Three main views have been put forward as attempts to answer the question what were the political affiliations of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. According to one view Callicles is seen as the very archetype of the tyrant and the oligarch, a man prepared to indulge in himself an unbridled lust for power, the absolute antithesis of the democrat and all that democracy stands for, giving expression to a doctrine, in the words of Grote, ‘not simply anti-popular – not simply despotic – but the drunken extravagance of despotism’. This view was associated with repeated attempts to identify Callicles with one or other of the known oligarchs in the fifth century – Critias being the favourite. Such attempts are now generally abandoned. But the overall view of Callicles' doctrine probably remains the orthodox one, at least in the English-speaking world, and the comparison with Nietzsche and Carlyle has become commonplace.

According to a second view, however, the opposite is the case – Callicles was not aristocratic, oligarchic or tyrannical in his views, rather he was a democrat, indeed even ‘the typical Athenian democrat’. Finally it is possible to distinguish a third view, according to which initially Callicles is presented as a champion of absolutism but is shown as undergoing ‘a strange transformation’ in the course of the dialogue to a position more in accord with ‘the growing love of equality’.

Almost everything we know of Michael Marullus – Greek exile, Neoplatonist, mercenary soldier – is mediated by his poetry, much of which seems positively to invite biographical decoding. The poet tells us he was conceived in the year Constantinople fell to the Turks (1453), after which his family fled, via Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), to Italy. Here he grew up under the Iliadae … tecta Remi (Siena?), received an excellent education, and from an early age was frequenting the humanist academy of Giovanni Pontano at Naples. Marullus reports that when just seventeen, fate tore him away from his studies and plunged him into a military career (Epig. 2.32.71–3). Between wars, both abroad and within Italy, he composed Latin poetry – including four books of controversial ‘pagan’ hymns –, edited Lucretius, and fraternised with such prominent figures in the literary and intellectual culture of the day as Jacopo Sannazaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Severed from an eventful life by a fittingly dramatic death, Marullus drowned in an attempt to cross the river Cecina in full flood. His poetic talents were much appreciated in his own time, for example by Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas More. The love lyrics to ‘Neaera’, though perhaps stiff and conventional to modern taste, inspired Ronsard. His untimely death drew Latin epitaphs from all over Italy.

A paradox is like a pun. It is also like a Delphic oracle. For in all three cases, we escape puzzlement, or spoil the joke, when we interpret, when we follow the tracks of the words and disentangle their meaning. So paradoxes are about words - either about the relation between one word and another, or about the relation between words and the world; and the punch of the paradox is delivered by its verbal content. Thus it is characteristic of a good paradox that its verbal content is vicious: paradoxes are very often self-referential, such as ‘Please ignore this notice’.

Paradoxes may be classified according to two main types. Firstly, there are the innocuous paradoxes which tell - or point the way to - a surprising truth. The Socratic Paradoxes, for example, are paradoxical because to say ‘No-one does wrong willingly’ is to contradict the phenomena. But deeper reflection upon Socrates' moral psychology and his account of the good life, might make us concede the truth of his dictum. Certainly it is Socrates' view that we all hold beliefs that entail his thesis. Similarly Heracleitus tells the truth that we cannot step into the same (in all respects) river twice; although if we concede that the waters may flow without damaging the identity of the river, what he says is false. Thus ordinary paradoxes tend to have two faces - their initial, paradoxical one, where they appear false, and their truth, apparent upon reflection.

This paper investigates differing forms of attention entailed by the ecphrastic gaze in epic and epigram as a way of considering issues of time and narrative as crucial elements of ecphrasis. Its first section focuses particularly on Paulinus of Nola, who has been almost wholly ignored in recent discussions of ecphrasis, but who not only provides the first example of an ecphrasis of an ecphrasis – the description of an ecphrastic inscription attached to a work of art – but also provides a set of poems which construct the viewer's experience of visiting a church. This is taken as exemplary of a new development of a Christian gaze, a new form of attention. The second section looks specifically at temporality in ecphrasis (through Pliny, Virgil, and epigram), to see how different ideas of time and the experience of looking are inscribed in different genres – which in turn expect and create different forms of knowing. The third section looks particularly at later Greek epigrams, Callistratus and Achilles Tatius, to see how different authors play with ideas of temporality and narrative explored in the first two sections of the paper. Together, these interrelated arguments demonstrate how investigating forms of attention and modes of temporality allows us to develop a more nuanced comprehension of ecphrasis as a historical and aesthetic expression.

