The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization … in general what was specifically Latin in the common civilization of the empire made little impact in the east’, the exceptions being the influence of Roman law and the popularity of gladiatorial games. That verdict endorsed the view that ‘the emperors made no attempt to romanise the Greek speaking provinces’, which saw the foundation of cities as a continuance of Hellenistic royal practice, and which regarded the establishment of the rare eastern colonies as motivated by practical considerations rather than any attempt at encouraging cultural assimilation. More recently, a fuller survey of exceptions to this general rule nevertheless concluded that ‘On the one hand, the culture and identity of the Greek east remained fundamentally rooted in the Classical past. On the other hand, the visible presence of Rome, outside those zones where the legions were stationed, was extremely slight.’

In describing a close political union Sallust observes haec inter bonos amicitia, inter malos factio est (BJ 31, 15). This remark may be taken as a text for a fashionable interpretation of amicitia in the late Roman Republic. Professor Lily Ross Taylor writes that ‘the old Roman substitute for party is amicitia’ and that ‘friendship was the chief basis of support for candidates for office, and amicitia was the good old word for party relationships’. Again, Sir Ronald Syme says that ‘amicitia was a weapon of politics, not a sentiment based on congeniality’ and he maintains that ‘Roman political factions were welded together, less by unity of principle than by mutual interest and by mutual services (officia), either between social equals as an alliance, or from superior to inferior, in a traditional and almost feudal form of clientship: on a favourable estimate the bond was called amicitia, otherwise factio’. On this view, if a Roman called a man amicus, it meant that he was a political ally, or a member of what in eighteenth-century England could have been described as the same ‘connexion’.

During the last four decades historians of ancient logic have become increasingly aware of the importance of Diodorus Cronus and his pupil Philo as pioneers of the propositional logic which came to flourish in the Stoa. Their direct influence has so far been recognised in two main areas of Hellenistic controversy – the validity-criteria for conditional propositions, and the definition of the modal terms ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’. But some broader questions have not been satisfactorily answered. What were Diodorus' own philosophical allegiances and antecedents? What is his place in the history of Greek philosophy? How far-reaching was his influence on the post-Aristotelian philosophers?

There was little chance of tackling these questions confidently until 1972, when Klaus Döring published for the first time the collected fragments of Diodorus, in his important volume Die Megariker. Meagre though they are, these fragments confirm my suspicion that Diodorus' philosophical background has not been fully explored, and also that his influence on the three emerging Hellenistic schools – the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics – was far wider than has hitherto been recognised. There has been much discussion as to which earlier philosophers played the most decisive part in shaping Hellenistic philosophy, and the respective claims of the Platonists and of Aristotle have never lacked expert advocacy. In all this, the claims of so obscure a figure as Diodorus have been underrated.

A Pyrrhonist's researches do not end in discovery; nor yet do they conclude that discovery is impossible. For they do not terminate at all: the researches continue (PH 1.1, 4), and the researcher finds himself in a condition of ἐποχή (PH 1.7). Έποχή is defined as ‘a standstill of the intellect, as a result of which we neither deny nor affirm anything’ (PH 1.10). The Sceptical investigator neither asserts nor denies, neither believes nor disbelieves.

Έποχή is characteristically produced by argument - indeed, one of the most refreshing features of the Pyrrhonist tracts of Sextus Empiricus is that they are stuffed full of argumentation. When a philosopher offers us an argument, he normally implies that, if we accept the premisses, we ought to accept the conclusion. It is thus natural to suppose that a Pyrrhonist's arguments similarly imply an intellectual ought: ‘Consider these premisses’, the Sceptic urges, ‘and you will see that you should suspend judgement’. A few Pyrrhonian passages do indeed contain such an intellectual ought; but those passages are, I think, misleading. Sextus usually says, not ‘you should suspend judgement’, but ‘you will (or: must) suspend judgement’.

Genealogy was important in early Greece. One thinks readily of aristocratic lineages proudly recited by Homeric heroes, and the family lore carefully recorded by epinician poets; but passing remarks are even more revealing. In the seventh book of the Iliad Nestor tells of an embassy he once led north to Phthia, where he hoped to enlist the aid of Peleus' mighty son in the coming campaign. Welcoming his Argive guests, Peleus asks eagerly about their ‘ancestry and descent’, and hears the answers with much pleasure:

In Peleus' part of the country southerners were not often seen. He seeks by his questions to relate the unknown to the known; he is hoping that somewhere in the pedigree a familiar name will turn up to give him a point of reference. Genealogy gives him his bearings. For those within the system a genealogy is a map. They can read its signs. To the names are attached stories, thousands of them; collectively they gave the listeners their sense of history and their place in the world. Hence Peleus' great pleasure in hearing the answers. Centuries later, the Greeks were no different; the sophist Hippias says that the crowds at Olympia like to hear nothing better than his recitations of genealogies.

