This article demonstrates that the spatial category of depth is crucial for understanding Aeschylus' Persians. Underground spaces are often symbolically represented in Greek drama not only on a vertical axis but also by the interior of the stage-building (skene). By investigating the connections between ‘interiority’ and ‘depth’, this article argues that the most economical and effective reconstruction of Darius' apparition is to suppose that he emerged from the interior of the skene, whose existence at this date is often disputed. The article furthermore analyses the multifaceted concept of the earth in the Persians, to suggest new ways in which underground, ground and interior spaces can be connected holistically to other spatial and natural imagery.

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.

Zimmerman's edition of this extraordinary novel (Oxford 2012) offers a well-constituted text based on consistently reliable editorial judgement, together with a substantial and informative preface and a full bibliography. But the last critical word has never been said, and a study of Book I has thrown up the following selection of passages which it is suggested may deserve further editorial attention.

The third part of the Timaeus, where the account is focused on the cooperation of reason and necessity, has received far less attention than the opening two sections. Particularly, the description of irrigation, digestion and respiration constitutes a challenging passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by scholarly research. Virtually the only modern explanation for the passage was devised by Cornford, and despite several inaccuracies it has been unanimously accepted by all commentators. This paper will challenge Cornford's interpretation, and use some modern biological concepts to provide an alternative approach to the passage more compatible with an actual human body.

It has been suggested that the so-called tool analogy passage of Plato's Cratylus presents us with a moderate linguistic naturalism that can stand or fall independently of the more unpalatable etymological and mimetic theories advanced later in the dialogue. This paper offers a reading of the tool analogy which argues that Socrates' employment of Forms (and in particular Species-Forms), together with a careful distinction between the types of knowledge associated with making and using tools, aims to establish a radical linguistic naturalism that constrains the intrinsic properties of names. This should be clear if we take Socrates' claim seriously that names are tools: tools in general can only function successfully if they exhibit the relevant structural, compositional and (to some extent) material properties. Since Socrates claims that names are a class of tools and not merely like tools in some respects, as many have supposed, then what holds for tools in general must also hold for names.

This paper contends that Horace's comparison of his completed poetic monument to pyramids at the end of Odes 1–3 is both figurative and literal insofar as we possess ample art historical, literary and papyrological evidence from antiquity for the stacking of an appropriate number of book (sc)rolls in ‘pyramidal’ form. Most notable in this regard is the dedication to Delian Apollo of a triangular casket containing the ten books of Aristarchus' edition of Alcaeus, whose resonances with the Pythagorean τετρακτύς, and implications for Horace's own oeuvre, are duly explored.

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.

John Toland's Description of Epsom (1711) is one of the most remarkable creative responses, ancient or modern, to Pliny's Epistles. Drawing on the villa letters and the collection as a whole for both topographical description and self-styling, Toland moulds himself after an intensely ruralist – and strikingly Horatian – Pliny. This article reads Epsom together with Toland's translations from the Epistles (1711–12) as a case study in reception which can also shed fresh light on Pliny's own epistolary self-portraiture.