One of the most striking features of Athenian laws regulating commercial activities is the absence of any concept akin to the modern legal notion of the partnership or corporation. Despite the presence in Athenian society of numerous koinoniai, groups of individuals cooperating for some purpose, be it commercial or otherwise, Athenian law concerned itself solely with individual persons and did not recognize the separate legal existence of collective entities. And just as Athenian law did not recognize the legal existence of partnerships or corporations, it also did not possess the notion of corporate liability. This meant that if someone entered into an agreement with a group of individuals and one of those individuals violated the terms of the agreement, the plaintiff proceeded only against the individual who acted contrary to the agreement, not against the group as a whole. If the plaintiff won his suit, he only had a right to receive compensation from the defendant's private property; he did not have a claim on all the funds held in common by the group.

A dominant theme in the ninth of the Heroides, Deianira's letter to Hercules, is Deianira's indignation that Hercules has been defeated by a woman: first by Iole (especially in the first part of the letter: for example, lines 2, 5f., 1 If., 25f.); then by Omphale (especially in the section 103–18). The theme is exploited so insistently that Vessey, who regards the epistle as spurious, sees in this insistence a sign of the forger's clumsiness. consider the exploitation of the motive of‘victor victus’ in Heroides 9, on the contrary, as a strong sign of Ovidian authorship. From the very beginning of the letter, the reader is reminded that if a woman, Iole, has metaphorically destroyed Hercules, another woman is on the point of destroying Hercules in a much more real and literal way, and this woman is none other than Deianira herself. When Deianira writes the letter, she has just sent to Hercules the garment soaked in Nessus' poison that will provoke Hercules' horrible death (see 143–68): thus Deianira, rather than Iole or Omphale, is the woman who vanquishes the unvanquished hero. But this is not only a matter of dramatic irony based on the general lines of the story. Heroides 9 is an elegiac rewriting of Sophocles' Trachiniae (it is no coincidence that the letter opens with an allusion to Propertius 3.11), and at the same time is inserted in the time and the ‘body’ of the tragedy. Ironic prefiguration in Heroides is normally realized through intertextual anticipation: thefuture events that are prefigured are present in the texts of the model epic or tragedy. Deianira blames Hercules for bis defeat:

quern numquam Iuno seriesque immensa laborum

fregerit, huic Iolen imposuisse iugum (Her. 9.5f.)

quem non mille ferae, quern non Stheneleius hostis,

non potuit Iuno vincere, vincit amor. (Her. 9.25f.)

Ancient and modern scholars are so unanimous in their condemnation of Varro as a writer, that a study of his ‘style’ may seem to be valueless. Cicero paid ready tribute to his great contemporary's learning, but studiously forbore to say anything about his writing, a fact which was observed by Augustine, who admitted Varro's inferiority in this respect. Quintilian, in a guarded way, makes the same criticism; for him Varro is ‘plus scientiae collaturus quam eloquentiae’. In recent times Norden has castigated the De, Lingua Latina as exhibiting the worst Latin style of any prose work, and his opinion of the Res Rusticae is not much higher.

In the ontology of the Philebus (23C–30E) νο⋯σ is the αἰτία τ⋯ς συμμ⋯ξεωσ, the cause (called also τ⋯ δημιουργο⋯ν and τ⋯ ποιο⋯ν) that combines π⋯ρας with ἃπειρον into the mixture called γ⋯νεσισ εἰς οὐσ⋯αν or γεγενημ⋯νη οὐσ⋯α: correspondingly in the Timaeus the Demiurge, ⋯ ἃριστος τ⋯ν αἰτι⋯ν (29A), brings order into unordered chaos by ‘Forms and Numbers’ (διεσχηματ⋯σατο εἴδεσι κα⋯ ⋯ριθμοῖς 53B). In the Philebus the Universe has a Soul, discriminated from the νο⋯ς that causes it (30B, where it is argued that we cannot imagine that the αἰτ⋯α, while it provides our human bodies with a soul, does not ‘devise that which is fairest and most precious’ in the body of the Universe: οὐ γ⋯ρ που δοκο⋯μ⋯ν γε … ⋯ν το⋯τοις δ' οὐκ ἃρα μεμηχαν⋯σθαι τ⋯ν τ⋯ν καλλ⋯στων κα⋯ τιμιωτ⋯των φ' σιν): correspondingly in the Timaeus the Demiurge devises (⋯μηχαν⋯σατο 34c) a soul of the world, as well as its body.

