This article uncovers the intellectual traditions behind Dio Chrysostom's Oration 20: On Anachôrêsis. The examination reveals a variety of subtexts and traditions with which Dio engages, and shows that at its core the text inspects three types of lives promoted by three philosophical schools: Epicurean, Stoic and Peripatetic. They are never referred to directly, however, which raises questions concerning Dio's strategy of not acknowledging the sources of the ideas with which he engages. The article also develops our understanding of anachôrêsis and the controversies surrounding it in pagan antiquity.

Notes on the text and interpretation of passages in Plutarch's Life of Alexander.

This article presents a systematic examination of matrilineal succession in Greek myth. It uses MANTO, a digital database of Greek myth, to identify kings who succeed their fathers-in-law, maternal grandfathers, step-fathers, or wives’ previous husbands. Analysis of the fifty-four instances identified shows that the prominence of the ‘succession via widow’ motif in archaic epic is not typical of the broader tradition. Rather, civic mythmaking more commonly relies on succession by sons-in-law and maternal grandsons to craft connections between cities and lineages, and to claim panhellenic prestige. We show that matrilineal successors are not treated as necessarily illegitimate or inferior within the overwhelmingly patrilineal conventions of Greek myth. In fact, matrilineal calculations afford certain advantages, like the ability to integrate heroes from elsewhere, or to champion local kings with divine fathers. Matrilineal succession reveals the gendered dynamics inherent to Greek myth; we argue that, although in these instances regnal power is transferred through female relatives, the heroines involved are typically treated simply as nodes for this power and their roles in these stories do not necessarily correlate to a greater visibility or autonomy.

This article examines a complex passage of Aristotle's Physics in which a Pythagorean doctrine is explained by means of a mathematical example involving gnomons. The traditional interpretation of this passage (proposed by Milhaud and Burnet) has recently been challenged by Ugaglia and Acerbi, who have proposed a new one. The aim of this article is to analyse difficulties in their account and to advance a new interpretation. All attempts at interpreting the passage so far have assumed that ‘gnomons’ should indicate ‘odd numbers’. In this article it is argued that the usage of ‘gnomon’ related to polygonal numbers, which is normally considered late, could be backdated to at least the fifth/fourth centuries b.c.; in particular, it explains the link between the philosophical explanandum and the mathematical explanans in Aristotle's passage.

This article argues for a more diverse approach to the appearance of enslaved persons in Greek historiography through an analysis of the Persian navy's battlefield tour of Thermopylae in Book 8 of Herodotus’ Histories. Previous approaches to slavery in Greek historiography have rightly commented on the cultural awkwardness to Greek authors of slaves’ extensive involvement in ancient warfare. However, this is only one aspect of how slaves featured in historiographical narrative. Herodotus continually problematizes the methods of enquiry and many characters within his work engage in enquiry-like activities. Book 8 itself is no different, with much of the action involving errors in human perception. The appearance of helots amongst the heroic dead at Thermopylae is intended both as a narrative reveal, since their presence has not previously been known to the reader, and as a comment on the contestation of Greek identity, which is framed at the start of Book 8 with a series of direct addresses to different groups of Greeks, all of whom take a different approach to their participation in the Persian Wars. Hence what appears to be an incidental detail can in fact be understood in the wider, thematic context of the Histories and especially that of the books concerning the Persian Wars.

This article revisits a famous graffiti poem from Pompeii (CIL 4.9123). It argues that the poem is both more erotically charged and more cleverly metaliterary than previously recognized; and that this reading of the poem offers new evidence for the literary richness of Pompeii's graffiti culture.

This article reconsiders a graffitied riddle from Pompeii (CIL 4.1877). It argues that slavery is one possible dimension of the puzzle, and that acknowledging the existence of slavery in this text testifies to the potential of Pompeian graffiti as a source for overlooked social histories.

The management and mismanagement of Roman groves was a serious matter, and intentional and unintentional violations of these spaces could be severely punished. In spite of this, groves remained loosely defined by Romans and their boundaries were commonly misunderstood, a confusion that has continued into modern scholarship, where groves are understood as either a clearing in a wood or a dark space lit by artificial lighting. This article takes up this discussion, and explores the nature of an ancient grove as a well-attested space under forest management that influences later conversations on the nature of wooded spaces in more recent periods.

A passage in Eunapius (476–7, pp. 440–2 Loeb) draws an interesting contrast between the attitudes to divination of the two sophists Maximus and Chrysanthius: Maximus, who manipulates the omens until they say what he wants, and Chrysanthius, who scrupulously obeys their apparent meaning. But a passage a little later (500–1, pp. 542–4 Loeb) apparently ascribes to Chrysanthius the opposite attitude. This article suggests a transposition to restore coherence to the text. Even if the transposition is wrong, the contrast drawn in the first passage between two attitudes to divination, one rigorous and literalist, one manipulative, is important.

In poem 40, through a series of rhetorical questions, Catullus confronts Ravidus about what made him commit such a foolish action as to fall in love with Catullus’ own lover. The poem ends with the lines: eris, quandoquidem meos amores | cum longa uoluisti amare poena, ‘You will be, since you have chosen to love my lover at the risk of receiving a long punishment’. There is a long-standing tradition of scholarship which testifies to the frequency with which Catullus incorporates wordplay in his poems, including bilingual puns. This essay proposes another such pun by arguing that Catullus is making a play on words through the homophony of the Latin verb eris and the Greek noun ἔρις.