This article examines the character and identity of Seneca's Medea. Focusing on the recognition scene at the end of the play, I investigate how Medea constructs herself both as a literary figure and as an implied human personality. The concluding scene of Seneca's Medea raises crucial questions about self-coherence and recognisability: in contrast to other moments of anagnōrisis in Greco-Roman drama, it confirms the pre-existing facets of Medea's identity, rather than revealing new ones. This concept of recognition as self-confirmation is also integral to Seneca's Stoic view of human selfhood, and Medea's use of Stoic principles in this play reinforces her dual status as textual entity and quasi-person.

For over 2000 years views of the Persian empire founded by Cyrus c. 550 B.C. and conquered by Alexander in the space of ten years between 334 and 323 have been constructed on the basis of Greek literary sources (in which I would include historical works, such as Herodotus' histories) and some sections of the Old Testament. Despite the fundamental ‘honesty’ of Herodotus' account, the fact that the focus of his history centered on the Greco-Persian conflict of 480/79 and aimed to explain the unexpected Persian defeat which had such enormous repercussions for Greek political and cultural development, means that his work serves to commemorate for us the ineffectiveness of the Achaemenid style of imperialism and to emphasize its ultimate failure. A failure epitomized at the very end of Herodotus' work (9.122), where Cyrus, the wise ‘father’ of the empire, is made to utter a prophetic warning about the enfeebling dangers of successful imperial expansion particularly when connected with the system of ‘oriental despotism’. The implication, given the detailed descriptions of Xerxes and the huge Persian army's defeat at the hands of a small number of Greeks, is that by the time of the Persian wars the rulers of the empire had lost their former rugged strength and had been seduced by the soft life offered them by the countries they had defeated: the conquerors had been taken captive by their victims and emasculated.

If we remember anything about Cicero's political ideas, it is that he believed in the right and duty of the senate to exercise supremacy in Rome, but that he also advocated a concordia ordinmi, an alliance between and recognition of the common interests of senators and equites, to whom property and the status quo were sacred. Closely connected with this is the idea of a consensus omnium bonorum, a wider alliance to include most of the plebs, and Italy. In the service of this ideal of unity he believed that the conservative statesman should be concordiae causa sapienter popularis, though he should consult the true interests of the people even more than their wishes; and that all government should be mild and conciliatory. These are the views by which we distinguish him from his more obstinate optimate contemporaries, above all Cato, who are less flexible, more rigidly reactionary. Although, since Strasburger's famous study of Concordia Ordinum, students of Cicero ought to have been prepared to pursue some of these beliefs of his back into the Roman past, too many historians and biographers still give the impression that they were Cicero's own invention (and an unhappy and unrealistic one too, it is often implied). But this is rash. Cicero, pace some of his detractors, was an intelligent man; but he was not a man of deeply original mind, as would be generally admitted. His greatness lay not in originality, but in the life and form that he could give to the Roman tradition, enriching or illuminating it, sometimes even criticising it, from his knowledge of Greek history and thought.

We should be chary therefore of supposing that Cicero's political programme was wholly his own; and, where a programme on a practical level is concerned, we should probably look more closely for Roman than for Greek sources. The first place to search is of course in a man's immediate family background, its position, traditions and contacts. This is true of all ages and places; but it is especially true of Rome. In the recent and justified reaction against the idea of fixed family parties, allied to or warring with certain other families from generation to generation, we are in danger of forgetting that family tradition in a broad sense was often very important. Cicero explains in the de officiis how one should imitate not only the maiores in general, but one's own maiores in particular – thus successive Scaevolae have become legal experts, and Scipio Aemilianus emulated the military glory of the first Africanus.

Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile at Aene.d 1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.

Satire is not ‘about’ women (or even ‘Woman’). But it is tied into social discourse on gender. If you ask me, feminism has it knocked into a cocked hat.

1. Roman, Human, Man:

The important thing is to have said I AM I, or even I AM AN I THAT IS IN WITH THE CROWD THAT LIKES TO SAY I AM LIKE THIS

It is not, I suppose, difficult to state the principle that no text can simply report, image, reflect or document the ‘position’ of women in culture. Nor would it be difficult to show that all writings, ancient or modern, are implicated in this truth. I feel it as I write, feel it as you read this.

In the first place, texts always do both more and less than ‘report’ – about anything. There could not be a text recognisable as a text which just offered information indifferently as to its recipients, impersonally so far as its authorship is concerned, neutrally in terms of its role within the social, political, cultural discourses which empower it to speak.

These two chapters (642 b 5–644 a 11) form a continuous argument in which Aristotle offers three reasons for rejecting ‘dichotomy’—a misnomer, as it turns out. It is the only passage where he mentions dichotomy, and the three reasons against it do not appear in his discussions of Division elsewhere. They are:

1. 1. The final differentia of a dichotomy is inadequate to mark out the species;

2. 2. Dichotomy cannot avoid splitting up natural kinds, like Birds;

3. 3. Dichotomy cannot make use of privative differentiae (στερήσεις).

