatives and the like). Indeed, comparing the main alternative seemingly supports this intuition. Epistocracy would instead give power just to the most epistemically competent. Testing citizens’ political and economic knowledge looks likely to disproportionately disempower marginalized groups, making the position seem like a non-starter and democracy the clear winner. Nevertheless, this paper argues against giving citizens equal say, or at least, it offers the strongest possible motivation for this position. In particular, I introduce the progressive case for epistocracy, and what I term standpoint epistocracy. This account refigures the relevant notion of political competence such that it is not the most privileged classes who would likely constitute our epistocracy, but rather, the least. The resulting picture considerably improves on traditional versions of epistocracy and also democracy.

Domitian, son of the war hero and emperor Vespasian and related to a large number of Roman soldiers, should logically have found himself as a young man in the army. His repeated requests to serve, however, were all denied, reportedly from fear of his political ambitions. A more immediate reason may have been physical inadequacy. Suetonius writes of Domitian's malformed toes, and of a lingering disease – here we suggest polio – that left Domitian with thin legs. Residual weakness and chronic pain could explain Domitian's preference for a litter and his perceived unsuitability for military service. His martial interests and desire to display virtus, manly courage, however, never wavered, and found their outlet in archery, a skill requiring dexterity of hand rather than fast footwork. Hostile writers played on this skill by relating it to an alleged habit of spearing flies for pleasure. Modern scholars may find the suggestion of a chronic disability useful in considering his character.

This article is dedicated to investigating limit behaviours of invariant measures with respect to delay and system parameters of 3D Navier–Stokes–Voigt equations. Firstly, the well-posedness of such a system is obtained on arbitrary open sets that satisfy the Poincaré inequality, and then a unique minimal pullback attractor is attained by using the energy equation method and asymptotic compactness property. Furthermore, we construct a family of invariant Borel probability measures, which are supported on the pullback attractors. Specifically, when the external forcing terms are periodic in time, the periodic invariant measure can be obtained. Finally, as the delay approaches zero and system parameters tend to some numbers, the limit of the invariant measure sequences for this class of equations must be the invariant measure of the corresponding limit equations.

Average lifespans for people with physical disabilities are increasing; yet there is limited knowledge about their perceptions of what it means to age well. The criteria for Rowe and Kahn’s influential model of successful ageing effectively preclude people ageing with a long-term disability. Several authors have attempted to develop more-inclusive models of successful ageing. The aim of this study was to explore what successful ageing means for people ageing with either spinal cord injury (SCI) or post-polio syndrome (PPS). We used an emic-based methodology, and recruited from Australia 17 participants aged 40–78 years. Nine participants (one male, eight female) had acquired poliomyelitis in childhood and experienced PPS, and eight participants (seven male, one female) had acquired an SCI 15 or more years ago. We used semi-structured interviews to elicit participants’ views on the dimensions important to ageing successfully with a disability, and analysed the transcripts using inductive thematic analysis. We identified eight themes, which related to: (1) maintaining physical health, (2) retaining cognitive abilities, (3) a sense of safety and security, (4) being treated with fairness and respect, (5) positive psychological resources, (6) independence and autonomy, (7) social engagement and participation in community and (8) a sense of purpose. We used the findings to construct a multi-dimensional successful ageing model for those ageing with SCI or PPS. The model includes insights from lay perspectives that further illustrate the role broader society plays in supporting or hindering individuals to age successfully, and has implications for health-care and government services.