False generalisations have often been made about the use of hyperbaton in Latin prose. According to Hofmann-Szantyr, for instance, ‘die klass. Prosa geht im Gebrauch des Hyperbatons…kaum über die Praxis des Aldateins hinaus'. The same scholars also imply that even when Cicero and Caesar do separate a substantive from its attribute, the separating word is seldom a verb. Again, E. Fraenkel, while showing that long disjunctions are common in Cicero, has maintained that hyperbaton ‘vielmehr ist… in der Umgangssprache zuhause’.

E. Skard has recendy pointed out the frequency with which Cornelius Nepos uses hyperbaton of the kind which comprises a substantive separated from its attribute by a verb. Since Skard accepts the above assertions of Hofmann-Szantyr, he is led to suggest that Nepos must have been following a Greek master. The favoured candidate is Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Dionysius not only has hyperbaton more often than any earlier Greek prose author; his work περὶ ἐνδόξων ἀνδρῶν may have been a source for some of Nepos' biographies.

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the history of one type of hyperbaton in Latin prose, that consisting of a verb standing between a substantive and its adjective (henceforth for convenience referred to as ‘verbal hyperbaton’). It will be demonstrated that, however easy disjunction might seem in a synthetic language, our device was artistic rather than natural to ordinary speech. The statements of Hofmann-Szantyr mentioned above will be shown to be inaccurate, and Skard's hypothesis to be unnecessary.

The aim of this paper, which is what scientists would call a ‘working paper’, is to provide some orientation and ideas for future research on the level and distribution of population in Graeco-Roman Egypt. A traditional concern of historians has been to fix the size of the total population. On the shaky basis of an incidental figure in Josephus and a doctored passage of Diodorus Siculus, this is conventionally pitched, for the most prosperous periods of Ptolemaic and Roman domination, in the range of 8 to 10 million. In section 1 of this paper I discuss the literary sources at some length, not because of their value but in the hope of ending misleading citation of them. In the more positive section 2 I use general considerations and what documentary evidence we have to argue instead for a population in the Graeco-Roman period of from around 3 million to a maximum of 5 million.

Such vague total estimates, however, are of limited value. They serve as an introduction to and as parameters for the more historically interesting questions of relative increases and decreases over time, and of the density and distribution of population in relation to other socio-economic factors such as the quantity and type of land under cultivation, the prevailing agricultural regime, the scale of urbanisation, elite exploitation through taxes and rents, and the standard of living of the rural population.

It has long been recognised that the Linear B archives from the Mycenaean palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece document ‘a massive redistributive operation, in which all personnel and all activities, all movements of both persons and goods … were administratively fixed’. Goods, land and services were transferred within the extensive territory of each palace without the equivalences of value between commodities which are a prerequisite of market exchange. The transactions recorded in the Linear B archives are thus unambiguously ‘redistributive’, an Aegean variant of a form of exchange widespread in the ancient civilisations, and as such have attracted the interest both of economic historians and of prehistorians concerned with the development of complex society. The term ‘redistribution’ embraces a range of possible forms, however, and in the case of the Mycenaean palaces poses a number of questions.

When Plato's and Aristotle's views on poetry are juxtaposed, it is usually for the purpose of contrast. Nowhere does the contrast seem to be so sharp as in the case of tragedy, by which both philosophers, agreeing in this at least, rightly meant Homer's Iliad as well as the plays of the Attic genre specifically given the name. While Plato made tragedy the target of his most fervent attacks on poetry, Aristotle devoted the major part of the Poetics to a reconsideration of the genre, in a sympathetic attempt, it is normally agreed, to defend it against Plato's strictures, and to restore to it some degree of valuable independence. The apparently fundamental opposition between the philosophers’ responses to tragedy can be regarded as expressive of divergent presuppositions about the status of poetry as a whole in relation to other components of culture: on the one side, the presupposition of Platonic moralism, by which poetry is subjected to judgement in terms of values, both cognitive and moral, which lie outside itself; and, on the other, of Aristotelian formalism, according to which autonomy can be established for poetry by turning the criteria of poetic excellence into standards internal and intrinsic to poetry's own forms. As Aristotle himself puts the point, in one of the Poetics’ more suggestive pronouncements, ‘correctness in poetry is not the same as correctness in politics or in any other art.’ Here, as often, an implicit response to Plato can be detected.

