The ancient critics were not in doubt about the purpose of the Aeneid: it was to glorify Rome and Augustus. In the Donatus-Suetonius life we read (21) ‘Last of all he began the Aeneid, a varied and complicated theme, a sort of equivalent of both Homer’s poems; also it was concerned with characters and events which were both Latin and Greek, while in it (and this was his special interest) there would be contained the origin of the city of Rome and of Augustus’ (… in quo, quod maxime studebat, Romanae simul urbis et Augusti origo contineretur). Similarly Tiberius Claudius Donatus says (Prooem. Aen. i): ‘he had to depict Aeneas as a worthy first ancestor of Augustus, in whose honour the poem was written’ (talem enim monstrare Aenean debuit, ut dignus Caesari, in cuius honorem haec scribebantur, parens et auctor generis praeberetur). And again, Servius (in the introductory note to his commentary on the Aeneid): ‘Virgil’s intention is to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus by means of his ancestors’ (intentio Vergilii haec est, Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus); and he quotes a magno demissum nomen Iulo (i 288).

In recent years, the idea of ‘performance’ has become a more and more important concept for the analysis of literary texts, even if the notion of ‘performance’ in literary criticism still does not denote a single agreed theory, but is a collective term referring to a number of different aspects and methods. The performance approach seems obvious for some literary genres, like drama and also oratory, for which performance is an essential characteristic. In the case of orations, in antiquity already a detailed doctrine of the perfect performance was established, both in theory and practice. Building on this knowledge and trying to recover the quintessential context of a speech, people have successfully attempted to explore a Roman orator's potential and to contexrualize Roman orations by reconstructing the delivery of sample speeches.

The relationship of the ancient historian to his sources has not infrequently been compared to detective work. When the problem in hand is to discover the circumstances surrounding a murder, it is little wonder that ancient historians delight in retreading the same ground, encouraged by the absence of a final solution. There are a number of such mysteries thrown up by the world of antiquity, some more mysterious than others. Often there is the problem that at least one major suspect in some sense succeeded the victim in power, a dual problem in fact, since if guilty, the successor could cover up his tracks, if innocent, but nonetheless beneficiary of the death, he would incur suspicion anyway. I use the masculine pronouns, but female involvement is frequent — think of Livia and Agrippina. The case in hand is such as to excite curiosity: there seems to be an amount of evidence sufficient for a solution and the involvement of Alexander III raises tantalizing questions. Nor do we lack modern parallels to add spice to our investigation. The attempt to explain the assassination of President John Kennedy continues. Was there one gunman or, as now seems likely, two at least? Does that point to a conspiracy? There are further and more remarkable suggestions which, whatever their validity or otherwise, show a similarity with our case.

In the prologue of Terence's Eunuchus, written, according to the didascalia, in 161 BC, the author of the play defends himself against the charge of literary theft. He denies completely any knowledge on his part that the Greek plays he had combined to produce his own play had already been translated into Latin. In the alternative, he argues against the charge of comic theft by way of the very nature of stock characters. ‘If’, argues Terence, ‘a man isn't allowed to make use of the same characters [personae] as other writers, how, all the more, is he allowed to write of the running slave, to make his matrons good and his prostitutes wicked, his hanger-on greedy, his soldier arrogant; how is he allowed to have a child substituted, an old man deceived through his slave, to love, to hate, to be suspicious?’ This last line — amare odisse suspicari — aims to evoke the characteristic attitude of the comic adulescens, whose emotional vacillation is presented as just another stock aspect of the genre, a literary inheritance as clich6d as any of the comedy's archetypal stock characters. ‘Nothing is said nowadays which hasn't been said before’, concludes Terence. Mid second century BC, and the Latin literary lover is already afflicted by textual, as much as emotional, exhaustion.

