When the Argonauts reach the island of Lemnos, Apollonius of Rhodes tells us, they send their herald Aethalides to the ruler of the island. Such a means of establishing contact and requesting safe passage was the norm in the Homeric world; there heralds acted as intermediaries between commanders and subordinates or between groups of people. In preliterate societies, heralds facilitated communication: messages were transmitted through memorization and repetition rather than by means of writing. While verbatim repetition was no doubt a necessary feature of this form of communication, its wholesale transference into Homeric poetry was not necessarily the logical corollary. Nonetheless, we know of such repetitions precisely because of their appearance in the Homeric poems. It is now widely accepted that such passages are a result of the oral style of composition in which the oral poet repeats passages just as he uses shorter formulaic phrases. The debate embedded in the A-scholia of the Iliad suggests that repeated passages were a source of contention already in antiquity. While it is more common to see the scholiasts trying to decide which passage is ‘correct’ and which should be athetized, this provides evidence that athetization was not a unanimous impulse. The scholiast defends 2.60–71, part of which (65–9) is repeated for the third time, against Zenodotus:

His defence is based on context: it is necessary for the passage to be repeated for the sake of internal coherence. Clearly not all scholars believed all repetitions to be spurious padding.

The popular question why Plato wrote dramatic dialogues, which is motivated by a just fascination and perplexity for contemporary scholars about the unique form of the Platonic texts, is confused and anachronistic; for it judges the Platonic texts qua philosophical texts in terms of post–Platonic texts not written in dramatic dialogic form. In comparison with these, the form of Platos early aporetic dialogues is highly unusual. Yet, in its contemporary milieu, the form of Platonic literature is relatively normal. Dramatic dialogue was the most popular form of Attic literature in the late fifth and fourth centuries. This explains why Plato wrote dramatic dialogues.

So far as we can judge from his one completely preserved play and extensive fragments of others, Menander carefully worked out the movements of his characters on and off stage, so as to give an appearance of realism, within certain conventions, and avoid inconsistencies that might distract the audience. Menander's observed practice confirms the famous anecdote, according to which he regarded the construction of a plot as of primary importance, adding the lines as secondary. Thus a character who returns to the stage after an earlier exit always re-enters through the same stage door or wing by which he made his exit; if, for example, he makes his exit in the direction of the market-place, he will be seen by the audience to return from there. Although the ancient evidence is confused, it seems clear, at least, that convention allowed the Athenian audience to regard one wing as leading to the market-place, the other to the country. Similarly, dramatic time is carefully articulated by means of the conventional choral interludes which divide a play into five acts. Some acceleration of dramatic time is possible within an act, but major lapses of dramatic time take place between acts; if a character makes an off-stage trip of some length, for example to the market-place, his exit and re-entry are separated by a choral interlude. Within the act a strict unity of time is maintained and dramatic time (gespielte Zeii) does not greatly exceed performance time (Spielzeii).

On Anatomy (Anat.) is the shortest treatise preserved in the Hippocratic Corpus (HC). It describes the internal configuration of the human trunk. The account is for the most part descriptive, function being largely disregarded and speculation completely eschewed. Though systematic it is unsophisticated: two orifices for ingestion are linked by miscellaneous organs, vessels, and viscera to two orifices for evacuation. There is a clear progression in two parallel sections: first, trachea to lung, lung described, location of heart, heart described, kidneys to bladder, bladder described, bladder to genitals, conclusion; and second, oesophagus to belly, location of diaphragm, location of spleen, location and description of belly (close to liver), belly to intestine/colon, colon to rectum and anus, conclusion. The text offers good basic topographical or regional anatomy (the organs studied as they lie in relationship with one another in the different regions of the body). That the work is concerned with human anatomy is certain from the precise description of lung and liver, with features peculiar to human organs; and is corroborated by frequent references to comparative anatomy, with which familiarity is apparently assumed. Such anatomical knowledge, based on extensive observation of animals (probably sacrificial victims as well as laboratory specimens), may have been corroborated by some human dissection, perhaps of the aborted foetus or exposed infant, in conjunction with opportunistic observation of war wounded and accident victims. While the syntax is bald, telegraphic, and asyndetic, the vocabulary is recondite, and poetic. There is erratic omission of the article and recurrent use of compendious comparisons. These features suggest that Anat. may be an abridgement of a fuller and more flowery account; this hypothesis is supported by several passages where erroneous or unclear information apparently results from excessive compression or imperfect comprehension of a source.

According to a report in Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 561CD), the qualities of Erosled the Stoic Zeno to make him the tutelary god of his ideal state:

Pontianus said that Zeno of Citium took Eros to be the god of love and freedom, and even the provider of concord, but nothing else. This is why he said in his Republic that Eros was the god who contributed to the safety of the city.