In Plato's Theaetetus Socrates is portrayed as a midwife of the intellect. The comparison of Socratic questioning to midwifery had until recently been commonly attributed to Socrates himself. In 1977 M. F. Burnyeat published Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration, which transformed the way in which the dialogue has since been perceived. The author maintains that the midwife comparison is in no sense to be attributed to the historical Socrates.

Ovid's Tristia4.10 has in the past chiefly been considered as a source of biographical information rather than as a poem, but increasing interest in the poetry of Ovid's exile has now at last started to promote serious efforts to appreciate its literary qualities. The poem presents a formidable challenge to the critic: at first reading it seems a singularly pedestrian account of the poet's life and, although one may adduce plenty of parallels for details in its phrasing elsewhere in the poetry of Ovid and the other Augustans, it is clear that Ovid's thought-processes are not to be explained solely in terms of the main stream of Greco-Roman poetic tradition. Prose biography and autobiography, rhetorical apology and eulogy, subliterary epitaphs and inscriptional lists of achievements: all these types of writing could have influenced Ovid's selection of data.

Already an admired senior poet to Virgil in the Eclogues (9.35), Varius by the mid-thirties, B.C. had established himself as the leading epic writer of his day (Horace, Sat. 1.10.43–4). It is a sobering thought that we do not know even the titles of the serious hexameter works which had won him so high a reputation, except for de Morte, quoted four times by Macrobius (from whom we may gather that the poem was not split into more than one book).

The modern admirers of Horace who take him seriously as a moralist are inclined to attribute an undue degree of originality to his views on the moral function of poetry. The conception of the poet as teacher was, of course, the traditional Greek view. But Professor A. Y. Campbell thinks—in spite of ‘passages from Strabo and Plutarch’ —that this conception ‘after the days of Plato and Aristophanes lapsed as completely as did the production of the sort of literature that had justified it.’ Strabo and Plutarch, he asserts, merely provide evidence that the older Greek view revived; the forces inspiring this ‘revival’ were ‘not Greek, but Roman.’ ‘The Greeks got it from the Romans, Strabo from the spirit of the Augustan age.’

In a discussion of the spread of Latin in ancient Palestine it has been argued that, apart from Westerners like Jerome who settled in the province and a number of translators from Greek into Latin and from Latin into Greek, three Latin authors whose works are extant may have been, with various degrees of probability, natives of the country. These are Commodian of Gaza, arguably the earliest extant Christian Latin poet; Eutropius, the author of a breviarium of Roman history, who apparently hailed from Caesarea; and the anonymous author of the Descriptio totius mundi et gentium, who certainly was a native of the Syro-Palestinian region, and conceivably of one of the Palestinian cities. Here I wish to discuss another case, which seems to me characteristic of the reluctance of scholars to admit that Latin, and Latin authors, were more prevalent in the East than is usually acknowledged. In fact, it may be not misleading to assert that the invariably adduced exceptions of Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian as Latin writers from the East are exceptions by virtue of the quality of their work rather than by its very existence.

Marriage is a subject of perennial interest, and we should like to be able to assess the exact degree of importance which the Greeks attached to this institution. One of the chief questions is how the formality of marriage, or the lack of it, affected the children of a union; above all, was illegitimate birth a bar to citizenship even in democratic Athens? Unfortunately there is still no general agreement about the answer to this question.

Although Plato's notion of spiritual pregnancy has received a great deal of critical attention in recent years, the development of the metaphor in the Symposium has not been fully analysed. Close attention to the details of the image reveals two important points which have so far been overlooked: (1) There are two quite different types of spiritual pregnancy in the Symposium: a ‘male’ type, which is analogous to the build-up to physical ejaculation, and a ‘female’ type, which is analogous to the physical experience of pregnancy as normally understood.

