This article addresses a problem that is rapidly advancing to the status of a new Homeric question: the relationship between Greek epic and the narrative traditions of neighbouring Near Eastern cultures. The present situation recalls the debates that raged over the issue of oral poetry not so long ago. The formula used to be the central object of contention, now it is the ‘Near Eastern parallel’. Today there are so many parallels on record that it is hard to keep track. Yet, as with the formula, the number of known parallels seems to bear little relation to their usefulness. Now as then, problems of the most basic kind abound. What, for a start, is a Near Eastern parallel? And why should we care if someone pointed one out to us? Questions such as these are only just beginning to be asked in earnest.

As with the oral-traditional hypothesis, the Near Eastern hypothesis concerns the whole of Greek literature. But the problem has crystallised around epic, and so it is epic that concerns me here. In the first part of my paper, I sketch out briefly what I see as some of the parameters of the present impasse. In the second half, I suggest a framework for future study that enables us to see what we have come to call ‘Greek epic’ as one regional offshoot of the broader Near Eastern genre of cosmic history. In order to illustrate my claim, I look at one of the more notorious parallels between Greek and Near Eastern literatures: the problem of mortality as developed in the Iliad and the Poem of Gilgamesh. I argue that the full implications of the issue are better understood within the overall framework proposed in this article.

The title given to speech number twenty-one of Demosthenes at some time in antiquity, although surely not by Demosthenes himself, is ΚΑΤΑ ΜΕΙΔΙΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΚΟΝΔΥΛΟΥ –‘Against Meidias, concerning the punch’. This refers of course to the punch on the cheek which Demosthenes received from Meidias in the very orchestra of the theatre of Dionysos at Athens on the day of the competition in the men's dithyramb, in which Demosthenes was chorēgos for his phylē, Pandionis, at the Great Dionysia of 348 B.C. – an act of physical abuse perpetrated under the gaze of ‘more than 30,000 Greeks’ – (that is the Platonic Sokrates' exaggeration, not mine) – in that place and at that time of maximum Athenian self-regard. The act which forms the ostensible basis of Demosthenes' case is thus self-evident: for by the powerful trope of the homogeneity across time and place of the Athenian dēmos, the spectators who were in the theatre on that day are identical to those citizens at the subsequent ekklēsia which met (also in the theatre) to hear complaints arising from the conduct of individuals at the festival, and they are the same men empanelling the court today. They booed and hissed Meidias in the theatre, passed a preliminary motion against him in the ekklēsia and so, today, their course of action is clear.

A paper on the herms needs no excuse. There is no proper treatment in English of the origins of the herm or of the erection of herms by Hipparkhos. The Eion herm monument has been well studied by Jacoby and Harrison, but the recent treatment by Clairmont demands their reconsideration. The scholarly literature on the mutilation has been very narrowly focused on the questions of who mutilated the herms and why. These questions are clearly closely inter-related, and yet the attempts to answer the question ‘why?’ have been singularly unsatisfactory. Some have arbitrarily chosen to emphasise a single feature of the herm, and with little evidence have made wild claims: thus Farnell could write that ‘the mutilation of the phallic Hermai of Athens produced… in the Athenians the despondent sense that the luck of the state was gone and the divine power of fertilisation impaired’, Crome that ‘with this mutilation must be connected the religious world of the phallus cult of the old native population which had certainly always been strange to the oligarchs’. Others have ignored the fact that it was specifically herms that were mutilated and have reduced the activity of the hermokopidai to a massive act of general impiety, as Dover does when he argues that the mutilation was politically significant because as an act of impiety it would seem to bring down the wrath of the gods on the whole community, as a conspicuous act of vandalism it would make the number of people involved seem large, and as an offence against nomos it would prompt concern for the fact that a body of men had set themselves beyond the law.

It is often observed that the familiar story of the origins of Rome appears to combine two distinct and incompatible legends: that of Aeneas, and that of Romulus and Remus. The first of these was in origin a development of a Greek story, with its roots in the epic tradition. Aeneas, the son of Venus and Anchises, escaped from Troy with his family and friends and after a series of adventures arrived in Italy where he founded Rome. The other story, that of Romulus and Remus, was localised in Latium. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the god Mars and Rea Silvia, daughter of a king of Alba Longa. On the orders of their grandfather they were cast into the Tiber. The river happened to be in flood, and when the waters receded the boat containing the infants was left high and dry at the foot of the Palatine, under a fig tree later known as the ficus Ruminalis. There they were suckled by a she-wolf, whose den was the near-by cave of the Lupercal. Rescued by shepherds, the boys grew up and after the death of Remus in suspicious circumstances Romulus founded a city on the Palatine, where his original dwelling, the casa Romuli, was preserved in later times.

