The proposition that man is the only animal capable of laughter is at least as old as Aristotle (Parts of Animals 673a8). In a strictly physical sense, this is probably false; but it is undoubtedly true that as a psychologically expressive and socially potent means of communication, laughter is a distinctively human phenomenon. Any attempt to study sets of cultural attitudes towards laughter, or the particular types of personal conduct which these attitudes shape and influence, must certainly adopt a wider perspective than a narrowly physical definition of laughter will allow. Throughout this paper, which will attempt to establish part of the framework of such a cultural analysis for the Greek world of, broadly speaking, the archaic and classical periods, ‘laughter’ must be taken, by a convenient synecdoche, to encompass the many behavioural and affective patterns which are associated with, or which characteristically give scope for, uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word. My concern, then, is with a whole network of feelings, concepts and actions; and my argument will try to elucidate the practices within which laughter fulfils a recognizable function in Greek societies, as well as the dominant ideas and values which Greek thought brings to bear upon these practices. The results of the enquiry will, I believe, give us some reason to accept a rapprochement between the universalist assumption for which my epigraph from Johnson speaks (and which most grand theorists of laughter appear to have made) and the recognition of cultural specificity in laughter's uses for which many anthropologists would argue, as emphatically asserted, from a Marxizing point of view, in the quotation from Vladimir Propp.

M. Finley in a well-known and influential article, established the theory that the bridegroom (or the potential suitors) offered gifts to the bride's father, which had their recompense in a counter-gift or dowry to the groom and the bride; these gifts must be equal in value.

This article is about the rules of succession in Bronze Age Greece as reflected in Greek tradition. The question as to whether or not the figures dealt with by this tradition are historical is of little relevance to the present discussion: what I seek to recover is not the history of one royal house or another but rather the recurring patterns according to which the members of these houses – no matter whether real or fictitious – were expected to behave when it came to the question of accession to the throne and transmission of the kingship to their successors.

The Acarnanian chrēsmologos Amphilytos spoke the verses to Peisistratos just before the battle of Pallene in 546 b.c. They contain a prediction of imminent victory for Peisistratos and total defeat for the Athenians. The Athenians will be routed and deprived of political self-determination, while the victory will restore to Peisistratos the tyranny from which he was twice forced, ‘rooting’ it once for all. Of course, all of this appears quite evident from the narrative. But as the verses form part of Herodotos' account of Peisistratos' ascent to power they amount to much more, for they constitute penultimate proof of Peisistratos' irresistibility (and his tyranny's inevitability), a recurrent theme in Herodotos' logos, but one which was undoubtedly encouraged by his Athenian sources as a means of explaining how the Athenians were forced to yield the tyranny. Indeed, the theme of irresistibility helps to excuse the Athenians for being overcome; as much of the logos, which is historically quite vague, it is a reaction to fact, not factual itself.

My recent edition of Antigone (Warminster, 1987) was not intended primarily as a contribution to textual criticism. I did no work on the manuscripts, and little work on tracing the sources of old conjectures. Nevertheless, some of my thoughts on the text may merit fuller discussion than I was able to give them in a beginners' edition. And there have been more recent developments: in particular we now have a new Oxford Text of Sophocles with a companion volume of Sophoclea, and I have benefited from stimulating discussion with Dr David Kovacs, who has kindly allowed me to see a draft of some forthcoming notes of his own.

In 246 we should, as Dodds suggests, get rid of the feeble δεινς and adopt Mau's δειν κγχνης. (Dodds suggests that K was misread as IC and the resulting δειναῖς was ‘corrected’ to δεινς.) Verdenius, Mnemos. 41 (1988), 254, defends the reading of the MSS., saying that δεινς serves to distinguish the noose of punishment from that of suicide, but this is untenable: why is one noose more ‘terrible’ than the other, and who on hearing ‘worthy of the terrible noose’ would draw conclusions about it that could not be drawn from ‘worthy of the noose’? The question raised about the kind of noose is important (see below) but cannot be answered by these means.

A. H. Sommerstein has recently directed our attention away from the belaboured topic of the essential and original structure of Old Comedy to the more productive question of how the extant plays of Aristophanes are shaped. He begins with the question of the source of ‘the five-act principle, standard in Menandrian comedy’ (140). Correctly looking to the chorus as the key element in articulating a play's form, Sommerstein finds that the five-act format already dominates the shape of Old Comedy, although he argues that the number of acts ranges from four to seven and that only in the fourth century do the acts become about the same length. His analysis is largely correct, I think, but it is in danger of being ignored because his criteria are not objective and have not been applied systematically. Thus, B. Zimmermann has more recently described the structure of Aristophanic comedy as free

It has often been assumed that Plato's Apology is a faithful recreation of Socrates' speech on the final day of his trial in 399 b.c.; that it contains almost nothing of Plato's own philosophy; and that it therefore represents rather the position of the historical Socrates on how to live and how to philosophize. In this belief, Schleiermacher relegated the Apology to an appendix to his translation of Plato, along with (among others) some spurious works. His view was followed by Zeller and Grote in the late nineteenth century, and further popularized in the 1920s by Burnet's edition of the Apology.