The romance of Joseph and Asenatk (JA), a work almost entirely neglected by classicists, was extremely popular for many centuries and translated into many languages—Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, Roumanian, Latin (twice), Middle English, Coptic, and Ethiopian. Yet the first complete edition of the Greek text was not published until 1890, and Batiffol's editio pritnceps (‘Le Livre de la Priére d' Aséneth’, Studia Patristica i-ii (1889–90) does not inspire confidence.Batiffol treated JA as a product of the late fourth or fifth century A.D., though he soon conceded an earlier date, convinced by the arguments of various reviewers that it reflected the missionary outlook characteristic of Judaism of the late Hellenistic and early Imperial period.

From Pliny the Elder, who was his contemporary, to the present, the unhappy ending of the fourth Julio-Claudian emperor's life is often and uncritically retold. Thus Agrippina's poisoned mushrooms have become proverbial through the writings of Pliny, Juvenal and others. Historical evidence surrounding the circumstances of his death is, however, vague, contradictory, and open to alternative explanations. In the present note I shall argue for the simplest of these: that the emperor Claudius died after having ingested – either through criminal intent, or by sheer accident – the most W poisonous of mushrooms, Amanita phalloides or Death Cap.

The object of this paper is to show that, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., two different and radically opposed systems of thought were elaborated within the Pythagorean school. They may be called respectively the mystical system and the scientific. All current accounts of Pythagoreanism known to me attempt to combine the traits of both systems in one composite picture, which naturally fails to hold together. The confusion goes back to Aristotle, who usually speaks indiscriminately of ‘the Pythagoreans,’ though now and then the phrase ‘some Pythagoreans’ indicates that he was aware of different currents within the school.

In 1824 Eduard Gans, in the course of a study of inheritance law, had occasion to deal with the class of women known in Athens as epikleroi—daughters of a deceased man who, in the absence of sons, were married to their nearest relative, with the estate of the deceased passing to the son or sons of the new union. ‘For these,’ he wrote, ‘… the basic concept throughout is not that, in the absence of descendants, they themselves appear as inheritors, but rather that they are inherited along with the property by the collaterals.’

Poem 31 in our collections of Sappho's fragments is so well-known both through the original version, quoted partially by ‘Longinus’ (De sublimitate 10.1–3), and through Catullus’ adaptation (no. 51), that it is difficult to achieve sufficient distance from one's preconceptions to permit reappraisal. For the poem has in the modern period elicited such startlingly contradictory responses that one wonders whether we may not all along have been missing, or misconstruing, some point which was obvious enough to Sappho and her listeners.

A major source of dissent among modern interpreters of the poem concerns the question of jealousy: is Sappho moved to such convulsions of emotion by jealousy at seeing her beloved girlfriend in intimate colloquy with a man, or is she not? For the situation is, simply put, the following: a man is said to be godlike who sits opposite a certain girl, enjoying her conversation and her laughter. This, says Sappho, makes her boil over with a mixture of passionate emotions. Now one may take these emotions either as a response to the sight of her beloved girlfriend talking to a man (that is, jealousy), or one may refer the emotions described to the love Sappho feels for the girl under ‘normal’ circumstances: the man is simply extraordinarily fortunate (‘like the gods’) in enjoying her affection.

For a homicidal tyrant Domitian was disconcertingly droll. A number of examples of is ‘sardonic wit’ survive. One of them was so good that Marcus Aurelius supposedly repeated it, and attributed it to Hadrian rather than Domitian on the grounds that good sayings had no moral force if they came from tyrants.3 Domitian also possessed a talent for writing. Suetonius (Dom.2.2, 20) and Tacitus (Hist.4.86.2) claim that his interest in literature was merely a pretence, but Domitian′s contemporaries claim for him genuine ability, and here for once they seem much closer to the mark, as Coleman argues.