Near the beginning of In Toga Candida, Cicero informed his audience of a private meeting between his two most serious competitors for the consulate and the managers of their campaigning funds. This meeting took place at the house of a nobleman whom Cicero did not name but to whom he attributed a signal notoriety in the practice of electoral corruption. Asconius offers a solution without hesitation: it was at the house of either Caesar or Crassus. He explains his choice: these two men were Cicero's most committed and influential opponents in his campaign for the consulate, and he has excellent evidence for their opposition: Cicero's own Expositio consiliorum suorum, no longer extant. The credibility or otherwise of this controversial work must be dismissed from any enquiry into the identity of the mysterious figure, however. Asconius, in naming the two alternative possibilities, discloses himself to be without authoritative evidence on the point. Nothing can have been said in De consiliis suis to identify the house, the meeting, or the notorious nobleman. Asconius' words reveal that his attempt at an identification is based on Cicero's assertion therein of an overt hostility to him on the part of both Crassus and Caesar during the campaign. His attribution of a covert ‘dirty tricks’ operation to one of them is no more than speculation.

Most ancient philosophers found access to the mental states of people other than the perceiver less problematic than the moderns did. But there is evidence, however scarce, that some groups of ancient sceptics raised questions which I shall call, for brevity's sake, doubts about other minds.

The study of the circulation of literary texts in ancient Rome has taken on new significance lately. Recent work on Roman books and their readers has emphasized the difference between the dissemination of texts in the ancient world and publication as we moderns know it, and we have come to see that our understanding of Roman culture and their politics can benefit from a closer examination of how the Romans composed, recited, and released their books. Take, for example, Cicero and the readers of his philosophical works. In the Tusculans, the Academica, De Officiis, De Divinatione, and De Finibns Cicero promoted Latin, in terms very like those of modern linguistic nationalism, as a medium for intellectual discourse at the expense of Greek, and exhorted his readers to follow him in transferring philosophy from Greece to Rome. To choose to write philosophy at this time in Latin instead of Greek was, as Cicero put it, a practical means of increasing Rome's intellectual prestige, a campaign in which he invited his readers to enlist. But to whom was this appeal directed? Who, to Cicero's mind at least, would have been useful in achieving this political goal? From evidence in Cicero's letters to Atticus, we can largely retrace how he disseminated these philosophical books, reconstruct to some degree their original readers, and, most importantly, deduce the grounds on which Cicero selected them. Cicero's choice of audience, and the manner in which he assembled it, throws an interesting light both on his agenda in promoting Latin as a philosophical language as well as on the Roman culture of publication.

I begin by listing those manuscripts older than 1100 that have hitherto been known to editors.

Euphorion SH 417 (fr. 36 Van Groningen) deserves to be better known. A curiosity in itself—an apparent poetic reference to number theory—it is also, potentially, one of our earliest references to Euclidean material. On the authority of a late commentator on Aristotle, Euphorion, a mid-third-century b.c. Euboean poet who was also active in Athens and Antioch, is said to have mentioned perfect numbers—i.e. numbers which equal the total of all their factors, including 1 (but obviously excluding the number itself). It is a pity that the context in Euphorion does not survive, and that the line is only preserved, and indeed interpreted, by so late a source. But the wording of the fragment—if Westerink's restoration of its various corruptions (again, a pity) is plausible—would strongly suggest a reference to the notion of perfect number. The fragment has been known since Westerink published it in 1960, and was included both in Van Groningen's edition of Euphorion in 1977 and in Supplementum Hellenisticum (1983). But its implications have still not been discussed, and when David Fowler came to gather the evidence for references to Euclidean material in and after the third century b.c. in The Mathematics of Plato's Academy, his attention, unsurprisingly, was not drawn to it. Euphorion has had a bad press, as a poet of rebarbatively obscure myth and intractable vocabulary; yet he holds some interest, and we may be missing more insights into the intellectual life of the Hellenistic period which the perverse intelligence and baneful wit of the fragments display.

This brief enquiry concerns two main questions: how and why Sulpicius' law differed from a similar prior rogation of the same year, which he had vetoed; and the probable authorship of the latter.

This paper sets out in section I the most useful evidence we possess for the dating of Propertius Book 1, Tibullus Book 1, and Propertius Books 2a and 2b.2 The evidence squares with a sequence of publication: Prop. 1, Tibull. 1, Prop. 2a, Prop. 2b, which is what, in my view, literary considerations suggest. The most important, or at least most interesting, of these considerations are the signs of response and counterresponse between the two poets. I detect spirited ripostes by the poets, one to the other. Section II examines some Tibullan responses to Propertius Book 1, and section III some Propertian responses, in ‘Book 2’, to Tibullus Book 1.

