That the extraordinary narrative experiment known as the Satyricon has regularly stimulated scholarly investigation into the relationship between status and freedom is not surprising for a work, the longest surviving section of which features an excessive dinner party at the house of a libertus. Much of the discussion has concentrated on the depiction of the dinner's host and his freedmen friends. Following the lead of F. Zeitlin and others in seeing the depiction of a ‘freedmen's milieu’ in the Cena, J. Bodel argued in a seminal paper published twenty years ago that the Cena opens a window onto the ‘freedman's mentality’. The last ten years or so have seen a revival of the theme, with much emphasis on the display of an open society in the Cena, even a Saturnalian world-view, based on a suspension or reversal of the traditional social hierarchies, all framed by a general air of excessive liberality: whatever satirical lens the Satyricon’s author is seen to have projected onto Trimalchio and his freedmen friends, they are understood as celebrating ‘freedom's defining difference’. In the light of such a unifying conceptualization of the Cena’s motley crew, it is not surprising that scholars have come to understand the libertine assemblage as a reflection of ‘the social class of the “freedmen” in first-century a.d. Italy’. After all, ‘class’ can be defined as ‘a number of individuals (persons or things) possessing common attributes’, and, with specific regard to human society, as ‘a division of society according to status’.

INTRODUCTION

Very soon after I began working on the identity of magic-workers in classical antiquity, I realized that it was necessary to come to terms with a thesis about depictions of erotic magic-working in Greek and Roman literature. It asserted that male writers engaged in a systematic misrepresentation of the realities of magic-working in portraying erotic magic as an exclusively female preserve; the reality was that men were the main participants in this form of magic-working. The thesis is based on the supposition that the truth about erotic magic and the people who performed it is to be found in the formularies or spell-books preserved in papyrus and in defixiones. These two sources of information are said to show us that erotic magic was performed by men and not by the women who are the persons depicted engaging in love-magic in literature. The scholar who first presented the thesis was the late John Winkler. A version of it is to be found in Fritz Graf's general account of Greek and Roman magic. There is agreement over what are taken to be the facts, but views diverge over their interpretation. Winkler appeals to the Freudian notion of denial and transference to offer an explanation not only of the discrepancy between life and literature, but of what he took to be the belief held by the young men who cast erotic spells that the girls who were the objects of their spells were as sexually eager as they were: men, when overwhelmed by sexual desire for unattainable women, through a process of denial transfer that feeling to women, whether old or young, whom they fondly imagine suffer the same intense sexual longings as themselves.

Dotted throughout the records of the turbulent last decades of fourth-century Athens are reports—often frustratingly vague—of prosecutions, many of intellectuals on the charge of (136xxx1). Most belong to the period of Macedonian domination: Theophrastus was one targeted at this time, and we hear also of actions against Demetrius of Phalerum, Theodorus the atheist, and Stilpo of Megara. Even before the Athenian capitulation to Macedon, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Alexander, prosecutions were launched against Demades and Aristotle. These two early (and relatively well documented) prosecutions are generally accepted to have had a political purpose, being attacks aimed at Macedonian sympathizers by the more staunchly pro-democratic Athenian elements; the later trials, however, are poorly attested in the sources and have received less scholarly attention, particularly for their political aspects.

The wounds inflicted by Homer's warriors fascinate readers, since they are vividly described and often curious or even grotesque. Commentators have struggled to explain some of them since commentaries began: some of the explanations are more curious than the wounds. Not surprisingly, the commentaries have not usually been graced by a high standard of anatomical or, especially, physiological background knowledge, and are often misleading in these respects. When such knowledge is applied, some wounds which have appeared problematic become realistic, but some which have been accepted as straightforward become problematic.

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.

