In this paper I shall review some common expressions of scepticism or disbelief, as they are used in Greek literature. I shall argue that these are frequently not at all what they purport to be, and express not disbelief but some quite different attitude. I shall then try to show how this applies to some apparent expressions of scepticism about myth or religion in Euripides.

Suppose someone tells me a powerful real life story about a Cabinet Minister or the President of the United States. I might respond with a number of expressions which purport to cast doubt on its truth— ‘incredible’, ‘fantastic’, ‘I don't believe it’, ‘I can't believe it’, and so on—but in fact simply comment on the striking, surprising, shocking or truth-is-stranger-than-fiction aspects of the story, and no more deny its truth than would, e.g., ‘amazing, Holmes!’ Indeed, ‘I can't believe it’ generally means that the speaker does believe it, for good or ill. Again, suppose I say ‘I can't believe that a Parliament House will be built in Swansea’.

‘Le fondateur du Lycée était à Athènes un métèque; cette position marginale est pour quelque chose dans son détachement et sa lucidité.’ Thus a recent and stimulating commentary upon the economic and social structure of Greek society, in a formulation of the obvious difference between Plato's participation in and Aristotle's observation of contemporary political phenomena. In one area, however, it was Aristotle rather than Plato whose experience was the more direct – that of life, over a prolonged period, as a resident alien. In this brief παίγνιον I shall pursue the Aristotelian side of this contrast along three paths: (a) Aristotle's exact juristic status in Athens; (b) the feelings aroused by his presence there; and (c) what he himself has to say on the subject of metics and foreigners. I advise the reader to derive what satisfaction he may from the journeys themselves, for no startling revelations await him ἐν τριπλαἴς ἁμαξιτοῖς.

How do women enter the discourse of Augustan love poetry and become elegiac? Studies of the representation of women in antiquity generally suggest that women enter its literatures doubly determined. Broadly speaking, literary representations of the female are determined both at the level of culture and at the level of genre: that is to say by the range of cultural codes and institutions which order the female in a particular society and by the conventions which surround a particular practice of writing. I propose in this paper, therefore, to explore the place of the elegiac woman in the literary landscape of Augustan Rome through an examination of the interplay of her cultural and generic determinants. The phrase ‘the elegiac woman’ which appears in the title of this paper should make clear at the outset that my concern will be not with the realities of women's lives in Augustan society but with a poetic genre of the female.

The Phaedrus falls by design into two distinct movements. The first movement includes three set speeches, one a written speech which claims to be by Lysias, the other two given impromptu by Socrates; the second then uses these speeches as the basis for a general discussion of rhetoric and of the value of writing as a medium of communication and teaching. Whatever else we may want to say about the structure of the dialogue, this much is clear enough. But there is a problem. So powerful is the impact of Socrates' second speech, with its eloquent account of divine love and the peregrinations of the immortal soul, that everything which follows it is likely to appear to any ordinary reader as mostly dull and insignificant by comparison. If Socrates suggests, as he does at 265c-d, that the only fully serious aspect of the speech was as a demonstration of the method of collection and division, the rest being ‘really playfully done, by way of amusement’, that looks merely disingenuous; for it is hard not to feel, with Ficino, that it is in this main speech of Socrates the ‘principal mysteries’ of the Phaedrus are contained. Yet if this is so, the dialogue is intolerably misshapen.

Two artistic competitions in the Metamorphoses, those between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus (5.250–678) and between Arachne and Minerva (6.1–145), are now widely recognised as exploiting familiar generic differentiations. Ovid's treatment of these differentiations is further seen to have a bearing on establishing the elusive poetic identity of the whole poem, and to locate that identity firmly within the Roman response to Alexandrian poetics. The significance of these sections for the literary programme of the Metamorphoses has been persuasively argued by H. Hofmann and E. W. Leach for the Arachne competition, and more recently by Hofmann and S. Hinds for the Pierides. It is now clear how wide the range of literary forms represented at this pivotal point in Metamorphoses actually is, at the close of the first pentad and at the start of the second. Each of the episodes spanning this juncture has its winning and losing side, and there is an obvious way in which the positive and negative judgements in an artistic competition refine the reader's literary discrimination: the outcome of the contests encourages us to see in the competition itself at least an implicit comment on the relative qualities of the participants.