One of the distinctions that Plato in the Laws stresses most heavily in his discussion of the proper relation between the individual citizen and the laws of the city is that between persuasion and compulsion. Law, Plato believes, should try to persuade rather than compel the citizens. Near the end of the fourth book of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, Plato's spokesman in this dialogue, asks whether the lawgiver for their new city of Magnesia should in making laws ‘explain straightaway what must and must not be done, add the threat of a penalty, and turn to another law, without adding a single bit of encouragement or persuasion [παραμυθας δ κα πειθος … ἓν] to his legislative edicts’ (Laws 720a 1–2). A few lines later, the Athenian Stranger himself condemns such a procedure as ‘the worse and more savage alternative’ (τò χεῖρον τοῖν δυοῖν κα γριώτερον 720e4). The better method is for the laws themselves to try to persuade (πεθειν) the citizens to act in the manner that they prescribe. And as a means of doing this, Plato proposes attaching preludes (προομια) to particular laws and to the legal code as a whole: such preludes will supplement the sanctions attached to the laws and will aim at persuading the citizens to act in the way that the laws direct for reasons other than fear of the penalties attached to the law. Such a practice, Plato believes, is an innovation: it is something that no lawgiver has ever thought of doing before (722b–e). And we have no reason to think that Plato is here excluding his earlier self, e.g. the Plato of the Republic and the Politicus, from this criticism.

In chapter 9 of the Poetics Aristotle states that poetry is concerned with the universal (τ καθλου 1451b6–15). In this paper I shall consider three questions arising out of this statement. First, what does it mean? Secondly, what constraints does it impose on the construction of (in particular) tragic plots ? I shall consider this question with special reference to the possible role of chance in tragedy. Thirdly, why is poetry concerned with the universal – that is, why is poetry such that these constraints are appropriate ?

Much of the fascination that Petronius' Satyricon holds for its readers originates in the work's gleeful violation of traditional categories of classical genres. Critical terminology makes explicit the issue of unconventionality, as it is reduced to the neutral word ‘work’ in describing the Satyricon, which, as far as we can tell, belongs to no single category (e.g. novel, romance, satire), but appropriates elements from many sources in both poetry and prose. Perhaps if we had more evidence with which to compare the work, such as a greater selection of Menippean satire or proto-novels from antiquity, we might be able to identify it more accurately. But the suspicion remains that the intense variety of its evocations, allusions, and parodic passages differentiates it clearly from its component genres without allowing it to settle firmly in any one established genre. A certain amount of ‘Kreuzung der Gattungen’ is, of course, typical of both Alexandrian and consequently Roman texts. But the Satyricon seems to revel in its generic instability; it plays with the notion of ‘literariness’ by revealing impulses from non-literary forms such as mime and subliterary prose fiction, raising this material to an unfamiliar level of literary sophistication even as it debases other traditional genres (e.g. epic) through parodic techniques. One of the results of this open experimentation with style and decorum is an extremely dense fabric of literary (and sub-literary) allusion which some would label ‘literary opportunism’. The reader quickly learns to expect intertextual pyrotechnics, swift changes from the sublime to the ridiculous, and humorous incongruities in plot and form, as the stylistic disorder of the text reflects the topsyturvy Petronian world. The modern reader's response to this profusion of referents is to explore the recognizable categories and sources embedded in the work, to tease out the familiar elements in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the whole. Since a great deal of the allusion in the Satyricon functions parodically, there is yet another step necessary in the interpretation, namely taking into account the effect of the decontextualization of language and events from the source material and their recombination and transformation into the new text.

The overwhelming importance of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura for the interpretation of the Georgics is recognized by almost all critics. As W. Y. Sellar expressed it over a hundred years ago, ‘the influence, direct and indirect, exercised by Lucretius on the thought, composition and even the diction of the Georgics was perhaps stronger than that ever exercised, before or since, by one poet on the work of another’. Richard Thomas' recent commentary attempts to play down the extent of this influence, contending that ‘the debt of Virgil to Lucretius in the Georgics is predominantly formal’, and manifests itself chiefly on a verbal level, whereby the poet seeks ‘to create a didactic appearance for his poem’. The aim of this paper is to reassert the pervasive importance of Lucretian ideas, as well as Lucretian language, throughout the poem, and particularly in Virgil's presentation of the physical and metaphysical relationships between man and beast.

A list of the principal works referred to is given in my previous article, ‘Notes on Some Passages in Seneca's Tragedies and the Octavia’, CQ 39 (1989), 186–96.

In the preface to each book of his collected poems, the Silvae, Statius writes in the apologetic mode. Addressing his friend Arruntius Stella in the preface to Book 1, he claims that his poems are mere impromptu productions, ‘qui mini subito calore et quadam festinandi voluptate fluxerunt’, and he worries that by the time they reach publication they may have lost their only charm, that of speed, ‘celeritas’. Statius makes the same claims for impromptu production with the poem I will be discussing in this article, Silvae 3.1, which celebrates the remodelling of the temple of Hercules on the private Campanian estate that belonged to Statius' friend Pollius Felix: ‘nam primum limen eius Hercules Surrentinus aperit, quern in litore tuo consecratum, statim ut videram, his versibus adoravi’ (praef. 3).