The verb is translated as ‘wench’ by LSJ, λαικάστης as ‘wencher’ and λαικάστρια as ‘strumpet’. They are followed by Frisk with ‘huren’ and Chantraine with ‘forniquer’. Against the Grecians, Walde-Hofmann and Ernout and Meillet s.v. laecasin equate the Greek verb with fellare. An examination of the evidence shows that the Latinists must be right. The Grecians had no Heraeus to guide them.

The Nostratic Theory was first proposed by the Danish scholar, H. Pedersen, at the beginning of this century. He had observed certain similarities between Indo-European and Semitic and saw these two families of languages as belonging to our territory around mare nostrum and hence his name for this group.

Speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages were surprised that Indo-Europeanists after working on the comparative philology of IE should turn next to Semitic, but the interest in Arabic as the preserver of Greek mathematics and science and Hebrew as the language of the Old Testament inevitably suggested that Semitic had an interest for Philology as well as Theology. But there is a closer resemblance of Finno-Ugrian to Indo-European than there is between Indo-European and Semitic. Moreover, Finno-Ugrian has been in contact with and a close neighbour to the North of IE since prehistoric times. Burrow lists over 20 words of Sanskrit origin borrowed by Finno-Ugrian languages in the prehistoric period when both families of languages were in contact probably in south Russia. Strangely enough they include the Sanskrit svásar- ‘sister’ giving Finnish sisar, Mordvin sazor ‘younger sister’, Cheremis suzar id. where the survival of the sibilant is a clear indication of borrowing before the Aryan branch split into Indian and Iranian with the characteristic Iranian sound change to h as in Av. xvanhar-. It is surprising to find ‘sister’ among these loan words.

I print the passage without a full stop until the last line, to avoid interrupting the unity of its structure:

‘The stars of slight magnitude and slight brilliance between the Rudder and the Sea-monster, lying beneath the flanks of the grey Hare, are nameless in their course; they are not cast in a resemblance to the structure of any specific figure, like the numerous constellations that pass in ordered ranks along the same paths year after year, constellations that someone in a past generation observed and thought of calling all by names, after giving them definite shapes; he could not, of course, have named or identified all the stars taken individually, because they are too numerous all over the sky, many of them are alike in magnitude and in colour, and all of them have a circling movement; therefore it seemed best to him to make the stars into groups, so that different stars arranged in conjunction with each other could represent figures; and that is how the named constellations came into being, and no star-rising is a surprise nowadays; but while the stars in general are fixed in clear-cut figures when they appear, those beneath the hunted Hare are all very dim and nameless in their course.’

, gloated Roman soldiers after the battle of Magnesia. To the historian they have left the task of assessing the ex-greatness of the Seleucid empire under the shadow of the victor. That all subsequent Seleucid rulers were compelled to play to the Roman audience when acting on the Mediterranean stage needs no emphasis. However to gauge more precisely the degree of their dependence is much more difficult.

Prima facie, the literary tradition offers at least one document that clearly delineates the extent of Roman control over Seleucid affairs. The Treaty of Apamea established φιλία (= amicitia) between the Roman people and King Antiochos III , and it is widely assumed that this treaty governed relations between Rome and the Seleucids during the subsequent half-century. However, a cursory reading of the literary sources immediately reveals two or three striking facts that contradict this assumption.

I begin with a quote from W.R. Johnson on Propertius 4.11: ‘When we have finally gotten to Cornelia, whose central message is that the game of recusatio has ended, overwhelmed by her chilly sublimities and conquered by the powers of her Roman Truths and Virtues – when the performance ends and the silence begins, we may be shocked to hear Cynthia laughing loudly at the lachrymose deity and the metonymic skid that has now enfolded him.

