‘A property’, according to the author of De Rerum Natura in 1.451–4, ‘is that which can never be sundered and separated without fatal dissolution, as weight is to stone, heat to fire, liquidity to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to void’, seiungi seque gregari. As elsewhere Lucretius, that most committed practitioner of word-play, makes his verb mirror the very separation which it describes.

The total surviving output of the Hesiodic school of Greek Epic is too little, in point of sheer quantity, to afford an insight into social life and outlook comparable with that offered by the Homeric poems. Worse still, it is too heterogeneous a collection to form a meaningful social document.

There are two basic objections to Plato's account of love in the Phaedrus, both raised by Gregory Vlastos, both metaphysically important in their own right, and both still unanswered. The first is that the Phaedrus sees men as mere images of another world, making it folly or even idolatry to treat them as worthy of love for their own sakes. The other is that it considers the love that we bear for our fellow men to be the result of human, temporal deficiency. If only we could be free of this deficiency, the objection runs, we would have no reason to love anything or anyone except the Forms: seen face to face, these by themselves would absorb all our love.

In 427 B.c. the Athenian assembly passed a decree bearing on the recently suppressed revolt on the island of Lesbos. All citizens in Mytilene, the city which had led the revolt, were to be executed and their women and children sold into slavery. A trireme was swiftly dispatched to Paches with instructions to execute the decree. But the Athenians had arrived at their decision in a fit of anger; and when presently their ργ subsided, they experienced grave misgivings over an action which now seemed in their own estimation cruel and excessive. They earnestly sought to reconsider the matter, and so within the space of a day they convened once more to debate Mytilene (3.36).

In his speech against Meidias Demosthenes describes the arrogant and proud behaviour of his opponent in which Meidias persists in spite of the popular vote condemning him. Whenever there is voting, Demosthenes says, Meidias is put forward as a candidate; he is the proxenos of Plutarch, he knows everything, the city is too small for his aspirations. This illustration of the enormous popularity of an Athenian politician shows his predominant influence in the two spheres of domestic and foreign policy. The main line of this foreign policy —the passage is obviously intended as an accusation—is expressed by the relationship of proxenia and xenia between Meidias and Plutarch, the leading politician of Eretria who, pro-Athenian at first, changed his attitude and almost brought disaster on the Athenian army intervening in Euboea.

In a recently published article I have suggested an amendment of the textual crux in Suetonius, Tiberius 21. 4 and an interpretation of the passage as providing direct evidence that the arrangement of the marriages of Germanicus and the younger Drusus was integral to Augustus' settlement of 26 June a.d. 4, even if (as seems on balance likely) they were not celebrated until early 5. This view differs from the more usual assumption that while the marriages took place in 5, the date of their arrangement was not particularly significant, or from the possibility implied by Levick that Germanicus' marriage may have been arranged to placate the ‘faction’ (or what remained of it) of the elder Julia after the consolidation in 4 of the position of Livia's descendants. The more precise hypothesis that the marriages were intended as part of the settlement may help us to bring into sharper focus some of the political events of the next few years, and this article attempts to do so; in particular it looks at (a) the internal balance of the settlement; (b) the anomalous separate adoption of Agrippa Postumus; and (c) the decline and fall of Agrippa Postumus and the younger Julia. First, however, some further observations on the hypothesis in my earlier article.

The story of the votum made by the inhabitants of Locri Epizephyrii in 477/6 is well known: they vowed to prostitute their virgin daughters at the festival of Aphrodite, if they were granted victory over the tyrant Leophron of Rhegion who was directing an attack against their city. The threat, which was very serious, was overcome thanks to Hieron of Syracuse, but the Locrians did not fulfil the votum; they were reminded of it more than a century later, but that is another story.

In 1984 and 1985 Ralph Hall and I presented statistical methodologies, based on inductive statistics and the comparative method, to determine the rhythmical qualities of Latin prose from the third to early sixth century A.D. We continued our work with the publication of articles on the final clausulae in the legal codes and Augustine's letters and on rhythms in internal positions, while I produced studies of the clausulae in the Pseudo-Sallustiana and Ammianus.