In a recent article I tried to disperse the fog in which modern editions envelop the transmission of the Livian Periochae and Floras' Epitoma de Tito Liuio. Working from editions and catalogues, and without looking at more than a few readily accessible manuscripts, I argued that the Periochae reached the Middle Ages in the company of Floras and nothing else; that the mainstream of the medieval tradition, which probably issued from the region south-west of Paris, derived first from a manuscript that presented Florus and only 1–7 of the 142 Periochae, Λ, and then from one that presented Florus alone, e; that after appearing for several centuries only in N (s. ix1) and P (s. xii2) the complete text of Florus and the Periochae saw a revival in the Italian Renaissance, probably thanks to Petrarch and Boccaccio; and that most Italian manuscripts contaminate the text of e with the complete text. Pending visits to libraries, I left open several questions: whether Λ derived from the source of NP; whether e derived from Λ; whether the Italian manuscripts of the complete text all derive from one source; whether, if so, it was P; whether any of them have escaped contamination in Florus; and whether contamination had already begun in France.

There has been little research on the vocabulary of the Greek novelists. Gasda studied that of Chariton in the last century. He compared some of his terms with those of other authors and he concluded he should be placed in the sixth century A.D. Then Schmid considered that Chariton's language was not Atticist, and dated his novel in the second century or beginning of the third. In 1973 Chariton's language was studied by Papanikolaou. His research dealt above all with several syntactic aspects and the use of some vocabulary, which led him to conclude that this language was closer to the koiné than that of the other novelists. But Papanikolaou went further in his conclusions: finding no trace of Atticism in Chariton, he considered him a pre-Atticist writer and, using extra-linguistic data, such as the citing of the Seres, the Chinese (6.4.2), placed him in the second half of the first century B.C. This chronology has been accepted by some, but already Giangrande has observed that this lack of Atticisms could have been intentional, in which case that date would be questionable.

In his Ars grammatica Fl. Sosipater Charisius quotes long portions of text which he has taken over from books of other grammarians. One of these quotations starts at 246.18 (‘C. Iulius Romanus ita refert de adverbio sub titulo ϕορμν’) and continues up to 289.17. At 246.19–252.31 we find a long argument in which Romanus offers a sort of introduction to the theory of the adverb. This introduction is a surprise to modern readers because it is written in a very rhetorical manner. I mention this because otherwise one cannot understand why at 251.22ff. the author of a Latin treatise on grammar should quote from a Greek work on Aristotle's Categories by a certain Aquila.

In this article I am making what is, as far as I know, the first systematic analysis of Justin books 7, 8 and 9. The method is that which I employed in analysing the sources of Diodorus 16 in CQ 31 (1937), 79ff. and 32 (1938), 137ff. Previous scholars had looked for similarities between the fragments of ancient historians and details in the text of Diodorus, and they had taken any such similarity as proof of a particular source being followed. They had carried their method to extremes: A. Momigliano, for instance, had concluded that Diodorus changed his source 12 times within 23 chapters, and R. Laqueur 18 times within 4 chapters in book 16. My system was to define separable Groups of narrative on the basis of fullness, accuracy, military and political detail, and attitude to the general theme, and to see how far any one Group could be attributed to an ancient author. I begin, therefore, with separable Groups of narrative.

It is a brave scholar who ventures into the murky world of Late Antique medicine in search of information on earlier theories. Not only may the opinions of a Herophilus or a Galen be distorted by their distant interpreters, but frequently the texts themselves present serious challenges to understanding. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Latin versions made from Greek philosophical and medical commentaries, which interpose an additional linguistic barrier before one can make sense of sometimes complex arguments. Yet as R. J. Hankinson has shown in his recent note on John of Alexandria, there is much to be gained from these forbidding works. But while he has succeeded in elucidating much of the technical terminology and argument that lies behind one of these translations, his lack of familiarity with the textual basis of the relevant commentary has both led him into error and prevented him from resolving still more of its difficulties. His ignorance is easily pardonable, for, as will be shown, modern editors have unwittingly conspired to block the way to the truth, and the essential secondary literature has been published in journals and theses rarely accessible to the classicist.

On the morning of the third day on Circe's island of Aeaea, Odysseus takes sword and spear in hand and leaves his demoralized and exhausted crew to seek out some sign of habitation. Eventually, from the height of a rocky point, he spies smoke rising in the distance. After debating with himself whether or not to investigate immediately, he determines first to return to his ships, in order to see about his comrades' dinner (10.144–55). Returning to the beach, he encounters an enormous stag, which he takes to have been sent by a god who pitied him (10.157–9) and which he kills, binds with a makeshift rope of brushwood and willow branches, and drags back to the camp (10.160–72).