‘Lord Proteus: the saviour of the Hellenes, this watchman of Pharos, was built by Sostratos, son of Dexiphanes, a Cnidian. In Egypt there are no mountain-peaks, as in the islands: but low lies the breakwater where ships may harbour. Therefore this tower, cleaving the sky straight and upright, shines in the daytime countless leagues away: and all night long the sailor who runs with the waves shall see a great light blazing from its summit. And he may run even to the Bull's horn, and yet not miss the god of safety, O Proteus, whosoever sails this way.’

So, in Denys Page's translation, runs the contemporary commemoration by Poseidippos of Pella of the Pharos of Alexandria, the lighthouse which formed one of the wonders of the ancient world. So too, choosing as a continuing theme the most striking monuments of the new Ptolemaic regime in Egypt, the same poet commemorated the temple of Arsinoe-Aphrodite on Cape Zephyrion, east of the city ‘midway between the beach of Pharos and the mouth of Canopos’, whence the lock of Queen Berenike was soon to disappear.

1.1 Dialectical diversity is common to all languages. It comes about when groups of speakers of the same language become isolated from one another and from the conformist pressures of an administrative or cultural centre. The tendency to local change can be accelerated by the presence nearby of another language and the growth of bilingual interaction in settled conditions over several generations. Like linguistic change in general, dialectal diversity tends to be retarded by improved communications and a universal homogeneous education system.

1.2 Modern dialect geographers go about their work with a questionnaire, a tape-recorder and a note-book, listing items of pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and syntax that distinguish particular localities from one another. If their aim is not the purely linguistic one of establishing an underlying diasystem and the range of variation within it, but is more concerned with the sociological aspects of the linguistic data, then they will plot the dialectical variations against the ‘standard’ language, viz. the dialect which because of its association with an administrative or cultural capital has in an elaborated and artificial form acquired prestige and dominance throughout the whole speech community. If researchers find that their information is incomplete, they can simply return to the field with further questions.

I wish to argue that the year 490 saw two battles of Marathon. In the first instance, the Persians marched against the Greeks shortly after the latter had taken up a strong defensive position at the Marathonian Herakleion, but were counter-attacked by the Greeks, this fight being Delbrück's Defensiv-Offensiv-Schlacht. After this unsuccessful attempt to take Athens, the Persians resolved to set sail and try again from the opposite coast. After some days, when most of the forces had gone on board the ships, the Greeks launched a night attack upon the remaining troops; this was the battle of Curtius. The Persians were then prevented from landing at Phaleron by the Athenian fleet; this is a variant of the Maas–Raubitschek battle.

In the general revaluation of Ovid's poetry that began in earnest with the publication of Hermann Fränkel's book in 1945, and received a vigorous impetus from the celebrations attending the bimillenary of his birth in 1958, the poetry of his later years has not adequately shared. Even Mr Wilkinson's warm sympathies have not been moved to more than what, with great respect, I would call a somewhat perfunctory appraisal: for his chapter on the poems of exile, though not unjust, gives the reader no idea of how good some of the best of them are and—which perhaps is more important—why and how they are good. In a word, I do not believe that this poetry has yet been read with the critical attention that is its due, and a glance at the relevant pages of L'Année Philologique for the past thirty years or so reinforces this impression. Not that no opinions respecting it are on record. For instance, in the Preface to A. Scholte's edition of Book 1 of the Epistulae ex Ponto (Amersfurt, 1933) will be found a substantial section entitled ‘Iudicia de Epistulis ex Ponto’, in which are recorded the opinions of editors and readers ranging from Edward Gibbon to P. J. Enk. Such doxographies tend to recur in editions of classical writers: a recent example is to be found in Raoul Verdière's very disappointing edition of Grattius (Wetteren, [1964]). What value they have is not critical but historical—and also, indirectly, admonitory: for they ought to remind us of our obligation to read the poems for ourselves, looking for enlightenment not to the experience of previous readers but to our own experience in the light of the guidance provided by the poet.

Ancient divination had something of the status of modern science. Diviners, like scientists, were expected to offer public comment on all manner of subjects, from strange meteorological phenomena to proposals for military campaigns, from shooting stars to Star Wars. In both cases this public responsibility is based upon a supposed expertise in prediction. And the arguments of those ancient philosophers who attempted to justify such a status for divination run in some ways remarkably parallel to those of modern philosophers who have attempted to justify such a status for science. Thus we are told both by Stoics and by modern Scientific Realists that the world forms a single and unitary physical system, with nothing outside it to prevent the course of events from unfolding in accordance with the adamantine regularities which are the laws whereby nature operates. This determinism, and its consequence that the entire future of the world is already prefigured in the current state of things, makes it possible for us now to tell what will happen later. And that possibility is realised. Scientific predictions, we are told, may not be uniformly correct, but they are correct too often for that to be due to chance. The predictions of diviners, one must likewise concede, are not uniformly correct: nonnumquam ea quae praedicta sunt minus eueniunt (Cicero, De Divinatione, 1.24).