Few of the many treatments of this famous preface seem to recognise the need for close reading of the text. The present paper sets out to remedy this deficiency in the hope of achieving three main aims: (1) to demonstrate the coherence and power of Livy's argument, as well as the subtlety of its exposition and the richness of its language; (2) to resolve certain specific problems; (3) to further the continuing debate on important general questions in ancient historiography.

Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nee satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim, (2) quippe qui cum ueterem turn uolgatam esse rem uideam, dum noui semper scriptores aut in rebus certius aliquid allaturos se aut scribendi arte rudem uetustatem superaturos credunt.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the treatise On sublimity was universally attributed to the third-century critic, rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus. Weiske's edition, first issued in 1809, marked a turning-point in the trend of scholarly opinion, and Longinus' claim to authorship is now generally rejected, often summarily. A variety of alternative attributions have been canvassed; most commonly the work is assigned to an anonymous author of the first century A.D. But a minority of scholars have resisted the consensus and defended Longinus' claim to authorship. This paper will argue that they were right to do so.

To avoid ambiguity, I shall follow Russell in using the symbol ‘L’ as a non-committal way of designating the author of On sublimity; by ‘Longinus’ I shall always mean Cassius Longinus. So the question before us is whether L is Longinus. I begin by explaining why manuscript evidence (§2) and stylistic comparison with the fragments of Longinus (§3) fail to resolve the question. I then try to find a place for the composition of the treatise within Longinus' career (§4). This leads to a consideration of the final chapter, widely regarded as inconsistent with a third-century date; I shall argue that there is no inconsistency (§5). If so, the way lies open to a reassessment of the case in favour of Longinus' claim.

The Byzantinist has one advantage over the student of classical antiquity—unless the latter happens to be a papyrologist. With a little diligence and a minimum of good luck he can easily unearth unpublished texts and find himself producing an editio princeps. And however often one has turned over the leaves of a manuscript and laboriously read words which have remained unread for perhaps five centuries or more, it never loses its thrill. Yet one must admit that the advantage is less than it seems. The classical scholar's texts are usually worth reading from some point of view, while what the Byzantinist finds is so often empty rhetorical verbiage. Byzantine funeral orations are notorious for their lack of information on the life of the deceased. Yet they never tell us absolutely nothing if we read them alertly, and they are sometimes remarkably informative on the ideas and values of the times. When the subject is a major figure of medieval Greek literature about the details of whose life we are very much in the dark, even the most trifling addition to our knowledge is welcome. It is this thought which encourages me to present a hitherto unknown Byzantine writer of the middle of the twelfth century—George Tornikes, Metropolitan of Ephesus—and to dwell in particular on his funeral oration on Anna Comnena.

It is now a recognised phenomenon in the study of ancient philosophy – especially of the Hellenistic period – that the various philosophical schools disseminated or fabricated stories about the life of their chosen founder which were supposed to embody the theories – especially the ethical theories – to which that school subscribed. This may be termed ‘biodoxography’: the presentation and manipulation of purportedly biographical anecdotes in order to illustrate a particular philosophical stance. This biodoxography could be used for various and sometimes conflicting ends. While a particular philosophical school might attempt to publicise and embody in the image of its founder what it thought was an attractive model for living, opponents of that school were encouraged by this very biodoxographical practice to scrutinise the details of a chosen figure-head's conduct in order to produce possible conflicts with the proposed doctrine. The greater the emphasis laid on the founder's life as a model and paradigm of a particular philosophy, the greater the profit in finding some contradiction between his behaviour and the doctrine of the school.

‘If I were to waste your time with a long conversation (si longo sermone morer tua tempora), I would be damaging the public interest.’ So Horace begins his Epistle to Augustus, typically selling himself short. He does not pause for breath for 270 lines. Equivocations like this about the sound of his own voice had been a particular characteristic of Horace's earlier books of ‘Conversations’, the Satires or Sermones, a teasing mixture of seemingly directionless rambling and forceful short cuts. Nowhere is this mixture more evident than in the fifth satire of the first book, a short story which apologises for being a long one, where Horace compensates his readers for a long haul with an ending that must leave them feeling short-changed.

