The plot of Iphigenia in Tauris is usually thought to be Euripides' own invention. Its basic assumption can be found in Proclus' summary of the Cypria, viz. that a deer was substituted for Iphigenia during the sacrifice at Aulis and that she herself was removed to the land of the Tauri. Her later rescue by Orestes and Pylades, however, cannot be traced with probability to any work of art or literature earlier than Euripides' play. In this play, in which Orestes recognizes and then saves the sister whom he had long thought dead, it is assumed that her replacement by a deer went unseen by those present at the sacrifice. The sequel which this assumption allowed Euripides to invent (if it was he who invented it) is original only in a limited sense, since it bears the imprint of several familiar story types. These types include the following: (1) the murder of a kinsman is narrowly averted by a recognition; (2) a reunion is followed by an intrigue; and (3) a maiden is rescued. Each is used elsewhere by Euripides. The first two, for example, are found in Cresphontes, the second in Electra, and the third in Andromeda. Correspondences of this sort, based on plot patterns, will naturally gain in interest if it can be shown that they throw light on a play's meaning or on the process that led to its creation. The student of dramatic plots, however, soon discovers that analogies between them are easy to draw and can be quickly multiplied.

Students of Stoic philosophy, especially of Stoic ethics, have a lot to swallow. Virtues and emotions are bodies; virtue is the only good, and constitutes happiness, while vice is the only evil; emotions are judgements (in Chrysippus' Stoa); all sins are equal; and everyone bar the sage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Non-Stoics in antiquity seem for the most part to find these doctrines as bizarre as we do. Their own philosophical or ideological perspectives, and the criticisms of the Stoa to which these gave rise, are no less open to criticism than are the paradoxes and puzzles under attack – but they may be, often are, better documented, less provocatively attention-begging, or simply more familiar. Even disputes within the Stoa can be obscured or distorted by modern prejudices. Posidonius rejected Chrysippus' theory of a unitary soul, one rational through and through, on the grounds that such a theory could not satisfactorily account for the genesis of bad – excessive and irrational – emotions, the πάθη (Galen, PHP 2.246.36ff., 314. 15ff. De Lacy). Posidonius' own Platonising, tripartite soul feels more familiar to us because the Republic tends to be a set text rather more often than do the fragments of Chrysippus' de anima; and the balance in Plato's favour is unlikely to change. When Posidonius wrote, on the other hand, the Chrysippean soul was school orthodoxy, and Platonism the latest thing in radical chic.

Julius Tomin has recently questioned the new orthodoxy, stemming from Burnyeat's impressive article, that Socratic midwifery is not genuinely Socratic. I understand that many will feel the need to question Burnyeat's position, but I am unhappy that Aristophanes' comedy has once again been thought to give support to the view that Socrates had been known as an intellectual midwife. Thus my response will concentrate on our understanding of Clouds, and in particular on the key passage at 135ff.

The standard histories give notice of a polemical treatise entitled Letters on Empedocles, 'Eπιστολικὰ. περὶ 'Eμπεδοκλέους (Diog. Laer. Vitae 10.25) in twenty two books by Hermarchus, Epicurus' favourite pupil and successor. The work survives in some twenty fragments of more than probable ascription. The most important of these is an extensive extract preserved by Porphyry at De Abstinentia 1.7–12 on the origin in human history of justice, homicide law, and expiatory purifications, which has been the subject of much discussion. Porphyry himself never names the title of Hermarchus' treatise, though he makes it clear that it was in the form of a polemical attack on the views of Empedocles. A recent papyrus find gives the title not as Letters on Empedocles, but as φρὸς 'Eμπεδοκλέα (Against Empedocles). In what follows it will be convenient to show that this is no mere variant but in fact the original and correct form of the title, and to determine what can be known with certainty as a result about the make-up of the work.

Plutarch, in his Apophthegmata Laconica (Ages. 25 = mor. 210d), records that the Thasians made an offer of divine honours to king Agesilaus, and that Agesilaus ostentatiously refused them. In the past, most scholars who have had occasion to comment on this anecdote have not doubted the veracity either of the report or of the language in which it is expressed. The situation, however, has now reversed itself. The current communis opinio is the contention of Chr. Habicht that the story is an invention of the Hellenistic or early imperial period and was intended to be a criticism of contemporary practices. The purpose of this note is threefold: to demonstrate that the anecdote derives from Theopompus' Hellenica, that it has a basis in historical fact, and that the incident thus narrated had far-reaching social and political consequences.

