Homer's Iliad is an epic poem full of war and battles, but scholars have noted that ‘[t]he Homeric poems are interested in death far more than they are in fighting’. Even though long passages of the poem, particularly the so-called ‘battle books’ (Il. Books 5–8, 11–17, 20–2), consist of little other than fighting, individual battles are often very short with hardly ever a longer exchange of blows. Usually, one strike is all it takes for the superior warrior to dispatch his opponent, and death occurs swiftly. The prominence of death in Homeric battle scenes raises the question of how and in which terms dying in battle is being depicted in the Iliad: for while fighting can be described in a straightforward fashion, death is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to grasp. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have ascertained that, when coping with difficult and abstract concepts, such as emotions, the human mind is likely to resort to figurative language and particularly to metaphors.

The fifth book of the Iliad contains a curious story about the fight between Heracles and Hades at Pylos, told by Dione (395–7): τλῆ δ' Ἀΐδης ἐν τοῖσι πελώριος ὠκὺν ὀϊστόν, | εὖτέ μιν ωὐτὸς ἀνὴρ υἱὸς Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο | ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι βαλὼν ὀδύνῃσιν ἔδωκεν; the tale seems to have no clear mythological reference or at least not any known to us. Neither can one be found for the most puzzling element of this passage: the bizarre phrase in line 397 that Hades was wounded ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι, as we know nothing about a myth which might have been connected with this event. The lines in question have not been of great interest to scholars hitherto and tend to be mentioned only cursorily; even if some attempts at explanation have been made, no satisfactory solution has yet been offered. In this paper I would like to address two issues: (a) the myth(s) involved in the story and the meaning of ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι within it, and (b) the mechanisms through which the confusion of the transmitted versions of the motif of Heracles fighting various gods might have originated, amalgamating separate tales into an apparently unitary story. The motif of Heracles’ fight with Hades is particularly interesting and deserves careful examination.

Archil. fr. 232 West (= 50 Tarditi = 133 Bergk = 230 LB) reads as follows:

νόμος δὲ Κρητικὸς διδάσκεται

a Cretan law is taught (transl. Dilts)

The following notes concern textual problems in the prologue and parodos of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. The text and apparatus criticus are based on those of M.L. West, Aeschylus: Tragoediae (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1990; corrected edition, 1998).

χαιρέτω ἡμέτερος βασιλεὺς σωτήρ τε πατήρ τε·
ἡμῖν δὲ κρητῆρ’ οἰνοχόοι θέραπες
κιρνάντων προχύταισιν ἐν ἀργυρέοις· †ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς
οἶνον ἔχων χειρῶν νιζέτω εἰς ἔδαφος.†
σπένδοντες δ’ ἁγνῶς Ἡρακλεῖ τ’ Ἀλκμήνηι τε,
Προκλεῖ Περσείδαις τ’ ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχόμενοι
πίνωμεν, παίζωμεν· ἴτω διὰ νυκτὸς ἀοιδή,
ὀρχείσθω τις· ἑκὼν δ’ ἄρχε φιλοφροσύνης.
ὅντινα δ’ εὐειδὴς μίμνει θήλεια πάρευνος,
κεῖνος τῶν ἄλλων κυδρότερον πίεται.

Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, 781
Ἔρως, ὃς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις,
ὃς ἐν μαλακαῖς παρειαῖς
νεάνιδος ἐννυχεύεις,
φοιτᾷς δ’ ὑπερπόντιος ἔν τ’ 785
ἀγρονόμοις αὐλαῖς·

Despite its often daunting obscurity, the ‘Hippocratic’ treatise De Victu is a text of particular interest, not only because it presents the first clear formulation in an entirely preserved Greek text of the microcosm–macrocosm relationship but also for the sophisticated use it makes of this pervasive pattern of Greek thought in the context of dietetics.

The so-called ‘Olympian’ proof in Plato's Republic contains one of the first explicit distinctions between the nature of intellectual and bodily pleasures. The argument for the superiority of the former rests on a) identifying pleasure and pain with certain kinds of filling and emptying (583b1–585a7), and b) differentiating between bodily and intellectual pleasures according to the kind of filling:

1. (i) Bodily depletions differ from depletions of the soul in the kind of lack and, accordingly, in the kind of thing that fills the lack: hunger and thirst are bodily lacks which food and drink can cure, whereas ignorance and folly are cured by intelligence (585a8–b8).

   Thus, (ii), the kind of lack (belonging to the soul vs belonging to the body), together with the kind of filler (‘food’ for the soul vs food for the body), and derivatively the method of filling (eating vs learning) determine the kind of filling.

2. (iii) Kinds of filling differ in truth: filling A is truer than filling B if and only if the kind of fillers used in A are more than the kind of fillers used in B and the kind of thing filled via A is more than the kind of thing filled via B (cf. 585d7–10).

3. (iv) Fillers of the soul are more than bodily fillers (585b11–d4).

4. (v) The soul is more than the body (585d5–6).

