The present article aims to show that several passages of Greek tragedy make use of language present in the Getty Hexameters, especially in contexts where incantations and protection of the city are mentioned. The Getty Hexameters were written on a lead tablet at the end of the fifth century BC in Sicily (Selinus or, more likely, Himera). The article argues that the composition of the text predates the lead tablet by several decades (section 2). It focuses on similarities in structure and language that involve Soph. fr. 535 (section 4), Aeschylus’ Oresteia (section 5), Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (section 6) and Euripides’ Hecuba (section 8). It also suggests that Plato (section 7) and late antique poetry and prose (section 9) reuse some of the linguistic elements of the incantatory tradition of the Getty Hexameters.

After some notes on the remarkable linguistic difficulties encountered by ancient Athenian readers of Sophron's text, this article will deal with the textual and interpretative problems posed by two fragments of the mimes that are more significant than it may appear at first sight. It is argued that a verbal form transmitted in fr. 86 K–A, whose correctness has systematically been doubted, is in fact linguistically unassailable and used in the description of an ambush that might be either military or metaphorical. As to fr. 50, once the correct reading of the principal verb has been established, we recover a subtle metaphor used by a character in a mime to criticise those who make hasty speculations about things unknown –something that reveals a sophistication rarely encountered in other fragments, and provides us with a glimpse into the reasons why Sophron's mimes enjoyed such respect in antiquity.

This article explores an important aspect of the constellation of elements that contribute to the construction of the image of ‘Sappho’ from antiquity to the twentieth century, that of Sappho's ultimate destiny after her fatal leap from the Rock of Leucas. I first argue that the story of Sappho's leap lies behind the description of the Underworld in a long fragment of a fifth-century Attic comedy, the Miners of Pherecrates, and that indeed ‘Sappho’ appeared as a character in the play. The next sections examine the background and the iconic function of Sappho's leap in the underground Basilica near Porta Maggiore in Rome and connects all these elements to the way in which the Underworld is represented in Sappho's textual fragments. The fifth section of the article deals with the ways in which Sappho's fate was reconfigured from the Renaissance onward, examining first visual, musical and dramatic representations. In the final part I focus on the ways the motif is transformed by Baudelaire and Yourcenar. The image of the poetess can shift from being an icon of an eschatological message of new life to one of an exemplary failure, two poles that have an impact both on the reception of classical antiquity and on the vision of the destiny of poetry itself.

The upswing in brief forms of literature in the early Roman principate is marked. From Ovid to Velleius Paterculus, Phaedrus to Valerius Maximus, this aesthetic trend seems to transcend genre. Such a phenomenon has thus far been understood as arising from either the pressures of literary tradition or the transformations in the organisation of elite knowledge. This article disagrees. It posits a new prospective causality behind the eruption in brevity, namely the state of slavery and its time-conscious way of being in the world. The article performs a close comparative reading of Phaedrus’ Fables alongside Velleius Paterculus’ Compendium of Roman History to show how brevity and its suspension can be understood as formal constraints, acts of service and redemptive aesthetic coping modes – all determined by the historical conditions of enslavement. It concludes with a coda on the general association of poetry with bondage and constraint in the late Republic and early Empire.

Five conjectures are proposed on the text of the third book of Propertius, one a slight alteration of an idea already proposed, four mainly original contributions: 1.23 postremo for post obitum, 4.18 supra uinctos for subter captos, 8.13 seu grege custodum for custodum gregibus (custodum grege seu Heinsius), 10.13 somnos for somnum, 11.40 adulta canis for adusta nota. One additional conjecture is made in passing on the text of Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.4.104, where duces probably ought to be read for uiros.

This article analyses orthographic variation in the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace of Pylos. Despite the general consistency in spelling found in Linear B texts from all sites, variation was in certain cases both permissible and entirely normal, even within the work of a single writer. Examining the patterns of orthographic variation found in the texts from Pylos, along with the factors which may have influenced this variation, sheds light on how the Mycenaean scribes were taught to write and how they applied this training in the process of creating their documents.

This article examines two ‘digressions’ within the Letter of Aristeas: the description of the gifts which Ptolemy sends to the Jerusalem Temple (§§51–82) and the survey of the Jerusalem Temple, the city and the Judaean countryside, including the final comments on Persian mining on the Arabian border (§§83–120). I propose that Aristeas envisions the Alexandrian artworks as an imperial subject and that, by juxtaposing the two passages, he comments on the imperial machinations that attend the production of artworks. In concluding I suggest that this anxiety about material cultural production in an imperial context has ramifications for the Letter's central narrative of literary cultural production: the Alexandrian creation of the Septuagint.

Philostratus’ Heroicus betrays an obsession with statues that demands explanation. Just as cult statues of epic heroes litter the contemporary second-century CE landscape, so do they litter Philostratus’ text. No story of a hero is distinct from an ecphrasis of that hero's statue, and in practice a request for the one is a request for the other. Lifeless heroes (Protesilaus first and foremost) become vividly ‘alive’ in the imagination of their devotees and, occasionally, their Zoilean adversaries. As the lines between reality and fantasy blur, Philostratus’ critique of material cultural practices accompanies and fortifies his better known Homerkritik.

P.Herc. 1384 preserves an ethical work focusing on the wise man's lifestyle. This work, which had formerly been attributed to the Epicurean Philodemus, has recently been proven to be Stoic instead, and has been assigned to either an early or a second-century BC Cynicising Stoic philosopher. This article, while confirming the Stoic authorship of P.Herc. 1384, shows that it can only belong to Chrysippus or one of his immediate successors and brings forward new evidence in favour of Chrysippus himself. In particular, several arguments allow us to advance an identification with book 1 of his lost Peri biōn.

Tony Woodman's commentary has provided a convincing explanation of the apparently contradictory message of Odes 3.6. If the closing stanza does indeed allow the corruption of Roman morals to be reversed, the poem is best understood as a contribution to the celebrations in February 28 BC of Imperator Caesar's vow to restore the temples that had been allowed to fall into neglect by the corrupt oligarchy defeated in the civil wars. The widely held belief that Horace's references to performance are all metaphorical is shown to be unjustified.

Greek comedy is full of quotable maxims. According to a literal reading, the comedians might be seen as custodians of traditional gnomic wisdom, along with their tragic counterparts. Nevertheless, it is argued here that maxims in comedy are different from maxims in other contexts. Comic maxims typically appear ‘within inverted commas’, not just in a literal sense (because of their inherent ‘quotationality’) but in a figurative sense (because of their pervasive irony and self-consciousness). Examples from Menander, Antiphanes, Diphilus and others are used to demonstrate that the comedians can be seen as playing around with the content and form of traditional wisdom. Sometimes they seem to be poking fun at the maxim as a medium of expression, or at tragic maxims, or at the habit of quotation itself.