‘Jason…chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill, or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea but cowering before her later threats and curses, coldly efficient in the time-serving murder of an unsuspecting child (sic), reluctant even in marriage.’ So Carspecken put the case against Jason's heroism. In the face of such an indictment, Lawall's plea in mitigation, ‘it must be admitted that [Jason] often reveals the qualities of a true gentleman’, seems somehow inadequate. Criticism since Carspecken has found various overlapping categories for Jason which both take account of the earlier negative judgements and preserve the centrality of his ‘personality’ and character in the poem: Jason is the quiet diplomat who works through consensus rather than force, his is a heroism of sex-appeal, he is an anti-hero, the embodiment of Sceptic ‘suspension of judgement’, or, alternatively, he is ‘one of us’, credible and lifelike. Carspecken himself tried a different tack: the poem is concerned not with individual heroism but with the heroism of the group (cf. 1.1, 4.1773–81).

The main source of Archytas, fr. 1 Diels-Kranz is Porphyr. in Ptol. harmon. p. 56,5–57,27 Düring; there is also an extensive quotation of its initial part in Nicomachus, Introd. Arithm. p. 6,16–7,5 Hoche. In recent years both the text and the interpretation of this fragment, whose authenticity was questioned by W. Burkert, have been re-examined, and a good deal of progress has been made especially by paying more attention to the nature of Nicomachus' quotation and its context.

It has long been noticed that Virgil's Eclogue 10, in which Gal I us plays so prominent a rôle, contains a combination of pastoral and elegiac elements. But this prompts the question: who was responsible for this combination? Was the fusion of pastoral and erotic-elegiac detail Virgil's own, or did Gallus himself write love-elegies with a strong pastoral colouring, a type of poetry which Virgil then echoed in Eclogue 10?

The account of the death of Palinurus at the end of Aen. 5 raises to a higher level of importance a figure who has previously seemed very much a minor character in the Aeneid. This is achieved partly by the narrative brilliance of Virgil's account of his destruction by Somnus, and partly also by the atmosphere of solemn mystery which surrounds his fate. This solemn note is first struck in the passage which directly prepares the way for Palinurus' death. At Aen. 5.779 Venus, anxious that Juno's wrath may still prevent the safe arrival of Aeneas in Italy, appeals for help to Neptune. He reassures her. Aeneas will arrive safely. There is, however, one condition:

unus erit tantum amissum quem gurgite quaeres;

unum pro multis dabitur caput. (5.814–15)

In the largely historical and aporetic first book of the De Anima (DA), Aristotle makes what appear to be some rather disturbing remarks about the soul's status as a subject of mental states. Most notably, in a curious passage which has aroused the interest of commentators, he seems to suggest that there is something wrong with regarding the soul as a subject of mental states:

Thus, saying that the soul is angry is the same as if one were to say that the soul builds houses and weaves: for it is perhaps better to say not that the soul pities or learns or thinks, but that the man does [these things] with his soul. (DA 408bll–15)

Epistles 1.20, the last poem of its book, begins with an elaborate joke on the entry of Horace's book of epistles into the world and ends with a well-known σϕραγίς describing the poet himself. It will be argued here that this final poem recalls and subverts the pretensions of two earlier final poems in Horace's own Odes, and that its good-humoured depreciation of Horace himself is matched by a similar attitude towards his previous grand poetic claims as a lyric vates.

In what sense did the Hellenistic philosophers see themselves as the heirs or critics of Socrates? Was Socrates, in their view, a philosopher on whom Plato was the decisive authority? What doctrines or strategies of Socrates were thoroughly alive in this period? These are the principal questions I shall be asking in this paper, particularly the third. To introduce them, and to set the scene, I begin with some general points, starting from two passages which present an image of Socrates at the beginning and at the end of the Hellenistic era. Here first are three lines from the Silloi of the Pyrrhonean Timon of Phlius:

From these matters (i.e. the inquiry into nature) he turned aside, the people-chiselling moralising ‘chatterer, the wizard of Greece, whose assertions were sharply pointed, master of the well-turned sneer, a pretty good ironist.

When did Livy write his history? How many books had it, and what did the lost ones cover? Such answers as can be given to these questions come almost entirely from the one extant summary, the Periochae. The manuscripts of the Periochae disagree, however, on a matter of considerable interest: out of a hundred or so, only three, supported by a lost fourth, have been cited as adding to the title Ex libro CXXI the subtitle qui editus post excessum Augusti dicitur. When the latest editor, P. Jal in the Collection Budé (Paris, 1984), declares himself unconvinced of its authenticity (i. cxx–cxxi), he leaves the reader to decide whether authenticity means truth, authorial origin, or presence in the archetype; but whatever it means, seeds of suspicion have been sown.