   Therefore, (vi), filling of the soul is truer than bodily filling, that is, filling of the soul is more really a filling (585d7–10).

The final section on the aorist indicative in Goodwin's Moods and Tenses identifies the following usage: ‘In questions with τί οὐ [‘why not’], expressing surprise that something is not already done, and implying an exhortation to do it’. Other scholars identify urgency or impatience in these questions. Albert Rijksbaron writes: ‘Questions with the 1st or 2nd person of the aorist indicative, introduced by τί οὖν οὐ or τί οὐ, often serve, especially in Plato and Xenophon, as urgent requests [original emphasis] … The aorist indicative is more emphatic than the present: the speaker observes that a state of affairs which he apparently wants to occur has, in fact, not occurred, and he asks his interlocutor why it has not.’ Kühner and Gerth explain it as follows: ‘Der Redende wünscht in seiner Ungeduld gewissermassen die begehrte Handlung als eine schon geschehene zu sehen’ (‘the speaker impatiently wants, as it were, to see the desired action as one that has already been done’). They contrast allegedly less urgent examples in the present (‘der Ton der Frage ist alsdann ruhiger’, ‘the tone of the question is thereby milder’). These scholars stress the pastness of the aorist tense in communicating urgency and impatience: ‘Why have you not …?’. This remains the dominant view, regularly repeated in commentaries.

Over the last decades we have seen an increased interest in forensic rhetoric in Plato's dialogues, notably in relation to his Apology. However, little interest has been paid to this strain of rhetoric in relation to the Gorgias. In this article I focus on one notion, βοήθεια, as it was discussed in Plato's Gorgias. This notion had a wide currency in forensic rhetoric in classical Athens.

We can first note the obvious, that both glosses are sexual in nature: τὸ βιάζεσθαι γυναῖκας, ‘to rape women’; in τὸ παιδὶ συνεῖναι we obviously have the euphemistic use of συνεῖναι, ‘to have sex with a child’. Hesychius’ entries have the appearance of straightforward dialect glosses, yet Ambraciot never elicited much attention in ancient dialectology and glossography. Furthermore, as ancient glossography consisted mainly in culling unusual vocabulary from literary texts, we can legitimately ask what sources might have been available to Hellenistic scholars for Ambraciot.

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system.

At Argon. 4.1653–88, Medea steps forward among the Argonauts and asserts that their harbourage on Crete will not be blocked by the bronze giant Talos, who stands menacingly throwing rocks at their ship. She claims that she alone can subdue him, and then steps forward and proceeds to do so. Using a sequence of ‘magical’ ritualistic acts, she causes Talos to scrape his vulnerable heel on a rock and fall down dead, as the ichor pours from his wound. This scene is the last in which Medea appears in the epic, and accordingly it forms the final opportunity to bridge the gap between the Medea of the Argonautica and the future Medea, one whose actions are already well known from such works as Pindar's fourth Pythian Ode and Euripides’ Medea. The importance for Apollonius to create a plausible transition between the Medea of earlier myth and the Argonautic Medea is evident. A clear-cut break from tradition would allow Medea to become an alternative Medea, perhaps akin to the alternative portrayal of Helen by Euripides; a continuation would allow corroboration with earlier sources, which would lend authority and validation to Apollonius’ version. It is now the common consensus that Apollonius tried, however successfully, to bridge the gap between a young and an adult Medea and between tradition and innovation in her character.

In his Lives of Eminent Philosophers (6.75–6) Diogenes Laertius mentions, among the various traditions of how Diogenes the Cynic met his end, the belief that he committed suicide by retention of the breath. He cites as his authority for this the poet Cercidas of Megalopolis (c.290–post 215 b.c.e.), who, between some fifty and a hundred years after the death of the Cynic, celebrated his ascent to heaven in the following verses.

In 209 b.c. P. Cornelius Scipio captured the city of New Carthage. The victory was crucial for the Roman war effort in Spain, and indeed in Italy too, but Scipio's campaign is especially memorable—and the subject of much debate—on account of the manner in which the city was taken. New Carthage had in effect been built on a peninsula, with the sea to the south and a lagoon to the north, and with a canal joining the two to the west. The city, therefore, could only be approached by land from the east; but, according to Polybius, Scipio had learnt from some fishermen that the lagoon was shallow and could be forded in most places and, moreover, that the waters in it usually receded each evening (10.8.7). It was this knowledge that Scipio exploited to take the city. But this same knowledge he also kept from his men (10.9.1, 10.9.4–5). In his address to his soldiers prior to the attack, Polybius says, Scipio told them that Poseidon had visited him in his sleep and had promised to assist the Romans in their operations in a way that would be apparent to all (10.11.7).