Interest in νομαστìκωμῳδєȋν began early. Even before the compilation of prosopo-graphical κωμῳδούμєνοɩ in the second century B.C., Hellenistic study of Aristophanes had devoted attention to the interpretation of personal satire. The surviving scholia contain references to Alexandrian scholars such as Euphronius, Eratosthenes and Callistratus which show that in their commentaries and monographs these men had dealt with issues of νομαστì κωμῳδєȋν Much material from Hellenistic work on Old Comedy was transmitted by later scholars, particularly by Didymus and Symmachus in their variorum editions, and was eventually embodied in the scholia, though of course in an abridged and sometimes distorted form. Many of our fragments of Old Comedy, preserved in the scholia or in medieval works of reference as parallels to passages in Aristophanes, are direct evidence of the long ancient tradition of interest in the genre's large element of personal satire. What we find in the scholia should not therefore be treated as representative only of the latest and most derivative stages of ancient scholarship. It is the purpose of this article to argue that the scholia on Aristophanes allow us to see that in matters of νομαστì κωμῳδєȋν certain assumptions about the nature of this type of comic material were persistently made by ancient scholars, and that certain interpretative habits were consequently developed from them. It is my further aim to suggest that this pattern of interpretation has been widely but unjustifiably perpetuated in later work on Aristophanes.

In Aeschines' dialogue Alcibiades, Socrates sees his brilliant young partner's haughty attitude towards the great Themistocles. Thereupon he gives an encomium of Themistocles, a man whose wisdom and arete, great as they were, could not save him from ostracism by his own people. This encomium has an extraordinary effect on Alcibiades: he cries and in his despair places his head upon Socrates' knee, realizing that he is nowhere near as good a man as Themistocles (Aesch., Ale. fr. 9 Dittm. = Ael. Aristid. 286.2). Aeschines later has Socrates say that he would have been foolish to think he could have helped Alcibiades by virtue of any art or knowledge, but nonetheless by some divine dispensation he has, in virtue of the eros he felt for the youth, been allowed to make him better (fr. lla, c Dittm. = Ael. Aristid., Rhet. 17).

The political and administrative requirements of the Roman state during the early years of the Principate demanded an increase in the annual number of consulars. When Augustus finally acted to remedy this situation in 5 b.c., he introduced a system of suffect consuls and thereby increased the number of consuls from the two per annum of the Republic to four. A regular practice became established whereby one or both of the ordinary consuls retired at the end of June to be replaced in office for theremainder of the year by a suffect consul. For the reigns of Gaius and Claudius additional suffects were included in many years and a new pattern can be seen to have emerged. It was usual now for each ordinarius to hold office for the first six months of the year except in some special cases where the ordinarii resigned at the end of two months and their place was taken by a pair of suffects who remained in office for the next four months to serve out the more regular tenure of the ordinary consuls. Under Nero, the innovation of this two-month ordinary consulship was not perpetuated and ordinarii usually remained in office for the full six months. Suffect consulships throughout the period a.d. 38–68 were held for periods of either two, four or six months.

The Civil War of a.d. 68/69 and the consequent changes of emperor broke the above pattern. For 69, there are no fewer than sixteen consuls known to have held office during the year. Such confusion, however, would not be unexpected given the startling events of this year. Of considerable importance to students of the early Empire, therefore, is the question of what happened to the system of allocating consulships during a particular year when the state had once again settled itself down to running in routine under the victorious Flavian emperors. The answer to this question will be of particular importance for prosopographers of the early Empire for whom chronology is the backbone of their investigations, since the fasti for the reigns of Vespasian and Titus are notable for the number of years in which the complete list of consuls is lacking.

In this paper I argue that the stretch of dialogue from 385 b 2–d 1 (Burnet's lineation) in the Cratylus does not belong where it is found in the MSS. (and consequently in our published texts), but fits rather between 387 c 5 and 387 c 6. I suggest further that at any rate my negative thesis receives some measure of support from the fragments of Proclus' commentary on the dialogue.

