This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

Thucydides' account of faction in the Peloponnesian War (3.82–83) is perhaps more often admired than appreciated; and indeed its structure and wording have not always satisfied commentators. Two kinds of question raised by the passage may be identified:

(1) What does it say and what is it about? We need to examine it as a coherent train of thought, and at the same time – for it is plainly not a mere digression or show-piece – as an essential part of Thucydides' whole work. Both the historian's practice and his programme suggest that the reader should do this. For in putting his thoughts in so highly generalized a form, he invites us to apply them widely. Even when they occur in speeches, where a fallible or even dishonest orator is trying to persuade an audience, general statements may be thus widely applicable; how much more when they come directly from the historian. We should also be ready to consider whether what are presented as remarks on stasis may not apply beyond situations of stasis. For war and faction as twin causes of violent death are closely connected in the proem to Thucydides' whole work (1.23.2); and 3.82.1–2, which echo the proem (1.22.4), bring out that the growth of stasis was a natural consequence of war and that in stasis, as in war, human nature is revealed.

Diogenes Laertius lists in his catalogue of Epicurus' works (10.28) a treatise On Kingship, which is unfortunately no longer extant. Owing to the Epicureans' antipathy to politics, such a work might be viewed with surprise and presumed to be virulently negative in outlook. Indeed, Plutarch reports that the Epicureans wrote on kingship only to ward people away from living in the company of kings (Adv. Col. 1127a) and that they maintained that to be king oneself was a terrible mistake (Adv. Col. 1125c-d). However, the scattered evidence that remains suggests the Epicurean views on kingship were both nuanced and sophisticated. In this paper I seek to reconstruct a viable account of the Epicurean position on kingship.

They are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years – a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilisation to what it is at present, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem that the study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it.

But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language – to do so with fluency being the mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people know their own affairs best.

A few lines of a famous fifth-century treaty inscription between Argos, Tylissos and Knossos are the focus of this study which attempts to reconstruct the border between Tylissos and Knossos in the Classical period. Borders are important intangible features inscribed on the landscape, separating or uniting people. The two Classical states had a long history as neighbouring states, and the comparison between the Classical border and the projected borders of other periods is of particular interest.

quodsi in animum quis inducat, tormentis quibus et quibus machinis simulacrum omne formetur, erubescet timere se materiem ab artifice, ut deum faceret, inlusam. deus enim ligneus, rogi fortasse vel infelicis stipitis portio, suspenditur, caeditur, dolatur, runcinatur; et deus aereus vel argenteus de immundo vasculo, ut saepius factum Aegyptio regi, conflatur, tunditur malleis et incudibus figuratur; et lapideus deus caeditur, scalpitur et ab impurato homine levigatur, nec sentit suae nativitatis iniuriam, ita ut nec postea de vestra veneratione culturam. nisi forte nondum deus saxum est vel lignum vel argentum. quando igitur hic nascitur? ecce funditur, fabricatur, sculpitur: nondum deus est; ecce plumbatur, construitur, erigitur: nec adhuc deus est; ecce ornatur, consecratur, oratur; tunc postremo deus est, cum homo illum voluit et dedicavit. (Minucius Felix, Oct. 22)

Excavations at Lefkandi have dispelled much of the gloom enshrouding the Early Iron Age, revealing a community with significant disposable wealth and with connections throughout the Mediterranean. The eastern imports in particular have drawn scholarly attention, with discussion moving from questions of production and transportation to issues surrounding consumption. This article draws attention to some limitations in prevalent socio-political explanations of consumption at Lefkandi, arguing that models relying on gift-exchange, prestige-goods and elite display cannot adequately account for the distribution, chronology, find context and function of imports at Lefkandi. A study of trinkets – small but manifestly foreign imports of cheap material – offers a new perspective. An analysis of their form, context, use and meaning demonstrates that trinkets were meaningfully and deliberately deposited with children as talismans or amulets. Talismanic practice had Late Bronze Age precedents, and in the Early Iron Age was stimulated from personal contact with the Near East or Cyprus and nurtured by the unique mortuary landscape at Lefkandi. This article demonstrates the need for archaeologists to treat mortuary beliefs as a meaningful explanatory variable. Moreover, the ability of non-elite objects to convey powerful ideas has important implications for the nature and dynamics of artistic and cultural exchanges between Greece and the East in the Iron Age.