Books about Ancient Greeks and Romans for general readership abound, so it was with a certain weariness that I started reading Jennifer Roberts’ ‘accessible and lively introduction to the Greeks and their ways of living and thinking’ (jacket blurb). I like to read the acknowledgments section first to get a sense of the person behind the book. Among the formulaic, the catalogic, and the dutiful, slight personal details or minor idiosyncrasies can be revealing and even endearing, sparking my curiosity about the author's persona and their world view. Roberts pulled me in immediately with an anecdote about her dictation programme's hilarious interpretations of the name Thucydides (‘Facilities’, ‘The city flees’, ‘Abilities’, ‘He silly is’, and … ‘Frank’). I provide this detail not just because it is amusing, but also because it is telling. Although this book covers the territory I am very familiar with, I really enjoyed reading it and just could not put it down. Roberts is a wonderful writer and storyteller. Her sprawling narrative, dotted with quotations and anecdotes, is reminiscent of Herodotus. Even though the book is meandering at times and full of digressions, Roberts manages to both outline the historical macro-narrative about the Greeks from the Bronze Age to the end of the Hellenistic Age and, more importantly, to convey a good sense of who they were as a culture and what mattered to them, ranging from the myths about the heroic past, the city states and their various political organizations, attitudes towards women, slaves, and foreigners, competitiveness, religion, philosophy, afterlife, and (I see what she did there – but at the expense of internal logic because afterlife should have been paired with religion) reception. The tone is just right, instructing without condescension, lively without cuteness or overfamiliarity, and – what is probably the most difficult task when a professional Classicist is pitching to a wide audience – straightforward and confident, truly written with a wide audience in mind, rather than plagued by prevarication anticipating the snarky reviews by colleagues. This is a terrific and engaging book, and I hope that it will reach a wide audience well beyond the US (despite its title).

Motivated by recent papers [11] and [19] we prove a boundary Schwarz lemma (Burns-Krantz rigidity type theorem) for non-smooth boundary points of the polydisc and symmetrized bidisc. Basic tool in the proofs is the phenomenon of invariance of complex geodesics (and their left inverses) being somehow regular at the boundary point under the mapping satisfying the property as in the Burns-Krantz rigidity theorem that lets the problem reduce to one dimensional problem. Additionally, we make a discussion on bounded symmetric domains and suggest a way to prove the Burns-Krantz rigidity type theorem in these domains that however cannot be applied for all bounded symmetric domains.

What proportion of integers $n \leq N$ may be expressed as $x^2 + dy^2$ for some $d \leq \Delta $, with $x,y$ integers? Writing $\Delta = (\log N)^{\log 2} 2^{\alpha \sqrt {\log \log N}}$ for some $\alpha \in (-\infty , \infty )$, we show that the answer is $\Phi (\alpha ) + o(1)$, where $\Phi $ is the Gaussian distribution function $\Phi (\alpha ) = \frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi }} \int ^{\alpha }_{-\infty } e^{-x^2/2} dx$.

A consequence of this is a phase transition: Almost none of the integers $n \leq N$ can be represented by $x^2 + dy^2$ with $d \leq (\log N)^{\log 2 - \varepsilon }$, but almost all of them can be represented by $x^2 + dy^2$ with $d \leq (\log N)^{\log 2 + \varepsilon}\kern-1.5pt$.

I will start this review with a major development for the study of ancient Greek history: the publication of the first volume of the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (OHAGW), edited by Paul Cartledge and Paul Christesen. The range of the available evidence can no longer keep pace with the theoretical frameworks and the syntheses of individual scholars. A huge part of the evidence remains known to a few specialists, while wider interpretative frameworks rarely make the effort to incorporate the diversity and complexity of the evidence. Big data digital projects are certainly one way forward; the editors of OHAGW have chosen an alternative path: to offer a collection of syntheses on the archaic history of thirty Greek communities for which the available evidence makes this possible. The adoption of a common format for all local syntheses will make possible the focused comparison between individual cases; alongside the serious effort to systematically combine archaeology and history, which OHAGW editors call ‘archaeohistory’, this project has the potential to revolutionise Greek history.