‘Minoanisation’ is by common consent a fundamental element of Bronze Age Aegean cultural dynamics. It is a modern term of sometimes deceptive convenience for a heterogeneous range of ancient material culture traits and practices that indicate the adoption in places beyond Crete, through whatever means, of ways of doing things that originated directly or indirectly within that island. Examples include artefact styles and consumption, cooking habits, writing, weight systems, weaving, wall-paintings, design and use of built space, burial practices and ritual action. At a general level, Minoanisation is manifestly important, and related in some way to the expansion on Crete of complex palatial polities during the early to mid-second millennium BC. There the consensus ends. The interpretation of every other aspect of the phenomenon, or rather phenomena, remains locked in deep-seated controversy, notably concerning the potential implications for understanding of the nature of social, economic and political relations between Crete and its neighbours.

Recent interest in Hesiod has tended to concentrate on three broad aspects of his poems: their language, structure and myth. By contrast, their value as historical documents has been persistently underrated. This is a striking omission, as by general consent we have in the Works & Days a written source, giving detailed information about life in the early archaic period, for which virtually no other documentary evidence exists. Yet by comparison with the repeated and painstaking investigation of Homer as history, or even the poetry of Solon, Hesiod has been largely ignored.

Although it would be unrealistic to pretend that historians have never shown any interest in the Works & Days (see section VI), the use they have made of the poem has generally been either perfunctory and descriptive, or selective and focussing on isolated points. Typical of the former category is the treatment of Hesiod in the textbook on geometric Greece by Coldstream (1977). In his introduction, Coldstream warns the reader that the evidence for the ninth and eighth centuries is predominantly archaeological, but he does add a qualification (18): ‘On the other hand, Hesiod's Works & Days offers an authentic picture of a farmer's life in Boeotia at the close of the eighth century’, and in a later chapter (313): ‘The hard life of a geometric farmer is vividly described by the poet Hesiod.’

At the opening of Plato's Ion Socrates expresses his admiration for the rhapsodic profession in a characteristically ironic way:

I have many times envied you rhapsodes your art. Not only are you always dressed up in a way that accords with the dignity of your profession, and you cut the most imposing figures but you are also required to spend your time on many good poets, and above all on Homer, the best and most divine poet of all; and you must have a detailed knowledge not only of his verses but also of his meaning (διάνοια). All this makes you an object of envy.

Ion agrees, saying this is the aspect of his art which has demanded the greatest effort of him, and he declares:

I think that I am the best exponent of Homer, and neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos nor Glaucon, nor anyone else in the past has ever been able to express so many fine thoughts about Homer as I can.

Until recently this was a question that was not asked. It was not asked because there was a prior question that was asked, and that received a negative answer: Did peasant proprietors survive in significant numbers in the late Republic or early Empire?

The consensus of opinion has been that they were always to be found, but that they were relatively few. As the traditional rural economy of which they had been the characteristic feature gave way under the impact of new economic forces, they became a residual phenomenon. Moreover, this development had already occurred by the late second century B.C.

It is to be noted that peasant proprietors, small farmers working the land they owned, rather than free cultivators as a whole, have usually been the object of inquiry. The roles of tenancy in the late Republic and of wage labour in all periods have rarely been positively evaluated. Again, the idea that small ownercultivators, tenant-farmers and day-labourers were overlapping categories in ancient Italy has been little developed in the scholarly literature.

In classical tradition as well as in modern classical scholarship, the emergence of written law and the earliest conception of the very idea of legislation are inseparably connected with mythical figures of almost heroic status: the great ‘arbitrators’ (diallaktai, katartisteres or aisymnetai) and ‘lawgivers’ (nomothetai) allegedly appointed in many Greek cities during the seventh and sixth centuries. According to this tradition, they were men truly wise and just, who were chosen, sometimes from outside the city, to deal with political conflict and social strife, to mediate between hostile factions within the citizen body, to restore law and order and to establish eunomia in the polis community.

In the handbooks, it has been generally assumed that written law, legislation and ‘codification’ played a major role in this story in two respects. On the one hand, oppression, injustice, the arbitrary interpretation and distortion of traditional law and time-honoured custom by aristocratic judges – Hesiod's ‘gift-devouring kings’, handing down ‘crooked judgments’ – were, it is said, a major cause of social discontent among broad strata of the societies of these early cities.