Many modern scholars have argued that the consulship was not created at the foundation of the Republic as Roman tradition maintained, and that the government of the early Republic went through several stages of development before it reached the familiar ‘classical constitution.’ Building on this work, this article considers what the early civilian government of Rome may have looked like. It is argued that the Romans did not create an entirely new government (based on consuls) following the removal of the monarchy, but instead made use of existing sources of power and authority: rich land-owning clans dominated military activity outside the city, while priests, the curiae, and minor officials exercised responsibilities of civilian governance in Rome. The plebeian tribunate was probably the first significant office to be created in the Republic, and the unusual nature of its power (sacrosanctity) and the absence of any other chief magistracy enabled the tribunes to acquire a broad range of prerogatives. A series of reforms eventually led to the development of the familiar ‘classical constitution’, and the consulship and praetorship became the most prestigious and desired magistracies (and—outside the city—the most powerful), but the tribunes long retained the broadest prerogatives for civilian governance inside the city.

A dominant and fascinating figure at the very beginning of the Republic is Porsenna, king of Clusium. He has been a focus of attention since the Renaissance and for the following seven centuries. Fashions in interpretation have come and gone. This essay surveys those interpretations, and attempts to sum up the complexities of contemporary scholarship.

John Whittaker has again challenged the assumption that Numenius fr. 13 (des Places = fr. 22 Leemans) requires emendation at the beginning of the second sentence:

Without doubt he is correct in assuming that Numenius must have been familiar with the Judaeo-Christian manner of referring to the supreme God as ‘he who is’; one notes that other philosophers of his age, less concerned than he with Jewish religion, had adopted doctrine which would support such a formula; and it does not seem inappropriate that Numenius, who was capable of referring to this divinity as αύτοὸν (fr. 17 dP = 26 L), should use the expression ὸ ὢν as well. I have little doubt that the text does not require emendation, but I do not believe that the principal factor which has led Dodds, Thillet, and Dillon to propose emendations has been fully understood; and a more difficult problem concerning the fragment’s relation to Timaeus 41a ff. requires considerable discussion.

Roman mapping can seem a mystifying process. What could any reader garner from an itinerary or a periplus – a list of successive towns and geographical features reeled off in order? The itinerary has been compared to directions given to a stranger: in both written and graphic form, it simplifies, and gives a route with a definite aim, states what is near or comes after along the route, but does not attempt to give any extraneous information about the landscape which surrounds the single route. There is no overview, no aspirations to comprehensiveness or universality.

As the tumultuous Triumviral decades of the Republic ended and the Augustan era began, the shadow of Rome's majesty continued to envelop the shores of Judaea some 2000km to the east. King Herod had survived the struggle for dominance between Octavian (Augustus after 27 B.C.) and his rivals, Mark Antony and his ally and wife Cleopatra VII, in part by not being at Actium in 31 B.C. where the final battle in Rome's long series of civil wars was fought. Although his fealty had been to Antony, he had managed to be east of his kingdom's borders conducting a military operation against Malichus I of Nabataea, who had been accused of disloyalty by Cleopatra and Herod (Joseph. AJ 15.110).

The extant Notitia Dignitatum describes itself as a list of the highest civilian and military officials of the Roman state and their administrations, or rather as two such lists, one for the parts of the empire in the East and one for the parts in the West. Each begins with a list of officials (the so-called index), followed by separate entries for these officials (the so-called chapters). These modern labels are dangerously familiarising devices which set up anachronistic preconceptions about the nature of the text and its parts. I shall refer to the two lists as the initial list and the sectional lists. The latter all have a similar structure, being divided into three parts: (i) an illustration representing the jurisdiction of the official in a primarily visual form; (ii) a list of the functions and/or other officials within his jurisdiction; (iii) a list of his bureaucratic staff. The text first surfaces in fifteenth century copies of a probably Carolingian manuscript in the Codex Spirensis.

In modern scholarship a distinctly ‘Homeric’ presentation of the ancient Macedonian kings and their court still endures, in spite of recent notes on the use of ‘artifice’ in key ancient accounts. Although the adventures and achievements of Alexander the Great are certainly imbued with epic colour, to extend those literary tropes and topoi to the rule of earlier kings (and to wider Macedonian society) is often to misunderstand and misrepresent the ancient evidence.