In the opening chapter of the Iudicium de Dinarcho Dionysius quotes a passage from the Περì ὁμωνὐμων of Demetrius Magnes, mat the end of which come the words ἧ δέ λὲξις ἐςτί τοῦ Δεινάρχου κυρὶως ἠθική πάθος κινοῦσα σχεδòν τῇ πικρíᾳ μóνον καì τῷ τóνῶ τοὖ Δημοσθθενικοὖ χαρακτῆρος λειπομὲνη τοῦ δέ πιθανοὖ καì κυρíιυ μηδὲν ἐνδέονσα. [I have deliberately omitted all punctuation marks, because the punctuation of this sentence is still doubtful, though I hope to suggest a possible interpretation of its meaning at the end of this article.] Now there is nothing in this sentence or in the words preceding it to indicate beyond all possibility of doubt the precise meaning ofκυρíως ἠθικὴ. And in such circumstances, to allow free play to personal (or perhaps natural) prejudices regarding the significance of thephrase is more than dangerous. The whole problem of ἠθική λὲξις has been treated too cursorily. If one mentions the phrase to a non-professional student of Greek, who, however, has some acquaintance with the Attic orators, he immediately replies: ‘I suppose you mean the sort of thing you meet in Lysias.’ And he is to beexcused, because, after all, that is the predominant meaning of the term. But it has other senses, and therefore one must fight shy of vague statements like that of Finke, who, after quoting the above lines, comment: ‘Demetrius Magnus attribuit ei (sc. Dinarcho)τἡν κυρíαν λὲξιν qua non sit Demosthene inferior’(the last few words of which are possibly not even a correct translation of the text); or of Burgess, who enumerates qualities, ideas, and topics ‘of special value to the epideictic and court orators, ’ among which appears ἠθοποιἷα which he merely translates ‘impersonation or delineation of character, ’ without offering any further comment. Sandys talks of ‘the ethical warmth of colouring, by which the dullest details are lit up with a fresh life and interest.’ Gromska is even more vague (and seems almost to confuse ἦθ∨ς and χαρακτὴρ: ‘Grammatici antiqui, qui de Hyperide tractabant, de eloquentiae eius genere disputabant, orationum Hyperidearum compositionem et ἦθ∨ς respicientes, i.e. quantum in arte rhetorica et oratoria valeret, examinantes.’ In the hope, therefore, of being able to represent the difficulty inherent in these lines, and of attempting to remove it, or at any rate to shed a broader beam of light upon it than has been shed hitherto, I propose to review very briefly the fluctuations of meaning in the life of this phrase and its equivalents, as we find them used in the critical writings of the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians.

Arrian was better qualified to understand the nature and significance of ‘the pursuit’ in Macedonian warfare than any modern scholar. He had himself fought and commanded in a very similar kind of warfare, and he was keenly interested in the study of military tactics. He was also better informed about the pursuits which Alexander had conducted, because he was able to use the accounts of Alexander's contemporaries, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Anyone today who wishes to question the veracity of Arrian's reports of these pursuits cannot do so of his own experience. He should therefore turn to comparable pursuits of recent times which have been reported accurately beyond any shadow of doubt.

A new examination of Aristotle's Poetics has confirmed my conviction that a number of old and new puzzles can be solved by the same analytical method which in recent years (though not entirely unchallenged) has been successfully applied to a good many of his writings, giving us a better insight into the growth and successive elaboration of his thought. The importance of the Poetics seems to me to justify any attempt to discover the original train of thought and to distinguish it from later additions (each of which was made of course by the philosopher himself). Readers will be aware of the enormous number of books and papers dealing with the problems of this work and will forgive me for referring to a selection only.

Scholarship has long argued that the Batrachomyomachia (BM) is to be dated to the Hellenistic period or later, but the question of its literary affiliations in this context has only recently been addressed. Usually considered an example of παρωιδία, the poem is a unique example of that genre in several respects, including the extent to which it develops its own formularity rather than merely mirroring the Homeric exemplar with minimal change, and the fact that it was passed off as the work of Homer himself instead of being self-consciously distanced from the parodied author. It is therefore fitting that the BM is also unusual for ancient parody in dealing with the scholarly discourse surrounding its primary exemplar. This note offers, as an(other) example of this tendency, the BM's engagement with the Homeric arming scene, and its reception in Hellenistic poetry and scholarship.

The Stoa might be not the first philosophical school that comes to mind when considering the most important ancient contributions to aesthetics, yet multiple extant fragments show that the Stoics had a non-marginal theoretical interest in aesthetic properties. Probably the most important piece of evidence for the Stoic attempts to theorize beauty is the definition of beauty as summetria of parts with each other and with the whole. In the first half of this article, I present and analyse the main evidence for this definition. Then I discuss Plotinus' critique of the definition and argue that it contains some pertinent remarks that, with support of additional evidence, lead to the conclusion that the Stoics conceptualized aesthetic properties as supervening on functional composition.