Why Eunuchs? Primarily because they were important. No-one who has waded through the church histories of the fourth and fifth centuries or the numerous later Byzantine chronicles, or those lives of the saints which touch upon court life, can have failed to be struck by die frequent imputation that, in the Eastern Empire especially, the real power lay in the hands not of the emperor nor of his aristocrats, but of his chief eunuch; or alternatively that the corps of eunuchs as a group wielded considerable if not predominant power at court. Yet the eunuchs were barbarians by birth and slaves into the bargain. The purpose of this paper is to explain why eunuchs held so much power in the imperial and aristocratic society of Eastern Rome, to put this power in the context of the socio-political developments of the later Empire, and to analyse some of the social functions of this power.

Yet here, right at the beginning, the objection might be raised that we are faced with nothing but a problem in historiography. Eunuchs might have been to Byzantine historians nothing more than women and gods were to Herodotus, convenient personal pegs to hang historical causes on.

On re-reading Dio of Prusa's Euboicus, I formed the impression that his ideas on manual labour and on the respectability of occupations open to the poor are somewhat different from those conventionally adopted by Greeks and Romans of the upper class, to which Dio belonged. Part 1 of this paper discusses these ideas in the Euboicus and in some related works of Dio. It will inter alia afford some conjectural support to von Arnim's hypothesis that the Euboicus was delivered at Rome. Probably Dio's attitude was influenced by his experience in exile, when he had known what it was to be poor and had even propounded Cynic opinions. But the Euboicus is a work of his old age (VII. 1), and his conduct after his restoration to his home in A.D. 96 was conspicuously non-Cynic. If then we find some indication that he was also indebted to some previous theorizing on appropriate occupations for the free poor, we need not think of a Cynic model; indeed we should not, for the Cynics were little given to the kind of casuistry involved. In Part I some evidence will be found that Dio was also influenced by Stoic teaching, and in Part II it will be argued that his discussion of the way in which the poor could decently earn their living goes back to Stoic works on practical morality of the kind illustrated by Panaetius' treatise On Appropriate Action; however, Dio's ideas are not those of the Middle Stoa and more probably derive from Cleanthes or Chrysippus. In this connection I take Cicero, de officiis 1. 150 f., to represent the views of Panaetius, and as I have found that this interpretation can be contested, I have tried to justify it in the Appendix.

Since the decipherment of Linear B a number of scholars have argued, on the basis of supposed Mycenaean survivals in the Homeric poems, that the Greek legendary poetic tradition ran continuously from the Bronze Age through the Dark Age down to the singers of the Ionian towns in the ninth and eighth centuries. However, the directness of the connection between the narrative poetry of the Mycenaean Age, if indeed such existed, and the subsequent development of the Epic in Greece has been called into question. Thus Shipp, for example, has argued that most of the items listed by Chadwick in his article Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect in fact left their mark for a time at least on forms of Greek other than that of the Epic, and so could well have entered this tradition in post-Mycenaean times and in some other way than through a direct poetical current from the Bronze Age. A similar conclusion has been reached by Kirk, who has expressed his views forcefully in a series of publications. Consider the following:

The two objective criteria for dating elements within the Homeric poems, namely archaeology and language, require careful handling and reveal less than is generally claimed for them. They enable certain elements to be recognized as having existed as early as the late Bronze Age, but do not necessarily prove that these all passed into the Ionian Epic tradition by the medium of late Bronze Age poetry.

Two journeys are implied by the existence of Tristia 1: one, by a poet, a from Rome to the gates of the Black Sea; the other, by a book, from the gates of the Black Sea back to Rome. Each of these journeys is explicitly, and prominently, discussed in Tristia 1; and each makes its presence felt in various ways throughout Tristia 1. Leaving for another day the outward voyage, described especially in the second, fourth, tenth and eleventh poems, I am going to deal in this essay with the return trip of Ovid's book to Rome, as anticipated at some length in the very opening poem of the collection. And (because that is still a somewhat unwieldy topic) I am going to focus on the final destination of Tristia 1 within Rome, as specified in the last twenty lines or so of this first poem: viz: the bookcase in Ovid's Roman home. In these programmatically charged lines, the personified first book of exile poetry finds itself face to face with the poetry books written by Ovid before his exile. I want in the ensuing pages to take a closer look than is usually taken at some details of this and other encounters with Ovid's past writings in the first poems from exile; and my hope is that this analysis will tell us a few things along the way about how the poet is trying here to relate his literary present to his literary past.