The purpose of this article is to review the evidence upon the chronology of the Greek attempt under the leadership of King Agis of Sparta to throw off Macedonian domination, on which two totally different views have recently been stated. The date of the war must form the basis of any consideration of the strategic soundness of Agis’ campaign and Alexander’s reaction to it and it is therefore important in any evaluation of Agis and Alexander as generals and statesmen. It is necessary to begin by setting out the evidence in full.

The garrison of Mesopotamia in the later second century is unknown. What follows, therefore, is inevitably somewhat speculative. Nevertheless, with little likelihood of any foreseeable accretions of much new epigraphic or archaeological evidence, it may not be unproductive to resume such evidence as is available and consider the probabilities by reference to other comparable regions.

This paper does not aim to establish the ‘dramatic date’ of Plato's Gorgias, nor does it seek to establish with any precision the date at which Euripides’ fragmentary Antiope was written. Nor does it aim to show that Athenian anti-intellectualism had some fixed beginning and conclusion rather than persisting, in some fashion, as long as intellectuals frequented its public places. It does, however, have aims that may easily be mistaken for these. First, while Plato was not too particular about fidelity to a dramatic date, he frequently shows a strong desire to supply an intellectual background for the views that his characters will propound and the debates that follow from them. In the case of dialogues that employ a single interlocutor that certainly tends to produce a reasonably coherent dramatic date, but what matters to Plato is not so much fidelity to history as the appropriate intellectual context.

The third letter of the Heroides has long been appreciated for the consummate skill with which Ovid takes the Briseis of Homer's Iliad, where she is virtually a nonentity, and presents her in a new guise. By his masterly transformation of the enslaved girl into a lonely and desperate elegiac puella who is lost and bewildered in an epic world, he skilfully exploits the literary gulf between the two genres to produce a subtle masterpiece which can arouse only compassion for his heroine. There is, however, much more to appreciate in this letter than its poetic artistry.

41 verse texts are extant of the original 42 poems (also described as hymns, psalms or songs) which comprise the so-called Odes of Solomon—a corpus not to be confused with the 18 so-called Psalms of Solomon. As can be seen from the Appendix, the history of the discovery and publication of these poems began with C.G. Woide at the end of the eighteenth century.1 Up to that time the only evidence for the Odes of Solomon was twofold. On the one hand, there was an enigmatic Latin quotation of three lines (i.e. 19:6-7a) in the Divinae Institutiones of Lactantius (c.240-c.320). On the other hand, the mere title was listed together with the better known in the so-called of Ps.-Athanasios and the ascribed to Nikephoros Patriarch of Konstantinopolis (c.750-828). In these two canon-lists Psalms and Odes appear in this order among the Old Testament's ‘antilegomena’ which is a category between ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal’.

The notion that the Letters of Themistokles constitute some sort of ‘historical novelette in epistolary form’ has always run up against two major difficulties. One is that the letters are not arranged in chronological sequence; the other, that there are serious inconsistencies between individual letters in both factual material and the portrayal of the hero’s character. The existence of these difficulties has led some scholars to deny any real artistic unity to the collection; and the prevailing attitude seems to be that its only merit consists in the titbits of historical information that some of the letters contain – though even the reliability of these has been disputed.

The censors of 154/3 commissioned a stone theatre which was almost completed when it was demolished on the exhortations of P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica. The sources suggest that this destruction was as late as 151 or 150. Though an array of scholars has seised on Nasica’s claims that a theatre would soften Rome’s moral strength, there has been no satisfactory explanation of this peculiarly long delay between commencement of construction and final demolition. Something must have happened between 153 and 151 which would explain the late objection. This article proposes that Nasica’s awakening was spurred by the death of the princeps senatus and pontifex maximus, M. Aemilius Lepidus. The vacuum left by his death led Nasica to ‘audition’ for the role as Rome’s new leading voice. To demonstrate his worthiness, however, he needed a cause, and the widespread refusals to serve in the Spanish campaign of 151 offered just such an opportunity. Nasica seised upon the most shocking political crisis of the times – the refusal of young men to enlist – in order to parade his guardianship of Rome’s moral worth, and the destruction of a costly and undoubtedly popular theatre constituted the bravura performance he needed.