Since antiquity, Greek tragedy has continually preoccupied philosophers. From Plato and Aristotle, to Hegel and Nietzsche, many of the most interesting ideas in the history of thought have been developed through a dialogue with tragedy. This article explores the continuities and ruptures between Plato and Aristotle's reading of tragedy and the so-called “philosophy of the tragic” which emerged in the late eighteenth century. The influence of this modern tradition has been so profound that, even today, no reading of Antigone, of Oedipus or of the Bacchae is not also, at least unconsciously, in dialogue with Hegel, with Freud and with Nietzsche. Although there is some recognition that the philosophical understanding of tragedy has historically shaped the discussion of ancient drama, classicists remain resistant to returning to its insights to further the study of classical texts. This article aims to redress the situation not only by revealing the persistent traces of the philosophy of the tragic in our modern critical vocabulary, but also by arguing that a renewed interest in this tradition will invigorate debates within our field. By looking at the examples of the French feminists Hélène Cixous' and Luce Irigaray's interpretations of Sophocles and Aeschylus, the article investigates the apparent tension between historicist and universalising readings of tragedy and argues that these two approaches are not necessarily incompatible.

It is evident that there was no law expressly forbidding the re-election of tribunes of the plebs. When Tiberius Gracchus raised the issue, his colleagues were in doubt, though the majority apparently held that his candidature was inadmissible (Appian, B.C. I, 14–15). Two years later Papirius Carbo proposed a bill ‘ut eundem tribunum plebi quotiens vellet creare liceret’, which was rejected by the plebs (Livy, Epit. LIX, Cic., de Amic. 95). This event would have confirmed the presumption against the reeligibility of tribunes, but of course made no change in the legal position. In fact Gaius Gracchus was re-elected in 123 (for 122) without any recorded protest.

This essay depends upon certain assumptions, which had better be made explicit at the outset.

The first is that in Attic tragedy the choral odes were always intended to have an organic relation to the drama as a whole. They are not mere intermezzi inserted to relieve tension and allow the audience to relax between successive steps in the real business of the drama, but serve rather as lyrical commentaries on what is happening on the stage, inviting us to the emotional response appropriate at that point in the action, and to reflect upon certain ideas and concepts implicit in the events themselves. They form a bridge between successive acts, and their contextual relevance looks back to what has immediately preceded and forward to what is about to come. At this level we need not expect complete consistency between different odes. The Chorus's interpretation of the situation and the emotional reaction it expresses may change quite drastically in the light of a change in situation or the revelation of hitherto unknown facts.

The symbol:‘/’, for ‘Antithesis’, is used throughout this essay to indicate the main alternations in its voicing. What I have in mind is to project the contentiousness that constitutes narration through this discussion of Statius' epic. ‘/’ will mark exchange between the (binary/convergent) views of an ‘Eteocles’ and a ‘Polynices’, then, yes, but also between warring textual ‘forces’ such as uirtus / planctus, etc. / etc. For faction and fraction / threaten to / multiply in, and as, ‘Thebaid’ - to the power of Seven, or regression to Infinity. The essay explores Thebais' - / Barthes' insight:

(T)he antithesis is the battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors; the Antithesis is the figure of the given opposition, eternal, eternally recurrent: the figure of the inexpiable. Every passage through the wall of the Antithesis thus constitutes a transgression …

Pity and the characters' response to it have always been recognized as one of the central themes of Sophocles' Philoctetes. In recent years scholarship on the play has mainly focused either on the cognitive aspects of the dynamics triggered by pity-related emotions (that is, how pity seems to activate and at the same time is triggered by rational reflection and experience) or on its self-conscious meta-theatrical dimension (what Halliwell has called the intrinsic ‘theatricality of pity’ and the audience's response to it). My intention is to contribute to this critical debate by focusing more narrowly on the semantics of pity-related words in the play: a linguistic analysis of the language of pity in Sophocles' Philoctetes will show that the seeming interchangeability of the words oiktos and eleos bears further investigation. The first section of this article will offer a brief diachronic survey of the semantics of oiktos- and eleos-related formations in Homer and the fifth century tragedians (with special attention to Sophoclean usage). Building upon recent studies on paradigmatic semantic relations, it will then be argued that the relation of eleos to oiktos is better described, from a synchronic perspective, in terms of ‘hyponymy’ or ’gradient synonymy.’

Recent contributions to the debate on the role, status and autonomy of the artist in classical Greece remain polarised in terms which have remained largely unchanged for more than a century. On one side, we find ‘modernisers’ who hold that the role of the artist, the function of art and the social structure of the Greek art world was more similar to the modern western art world than different. On the other side are ranged the ‘primitivists’ who argue that modern conceptions of artistic autonomy and creativity are an anachronistic imposition on ancient Greek art, which was a largely anonymous craft, performing traditional functions and oriented to the reproduction of traditional artistic forms rather than the individualistic innovation held to be characteristic of western European art since the Renaissance. The modernisers look back to Winckelmann's neo-classical view of the Greek artist as free and autonomous creator, whilst the primitivists ultimately draw their inspiration from Jacob Burckhardt's alternative account of the Greek artist as mechanical craftsman or banausos. In this century, the primary point of reference for the debate has been Bernard Schweitzer's argument that whilst artists were held in low esteem during the classical period of Greek history, the fifth and fourth centuries, they came to be recognised as ‘creative’ in the Hellenistic period, the third to first centuries B.C. More recent contributions have largely been concerned with adducing, or criticising, new evidence for one or other side of the debate, whilst retaining the assumptions within which the debate was set up in the nineteenth century.

