In a familiar passage at the end of Plato's Apology, Socrates offers an account of what he believes will happen to us when we die. As in the Phaedo, it is his impending death that prompts Socrates to speculate about the nature of the afterlife: as soon as his verdict is announced, Socrates turns to the jury to gloss on his sentencing. It was unprecedented, as far as we know, for a defendant in the Athenian court to end his trial by addressing the members of the jury, but the Apology has Socrates doing just that. While his defence in the Apology was already audacious, Socrates' closing speech appears even more provocative. Among other things, he declares that he has no reason to fear death, but that, on the contrary, the death penalty he received only moments before may well be considered a blessing. Socrates supports this claim with an argument in the form of a constructive dilemma: either death involves the cessation of consciousness, in which case our afterlife existence will resemble a single night of dreamless sleep, or after our death we will go to a place where all the dead are ruled over by just judges. Since either scenario constitutes a good state, death should be considered something good (40C5–41C7). This article will examine Socrates' argument in detail and discuss a number of salient problems that arise from it. Commentators have typically attempted to tackle the interpretative problems one by one, but I shall argue that they resist satisfactory resolution and instead alert us to an ironic reading of this passage.

In a short article published in The Classical Quarterly, Professor W.V. Harris questioned some of the opinions that I have put forward concerning revenge in Athenian society. His reservations presupposed certain methodological premises that he believes the researcher should adopt when dealing with ancient sources that reveal sentiments and emotions. In expressing the aforementioned opinions I criticised these premises by implication, but without dealing directly with the methodological problems surrounding the issue. Professor Harris's article has now provided me with an excellent opportunity to confront these problems explicitly and to examine how two different methods of analysis have given rise to diametrically opposed opinions concerning revenge in Athenian society. Revenge is a common human sentiment that is expressed in the individual's outward behaviour, influences social behaviour and has implications for society as a whole. The question of whether it was controlled and repressed or fostered and stimulated in classical Athens is of no trifling importance.

The purpose of the following notes is twofold: to correct some current mis-statements about the text, dialect and metre (on which, to some extent, our judgement of the date may depend); and to draw from the text an inference about the status of Hybrias.

Athenaeus xv, 695 F seq.

This paper draws attention to the unprecedented prominence of metaphors of enslavement to Rome in the historical narratives of Florus and Cassius Dio. Following an analysis of the thematic importance of the trope in their respective works, I point to further parallels in Herodian and Justin which suggest that the trope proved particularly productive in both Latin and Greek historiography in the late second and early third centuries CE. The end of the paper considers broader cultural developments that might underlie this phenomenon, notably the proliferation of dominus as an epithet for the emperor and the ongoing enfranchisement of provincials.

Offering a re-evaluation of all the available evidence, including passages from Aristotle's Rhetoric, Poetics and Sophistici Elenchi, Diogenes Laertius’ biographical sketch as well as the grammar scene in Aristophanes’ Clouds, this article argues that Protagoras’ engagement with grammatical questions must have been more sophisticated and thorough than is often assumed. In Protagoras’ discovery of grammatical gender, formal considerations – most likely inspired by the analysis of personal names – played a more fundamental role than semantic ones, and his typology of πυθμένες λόγων equally presupposes the formal recognition of at least verbal mood, if not also tense.

Semonides fr. 7, for a long time one of the poor relations of archaic literature, has recently been basking in the attentions of both literary critics and historians. A comic catalogue of the types of women created by Zeus, each of them derived from an animal, insect or inanimate material and nearly all of them vicious, it has been connected with Hesiod's myth of Pandora and other stories in which women are seen as dangerously and subversively different from men. Along with other invective iambic poetry, it has been sited in the symposium, where scholars have suggested that the exclusion and degradation of women helped to create and reinforce male solidarity. Since as individuals men often like women, and need wives, and their sympotic invective therefore cannot be taken too seriously, readers have highlighted the poem's use of irony and paradox.

In what follows I hope to add something to our reading of both the poem and its context. I shall try to show that Semonides' picture of women and male–female relations is more complex than has been assumed, and that we can place it in a tradition of moralizing literature which is concerned not just to pillory aspects of its world, but to explore its problems and stimulate people to think about them.