Ceremonial life (contests and festivals) was a major preoccupation of the inhabitants of the cities of the Roman East in general and of Roman Asia Minor in particular. Processions meandered through the streets every week, and perhaps even every day, carrying processional statues and driving along sacrificial animals. The air was frequently filled with the smells and sounds of sacrificial banquets. In public places benches were set up, on which people sat to drink and eat together. On some days flocks of people could be seen rushing towards the theatre or the stadium, eager to take up their places in the auditorium, from where they could watch traditional Greek athletic or artistic contests. It must have seemed as though at any given time some part or other of the population was involved in some public ritual. The Greek city in the Roman period was – to borrow a phrase of Walter Burkert – a Festgemeinschaft, a festive community. Greek festive life was not the last resort of traditionalists, however, trying to insulate themselves from new and unpleasant social and political realities. Traditional Greek festivals were very much part of the contemporary world. I shall argue here that Greek festivals played a central part in civic life under Roman rule. I also intend to discuss how they were reformed and adapted to fit into a world where the centre of power was located in Rome. And finally, I want to assess their importance for the self-identification of the local élites.

This is a subject of great relevance to the proper understanding of the Greek cities' economy. So far, however, it has scarcely been given the attention it deserves in modern discussions. There is, too, a curious ambiguity in the Greeks' attitude to this activity. On the one hand, temple architecture was a public art, and temple building a cultural activity of great importance to Greek society. The patrons of temple building—aristocrats, tyrants, oriental potentates, citizens, or devotees of a Panhellenic cult—all were concerned not only for the end product of temple building, but also in the process itself, for the opportunity it gave of showing to the rest of the community, or to the world, that they had taken part in so complex, unusual, and costly an undertaking. There was merit in the building of temples, as much as in being able to boast their existence, once built.

The famous Sisyphus fragment of a tragedy or satyr play is one of the best known documents of ancient atheism, proposing as it does a social-constructionist theory of the emergence of religion as a form of social control. This article argues that the fragment should be seen not just as a philosophical contribution to Presocratic and sophistic thought on the gods, but also as a work of theatrical poetics: it alludes to Hesiod's foundational role in the articulation of Greek theology, self-reflexively explores the role of the literary author in the creation of belief systems, and unpacks the specific role of the theatre in the manufacture of images of divinity, not just through acting but also through technical effects such as the bronteion.

Nec Tityon uolucres ineunt Acherunte iacentem
nec quod sub magno scrutentur pectore quicquam
perpetuam aetatem possunt reperire profecto.
quamlibet immani proiectu corporis exstet,
qui non sola nouem dispessis iugera membris
obtineat, sed qui terrai totius orbem,
non tamen aeternum poterit perferre dolorem
nec praebere cibum proprio de corpore semper.
sed Tityos nobis hic est, in amore iacentem
quem uolucres lacerant atque exest anxius angor
aut alia quauis scindunt cuppedine curae.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III, 984–94

This paper is specifically concerned with the classical Latin panegyric, thus excluding both panegyrics from late antiquity, where the religious context is substantially different, and (at least in the first instance) panegyrical literature in Greek, with its distinctive linguistic and hence ideological background. I am, moreover, defining ‘panegyric’ to comprise only speeches in praise of a living person or persons: the religious status of living people, and the language applied to them, manifestly raise particular problems not present with other objects of praise.

But there are on the face of things difficulties with this definition. There is an obvious overlap between panegyrical speeches and other forms of oratory: themes of praise can clearly play a role, for example, in forensic speeches. Conversely, according to both ancient theorists and modern commentators, panegyrics can be used to give advice, either openly or covertly – the latter when, for example, one recommends future clemency to a tyrant under the guise of praising examples of clemency in the past. I shall be dealing only with speeches that are overtly panegyrical in form, those whose ostensible object is not persuasion, but simple praise; but the limitation seems rather artificial.

The whole question of the future of the East is full of interest, and is, perhaps, the greatest political question in the world.

(Benjamin Jowett)

… a corps of men specially selected, brought up in a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modern people have subjected their ruling class, trained by cold baths, cricket, and the history of Greece and Rome …

(Philip Mason)

In his essay ‘Comparativism and references to Rome in British imperial attitudes to India’, Javed Majeed shows how Greek and Latin figured prominently in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the prestigious administrative body that David Lloyd George called ‘the steel frame’. Greek and Latin were not just used to attract and shape a class of ruling ‘gentlemen’, but were also part of a complex structure of attitude and practice designed ‘to preserve the ICS as a monopoly of European officers’. Majeed's insightful essay sheds light on the role of ICS examinations and on the function of Classics in colonial contexts, although it is mainly about comparative approaches to the British and Roman empires.