The rest of his argument is in support of these three reasons, as I will try to show. It falls into separate sections in which he adduces various rules and practices of Division to show that if Dichotomy is properly conducted according to these rules it cannot work. The rules that he gives here are all found elsewhere, with one minor exception at 643 a 35 which is applicable only to zoology. Neither here nor elsewhere does he suggest that division in general is unsound or useless. (He denies that it can prove, but allows that it helps towards finding a definition, An. Pr. 1. 31; An. Post. 11. 5 and 13.) True, dichotomy is a particular kind of division. But having shown that it is useless in zoology, he replaces it with another kind of division.

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear.

It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce.

ALCMAN 58 (D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci) = 38 Bergk; 36 Diehl.

It is not Aphrodite, but wild Eros plays like a boy (or ‘like the boy he is’), coming down over the tips of the galingale flowers: don't touch them!

There are no serious textual variants; Bentley's παῖς looks a certain supplement. The context in which the fragment is quoted (Hephaestion 13. 6, p. 42 Consbr.) is a discussion of the cretic; the lines are cited as a metrical example, without reference to their meaning.

Meineke's comment on the passage was sensus non plane liquet, but it is tempting to go further, because this is the earliest extant reference to Eros at play, an idea that was to be interestingly influential in later poetry.

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

Altogether in his History Thucydides finds occasion to mention about 530 persons, of whom 496 are men, twenty-two are heroes, seven are gods and six are women. Most of these people are never introduced or described in any way, so that the mere presence of an introductory phrase or description in itself may be thought to have some significance. Especially, Thucydides is notoriously reticent about the private and personal affairs of his public characters; so that any exceptions to that rule ought to be interesting. Especially interesting, as I see it, is anything that he may see fit to tell us, that he evidently judges to be something we need to know about a man before he makes his first appearance, or before he begins the particular course of action that is just about to be described. That is the point of using the phrase ‘when introducing persons’ in the title of this paper.

In the closing chapter of his Greek tragedy in action Oliver Taplin writes:

Understanding, reason, learning, moral discrimination – these things are not, in my experience, incompatible with emotion (nor presumably in the experience of Gorgias and Aristotle): what is incompatible is cold insensibility […] our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning, are indivisible from them: they are simultaneous and mutually dependent.

On the other hand, Malcolm Heath's work inveighs against Taplin's suggestion of a balance between reason and emotion, and proposes

a third possibility: intense but ordered emotion, controlled not by intellectual interests, but by the coherence of the whole simply as an emotional experience, by the aesthetic satisfaction which the audience receives through its experience of the emotions as an ordered sequence.

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.

Comme tous les Grecs, il n'a pas pu ne pas embellir ce qu'il a touché. On retrouve en lui cet éminent esprit d'une race privilégiée qui dans les sujets les plus arides fait pénétrer l'art et même la poésie. … même en quittant … le Périple d'Arrien, nous pouvons dire comme Fuséli en quittant les marbres du Parthénon: ‘Ah! les Grecs, les Grecs, c'étaient des dieux.’ H. Chotard, Le Périple de la Mer Noire par Arrien

Arrian's Periplus maris Euxini (Circumnavigation of the Euxine) is an ambitious and unusual work. Written in the 130s AD in the form of a letter to the emperor Hadrian, who had himself visited the Black Sea a few years earlier, it was a literary complement to a report Arrian made in Latin, as governor of Cappadocia, on Rome's military position in the Black Sea. It is also unusual in its form: unlike most periploi, which are marked by continuity of movement and by a highly repetitive style, it is discontinuous both in its spatial movement and in its narrative style.

An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. [Sir Henry Wotton (Seventeenth century).]

A seemingly straightforward passage in Thucydides' history offers a good point of departure for the elucidation of an ambiguity which bedevils ancient texts but has received little attention in modern research:

After the disaster in the Sicel country (413 BC) the Syracusans gave up the idea of an immediate attack on the Athenians. Meanwhile Demosthenes and Eurymedon, now that their forces from Corcyra and from the mainland were ready, crossed the Ionian gulf with the whole of their expedition to the headland of Iapygia. Setting out from here, they put in at the Iapygian islands called the Choirades, and took on board 150 Iapygian javelin-throwers of the Messapian tribe. Then, after they had renewed an old friendship (ἀνανεωσάμενοί τινα παλαιὰν φιλίαν) with Artas, the local ruler who had provided the javelin-throwers, they went on and reached Metapontum in Italy. (Thuc. 7.33.3–4, adapted from the translation by Rex Warner, as are all quotations from Thucydides in this article)