διπλῶς όϱῶσιν οί μαθόντες γϱάμματα

Menandri Sententiae, number 180 in Pernigotti (2008) 234.

This proverb, attributed to Menander in a Byzantine collection, points to the simple paradox of reading: readers are able to see both the shape of letters and the meaning conveyed by them. How does mind get from visual recognition to the recognition of meaning? The step sounds incredibly simple when we make it, but becomes exceedingly complex to explain. Strangely enough, the step is not executed in the same way for all languages and scripts.

The ability to recognise shapes must be assisted by the interpreting activity of specific parts of the brain. A famous nineteenth-century medical case tells the story of a ‘French Businessman and amateur musician who woke up one day to discover that he could barely read a word’; as a consequence of a stroke, he could ‘no longer read words, name colours, or read musical notes, despite having completely intact vision’ (Wolf (2008) 171). Vision is thus a necessary but not sufficient requisite for reading.

Different systems of writing make use of different parts of the brain. Another case tells us yet again about a businessman ‘proficient in Chinese and English’ who ‘suffered a severe stroke in the posterior areas. What was amazing to all at the time was that this patient, who had lost his ability to read Chinese, could still read English’. In fact, people reading alphabetic scripts use some specific parts of the brain, whereas others are active when people read logographic script. In the Japanese writing system, two syllabaries (Katakana; Hiragana) as well as a large set of ideographic characters (Kanji) are used side by side, activating different parts of the brain when each of the types of characters (syllabary or ideographic signs) occurs.

The present paper explores two main areas: the cognitive implication of the lack of spaces between words in ancient Greek script; the length of the line in prose texts, in musical texts, and in lyric texts (colometry). I will offer a short presentation of some basic concepts about the cognitive aspects of reading (section I), before discussing the textual layout of papyri (sections 2–7).

In their speech dissuading the Athenians from the Corcyraean alliance the Corinthians are represented by Thucydides (1, 40,5) as saying:

The significance of this passage for Corinthian policy has often been noted, but its bearing on that of Sparta seems to have been ignored. The occasion to which allusion is made is evidently a formal congress of the Peloponnesian League; the language is explicit—the Peloponnesian cities are divided in their vote, Corinth does not record her vote against Athens, but speaks on her behalf. From the detailed account of the preliminaries of the Peloponnesian war we know the procedure of the League. A complainant first applied to Sparta (1, 67), the Spartan assembly voted (1, 87), and if its vote were favourable, the Spartan government summoned a congress of the allies (1, 119), whose vote was taken (1, 125). If this vote were also favourable, the League took action. The machinery was evidently so designed that Sparta could not be committed to a war without her prior consent, nor could she commit the League to a war without the agreement of the majority of its members.

When Alexander was civilising Asia, Homer was commonly read, and the children of the Persians, of the Susianians and of the Gedrosians learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. And although Socrates, when tried on a charge of introducing foreign deities, lost his cause to the informers who infested Athens, yet through Alexander Bactria and the Caucasus learned to revere the gods of the Greeks. Plato wrote a work on the one ideal constitution, but because of its forbidding character he could not persuade anyone to adopt it; but Alexander established more than seventy cities among savage tribes and sowed all Asia with Grecian magistracies, and thus overcame its uncivilised and brutish manner of living.

These familiar words of Plutarch (Mor. 328 D-E, Loeb) begin to seem not quite as foolish as they did, in the light of modern discoveries in Ai Khanum and Kandahar. They may thus serve to raise some larger questions. Firstly, it is curious how Plutarch concentrates on remote central Asian areas which were no longer Hellenised in any obvious sense in his own day. Secondly he emphasises, as we would expect, the creation of new cities with Greek constitutions. Here we might well turn to a neglected passage of his older contemporary, Josephus, concluding his account of the tower of Babel (Ant. 1. 121).

