Quaeritis unde is a good opening for a book of the Fasti (5.1). The question and answer form here exemplified is basic to the poem, even if in the classic Callimachean form from which Ovid draws his inspiration it is the poet who asks the questions – and this in fact happens with the exhortation dicite in line 7. But this quaeritis unde has also, I believe, an allusive value: it opens another book of elegiac poetry, Propertius' second book, where it is the more remarkable as an opening in that as far as we know it is the earliest example of a direct address to the reader in Roman poetry.

The purpose of this allusion becomes clear if we take a wider look at the two contexts. In the first elegy of his second book Propertius inserts a celebrated negation of the Musenweihe:

non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo (2.1.3)

while Ovid, on the contrary, is just about to consult Calliope and her sisters. The allusion offers other points of interest if we consider the subsequent development of Propertius' poetics.

This note offers an answer to the problem of apparent disorder in Book 2 of Propertius by disclosing a principle of order that underlies it. The observations that follow tend to confirm the internal unity of some elegies, to indicate the divisions to be perceived at some points between one elegy and the next, and to suggest the probability or otherwise of some conjectured transpositions. They may also aid interpretation by suggesting what movement within an elegy was intended by the poet to be felt.

The area of observation has been restricted to Elegies 1–25 because it is possible to show that within that area an identifiable principle of composition has been applied consistently. It cannot be assumed without further consideration that a principle found to be applicable within the defined area is applicable outside it, even in this book, still less in the other books of the Elegies.

The symbol:‘/’, for ‘Antithesis’, is used throughout this essay to indicate the main alternations in its voicing. What I have in mind is to project the contentiousness that constitutes narration through this discussion of Statius' epic. ‘/’ will mark exchange between the (binary/convergent) views of an ‘Eteocles’ and a ‘Polynices’, then, yes, but also between warring textual ‘forces’ such as uirtus / planctus, etc. / etc. For faction and fraction / threaten to / multiply in, and as, ‘Thebaid’ - to the power of Seven, or regression to Infinity. The essay explores Thebais' - / Barthes' insight:

(T)he antithesis is the battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors; the Antithesis is the figure of the given opposition, eternal, eternally recurrent: the figure of the inexpiable. Every passage through the wall of the Antithesis thus constitutes a transgression …

This paper summarises the results of an investigation into sentence-beginnings made as part of an attempt to find an approach to word order which would be effective in revealing linguistic continuity as well as coping with the complexity of facts. Its point of origin is the intuition that for a native speaker the process of understanding what is said or written ought to be, at least within reasonable limits, both continuous and in some way in keeping with the order in which the utterance or text is presented.

Utterances are linear and temporal, and the ear passes what it receives to the brain in a sequential order that matches the auditory stimulus itself, a fact reflected in the way we write and read; it would be anomalous (though by no means impossible within certian limitations) if the brain were to process the incoming material in some other order. It is therefore worth considering the order in which discourse elements are represented.

While the Latin technical writers have been, and continue to be, studied by historians of the relevant discipline, scant attention has been devoted by linguists to their technical language. If they have interested philologists and linguists at all, then until recently it was as writers of popular, or ‘vulgar’, Latin, rather than of ‘technical’ Latin. This neglect of Latin technical languages as varieties in their own right reflects a wider reluctance to take technical languages into account in other areas of linguistics. There is a substantial literature devoted to technical languages in isolation, especially to the practical problems of communication in technical contexts, of teaching, translating and standardising technical languages, but coherent treatment of technical words and technical languages in the context of the lexicon or the language as a whole is almost entirely lacking in the standard works on word-formation and semantics.

This article is an exploration of two distinct but related aspects of political life in the early Greek world, ethnicity (the conscious expression of group identity), and the existence of ethne, a term used very loosely in antiquity and now applied to most forms of state structure other than the polis. It is a review of a problem, namely a tendency to focus on the polis when studying state formation and a consequent need to re-examine certain assumptions about the relationship between material culture and group identity in order to trace ethnos development in the archaeological record. It is also an examination of current and potential avenues of research, illustrated with reference to one particular region, Achaia.

The title given to speech number twenty-one of Demosthenes at some time in antiquity, although surely not by Demosthenes himself, is ΚΑΤΑ ΜΕΙΔΙΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΚΟΝΔΥΛΟΥ –‘Against Meidias, concerning the punch’. This refers of course to the punch on the cheek which Demosthenes received from Meidias in the very orchestra of the theatre of Dionysos at Athens on the day of the competition in the men's dithyramb, in which Demosthenes was chorēgos for his phylē, Pandionis, at the Great Dionysia of 348 B.C. – an act of physical abuse perpetrated under the gaze of ‘more than 30,000 Greeks’ – (that is the Platonic Sokrates' exaggeration, not mine) – in that place and at that time of maximum Athenian self-regard. The act which forms the ostensible basis of Demosthenes' case is thus self-evident: for by the powerful trope of the homogeneity across time and place of the Athenian dēmos, the spectators who were in the theatre on that day are identical to those citizens at the subsequent ekklēsia which met (also in the theatre) to hear complaints arising from the conduct of individuals at the festival, and they are the same men empanelling the court today. They booed and hissed Meidias in the theatre, passed a preliminary motion against him in the ekklēsia and so, today, their course of action is clear.