This article argues that the game presented in the third scene of the third act of Plautus’ Asinaria involves a horseplay rather than an assplay (Asin. 697–710). This is suggested by the young master's name, Argyrippus, and by a list of equine terms occurring in the text: uehere, inscendere, descendere, subdomari, tolutim, quadrupedo, aduorsom cliuom, in procliui.

The study of bi- and multilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean has come into its own in recent decades. The evidence is far greater for the Hellenistic and Roman periods than the Classical, so naturally scholarly attention has focussed less on the earlier era. This has led to some enduring notions about bilingualism in the fifth century b.c.e. which are yet to be fully scrutinized, including the idea that a Greek's speaking another tongue was inherently transgressive. What did it mean for a Greek to speak a second language? This article re-evaluates the evidence for individual bilingualism in Herodotus and Thucydides in their fifth-century context, focussed on our two best-documented examples of bilingual Greek individuals (Histiaeus of Miletus and Themistocles of Athens). Close reading of Herodotus and Thucydides suggests that not only does the notion of an inherently transgressive bilingualism hold little water for this period, but bilingualism may even be a sign of μῆτις.

Sidonius Apollinaris’ Epist. 3.12 tells how one day, while leaving Lyons, he caught a couple of gravediggers about to violate his grandfather Apollinaris’ grave, which had become unrecognizable over time. He instructs the addressee, his nephew Secundus, to restore the tomb mound and provide it with a stone for which he attaches the text. Whereas this letter is usually interpreted as a piece of self-promotion by the author for his filial piety and expert storytelling, this article suggests that there is a significant subtext to be found in Lucan's Pharsalia which makes the letter first and foremost a rehabilitation of Apollinaris while strongly suggesting that the latter was executed. There follow some rather more tentative thoughts trying to grasp the precise critical moment in time for this rehabilitation. It is argued that this could be Sidonius’ departure for Clermont, in 469/470 to take on the episcopate, after his term as City Prefect of Rome and a stay in Lyons with Bishop Patiens. The letter is aimed at bolstering family cohesion in the conflict of interests between Auvergne and Provence and at securing Sidonius’ position as incumbent bishop.

Rhet. Her. 1.2 quoad eius fieri poterit contains the surprising reading quoad eius. Earlier scholarship has debated the authenticity of this reading and its relationship to quod eius. A survey of the sources shows that quod eius appears in a number of inscriptions as well as in the transmitted text of nine passages within surviving Latin literature. So that phrase must be authentic; it appears to have arisen as a limiting formula in the language of the law. In two other passages, quoad eius appears in inferior manuscripts that lack authority, while the reading transmitted by authoritative textual sources is quod eius. Rhet. Her. 1.2 is the only passage in which quoad eius is the transmitted reading. This phrase is also linguistically problematic. Hence it is very likely to be corrupt. It probably arose as a conflation of quod eius with quoad, both of which are attested in similar contexts. On balance, it seems more likely that the original reading in this passage was quoad.

The aim of this short note is to highlight a possible, hitherto unnoticed, telestich in Verg. Aen. 8.246–9, which presents the Greek word sēma (‘portent’, ‘wonder’, ‘prodigy’, ‘tomb’). To justify this identification, I will argue for its significance from its context in the poem (the battle between Hercules and Cacus), pointing out the insistence on the imagery of light and revelation, and the use of the phrase mirabile dictu, which appears in the same episode of the Aeneid, in the Latin poetic tradition.

The Latin word lupus ‘wolf’ uniquely shares with Greek λύκος a metathesized form of Proto-Indo-European *u̯l̥kʷos, and it is unlikely that they could have arisen independently. But an early borrowing from Greek into the Italic languages can be justified, after metathesis took place, but before the changes to labiovelar consonants in each language that would exclude the possibility.

This paper raises objections to the constitution of these lines in the OCT. The lines are gnomic but they generalize based on an actual sequence of events just described and should contain an allusion to the offence that will cause the Greeks to perish, the outrage against Athena's temple. This, it is argued, stood in a lacuna best marked after 95. The article has three theses: (1) sacking ‘cities, temples, and tombs’ is implausible because the latter two are parts of the first; (2) plundering tombs refers to nothing in the play, nor was this thought of as an offence against the gods; (3) 96–7 do not refer to the offence that causes the fool's death but are a description of his success, the destruction of the hated enemy population. That success stands in ironic contrast with his subsequent death.

This article argues that Vitruvius’ description of Julius Caesar's ‘discovery’ of the larch (larix, De arch. 2.9.15–16), previously read as a journalistic account of the author's first-hand experience in Caesar's military entourage, should instead be interpreted as a highly crafted morality tale illustrating human progress thwarted. In the passage, the use of larch wood to construct a defensive tower renders the Alpine fortress at Larignum impregnable to assault by fire; only the fear aroused by siege provokes the inhabitants to surrender to Caesar and his troops (2.9.15–16). Nevertheless, the outcome of this discovery is not a complete victory, because the logistics of importing this remarkable timber to Rome are as yet insurmountable (2.9.16). Once the siege of Larignum is recognized as a diptych to Vitruvius’ narrative of the origins of civilization, in which fire and wood likewise play essential roles (2.1.1–7), and compared with similar aitia and source histories across the De architectura, it becomes clear that Larignum and its resources emblematize obstacles to a Vitruvian conception of imperial success, in which the city of Rome catalogues and indexes architectural knowledge amassed throughout the empire.

At Aur. Vict. Caes. 10.5, the reading lautus should be retained; -que is a dittography and should be deleted. At 13.3, satis should be emended into sagatis. This article also provides a brief analysis of Victor's references to clothing and attempts to explain why he comments on the Dacian costume at 13.3, the only ethnographic reference to clothing in the entire work.