As the sun rises over the heights, a band of pirates cross a ridge near the mouth of the Nile and look out to sea. No prospect of booty meets their gaze, which travels to the shore. A merchantman is moored there, laden but unattended. The shore itself is strewn with bodies, some dead, others still writhing, in the aftermath of a feast that turned into a pitched battle. The pirates approach but are struck by a sight yet stranger. A girl sits on a rock, a girl whose beauty suggests a goddess. On her head is a wreath, over her shoulder a quiver; a bow supports her left arm; her right elbow rests on her thigh, and her chin on her right hand, as she stares at a youth who lies wounded and gasping at her feet. Only because he still draws breath, she tells him, has she not used on herself the sword that lies across her knee. So saying, up she springs, and the pirates take cover from her tall figure, made more awesome by the rattle of her quiver and the sunlight reflected from her golden raiment. Who can she be? Perhaps Artemis, Isis, or a mad priestess on a murderous rampage.

Treaties of course did not come into force by the appendage of signatures to documents, but after each of the contracting parties had sent envoys to administer the oaths of ratification to the authorities of the other state. In the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1957 Andrewes and Lewis in an illuminating article on the Peace of Nicias wrote that in the early part of the fourth century B.C. it was the regular practice for Athenian treaties to specify the authorities who were to swear the oath on either side, and that although the fifth-century evidence is more scanty three clear instances suggested the habit was already established by 425.

This article demonstrates that the spatial category of depth is crucial for understanding Aeschylus' Persians. Underground spaces are often symbolically represented in Greek drama not only on a vertical axis but also by the interior of the stage-building (skene). By investigating the connections between ‘interiority’ and ‘depth’, this article argues that the most economical and effective reconstruction of Darius' apparition is to suppose that he emerged from the interior of the skene, whose existence at this date is often disputed. The article furthermore analyses the multifaceted concept of the earth in the Persians, to suggest new ways in which underground, ground and interior spaces can be connected holistically to other spatial and natural imagery.

This article presents some fresh evidence in favour of recognising in a series of late testimonia on Hipponax the vestiges of a poem in which the iambist recounted his poetic initiation. It argues that Herodas alludes to such a poem in the opening of his programmatic Mimiamb 1 and in his own account of poetic investiture in Mimiamb 8. Finally, the article attempts an interpretation of this proposed new fragment of Hipponax with the aim of teasing out some of its implications for his poetics.

Five forms of the modal particle are attested in ancient Greek (ἄν, κε, κεν, κᾱ, and κ’). This article argues that ἄν is an inherited particle, and that the k-forms were the result of reanalysis of prevocalic οὐκ and εἰκ (i.e. εἰκ was reanalysed as εἰ κ’), supported by the vestiges of an old topicalising/conditional force of the IE particle *kwe (which appears elsewhere in Greek as connective τε). The attested forms in Greek grew out of *kwe in contexts where an adjacent u caused the labiovelar *kw > k (West Greek κᾱ was influenced by indefinite *kwā). The form κεν is a creation of epic diction.

Maurice Holleaux, in the brilliant study which for so long dominated discussion of Rome's early dealings with the Greek East, argued that Roman aims in the First Macedonian War were strictly defensive. The Romans' sole purpose in forming alliances with the Aetolians and other Greek powers was, he held, to prevent Philip from crossing to Italy by obliging him to fight in Greece. Roman conduct showed how limited their interest in the war in Greece was: they fulfilled their obligations to their allies halfheartedly and in the end neglected them altogether, while they viewed the other Greeks simply as a source of booty. They regarded the compromise peace reached with Philip at Phoenice as entirely satisfactory, and their decision to renew war against him in 200 was a complete reversal of policy.

Although most aspects of Holleaux's interpretation of Rome's Eastern policy have generated great controversy, his treatment of the First Macedonian War has, except for certain specific points, received relatively little attention. While the significance of the Peace of Phoenice has been much discussed, most of those who have written on the war itself have been in broad agreement with Holleaux's views on the Romans' aims and conduct, and only a few brief protests have been registered. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. I shall argue that Roman aims in the war were less limited and their conduct less half-hearted than has usually been supposed, and offer a new interpretation of the obscure last years of the war, based on a redating of the expedition of P. Sempronius Tuditanus and the Peace of Phoenice to 206.

Hesiod's Theogony contains three similes, each of which elaborates a climactic moment in Zeus' securing of power: an image of bees (594–602) describes the nature of women in the Pandora episode, the aftermath of Zeus' triumph over Prometheus; battle resounds with a crash as if earth and heaven are coming together (699–705) in the climax of the Titanomachy, wherein Zeus and the Olympians overcome the Titans; and Zeus is likened to a craftsman melting ore (861–7) during his conquest of his final challenger, Typhoeus. In each episode complemented by a simile, Zeus' power attains greater stability; in the aftermath of the last of these episodes, the Typhonomachy, his power achieves permanent ascendancy (881–5). Despite the prominent occasions of these similes, they stand largely unexplored. This paper considers the simile of metallurgy in the Typhonomachy, the simile that reconfigures Zeus' final acquisition of power. Positioned at such a critical moment, attention to this simile promises to reveal elements fundamental to an understanding of Zeus' ultimate power.

