I argue in this article that the scholiast's claim (schol. in Pi. O. 6.88) that Pindar was ἰσχνόφωνος meant that he was believed to be a stammerer rather than a weak-voiced person. I have attempted to show how later commentators developed some points of Alexandrian critics’ judgement of Pindar's poetry into a conventional biographical reference to the poet's speech defect.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara's famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus' description of the sea-monster Scylla's lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa. The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode's elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses' poetics.

Current descriptions of social status in the Greek world are strongly influenced by the works of Moses I. Finley and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, whose models were grounded in the sociologies of Weber and Marx. This article outlines a new paradigm for social status based on a model from the social sciences, commonly described as status (in)consistency. The article demonstrates the descriptive and interpretive usefulness of this approach using two case studies: social status and social mobility in classical Lakedaimonian society; and the lives and status of Pasion of Acharnai and his son Apollodoros.

This article elucidates some of the author's editorial decisions in his revised Loeb edition of Seneca's tragedies. It explains his new thinking about the text and interpretation at Phoen 176–7, Med 891–2, Oed 403–4, Ag 481, Thy 1032, HO 1016; offers further defence of the author's interpretation at Phoen 23, Oed 178, 370, 942, Thy 46–8, Oct 47–8, 761; and re-evaluates fourteen further passages in the light of recent scholarship.

A new reading of a passage in Philodemus' Index Academicorum reveals that Philo of Larisa died in Italy during an influenza wave spreading over the entire world, a hitherto unknown fact. The new reading also allows for a reappraisal of the intriguing question of who was Philo's (institutional) successor. Furthermore, this reading offers improvements which, by illuminating the syntax and context, corroborate the interpretation of a participle construction as referring to a sojourn of Philodemus in Alexandria (PHerc. 1021, cols. 33.42–34.7).

Traditional accounts of Greek declamation paint this important imperial genre as a flight from the alleged impotence of Greek cities under Roman rule into a nostalgic fantasy of the autonomy of the classical past. But there is clear evidence of declaimers using their works to refer to the world outside the fiction, often to the immediate performance context, and above all to themselves. This paper examines examples from Aelius Aristides, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists and Polemo, and shows that such a practice facilitated vigorous and eloquent communication, while also allowing for any external message to be plausibly denied.

This article explores two contrasting accounts of the exposure of Cyrus the Elder: the lengthy version in Herodotus, replete with characteristics of the infancy of royal mythological heroes, and that in Isocrates’ Philippus, in which the ekthesis implies illegitimacy and inferiority, as part of Isocrates’ political agenda. Cyrus’ alleged exposure is an ideal case study for the ambivalence of infant exposure in classical Greek discourse, either to signify heroicity in an individual destined for greatness and the founding of a dynasty (as in Herodotus), or to allude to illegitimacy and so exclude the individual from civil society (as in Isocrates).

This article highlights the extent and significance of the intertextual relationship between reception narratives in Virgil's Aeneid (Aeneas and Evander) and Callimachus’ Aetia (Heracles and Molorcus) and Hecale (Theseus and Hecale). Encompassing Aeneas’ succession to Hercules as Evander's guest, his failed pledge to his host and his acquisition of a shield on which his historical successor, Augustus, is depicted, Callimachean intertextuality informs the narrative of the Aeneid in its widest sweep. As the archetypal scene of Homeric hospitality (Odysseus and Eumaeus) is received from Callimachus by the new Homer of Augustan Rome, the narrative of reception becomes one of intertextual and cultural appropriation, the dynamics of which are far from those of amicable exchange.

Many societies have a normative preference for close-kin marriage of one or another variety. Whether this was true of any part of the Roman world has been hotly debated in recent decades. Earlier scholarship suggests that marriage between close kin may have been considerably more common in some parts of the Roman world (e.g. Egypt) than in others (e.g. the Latin West). This paper assembles the evidence for close-kin marriage throughout the Asia Minor peninsula during the Roman Imperial period, and concludes that close-kin marriage – particularly in the form of FBD (father's brother's daughter) first-cousin marriage – may have been unusually common and/or normatively desirable in Lykia and neighbouring regions.

Because Diodorus’ Bibliothēkē was written as an epitome, it has been common practice to conduct a compartmentalised study of his work. One of the results of this overly simplified approach has been to segregate passages from the rest of the narrative, such as 18.9.3 where Leosthenes recruits mercenaries for the Lamian War. As a result, the intended meaning of the crucial phrase μετὰ πολλῆς ἡσυχίας has been missed and valuable insight into the event is overlooked. This paper argues that μετὰ πολλῆς ἡσυχίας in Diod. 18.9.3 means ‘without great urgency’, not, as some have interpreted it, as ‘very quietly’ or ‘secretly’.