In section III, 12, of the Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses the style of practical oratory, λέξις ἀγωνιστική, as opposed to the literary style, λέξις γραφική. While in the latter a compact construction is necessary, the former uses an asyndetic composition which gives it the character of natural speech and a dramatic potential conformable to ὑπόκρισις, the artistic delivery. As far as Aristotle deals with stylistic composition in a larger sense (up to the beginning of ch. 4), his comments seem clear. In chapter 4 he passes to a more definite plane of syntactical notions: .

The interpretation of this passage offers more than one difficulty, contained both in its first section which ends with the example and in its last sentence.

1. The standard translation of the first section is as follows: ‘The asyndeton has a further peculiarity: in an equal space of time many things appear to be said. Just as the connective particle turns a number of statements into one, so its omission does the opposite: turns a single statement into many. Thus an asyndeton produces amplification, e.g. I came, I talked (with him), I entreated (him).’

In PCPS N.S. XV (1969), 69 ff. I defined the triadic structure of P. Oxy. 2735 fr. I and suggested that the contents of this and other fragments would seem more at home in Ibycus than in Stesichorus. It was already clear that not all the fragments of this papyrus come from the same poem, but I had not yet noticed that the number of poems represented is probably at least three, and that there are now further reasons for preferring Ibycus as author.

The following two fragments belong to poems different from each other and from fr. 1:

(a) P. Oxy. 2735 fr. II

(i) The tradic structure (top of column)

(a), (b), (c) with paragraphos mark stanza-ends according to the three schemes described immediately below.

Though the left-hand margin is nowhere preserved, I take it as self-evident that these are the beginnings of lines. It is likely, in Ibycus or Stesichorus, that eighteen lines will cover at least about two-thirds, perhaps the whole, of a triad; and in fact it seems obvious that strophe, antistrophe, and epode are represented here, although it is not quite certain where the stanzas end.

There are three choices:

(a) 1–6 = ant., 7–11 = ep., 12–17 = str., 18 ff. = ant.

(b) 1–5 = ant., 6–10 = ep., 11–16 = str., 17 ff. = ant.

(c) 1–5 = str., 6–16 = ant., 17 ff. = ep.

When translating the ‘potential’ Homeric Greek optative into English, ‘could’ is often the best modal verb to use, to be preferred to the more usual ‘would’. I will argue that, in some cases, this reveals that the optative expresses what is termed in the literature ‘dynamic’ modality. Examining several examples in more detail I will claim that the optative expresses a wide range of meanings, the differences between which are subtle and not always clear-cut.

‘Then babble, babble words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three…” Beckett.

In this paper, I intend to discuss three central Hellenistic poems: Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus, Theocritus' Idyll 11 and Idyll 7. Each of these poems holds a privileged position in the discussion of the Hellenistic era as well as in each poet's corpus. I am certainly not offering here what could be called complete or exhaustive readings of these works – that would be far beyond the scope of a paper of this length; rather, I want to focus on a key point of interpretation in each poem. In the Hymn to Zeus, I am going to investigate the language of truth; in Idyll 11, the poem's structure of frame and song; and in Idyll 7, the poem's programmatic force. There are two aims in this strategy: the first is to investigate the topic of the ‘poet's voice’ in Hellenistic poetry. The three poems and the three topics of my discussion are linked in the concern for how a poet places himself within his poetry – ‘Who speaks?’, as Roland Barthes put it. The interest in poetry and how a poet relates to his poetry is a constant and fascinating theme through these works, and each of the topics I have chosen to discuss will illuminate this interest from a different aspect. Secondly, through a consideration of these three key moments of interpretation, I shall be arguing for an increased awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hellenistic poetry. I intend to show how critics' approaches and decisions with regard to these nodes of interpretation, which may be regarded as paradigmatic, have led to a worrying oversimplification of Hellenistic poetry. I hope to show in some measure how the intellectual complexity which makes these poems so hard to read and to criticize, can also be a source of their continuing interest and delight for us.

A. Frr. 1+47

col. i

The poem represented in P. Oxy. 2619 is self-evidently the work of Stesichorus, presumably his Iliou Persis. From the fragments as originally published not a single complete line or sentence could be reconstructed; the style and structure were, as Mr Lobel said, ‘quite unrecognisable’. There was really nothing to be done; it was a great disappointment.

To this gloomy picture Mr Barrett, with extraordinary ingenuity and skill, succeeded in restoring two quite substantial patches of bright and clear colour. He joined fr. 47 to the second column of fr. 1, and frr. 30 and 31 to fr. 15(b), in each place creating an intelligible context for seven consecutive lines. The texts of these two pieces as restored by Barrett read, with only slight modifications, as shown on pp. 47 and 50.