In his excellent treatment of comic dicola, M. L. West provides a schema of the eupolidean:

adding that initial ◡◡ − theoretically admitted by the symbol o) is not actually found: ◡◡ at the beginning of either colon is always followed by ◡. At first sight, this is a mind-boggling rhythmic structure. One can make a start towards comprehension by noting that the two cola begin with aeolic base, in its Attic versio − −, − ◡, ◡ − or ◡◡◡, for which I shall here use Hermann's symbol: .. ... There is, then, no difficulty about the first half of the verse. It consists of base + − × − ◡◡ −, the colon known variously as choriambic dimeter, wilamowitzian (-us), polyschematist, anaclastic glyconic, etc. With some reluctance, I adopt ‘polyschematist’, partly on grounds of length; it is not short, but the alternatives are longer. Its close relationship with the glyconic is evident from its first appearance, which is in correspondence with glyconic in Sappho (LP 96.7).

In a programmatic article, published nearly twenty years ago, Peter Laslett characterized historians who try to write social history from literature as people who look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. His particular examples of their inverted gaze were not always well chosen: warfare in Homer, the young age at betrothal of Shakespeare's Juliet, the extra-marital affairs in Restoration Comedy. The main point, however, still challenges ancient historians. ‘The great defect of the evidence’, as A. H. M. Jones forewarned readers of his social history, ‘is the total absence of statistics’: at best, we have isolated numbers which do not survive in significant sequences. Yet since 1951, ancient historians have continued to look down their telescopes and find social history in a widening range of texts. In the past decade, Roman historians have re-read prose fictions for this purpose, while on the Greek side, more recent attention has gone to poetry, especially tragedy and Homeric epic.

If we look to the Protagoras for philosophical lessons, it may seem an irritating patchwork of niggling argument, irrelevant digressions, false starts and downright fallacy. Read as a play in which the most outstanding and individual minds of a brilliant period meet and engage in a battle of wits, it will give a different impression. That is how it should be read. A serious discussion of the nature of virtue, and how it is acquired, must be left, as Protagoras said, for another occasion - and, we may add, for different company: it is not to be achieved in the competitive atmosphere of a public gathering of Sophists.

The Protagoras is palpably interested in character, vividly reviving a lost intellectual generation. But it also seems to argue for a conclusion, albeit a very provisional one. How should we relate the dialogue's array of luminaries to its argument? A reader may be tempted, as in the quotation above, to use the dialogue's literary lustre merely to excuse its arguments from charges of philosophical clumsiness. But by the end of the work we have been shown apparently successful arguments for the unity of virtue, with Protagoras' attempt at a counter-example refuted (360d8–e5).

The Freudian engagement with the classical world represents one of the most important and intriguing episodes in the ongoing dialogue between antiquity and modernity. That Freud returned to antiquity to formulate his revolutionary theories of the human mind should strike classicists and psychoanalysts alike as a fascinating enigma. And yet classicists have to a large extent given short shrift to this issue. They have not only shown themselves indifferent to the question of why Freud takes the ancient world as the starting-point for his examination of modern man, they have also, by and large, rejected psychoanalysis as a methodological tool for providing insights into the classical world. Even those classicists who are most open to the benefits of contemporary theory have largely isolated psychoanalysis as a uniquely inappropriate methodology for understanding antiquity.

So, for instance, those classicists who display an interest in the complex series of discourses and practices which surround the construction of the ancient self have explicitly distanced their analyses from the insights of psychoanalysis. Thus in Christopher Gill's 500-page work on ‘Personality’ in Greek culture, Freud gets a mere three perfunctory citations.

The third part of the Timaeus, where the account is focused on the cooperation of reason and necessity, has received far less attention than the opening two sections. Particularly, the description of irrigation, digestion and respiration constitutes a challenging passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by scholarly research. Virtually the only modern explanation for the passage was devised by Cornford, and despite several inaccuracies it has been unanimously accepted by all commentators. This paper will challenge Cornford's interpretation, and use some modern biological concepts to provide an alternative approach to the passage more compatible with an actual human body.

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.