In the ancient Roman world, as in modern times, treaties were usually made between sovereign states. Indeed, prior to the Social War, the foedus was a significant element in relations between Rome and the non-Latin allies (socii). However, the Romans also had treaties with Italian communities integrated to various degrees with their own state. These communities included both the Latin allies (nominis Latini) and cities possessing full or partial Roman citizenship (municipia).

The long-awaited publication of Otto Zwierlein's edition of Seneca's Tragedies provides a welcome opportunity to present a few observations on the penultimate scene of pseudo-Seneca's Octavia (846–76).

The scene in question features Nero quarrelling with his Guard Prefect over the fate of the Empress Octavia. In this altercation there are three textual points which have for long been in dispute. The first section of the article is concerned with these, favouring an emendation (858) discarded in the new Oxford edition, but questioning two of the verse divisions suggested (867b–868a) or adopted (870a) by Zwierlein.

This passage has occasioned, if not proelia, at least divergent interpretations, not to mention instances of tergiversation. In 1910 Cyril Bailey modelled his first rendering of the lines closely on that of H. A. J. Munro: ‘But unless the breast is cleared, what battles and dangers must enter into us in our own despite’; ‘but unless the heart is cleansed, what battles and dangers must then find their way into us in our own despite’. But a reprint of Bailey's translation in 1921 produced the following change: ‘…what battles and perils must we then enter into despite our will’. What changed Bailey's mind?

The explanation appeared years later in Bailey's great edition and commentary of 1947. In his note on the passage (p. 1328), he cites objections to Munro's interpretation that had been raised by C. N. Cole and W. R. Hardie. In this paper I will examine these objections and present my own interpretation of the passage, which amounts to a qualified vindication of Munro.

Horace's Asterie ode (3.7) has been somewhat neglected by critics. Fraenkel, uninterested in the erotic odes, fails to mention it, and others see it as merely counterbalancing the preceding six Roman Odes by its frivolity and light irony. However, it is one of Horace's most subtle and best-organized erotic odes, matching the more obvious conventions of Latin love-elegy with a romanticized Odyssey as an underlying framework.

That the most poetic of all the Greek philosophers should also be the severest judge of the poets was a perpetual embarrassment to his disciples and an invitation to enemies who could never have found their way into the difficulties of his thought. At the hands of Colotes, an early Epicurean, Plato became the butt of his own asperities; the allegorist Heraclitus, showing equal contempt for Plato and for ‘the Phaeacian Epicurus’, found that philosophy lent itself to vices for which the Iliad and the Odyssey had no name. Proclus, in his Commentary on the Republic, has the task of reconciling Homer with Plato, and of showing that the mythopoeic faculty is an instrument of the profoundest thought in both.

It would be a mistake to attempt to identify in modern terms the disease of Galerius described so graphically by Lactantius, Mort. 33 (cf. the similar description at Eus. H.E. 8.16). Consumption by lice or worms, if not genital ‘gangrene’, was a typical end for a tyrant or the impious, and there must be an element of literary exaggeration in Lactantius' account. But whatever one makes of the nature of the illness, Lactantius did set out to give the passage a scientific plausibility by his use of technical medical phraseology, and by an allusion to a medical theory at 33.7. Recognition of this theory allows one to settle the text at one point, where editors have failed to agree. There is also a second place in the chapter where familiarity with medical Latin points one towards the solution of a textual problem.

In the six remarkable elegidia transmitted in the Tibullan corpus as 3.13–18 (4.7–12) we appear to possess the writings of an educated Roman woman of aristocratic family and high literary connections: a woman, moreover, who participates as an equal in one of the most distinguished artistic salons of the age, and composes poetry in an obstinately male genre on the subject of her own erotic experience, displaying a candour and the exercise of a sexual independence startingly at odds with the ideology of her class. Such a figure is either, depending on one's viewpoint, too good to be true or too embarrassing to be tolerated. The case could easily be put that Sulpicia, more perhaps even than Sappho, has found her poems condemned by accident of gender to a century and a half of condescension, disregard, and wilful misconstruction to accommodate the inelastic sexual politics of elderly male philologists. Certainly even the most sympathetic of recent comment is prone to lapse into a form of critical language outlawed in Catullan scholarship thirty years ago. Yet feminist critics have been strangely cautious in their response. A scholar who rose swiftly to the defence of Erinna when that elusive poet's identity was impugned has notoriously written of Sulpicia:

‘She was not a brilliant artist: her poems are of interest only because the author is female.’ Five years late, Sulpicia has found a place in the major sourcebook on ancient women, but with the cycle of poems violently reordered after the judgment of a nineteenth-century (male) critic, anxious to restore his poetess's chastity against the disconcerting frankness of the texts.