Early states functioned under entirely different circumstances from modern nation states, which politically and administratively require a capital city. The nature and extent of centralization in ancient societies is much harder to define. A comparative study of two similar geographical entities, such as islands, can shed light on the diverse and complex relationships between ancient polities and central places. Scholars have, at times, assigned capital cities to the Late Bronze Age island cultures of Crete and Cyprus – namely Knossos and Enkomi respectively. Differences in these cultures and settlements notwithstanding, this paper seeks to explore the multi-layered and diverse nature of past and present interpretations through a comparative approach. It is argued that we need to acknowledge the roles that recent politics and archaeological practices have had on previous and current narratives of the past. The often-troubled transformations undergone by modern nation states, and the expectation that such entities possess capitals, have coloured previous interpretations of the past more than is generally recognized. The categories constructed and models applied have guided our approaches but they have also imposed potentially anachronistic frameworks. This paper seeks further historical depth, and to better understand the complex and varied roles ancient central places had in their wider context.

Scholars disagree over why Plato's Clitophon ends without any response to Clitophon's criticisms of Socratic method. A close examination of the characterisation of Clitophon provides a potential answer. During the course of his speech, Clitophon shows himself to have misunderstood Socrates, in terms both of method and teaching. The manner in which he reports Socratic conversations suggests that he is more interested in Socrates' personal authority than in entering into productive dialogue. Clitophon represents the kind of young man who wants Socrates to tell him what to think and who will go elsewhere if Socrates will not answer this desire. Socrates remains silent in the face of Clitophon's criticisms because Clitophon has offered no thoughts of his own and, this being the case, there is no possibility of making elenctic progress.

The female readership of the Ars amatoria has been for two millennia a subject fraught with problems both historical and theoretical. For example: in antiquity, did respectable women read the poem? Almost certainly, and they were almost certainly expected to. Were they intended to? Here less certainty is possible, not only because of the problem of divining authorial intention. Did non-respectable women, the real life analogues to the poem's fictive courtesans, read the Ars? Some of them – the elite ones – must have, but lower-level courtesans would have had less opportunity to acquire copies of the poem. On the textual, rather than historical, level, other questions remain, most of them unanswerable, such as the sincerity of the poem's disclaimers to matronae, the No-Wives-Allowed signs. The deliberate textual confusion between matrona and meretrix in Ars 3 blurs clear distinctions and makes it impossible to tell if the praeceptor Amoris anticipates or seeks respectable, elite women, in addition to his declared readers, the courtesans.

The word cursus may seem to be keeping strange company with slaves and freedmen. It does not refer here to the cursus publicus, but to the system of promotion in the sub-equestrian regions of the Imperial administration. Cursus implies movement, advancement, promotion. No bureaucracy can function efficiently without order and opportunity in its lower as well as its higher ranks. If a cursus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent one. It is necessary to affirm this of the lower ranks of the Roman bureaucracy in the early empire precisely because it has so often been denied or ignored. The impression gained from reading many works on the Imperial administration is that of fervid equestrian movement from post to post and province to province at the top, with a static substratum of Imperial slaves and freedmen providing stability and continuity below. Such an account is to some extent true. But that it is not true enough is largely the fault of the evidence.

The private collection of the Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome holds the only surviving large-scale sculpture of a hunchback [fig. I]. Although this hunchback has been intensely studied, it remains enigmatic. The hunchback is generally agreed to be Roman and dated to the second century CE on the basis of its portrait head, particularly in the drilling technique of its hairstyle, though the realism of its misshapen and ugly body is in the direct tradition of works of the third century BCE.

Whether this hunchback is an original of its time or a copy of a now lost Greek work is still contentious. Since its discovery in the Baths of Caracalla, the figure has been identified as the famous Greek fabulist Aesop, who, according to literary tradition, may have been a hunchback. Although several scholars have suggested new possibilities for the identity of this hunchback, including the proposition that it is a Roman original representing a jester of the imperial court, its association with Aesop has remained. But is its identity necessarily key to understanding its significance? This article intends to move away from the identification of this figure to consider the hunchback primarily as a type, rather than a person, and shifts the emphasis to its context within a bathhouse.