In determining the time of Archilochos it is useless to begin with the eclipse—an event which strongly appeals to the modern mind, as it seems open to exact astronomical and mathematical computation. Even granted from the first and as a matter of course that Archilochos saw the eclipse and that it was total or nearly total in the place where he saw it, there are two objections: (1) the astronomical data for the two eclipses of 711 B.C. and 648 (or 647) B.C. are as yet insufficient even for Paros and Thasos; (2) we do not know for certain where the eclipse poem was written: probably it was in Paros, as the speaker is Lykambes, but it may be Thasos, not to mention Euboia, Crete, or Sicily. The whole thing is elusive, and Alan Blakeway, when he stated the case for 711—perhaps ‘too emphatically’, as he concedes—is quite clear in this respect. The most he affirms is that ‘there is nothing to choose between the two eclipses astronomically’; and what he asks for is a new examination of ‘the literary evidence without that unconscious bias in favour of the 648 B.C. eclipse which so far has influenced it’. That is quite a reasonable demand, and it is only with Blakeway's re-examination of the literary evidence that I find fault.

In this paper I wish to examine the meaning of the doctrine of anamnesis, with particular regard to the role assigned in it to sense-experience. I shall argue (a) that an empirical interpretation of the doctrine as it is presented in the Meno is false, and that Plato is not concerned at all in the Meno with the question of the role of sense-experience in recollection; (b) that the doctrine of the Phaedo (73 c ff.) shows an inadequate appreciation of the problems involved in assigning a role to sense-experience, and is seriously inconsistent with what Plato says elsewhere, in the Phaedo and in other dialogues, about the senses and sensible images; (c) that the revised and more responsible presentation of this doctrine in the Phaedrus is self-contradictory; (d) that misinterpretations of the theory of anamnesis are due principally to (i) either misinterpretation or neglect of what is said about it in the Meno, (ii) the custom of taking Phaedo 73 c ff. as specially representative of Plato's doctrine.

In The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens Dr. Pickard-Cambridge includes a most useful and convenient collection of south Italian vase-paintings which have been held to throw light on the stage-settings of Greek tragedy. He concludes that they give no evidence for Athens in the fifth century and in particular do not justify the assumption that interior scenes were played in a porch in front of the central door. The second conclusion is true, but some of the vases do show that the central doors could be thrown wide open to display an interior scene. The first conclusion is formally correct, but it should be remembered that the “plays came from Athens, and it is at least possible that the south Italian producers modelled themselves on Athenian producers. In any case these vases are worthy of further consideration.

So many scholars nowadays believe that the final scenes of the Seven against Thebes as we have them have been considerably distorted and interpolated that some may not be aware that such an opinion was first expressed little more than ioo years ago. The first scholar to do so was A. Scholl, who afterwards recanted (1 and 2);

In 267 the number of quaestors was increased from the established total of four (two consular and two urbani). But how many were added, and what were their functions? The standard works agree that the new quaestors numbered four, and that they were stationed in four Italian towns, where they are usually supposed tohave performed administrative functions necessary to the Roman navy, and, in the case of the quaestor stationed at Ostia, functions necessary to Rome's grainsupply. These were the quaestores classici, or according to others the quaestores Italici. A few historians have very reasonably gone on to interpret this event as an important stage in the tightening of Roman control in Italy, or as a deliberate step towards a large-scale navy and war against Carthage.

IN a discussion of the reading in Lucan i. 231, Richard Bentley dismissed Grotius's suggestion Ariminon: ignes on the correct grounds that, like Virgil, Lucan avoids starting a new sentence or clause at the beginning of the sixth foot of the hexameter, except with a pair of monosyllables (as in 6. 700, per quam) or with a word emphasized either by repetition (as in 7. 350, ipsi … ipsi) or by a strong contrast (as in Cicero, Arat. 266, hic totus medius circo disiungitur: ille… —the only example of this sort of break in Cicero's poetical fragments).

This passage has been used—and abused—for the study of Athenian female initiations, or, more cautiously, of the practice of the arkteia at Brauron. As it is, it poses more problems that it solves. Most of all, it complicates the question of the age of the arktoi. In fact the scholium seems prima facie to contradict the text, when on v. 645 it says that the ‘bears’ were not more than ten years and not less than five years old, while the accepted text of Aristophanes decisively implies an age greater than ten years. The situation is even more obscured by another indication pointing towards an association of the arkteia with the age of ten, the equation of the verb dekateusai with arkteusai.