This paper sets out to contribute to our understanding of the way exempla functioned in Roman culture through a close study of ethics in our only major extant collection of exempla from ancient Rome, Valerius Maximus' Facta et dicta memorabilia. I develop what Matthew Roller in a recent article calls the ‘discourse of exemplarity’ by demonstrating what Valerius Maximus can tell us about the dynamic process of reading and learning from exempla in ancient Rome, and also by suggesting that one role of exempla in Roman culture was to promote ethical deliberation within a tradition of ‘controversial thinking’. The main part of the paper analyses Valerius' treatment of the theme of seueritas and his presentation of pertinent exempla (especially in chapters 2.7 and 6.3) in order to illustrate the claims about Valerius' work and about Roman exempla more generally that I shall outline in this introductory section. In summary my contention is that Valerius' arrangement of exempla in sequence under ethical categories is designed to tell Roman readers not simply what to think but how to think ethically, enabling Roman readers both to explore the scope of those moral categories and to develop their skills of moral reasoning.

‘Diktys of Crete’ is a fictionalised prose account of the Trojan War. It does not enjoy a high profile in modern thought, but looms large in Byzantine and mediaeval histories of the Troy matter. Although the ‘Latin Dictys’ has enjoyed a moderate revival in recent scholarship, the Byzantine testimony to Diktys is still badly neglected. The present article focuses on: (1) a general overview of the Greek Diktys, including up-to-date information on dating; (2) a comprehensive list of witnesses to Diktys (the first list of its kind for over a century, and the first ever in English); (3) some problems relating to Book 6 of the ‘Latin Dictys’; and (4) an overview of the Sisyphosfrage, that is, the question of the role of ‘Sisyphos of Kos’ in the transmission of the Greek Diktys.

When Mardonius sailed along the coast of Asia and arrived in Ionia, something happened that will seem very wondrous to those Greeks who find it impossible to accept that Otanes proposed to the seven Persians that Persia ought to have a democratic government: for Mardonius suppressed all the Ionian tyrannies and established democracies in the cities. (Herodotus 6.43.3)

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the influence of contemporary Roman mime on Augustan elegy. I shall present evidence and arguments for believing that the elegists exploited that genre directly and deliberately, to provide themes and situations in their poetry. Before, however, considering the influence of specific mime-subjects on specific elegies, I shall show that contemporary mime is precisely the sort of literary production which we should expect to find exploited in elegy. This apologia for mime is a necessary preliminary, because of the entrenched prejudice against the genre as a trivial sub-literary form of entertainment, far beneath the notice of such highly sophisticated poets as the elegists. This prejudice arises from a simple semantic flaw: the term mimus, μĩμος, has always been used to cover a multitude of different types of production. Under this general title, works of a high literary quality have been categorised without discrimination alongside strip-tease and even less intellectual displays. In consequence of this, the higher forms of mime have suffered unfairly from the attacks directed by moralists against the corrupting effects of the lower forms.

This article scrutinises one of the most challenging theses of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be (or appear to be) ‘justified’. Through a close examination of the work's frequently masked revaluation of a series of Greek sources of thinking, not least its ‘inversion’ of both the metaphysics and the aesthetics of Plato's Republic, the article shows how the thesis of aesthetic ‘justification’ is caught up in a tension between Apolline and Dionysian interpretations, the first entailing a quasi-Homeric sense that the Olympians justify human existence by living a transfigured form of it themselves, the second involving a tragic insight into reality as itself the creative work of a ‘world-artist’, the latter allusively associated by Nietzsche with the philosophy of Heraclitus.

It is a commonplace of textbook treatments of mood and modality to point out that many languages employ ‘past tense’ forms to express not only temporal but also modal remoteness (i.e. unreality or potentiality) from the ‘here-and-now’, e.g. Lyons (1977: 809–23), Palmer (1986: 208–15). The same observation, mutatis mutandis, may apply to certain modal forms, which, given an appropriate context, can also refer to the past. The verb forms in English conditional sentences such as that in (1):

(1) If Mary went to the bar, she would drink too much.

provide an excellent example of both types of ‘extended’ usage; cf. the two possible readings of (1) given in (2):

(2)(a) If (ever) Mary went to the bar, she used to drink too much.

(b) If Mary were (ever) to go to the bar, she would drink too much.

The age of Nero is universally considered – even by its more circumspect modern historians – to be a zenith of decadence. This view is not simply the invention of modern writers. It is one point on which the ancient sources, not only historians from Tacitus to Cassius Dio, but also biographers such as Suetonius and poets like Martial, are agreed. One problem with the almost monotonous tale of vice, sexual and gastronomic excess, cruelty and murder, by which Nero's reign has been characterised, is that this is a story written by the winners in the turmoil which followed Nero's fall. It is hardly, in other words, an objective or unbiased account.