This paper offers a fresh review of the presentation of the early-Macedonian monarchy in the ancient sources, and considers the depiction of the Argead dynasty in both hostile and more-sympathetic accounts. It highlights the importance of another mythological model for these ancient kings: one that was supremely heroic, but not Homeric. The Argead appropriation of Heracles, Pindar’s ‘hero god’ (ἥρως θεός: Nem. 3.22), was a key part of the self-representation of successive kings. Undoubtedly the crucial paradigm for Macedonian rulers, Heracles provided them with an identity and authority that appealed to diverse audiences, and it is time to consider the subtlety of the Argead presentation of their dynasty as Heraclid.

Euripides’ Orestes is a paradox. Few critics of drama today would place it at the summit of the playwright’s achievement, on a level with the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae. In antiquity, however, it appears to have been one of the most popular Greek tragedies, performed and praised without stint. The hypothesis prefixed to the play’s text in one mediaeval manuscript called the Orestes ‘one of those dramas with a great reputation on the stage’. The comic poet Strattis referred to it as ‘a most clever play’, Menander used one of its scenes as the model for a long messenger’s speech in his Sikyonioi, and several other comedians in Athens parody or quote phrases from the play. A house in Ephesus has an incident from the Orestes painted on one of its walls. Such evidence for the play’s popularity can be corroborated further by the state of its text in the mediaeval manuscripts and by epigraphy. The former is grossly adulterated with actors’ revisions, the latter provides evidence for a performance of the play at the Dionysia of 340 B.C.

The standard body of primary evidence would seem to make it clear that Cleisthenes was responsible for the law on ostracism at Athens. The only contrary element is Harpocration’s use of Androtion (FGrH 324) F 6, when he talks of Hipparchos’ ostracism in 488/7, . However, verbal similarities and other considerations make it likely that Androtion was the source for Athenaion Politeia (henceforth Ath.Pol.) 22 and Philochoros (FGrH 328) F 30, both of which maintain a Cleisthenic origin for the law, so that this will have been Androtion’s view also. It is easy enough to see how Harpocration, in a passage where, let us remember, he is concerned with Hipparchos, not ostracism, could have been loose or confused in his usage. Unfortunately, the rediscovery of a late Byzantine account of ostracism has led to the supposition that there is a difference between Ath.Pol. and Androtion, but that in a way both were right.

tum qui sequitur gregem circumspectus ac uigilans—id quod omnibus et omnium quadripedum custodibus praecipitur—magna dementia moderetur idemque propior quia silent et in agendis recipiendisque ouibus adclamatione ac baculo minetur nee umquam telum emittat in eas neque ab his longius recedat nec aut recubet aut considat. nam nisi procedit, stare debet, quoniam quidem custodis officium sublimem celsissimamque oculorum ueluti speculam desiderat, ut neque tardiores grauidas, dum cunctantur, neque agiles et fetas, dum procurrunt, separari a ceteris sinat, ne fur aut bestia halucinantem pastorem decipiat.

Louis XIV may have made the image of the ‘sun-king’ his own, but the equation of monarch and sun has a long pedigree that stretches back into antiquity. For the Roman emperors, an association with Sol became commonplace, and both Caligula and Nero were explicitly saluted as νέος Ἥλιος. One of the earliest rulers to have adopted sun-related iconography within the western tradition is Demetrius Poliorcetes. His self-identification with Helius is not, to be sure, the most pronounced of his divine relationships. This was a king whose elevation to divine status in the Greek world of the late fourth and early third centuries was accompanied by a great number of religious and semi-religious associations: honoured by Athens as a Saviour, Demetrius himself seems to have cultivated above all an identification with Dionysus, whose combination of ferocity with a delight in wine and revels seems to have appealed to the character of the young king. Nonetheless, it is clear that imagery of the sun and of the heavenly bodies was employed of Demetrius in the representations of his status and power. The most explicit instance belongs to an ithyphallic hymn performed in Athens in 291/90 BC, in which Poliorcetes was hailed as the sun.