Descende caelo, Horace's ode 3.4, challenges the reader with an elaborate Pindaric architecture embracing seemingly disparate elements. After an opening invocation (1–8), the poet discourses at length on how the Muses protect him (9–36), then abruptly notes that those goddesses also nourished Octavian after his recent military campaign (37–42). This breaks off into a composite Titanomachy/Gigantomachy (42–64), followed by a set of maxims (65–8) which the poet further illustrates with other mythical exempla (69–80). This paper contends that the relationship among these various parts comes into clearest focus in the five-line description of the god Apollo that closes the Gigantomachy (60–4). This passage lies at the heart of the entire poem's major interpretive issuespoetics, panegyric, allusion, and structure but its pivotal role in the ode deserves fuller acknowledgement.

In one form or another an elevated, pleasure-transcending view of love is common, we might say natural. For readers of Latin poetry Catullus is perhaps the most impressive spokesman. In many respects, of course, Catullus is special. His particular values and choice of terminology, in his time and situation, mark him out from his crowd; in the Roman world indeed, ‘whole love’, perhaps rather its utterance, is hard to document before him. But a belief that love is powerful and profound, an important if not the most important thing in life, this is not a rarity. Roman tombstones attest to love and devotion, and myths inherited from Greece enshrine love's power, endurance, and transcendence.

Two herdsmen meet and bicker; bargain over a stake; duel in balladeering; and ballot their umpire for a final decision. The first half of their poem dramatizes the process of challenge and defiance from which the bout materializes; the result is a draw. Critics attempt what none of its three herdsmen try out loud, namely to solve the pair of riddles with which the song-contest ends, before the judge pronounces the result. Solutions range between putative attribution to the bucolic minds of the riddlers, and ascription to their creator, the intellectual, urban, bookish, Hellenizing poetaster, who here, in any event, dares a touch of rustic needling that he precisely did not find in his studies in Theocritea, which include no riddles. Solution has generally seemed the self-evident challenge to scholar-readers.

Menelaus' question in 1050 has puzzled interpreters. Why would Euripides put a joke at the end of this scene? It is true that of all the scenes in this play, the Helen scene is the only one that could admit a joke without terrible discomfort. And there is already humour in it. Hecuba employs scornful laughter (983) and an amusing reductio ad absurdum (976–81) in her arguments against Helen. So a joke here is not as utterly ruinous as it would be, for example, in the scene where Astyanax is buried.

In a long and important sentence in the Timaeus (52b6–dl), Plato explains that, whereas that which truly or really is () cannot come to be in anything else, sensible things, being mere images, must necessarily come to be in something else, on pain of not existing at all:

Diodorus Siculus was notoriously inconsistent in his statements about the terminal date of his survey of history, the Bibliotheca Historica. In the ‘table of contents’ (1.4.7) which he included in the general preface to the whole work, written apparently when he was preparing his manuscript for publication (probably about 30 b.c.), he specifically names the year 60/59 (‘the first year of the 180th Olympiad, when Herodes was archon at Athens’) as the last year of his narrative. Elsewhere, however, he not only gives a figure for the period of history encompassed by his work which would bring it down to 46/5, but he also on several occasions expresses the intention of including within his narrative some account of Julius Caesar's activities in Gaul, which implies a terminal date later than c. 52 B.C. How can this discrepancy be explained? The most economical hypothesis would be that Diodorus set out at first to compose a work that should go down to 46/5, but at some later stage in the composition changed his mind, and set back his terminus to 60/59. His originally intended terminus was most likely the triple triumph of Julius Caesar, whom Diodorus clearly admired beyond all other contemporary leaders. The decision in favour of an earlier terminus will have been due either to simple fatigue or to disillusionment with the course followed by Caesar's heir after 44 b.c. and anxiety about the dangers of dealing with events of a too recent and controversial past.

Although we do not know the philosophical source these scholia derive from (Erbse very plausibly suggested Porphyry; I would argue for the De regressu animae), there can hardly be any doubt that we have here a new Pythagorean fragment which communicates basic notions about metempsychosis. Pythagoras is criticized for representing the soul as afflicted by pain and grief (λνπεῖται, θρηνεῖ) when it leaves the body before entering a new one. The reasons given for its distress need not detain us here, but this new Pythagorean fragment clearly offers a conclusive solution to the vexed question of Homer's tears in Ennius, alluded to in Lucretius 1.120ff.

In Juvenal's third satire the main speaker, Umbricius, delivers a speech of farewell (a syntacticon) as he prepares to leave Rome. In it, he mounts a sustained attack on life in the capital. By contrast, he praises Italian country towns, a combination of laudatio and vituperatio which is foreshadowed in the prefatory praise of provincial Cumae (2–5) and denigration of Rome (5–9).