Ever since the decipherment of Linear B, a large amount has been written on Mycenaean spelling. The basic rules were established very quickly, although the debate is still continuing as to the theoretical basis of Mycenaean spelling; various models have been proposed here. One of the most serious problems for all existing models is that at the edges, there is spelling variation that simply cannot be captured by one and the same algorithm. Here, we shall look at two such cases:

• the graphic rendering of the subphonemic glides j and w as in e.g. i-je-re-u, a-re-ku-tu-ru-wo which can be contrasted with later Greek ἱερεύς and ἀλεκτρυών where the glides are not or not routinely indicated;

• and so-called plene writing; this term is used in a variety of meanings. Here, we shall deal with the graphic rendering of consonants in the coda of final syllables where the standard spelling rules would predict their omission, e.g. wa-na-ka rendering /wanaks/ where the spelling rules would predict a rendering wa-na.

It has been generally agreed for some time that the best piece of extant evidence for Pyrrho's thought is contained in a section of Eusebius' Praeparatio evangelica (14.18.1–4 = T53 Decleva Caizzi) where Eusebius cites Aristocles of Messene's πεϱὶ ϕιλοσοϕίας book eight, where Aristocles in turn cites Timon on Pyrrho. But there the agreement stops. The wealth of recent writing on this very short passage provides evidence of its difficulty. Ausland, Bett, Brennan, Brunschwig, and Stopper have all within the last ten years or so offered their own various interpretations of these dozen lines of Greek text.

It is always a useful opening to say what one is not going to talk about, so I shall start by saying that I am not going to talk about the influence of Seneca on Elizabethan tragedy. That is a topic which during the last couple of generations has probably suffered from over-exposure, and the pendulum has now swung from excessive claims for Senecan influence (ghosts, blood-and-thunder, the whole apparatus of the ‘Revenge’ play, and so forth) to the other extreme of allowing perhaps too little of Seneca in sixteenth-century tragedy – not even as much as the rhetorical features for which it seems to me he is clearly responsible. So perhaps we can give this topic a rest – a lot of books and articles have been written about it anyway. What I want to do is to explore some sixteenth-century critical attitudes to Seneca – mainly his tragedies, but his prose works will come into it as well. We shall see, I think, some interesting preoccupations which a wide-ranging and intelligent number of scholars had in what they said about Seneca – in particular, his style – and this will lead to a consideration of Polonius' well-known remark to the players in Hamlet (II. 2. 392 ff.): ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light’, and the question what precisely he meant by ‘heavy’. In doing this we shall not simply be burrowing into a rather dusty and recherché corner of literary criticism, but I think we shall be able to throw some light on wider aspects of Renaissance poetic and dramatic theory, which I am certainly not competent to discuss in detail; but I may stimulate somebody else to go further than I have done.

This paper should have had a longer and more explanatory title. I am not overmuch concerned with the interesting general question of the influence exerted by the Atthis of Androtion on subsequent accounts, primarily of course on that of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia: the specific problem I wish to discuss is the use of documents in these chapters of AP, and the possibility that they were transmitted by Androtion. Jacoby in his introduction to that author (n. 86) treats it as ‘fairly certain’ that ‘A. supplied the documents for the reform of the constitution in 412/1 B.C. (AP 29–33) in detail and evidently with approval as a kind of model constitution’. He was not alone in this opinion, which needs examination. The argument is necessarily speculative, a weighing of probabilities, and the only statement for which I claim certainty is that Wilamowitz was wrong in one detail.

In the first excitement of the publication of AP some eminent scholars, headed by Wilamowitz and Köhler, acclaimed the data found in AP as authentic documents which could be used to ‘correct’ Thucydides. The counter-attack by Ed. Meyer concentrated on the argument that official documents are not the best guide to what actually happens in a revolution: that is, Meyer still accepted the documents as authentic, but he upheld the narrative of Thucydides against them. To the best of my knowledge it was not till 1907 that the question was raised, by Judeich, whether any authentic documents would have survived the restoration of democracy.