After Marcus Atilius Regulus made inroads into North Africa as consul in 256 B.C. during the first Punic War, the Carthaginians were apparently ready to negotiate a settlement, but Regulus offered terms so harsh that they were refused out of hand. At this point Xanthippus, the Spartan mercenary-general, arrived on the Carthaginian side and soon made an impact as a shrewd and uplifting leader, not least because, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, he captured Regulus, by then proconsul, by ambush in 255. Regulus' subsequent fate, embellished in the later literary-historical tradition, was enshrined in die familiar version here represented by Valerius Maximus:

The Choephori and the Bacchae remain masterpieces of Greek literature although an unkind fate has removed a leaf (or more) from their texts. For the first part of this article I would like to assume that an unkinder fate has deprived us of the end of that greater masterpiece, the Oedipus Rex. The play (as we have it) now concludes with the heart-breaking farewell of Oedipus to his infant daughters. We could wish no better end, but it is not characteristic of Greek tragedy in general or of Sophoclean tragedy in particular to end on a dramatic high-point; loose ends must be tied up and the tension must be eased. We may reasonably assume that some such development occurred at the end of the Oedipus Rex. Fortunately, there is a good deal of evidence to tell us (in general) what happened. The versions of Euripides’ Phoenissae and Seneca’s Oedipus may be useful, particularly the latter (which is much closer to the Sophoclean original); there is, of course, Sophocles’ own Oedipus Coloneus; most important of all, there is the evidence of the Oedipus Rex itself, to which I shall now turn.

In 133 BC, when Scipio Aemilianus heard of the violent death of his cousin and brother-in-law, Ti. Gracchus, he uttered a line from Homer: ‘Thus perish all who attempt such.’ In effect, this endorsed the lynching of Gracchus. At a deeper level, it cast Gracchus (in the Homeric context of that quotation) as the tyrant Aegisthus. It may also have suggested an image of moral turpitude, Aegisthus having debauched his cousin Agamemnon’s wife. By analogy (if intended), that would have suggested an adulterous union between Gracchus and his sister Sempronia. It is further suggested that gossip arising from this extraordinary insinuation might have prompted a special reading of the claims circa 102 BC of L. Equitius to be the bastard son of Gracchus.

A version of this commentary and bibliography was originally presented at the ‘Greek Drama II’ conference in Christchurch in February 1992. A subtitle could have been ‘What's been done since Sydney’ (site of ‘Greek Drama I’ in 1982), since my topic was to present a survey of the work of the past decade in Old Comedy. In a short period I cannot deal with all plays and topics, but will limit myself to six areas of discussion: (a) general studies, (b) Aristophanes’ early career, (c) Aristophanes and politics, (d) ritual as sub-text, (e) women in comedy, and (f) Eupolis and Kratinos.

Most classical journals report on research on literary, historical and linguistic questions, and rarely allocate space to discussions of pedagogy at tertiary level. This article, however, falls into the latter category. It takes the form of a report on the teaching of Latin and Greek (both classical and post-classical) in universities in Australia and New Zealand; and it makes a number of suggestions regarding the future of the classical languages in this region.

Any general examination by an outsider of the situation of Classics in Australian and New Zealand universities would readily conclude that most departments are managing well, or at least holding their own, compared to other disciplines. Student enrolments are high overall, since most departments, like those in Britain and North America, have expanded their teaching range to embrace ancient history, classical literature in translation and, in some cases, archaeology. This has been the situation for the best part of the last two decades. Often these subjects were introduced in order to ‘subsidise’ and protect the continuance of Greek and Latin with their smaller numbers; but they have been extremely popular with students in every university in Australasia in which they are taught. And so these teaching areas have come to have a life and a rightful presence of their own.

Martial 9.79:

Oderat ante ducum famulos turbamque priorem

et Palatinum Roma supercilium:

at nunc tantus amor cunctis, Auguste, tuorum est

ut sit cuique suae cura secunda domus.

tam placidae mentes, tanta est reuerentia nostri,

tam pacata quies, tantus in ore pudor.

nemo suos — haec est aulae natura potentis —,

sed domini mores Caesarianus habet.