This paper investigates the ‘prehistory’ of automata in fourth-century Greece. It argues, first, that automata appear more frequently in the philosophy and drama of this period than has usually been recognised; second, that robots function in classical Greek literature as a utopian substitute for slavery or other forms of bound labour; and, finally, that the failure of Hellenistic automata to realise this utopia illustrates some basic constraints on the power of technology to disturb social institutions in the ancient world.

Plato and Aristotle give different answers to the question ‘What are the substances (ousiai)?’. One way Aristotle defends his answer is by arguing that his candidate substances – particulars such as Socrates or Callias – better satisfy the criteria for substance than do Plato's candidates – eternal, unchanging, nonsensible universals called ‘Forms’. This defense goes along with another. For Aristotle disagrees with Plato, not only about the candidates, but also about the criteria, for substance: one reason Plato fastens on to the wrong candidates is that he focuses on some of the wrong criteria.

Aristotle mounts his defense in different ways in the Categories and Metaphysics. In both works he defends the priority of particulars. In the Cat., however, their nature is left unanalysed; and their priority is defended largely by appeal to unPlatonic criteria. In the Met., by contrast, Aristotle analyzes particulars into compound, form, and matter. Socrates, for example, may be viewed as a compound of his form (his soul) and his matter (his body); or he may be viewed as his form or soul. Further, Aristotle now invokes additional, Platonic criteria for substance; and this leads him to argue that it is Socrates as form that counts as primary substance; the primary substances are individual forms.

The twentieth century has been so begrudging to Timon of Phlius that he could be forgiven for identifying himself with his misanthropic namesake. About a hundred and fifty of his ‘glänzenden Sillen’ (the phrase is Wilamowitz's) survive, but in Albin Lesky's Geschichte der griechischen Literatur Timon gets only a third of the space devoted to Anaximander from whom we possess one possible sentence. Serious work on Timon largely came to a stop with Hermann Diels who edited the fragments and testimonia in Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (Berlin, 1901), a book which is as difficult to come by as the older and much fuller study of Timon by C. Wachsmuth in Sillographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1885). In spite of his skilful parody of Homer and his Aristophanic versatility in language (some sixty neologisms, many of them comic formations, occur in the fragments), Timon has been ignored by those who give such generous attention to Hellenistic poetry. Many fragments raise at least one major textual difficulty. A new edition and literary study of the material is badly needed.

In Memory of Moses and Mary Finley

Like many of its brothers in ambiguity, ‘the Black Hunter’ has a double birthday. Like the First international, it is a French child educated in England. As ‘Le Chasseur Noir’, this paper was first given in Paris, on 6 February 1967, at the Association pour l'Encouragement des Etudes Grecques, and, a year later (15 February 1968), in Cambridge at the Philological Society. I owe it to the truth to say that in Paris the audience remained mute. In Cambridge, on the contrary, there was a lively discussion, not only among the classicists but also with no less an anthropologist than Edmund Leach, now Sir Edumnd. A few months later the paper was first published in Cambridge, on the initiative of the late Denys Page, in a translation by Janet Lloyd and with a dedication to the late Moses Finley, and a little later in Paris. One may easily note here a structural opposition in the form of a chiasmus: in Cambridge, in the University where eminent classicists – Jane Harrison, Francis MacDonald Cornford – were also anthropologists, it was in a purely philological publication, the Proceedings, that the paper was published. In Paris, where the anthropological tradition of classical studies remained, with Louis Gernet and Henri Jeanmaire, and, more recently, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, outside the University proper, it was in the Annales that the paper was published.

The proliferation of white and coloured marbles in Rome and the provinces has received detailed attention from archaeologists, and the symbolism underlying the use and distribution of these marbles has been discussed at length by art historians. In addition, there are now several important catalogues of ancient Roman marbles. Their stones are presented attractively in full glory, using state-of-the-art printing technology, page after page of dazzling colour. In case the full extent of the polychromy is lost on the reader, descriptions and labels (particulary those coined in nineteenth-century Italy) reinforce this vivid connection between stone and colour - ‘giallo antico’, ‘rosso antico’, ‘porfido’, ‘scisto verde’, ‘nero antico’, ‘marmo bianco’, ‘greyish-blues’, ‘black limestone’, ‘dazzling white’, ‘rot’, ‘gelb’, ‘violett’. It is a very simple exercise for us to align colour and stone.