The only two authoritative manuscripts of Ammianus Marcellinus to survive to the present day were produced in Germany in the first half of the ninth century: Vaticanus Latinus 1873 from Fulda (V), and a fragmentary manuscript from Hersfeld now preserved in Kassel (M). This article challenges the consensus that V is a copy of M. Taking into account recently uncovered fragments of M (new transcriptions of which are offered in the Appendix), we argue that both are copies of the same damaged original, and discuss the implications for the editing of Ammianus and for our understanding of Carolingian scholarship.

Nine years being nobody's idea of a significant anniversary, it will be understood that there is no celebratory intent in my returning here – with the kind permission of the Editors – to The Ideology of the Athenian Metic. Nor does it represent an author's peevish response to reviewers' nit-pickings, just or unjust. Rather, two purposes are to be served. The first is simply to bring together some of the less inconsequential addenda and corrigenda which any scholarly work (good or bad) generates, on the basis that the result might be a Nachtrag of some service to users of the book, and others; Section I comprises a series of twenty such points, listed in the order in which they arise in IAM and referred to by its pagination. Section II then re-opens a much broader issue – the Athenian metoikia in the third century – on which IAM could, and arguably should, have said more.

At M. 7.433 the sceptic Sextus Empiricus infers from the statement that the early Stoics did not profess themselves to be sages that ‘Cleanthes did not know whether he was a human being or a beast more complex than Typhon.’ Since in two other passages, at M. 7.264 and PH 2.22, Sextus ascribes (variations upon) this confession of ignorance to Socrates rather than Cleanthes, whom Sextus otherwise obviously presents as one of his dogmatic adversaries, it has been alleged that the reference to one of the heads of the Stoic school must simply have been a ‘wilful misreading’ on Sextus' behalf. As I hope to show, there are good reasons for Sextus to refer to a Stoic here, or rather even better reasons for a Stoic to have brought up this reference himself.

As has been picked up well in modern scholarship, Sextus' inference at M. 7.433 (as in the other two passages) ultimately refers back to the beginning of the Phaedrus, at 229e–30a, which contains an image (or perhaps even self-portrait) of Socrates.

Before Angelo Mai's publication of the Vatican Palimpsest in 1822 the de Re Publica was known to modern scholars only from the tantalizing fragments and paraphrases scattered about in Late Latin authors, ranging in extent from the Somnium Scipionis, the famous definition of uera lex preserved by Lactantius and the portion of Cicero's preface to Book v quoted by St Augustine to the incomplete sentences gleaned from Nonius, Priscian, and Isidore. Although the Palimpsest enabled men to form a better picture of the plan and scope of the whole treatise, it has nevertheless remained fragmented, and this for several reasons.

Monumental weathervanes have been overlooked as a tiny but important genre of ancient bronze sculpture. This is the first collective study of all three definite examples: the so-called ‘triton’ on the Tower of the Winds in Athens, a copy of this somewhere in Rome and the winged female ‘Anemodoulion’ on the Bronze Tetrapylon in Constantinople. I propose to identify the intended subjects of these sculptures as the weather-deities Aiolos and Iris, thereby restoring a part of each monument's original meaning that was unknown to the authors of our ancient written accounts. I also suggest that monumental weathervanes were first invented in Hellenistic Alexandria, which may explain why the Tower of the Winds shared the octagonal design of the Pharos, and why the Anemodoulion was mounted upon a bronze pyramidion.

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.

Our disagreements concern points of some importance. There is the question whether the soul in itself is blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written – a tabula rasa – as Aristotle and the author of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience; or whether the soul inherently contains the sources of various notions and doctrines which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions, as I believe and as do Plato and even the Schoolmen, and those who understand in this sense the passage in Saint Paul where he says that God's law is written in our hearts (Rom. 2:15). The Stoics call these sources Prolepses, that is fundamental assumptions or things taken for granted in advance.

Christian poetry, and biblical epic in particular, is intensely self-conscious. Both Greek and Latin Christian poets begin or end their compositions, paraphrases and centos with poetological reflections on the value and objectives of their works. The fifth-century Paraphrase of the Gospel according to John is an anomaly in this tradition. While Nonnus’ mythological epic, the Dionysiaca, is heavily self-conscious in that it includes a strong authorial voice as well as an extensive prooemium and an interlude, the Christian Paraphrase has no prooemium, epilogue or interlude, and its narrator never identifies himself. This article examines two passages in the Paraphrase where subtle, implicit poetological reflections may be detected, and then explores the reasons why Nonnus may have chosen to deny the Paraphrase a clear (meta)literary identity. It argues that Nonnus’ poem presents itself as the Gospel of John, and that its narrator ‘becomes’ John the Evangelist in a spiritual exercise which is indebted to Origen's views on that Gospel.

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.

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.

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.

My aim in this paper is to examine the general conception and the detailed problems in Aristotle's comments in the S.E. on how to organise the handling of false refutations. The influence of Aristotle's work in this area has been immense, as C. L. Hamblin has recently shown: the discussions of fallacious and illicit reasoning in books of logic down the centuries are dominated by the aim of adhering to what their authors conceive to be Aristotle's divisions of the subject. Even after the logical and metaphysical bases on which the Aristotelian treatment rests had been abandoned, logicians persisted with a codification of fallacies the very purpose of which had become obscure. Hamblin has well exposed the distortions to which the servile but misconceived tradition has subjected Aristotle's insights. Now that modern developments in formal logic enable us to appreciate that Aristotle's syllogistic occupies a small, albeit paradigmatic, part of the calculus of relations, we are better placed to understand the character of the non-syllogistic areas of his logical work. At the same time there has been a growth in the historical understanding of Aristotle's dialectic. So the way should lie open to a better appreciation of Aristotle's conception of errors in argument, and to a clearer grasp of the actual phenomenon.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.