Martial’s ninth book of epigrams contains twenty-nine poems out of a total of one hundred and three which refer to Domitian in some way, providing the largest group of epigrams concerned with an individual in a single book of Martial. The suppression by Martial of his tenth book of epigrams and its reappearance with the Domitianic references expunged means that Book 9 is the last book in which poems to Domitian form an integral part; it can be expected therefore that Martial’s attitude toward Domitian will find its most confident expression in this book.

One of the unsolved mysteries of Samaritan history is the problem of the Dosithean sect and its relationships with other Samaritan groups and with Christian and Gnostic sects. Of particular interest, in view of controversy over the history of Samaritan eschatology, is the question of whether the Dositheans believed in the resurrection of the dead and in a Messiah in the person of Joshua. It is more than fifty years since these questions were last examined in any detail and in the light of recent evidence accruing about the Samaritans the time would now seem to be opportune for a fresh evaluation of the evidence relating to Dositheanism.

Horse doctors of the Roman period were often, but not always, of low social status. On the one hand we hear of ueterinarii I mulomedici who were slaves or freedmen, but on the other hand the Greek-speaking Theomnestus was the friend of an emperor (probably Licinius), and accompanied him on an expedition: note particularly Hipp. Ber. 34.12, CHG I, p. 183.22 f. . Apsyrtus too, whatever his date, was a of some status.

It is widely accepted that in the later books Livy to some extent discarded the highly archaizing and poeticizing style of the first decade, in which the events belonged to the remote past. But by no means all of the relevant evidence has been presented, and discussions of the question have also usually suffered from inadequacies of method. Now that Packard's Concordance has appeared, it is possible to give a more comprehensive treatment of the lexical evidence, though the difficulty of finding syntactic modifications in such a long work remains the same.

This article argues that the emperor Macrinus initiated an overhaul of the ranks of provincial governors after he came to the throne in 217. He removed several of Caracalla's legates in the Danubian region and in the provinces along the eastern frontier, replacing them with his own appointees. This interventionist approach to provincial administration was a significant departure from the usual practice of emperors retaining their predecessor's governors. It is argued that Macrinus' break with tradition was motivated by the fact that he was the first emperor to be elevated from the ordo equester, and wanted to consolidate his position by ensuring that the provinces were entrusted to trustworthy legates.

The study of Latin and Ancient Greek at tertiary level is crucial for the survival of Classics within the university sector. And it is not too much to say that the serious study of Greco-Roman antiquity in most, if not all, areas is simply impossible without the ancient languages. They are essential not just for the broad cross-section of philological and literary studies in poetry and prose (ranging at least from Homer to the works of the Church Fathers to Byzantine Chroniclers) but also for ancient history and historiography, philosophy, art history and aesthetics, epigraphy, and many branches of archaeology. In many Classics departments in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, enrolments in non-language subjects such as myth, ancient theatre or epic, or history remain healthy and cater to a broad public interest in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This is, of course, to be lauded. But the status of the ancient languages, at least in terms of enrolments, may often seem precarious compared to the more overtly popular courses taught in translation. Given the centrality of the ancient languages to our discipline as a whole, it is worth keeping an eye on how they are faring to ensure their prosperity and longevity.

Callimachus’ distaste for Cyclic poetry is well known; he wrote, bluntly, (Ep. 28). That he was an opponent of Aristotle on the subject of epic has been clearly demonstrated by C.O. Brink. There are, however, two points in Callimachus’ opposition to Cyclic epic and Aristotle which I think call for further discussion. The first concerns Aristotle. For Aristotle epic and tragedy are or (Poet. 5, 6 et passim). Callimachus, on the other hand, says his critics berate him because he does not sing of ‘kings and heroes’ (Aetia fr.1. 3 and 5). The second is Callimachus’ criticism of bombast in epic. It is true that Aristotle in accordance with his theory of stylistic appropriateness will have demanded a serious style for the serious subjects of epic, but Callimachus’ explicit scorn is reserved for the bombast of the Cyclic poets.