At once Juvenal's reader is performing the ego of his text aloud, and the book's charge is on: semper ego auditor tantum? (1: ‘Forever just in the audience, that's me?’)

In this, the founding moment of his project, Juvenal finds a way to go ‘back’ through the writing/reading process to cue an entrée he can ‘share’ with his reader; he gets in before readers can decide, as they must, what relations they mean to adopt with the utterant constructed by the text. For he sets his start ‘before his performance begins’ – when he had it in common with the audience of a literary performance that all are there to give a hearing, lend silence, play the perpetual part of addressee. He finds a ‘bubble’ to write for everyone in every audience, necessarily implied in their repression, self-control and accommodation to the performer's ego. This writer must trade on exactly the same dynamics as any other, but his act presumes to capture his audience's thoughts, to speak them, and so have the reader of his text voice the presumptions which silently structure each and every scenario of reading.

Lucian's singular role within the socio-cultural context of the period known as the Second Sophistic has found increasing appreciation amongst scholars, particularly over the last fifteen years. Although not a sophist in the true sense, Lucian can be regarded as an outstanding pepaideumenos, meaning this: during an era in which being Greek was less a matter of political than of cultural definition, and in which membership in the upper administrative echelons was dependent on academic qualifications, on the mastery, that is, of a code which consisted of broad general knowledge and rhetorical activity partnered by thorough conversancy with the literary heritage and language of Attic Greece – during this age, then, Lucian proved himself not only a worthy representative of such paideia, but also contributed with his literary works to its development and adaptation.

In 1903, in the preface to the first volume of his edition of Manilius, Housman wrote:

… we now witness in Germany pretty much what happened in England after 1825, when our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley's Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester. England disappeared from the fellowship of nations for the next forty years.

(Housman (1903) xlii)

The name which lurks unspoken behind this paragraph is that of Richard Porson, and Dobree, Elmsley and Blomfield, whose names are spoken, were all in different ways his disciples. Although Porson had no pupils and gave no lectures, in the generation just after his death he had a number of followers who cultivated his memory and emulated his style, at least before they were removed to higher spheres by death or preferment to bishoprics. If the cultivation of his scholarly style can be called Porsonianism, it was the cult of Porson himself after his death in 1808, centred on Trinity College, Cambridge, for which three years later the Oxford scholar Peter Elmsley coined the name ‘Porsoniasm’. As one might expect, the name-giver was an outsider. Yet as his inclusion in Housman's sketch indicates, Elmsley could be called a Porsonian, and indeed in 1911, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin at Cambridge, Housman remarked that ‘scholarship meant to Elmsley what it meant to Dobree’ (Housman (1969) 25). But though Elmsley was a Porsonian, he was not (if I may venture a hapax of my own) a Porsoniast.

The Eclogues are universally regarded as a highly structured literary artefact, and some scholars believe that Virgil's summa manus modified the contents of individual poems at the book's final stage to achieve balance and symmetry. Whether or not such modification took place, the pattern of addressees/honorands in the collection – where they exist – ought to have some significance. The following table sets them out:

1. 1. deus (7) = iuuenem (42), usually identified as Octavian

2. 2. None

3. 3. C. Asinius Pollio (84–9)

4. 4. C. Asinius Pollio (esp. 11–14)

5. 5. None

6. 6. P. Alfenus Varus (6–7); C. Cornelius Gallus (64–73)

7. 7. None

8. 8. tu (6–13), often identified as C. Asinius Pollio, but by some as Octavian

9. 9. P. Alfenus Varus (26–9); L. Varius Rufus and C. Helvius Cinna (35–6); (?)‘Caesar’ (cf. Dionaei … Caesaris astrum, 47–9)

10. 10. C. Cornelius Gallus (passim)