While the reception of Greek tragedy is by now well-trodden terrain for the classical reception scholar, responses to Old Comedy are still harder to come by. Peter Swallow's study of the reception of Aristophanes in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century examines the playwright's appearance, following a period in which there had been ‘few translations, and no commentaries’ in English, and his obscure contemporary references proved irksome to Hellenists (23). As a result, while the political – or intentionally apolitical – dimensions of his case studies are a consistent topic throughout the study, we also see Swallow unpick some more subtle or ‘subterranean’ receptions among their more explicit companions. This is particularly the case in the chapter on W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911), who, although known as the ‘English Aristophanes’ (4), showed little in the way of direct acknowledgement of his Attic predecessor. However, characterizing Gilbert as a beloved, but moderate humourist, Swallow identifies several modes of Aristophanic reception across a number of his works. For example, his burlesque Thespis (1871) not only has similar plot points to those found in Birds but also shares with the Aristophanic Jacques Offenbach, whose ‘influence on the British tradition is impossible to overstate’ (98), a cheeky attitude towards the gods. Gilbert's body of work and attitude to classical sources is contextualized with reference to the work of J. R. Planché (1796–1880), in whom classical reception scholarship has already shown a significant amount of interest and who appears throughout this book, even having his own chapter. Here, Swallow helps to fill in some notable gaps in the history of Victorian burlesque and related performance forms.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have debated whether digital fieldwork can effectively substitute for on-site field research. The prevailing view is that digital fieldwork is a last resort when in-person access is limited. Reflecting on my recent field research in Vietnam and Malaysia, I advocate for integrating digital and on-site fieldwork as complementary components of the research process. This approach is particularly valuable for scholars who are unable to spend extended periods in the field. The integrative approach helps researchers (a) prepare effectively for on-site fieldwork, (b) adapt the data collection process flexibly while in the field, and (c) continue data collection and maintain working relationships with local networks after leaving the field. Through this reflection, I encourage researchers to normalize the integration of both methodologies to leverage the strengths of each approach.

The political status of Washington, D.C., is a longstanding question in American political thought. Intervening in that debate, I argue that Washington, D.C. deserves democratic equality. Democratic equality entails that, at a minimum, D.C. residents should have the power to vote for representatives in national and local legislatures (like residents of the several states), that their vote should have equal weight to others, and that D.C.’s elected legislative representatives should have power to vote on what the law is. This ideal of democratic equality for D.C. is only possible via D.C. statehood. Drawing on original archival research, the article provides a historical overview of D.C.’s democratic disenfranchisement, outlines three principal forms of democratic inequality faced by D.C. residents, and imagines what democratic equality for D.C. might look like. It concludes by sketching a broader research agenda about the democratic injustices accorded to those Americans living outside the several states.

DNA barcoding approaches have been successfully applied for estimating diet composition. However, an accurate quantification in the diets of herbivores remains to be achieved. In the current study, we present a novel methodology that reveals the relationship between the actual proportions (by mass) of each herbage species in the diets and the relative proportions of the ITS2 gene sequences obtained from faecal samples to evaluate the diet composition of sheep in a meadow steppe. Nine common and 12 rare species of plants were employed for formulating 6 diets, along with the addition of feed supplements for improving the growth performance of sheep. Faecal samples were collected for DNA analysis over the period spanning days 7–12. A significant positive correlation (Spearman’s ρ = 0.389) was obtained between the actual proportions (by mass) of the herbage in the diet provided and the relative abundance of ITS2 sequences obtained from the faecal samples. A significant regression coefficient was found between the relative abundance of all common species and their respective herbage mass proportions. The accuracy of the relation equations, evaluated by utilizing the similarity coefficient, showed 84.69% similarity between the actual diet composition and the correct percentage. Taken together, the current study has provided empirical evidence for the accuracy and applicability of ITS2 as a DNA barcode for obtaining quantitative information about the diet composition of sheep grazing in species-rich grasslands.

‘There is no well-known individual in all Greek mythology except Alcestis [original emphasis] who dies and is returned to human life without cosmic repercussions which are soon remedied’ (John Heath). The ineluctability of death is not just a feature of Greek myth in general but is also one of the most prominent themes in Euripides’ version of the story in his play Alcestis (438 bc). A further problem is that Greek tragedy is a basically realistic genre which is not hospitable to violations of the laws of nature. Euripides thus set himself a remarkable challenge in Alcestis, to present an event which violates a law of nature which is so unbreakable that it is on the whole observed throughout Greek mythology as well as being repeatedly affirmed in the play. This article will examine how he succeeds in doing so in a way which is dramatically convincing.