Excavations at Lefkandi have dispelled much of the gloom enshrouding the Early Iron Age, revealing a community with significant disposable wealth and with connections throughout the Mediterranean. The eastern imports in particular have drawn scholarly attention, with discussion moving from questions of production and transportation to issues surrounding consumption. This article draws attention to some limitations in prevalent socio-political explanations of consumption at Lefkandi, arguing that models relying on gift-exchange, prestige-goods and elite display cannot adequately account for the distribution, chronology, find context and function of imports at Lefkandi. A study of trinkets – small but manifestly foreign imports of cheap material – offers a new perspective. An analysis of their form, context, use and meaning demonstrates that trinkets were meaningfully and deliberately deposited with children as talismans or amulets. Talismanic practice had Late Bronze Age precedents, and in the Early Iron Age was stimulated from personal contact with the Near East or Cyprus and nurtured by the unique mortuary landscape at Lefkandi. This article demonstrates the need for archaeologists to treat mortuary beliefs as a meaningful explanatory variable. Moreover, the ability of non-elite objects to convey powerful ideas has important implications for the nature and dynamics of artistic and cultural exchanges between Greece and the East in the Iron Age.

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.

This article presents new insights into two aspects of the life of Darius III. In the first section, Darius’ presentation as a ‘slave’ in one source tradition is argued to be a delegitimising trope aimed at presenting him as an unworthy king, even though all Persians could be regarded as slaves of the monarch. In the second, Justin's use of cognati to describe those who betrayed Darius is interpreted, in the light of other accounts of Gaugamela's aftermath, as possibly being an allusion not just to blood-relatives but also to the cavalry guard, known as the ‘Kinsmen’ (συγγενεῖς = cognati).

Five forms of the modal particle are attested in ancient Greek (ἄν, κε, κεν, κᾱ, and κ’). This article argues that ἄν is an inherited particle, and that the k-forms were the result of reanalysis of prevocalic οὐκ and εἰκ (i.e. εἰκ was reanalysed as εἰ κ’), supported by the vestiges of an old topicalising/conditional force of the IE particle *kwe (which appears elsewhere in Greek as connective τε). The attested forms in Greek grew out of *kwe in contexts where an adjacent u caused the labiovelar *kw > k (West Greek κᾱ was influenced by indefinite *kwā). The form κεν is a creation of epic diction.

Homer plays an important role in the discussion in the Hippias Minor of voluntary and involuntary action and their relation to knowledge and goodness. This paper argues that the Hippias Minor sheds light on the Homeric criticism of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, and that it looks forward to, and significantly influenced, the tradition of Hellenistic and later Homeric criticism, for which our best witnesses are the Homeric scholia. This article considers Socrates' presentation of Achilles and Odysseus in the Hippias Minor and makes the case, more strongly than it has been made before, that this dialogue was an important influence on the later critical tradition.

The only two authoritative manuscripts of Ammianus Marcellinus to survive to the present day were produced in Germany in the first half of the ninth century: Vaticanus Latinus 1873 from Fulda (V), and a fragmentary manuscript from Hersfeld now preserved in Kassel (M). This article challenges the consensus that V is a copy of M. Taking into account recently uncovered fragments of M (new transcriptions of which are offered in the Appendix), we argue that both are copies of the same damaged original, and discuss the implications for the editing of Ammianus and for our understanding of Carolingian scholarship.

This paper concerns Horace's treatment of ‘the mean’ in Satires 1.2: his ironic demonstration of its elusiveness and changeability in the first part of the satire; and how this leads to the alignment of Epicurean moderation with a framework most associated with Aristotle. I argue that the irony in the sometimes apparently illogical, humorous expression of Peripatetic and Hellenistic ethics complements the satire's other ironic inconsistencies, while nevertheless serving a serious underlying philosophical purpose which some recent scholarship has denied.

Monumental weathervanes have been overlooked as a tiny but important genre of ancient bronze sculpture. This is the first collective study of all three definite examples: the so-called ‘triton’ on the Tower of the Winds in Athens, a copy of this somewhere in Rome and the winged female ‘Anemodoulion’ on the Bronze Tetrapylon in Constantinople. I propose to identify the intended subjects of these sculptures as the weather-deities Aiolos and Iris, thereby restoring a part of each monument's original meaning that was unknown to the authors of our ancient written accounts. I also suggest that monumental weathervanes were first invented in Hellenistic Alexandria, which may explain why the Tower of the Winds shared the octagonal design of the Pharos, and why the Anemodoulion was mounted upon a bronze pyramidion.

Damnatio memoriae, the ill-defined group of processes that we often now refer to by the term ‘memory sanctions’, is generally thought of in wholly negative terms. It is imagined as a process of destruction, of erasure, and of silence. Yet these complex assaults on the memory of fallen enemies were far more than simply destructive processes. Through the example of Magnus Maximus (383–8) and his commemoration in Rome and Constantinople during the reign of Theodosius I, this article considers how memory sanctions could be generative of historical material and how emperors used oratory, ceremony and triumphal architecture to memorialise their fallen enemies.

Greek poets of the archaic period, though often characterised as amateur aristocrats, could also seek to present themselves as professionals – regular practitioners of a specialist skill (τέχνη). In this capacity, the poet is understood to work primarily for the benefit of the community (either his own or, more commonly, those through which he travels). In return for these services, he expects to receive both a special status and material rewards (though financial gain is not presented as his main motivation). The poet's professional status thus forms one part of his identity and is a source of respect in the ancient city.