This paper proposes that living Seleucid kings were recognized as divine by the royal court before the reign of Antiochus III despite lacking an established centralized ruler cult like their fellow kings, the Ptolemies. Owing to the nature of the surviving evidence, we are forced to rely heavily on numismatics to construct a view of Seleucid royal ideology. Regrettably, it seems that up until now much of the numismatic evidence for the divinity of living Seleucid rulers has not been fully considered. I argue that the evidence from silver coinage produced in the name of the Seleucid kings presents a version of the official image of the reigning king and that images which portray the king as divine reflect central acceptance of the king's divinity. This is clear from the epithets on the coinage of Antiochus IV and his successors, but I will argue that the same principle holds for all earlier Seleucid kings. Thus coinage with divine images of Seleucid kings provided one of the mechanisms through which the royal court transmitted the divine nature of the kings to the population. As we will see, in the case of Antiochus Hierax, local considerations also influenced the numismatic representation of the king. This blurring of boundaries between the local veneration of the king, which has long been accepted as normal civic practice in the Greek city-states and in non-Greek temples, and the royal images of the divine king calls into question the strict division between civic and centralized ruler cults. The reflection of local cults within royal ideology can be seen as a manifestation of a negotiating model of Seleucid power that relied heavily on a dialogue with a wide range of interested groups. This article argues that the inconsistencies in the development of an iconography of divine kingship before the reign of Antiochus IV is a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

Grammar as a discipline devoted to the study of language was greatly advanced by the Alexandrian philologists, and especially by Aristarchus, as demonstrated by Stephanos Matthaios. In order to edit Homer and other literary authors, whose texts were often written in archaic Greek and presented many linguistic problems, the Alexandrians had to recognize linguistic grammatical categories and declensional patterns. In particular, to determine the correct orthography or accentuation of debated morphological forms they often employed analogy, which is generally defined as the doctrine that grammatical forms must follow strict rules of declension. Modern scholars have often opposed the Alexandrian doctrine of analogy to the Pergamene doctrine of ‘anomaly’, which favoured spoken usage to determine debated forms. Detlev Fehling and David Blank, however, have shown that this strong opposition never really existed and it is mostly due to Varro. More correctly, ancient grammarians identified inflectional rules as well as forms derived from spoken usage or otherwise aberrant forms—however, respect for spoken usage in the latter case was not labelled ‘anomaly’, which was never a technical term of ancient grammar. Rather, and especially in the Roman period, grammarians used the term ‘pathology’ to account for and explain irregular forms.

Of the hundreds of Greek common nouns and adjectives preserved in our MSS of Cicero, about three dozen are found written in the Latin alphabet as well as in the Greek. So we find, alongside συμπάθεια, also sympathia, and ἱστορικός as well as historicus. This sort of variation has been termed alphabet-switching; it has received little attention in connection with Cicero, even though it is relevant to subjects of current interest such as his bilingualism and the role of code-switching and loanwords in his works. Rather than addressing these issues directly, this discussion sets out information about the way in which the words are written in our surviving MSS of Cicero and takes further some recent work on the presentation of Greek words in Latin texts. It argues that, for the most part, coherent patterns and explanations can be found in the alphabetic choices exhibited by them, or at least by the earliest of them when there is conflict in the paradosis, and that this coherence is evidence for a generally reliable transmission of Cicero's original choices. While a lack of coherence might indicate unreliable transmission, or even an indifference on Cicero's part, a consistent pattern can only really be explained as an accurate record of coherent alphabet choice made by Cicero when writing Greek words.

Philosophical influences in the personality and public life of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, consul in 147 and 134 b.c., were once emphasized in scholarship. In 1892, Schmekel demonstrated the reception of Stoic philosophy in the second half of the second century b.c. among the philhellenic members of the governing elite in general, and statesmen like Scipio Aemilianus in particular, in what he called the ‘Roman Enlightenment’. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kaerst showed influences of Stoic philosophy on Scipio, contemporary politics and the Principate to come, while Capelle and Pohlenz identified Stoic ideas in Scipio's foreign and domestic policies. Together they formed a body of scholarship which held that Scipio possessed a serious interest in philosophy which defined his character and informed his public life. In the 1960s, the challenge to this scholarship was led by Strasburger in two articles, and by Astin in his 1967 biography. Both scholars downplayed and devalued philosophical influences on Scipio and denied him the pursuit of the Greek virtuous life. They placed him within the traditions of the Roman elite, ambitious for glory and results-driven, and they have successfully formed influential views to this end, despite the critique made by Erskine. Astin remained the authoritative study of Scipio and there was much in his Realpolitik that scholarship found compelling, even when it allowed Scipio an attachment to Greek culture. For example, Gruen, Elvers and Badian acknowledged Scipio's interest in Greek culture and philosophy, in combination with the practices and goals of a traditional Roman aristocrat, but they placed their accent on the latter by affirming that Greek learning did not change the current of a traditional aristocratic life. The contention of this article is that the pre-Strasburger/Astin interpretation of Scipio, despite its shortcomings, was indeed correct to detect a deep current of philosophical influences on Scipio. The article argues that the evidence demonstrates that in education, character and public life Scipio was informed by the Greek moral and political tradition; that Scipio had claimed to possess the cardinal virtues, derived ultimately from Plato; and that he had acted under a moral imperative of power formulated by the Stoic philosopher Panaetius; the conclusion will address the ethical intention of Scipio.