The concept of intermediality arose in the theoretical discourse about the relations between different systems or products of meaning, such as the relations between music and art, or image and text. The word gained currency in the 1980s in German- and French-language studies of theatre performance, and in scholarship on opera, film, and music, in order to capture the notion of the interconnections between different art forms. For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art. The term has entered the field of classics especially via the study of the relations between the narrative and inscriptional modes in literary epigram.

Although recent and ongoing excavations of the sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus have prompted archaeologists to discuss anew the aetiological references to the same god and his altar at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, these discussions have yet to make any impact on literary scholars working on the poem itself. Indeed, we now know that in archaic Miletus an altar of Apollo Delphinios was erected, as in the hymn, directly upon a sandy beach beside a harbour and was probably the focus, as in the hymn, of some kind of sacrificial ritual, before the annual procession to another famous Panhellenic oracle of Apollo at Didyma. These new revelations provide an incentive for returning to the somewhat puzzling details in the scene on the beach at Crisa in the Homeric Hymn, with its agrarian offering and meal (both of roasted barley) followed by a paeanic procession of musician and singers. I will argue that the Milesian parallels allow us to see more clearly that, like the Delian episode at the start of the Homeric Hymn, the events at Crisa seem to reflect a shorter hexametrical hymn originally composed for a seaside sanctuary at Crisa and then later adapted, again like the Delian section, by a poet intent on praising Apollo as a Panhellenic deity, whose most important place of worship was Delphi. Such an argument leads, finally, to a positive assessment of the recent suggestion that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo does not have a bipartite structure (Delian–Delphic), as is usually assumed or argued, but rather a tripartite one (Delian–Delphic–Crisaean) that organizes the poem into three hymnic movements: birth, oracle, priesthood.

The question of the exact nature of the Pythia's expertise has been the subject of academic debate for a very long time. It would indeed not be an exaggeration to say that this has been, and continues to be, one of the most controversial questions in the study of ancient Greek religion. Modern scholars are sharply divided over whether any inspired female oracles, and especially the Pythia at Delphi, had the ability to prophesy in hexameter verse without male assistance. During the classical period the two most famous oracles were those of Zeus at Dodona in Epirus in north-western Greece and of Apollo at Delphi, which was located on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus. According to Plato (Phaedrus 244), the Delphic priestess, as well as the priestesses at Dodona, prophesied in a state of altered consciousness (which he calls mania), and were practitioners of ‘inspired prophecy’ (mantikē entheos).

You are about to be amazed by a collection of tales on ‘the transformation of people's fortunes and figurae into different shapes, and their restoration again into themselves in a mutual nexus (mutuo nexu)’ (Met. 1.1) – this is Apuleius’ opening statement and promise to his listeners in the very first lines of the Metamorphoses. In this article I read the first inserted tale (Met. 1.5–19) from a corporeal point of view. Modern researchers consider this tale programmatic for the whole novel, which in itself has a strong corporeal orientation as it tells the story of a human figura that becomes bestial; of changing bodies, tortured limbs, and beaten organs; and of lascivious and uncontrollable desires. My focus is particularly on the nocturnal scene at the inn (Met. 1.11–17), where I analyse the nature of the body and its representations’ literary and philosophical implications. I investigate the tension between rationality and sensuality; explore spatial and temporal dimensions; and discuss sexuality and birth. My main argument is that in the first tale the body has a crucial function in the perception of the characters’ world and self alike. Furtheremore, I suggest that the body and the ‘corporeal subjects’ (a term explored later in the article) are this tale's protagonists: the body produces its own narrative, whose plot advances in a chaotic and perplexed way through intensities, uncontrollable lust, flowing secretions, and sensual experience. I shall therefore suggest reading the scene through the body, and by asking what the the body does rather than merely what it means. I thus propose reading the mututo nexu which appears in the prologue in the context of the nexus of body and mind, of physical shapes and mental consciousness.

A commonly attested episode in ancient art and literature is the brutal death of Troilus at the hands of Achilles. Priam's son is mostly depicted as a defenceless pais (‘young man’ or ‘boy’), slain in a cruel ambush outside Troy while on horseback on some non-military business. The Iliad makes no reference to the slaying of Troilus. The only mention of him is in Book 24, where Priam, after a visit from Iris, the divine messenger, becomes determined to go and visit Achilles in order to ransom the body of Hector. It is at this moment that in an emotional outburst the Trojan king berates his surviving sons for the mere fact that they still live, while Mestor, Troilus, and Hector, his three ‘most excellent sons’, have lost their lives as a result of the war (Il. 24.255–60):

The armed forces that Athens took into the Peloponnesian War had four distinct corps. The two that have been studied the most are the cavalry corps and the navy. The same level of focus is now paid to the hoplite corps. In contrast to these three branches, the archers continue to be largely unstudied. Indeed, the last dedicated study of this corps was published in 1913. This neglect of the archers by military historians is unjustified. The creation of the archer corps in the late 480s bc was a significant military innovation. For the rest of the fifth century, Athens constantly deployed archers in a wide range of important combat roles. In the late 430s the state spent as much on them as it did on the cavalry.

Asya Sigelman can write spectacularly well. Recently I've been spending a lot of time with Longinus (a.k.a. almost anyone but Longinus), and there were points in Pindar's Poetics of Immortality which made me think: Longinus would have appreciated that! It helped that Sigelman's theme is immortality – which she rightly insists does not, for Pindar, mean indefinite temporal extension: it is realized in a perhaps momentary achievement of godlike excellence (2–3). And prophecy is ‘not simply accurate prediction’ but the ‘god-like vision’ with which poets, as well as prophets, are endowed (5), along with the ability to share that vision: ‘it is just such sharing that we encounter in Pindar's epinicians’ (6). Longinus, too, speaks of the vision of godlike authors (35.2). But the line of argument which reading Longinus had primed me to expect is not the one the one that Sigelman actually takes. She sets her face firmly against ‘extrapoetic’ circumstances and objectives (9), and insists on reading ‘intrapoetically’ (11). She is concerned with how all that is extrapoetic ‘becomes the stuff and substance of immortality within and by means of the ode, right before the eyes of the song's audience, regardless of which epoch this audience belongs to’ (10). (Note, in parenthesis, ‘eyes’: Sigelman only once remembers that audiences have ears [136]: a very un-Longinian oversight.) One might ask: can the conditions of reception really be disregarded? The question turns out to be otiose (or, rather, the prompt to the question turns out to be misleading), since Sigelman's poet, victor and audience are ‘exclusively…intrapoetic characters’ (11). From this we can infer that when she says that ‘Pindar structures his adjectives and myths in such a way as to keep constant focus on the song's ongoing work of crafting itself from within’ (14), she is not referring to Pindar, but to an intrapoetic homonym. Yet if the song is crafting itself from within, what structuring is left for the intrapoetic poet (a product, presumably, of the song's self-crafting) to do? ‘The epinician is always…structured as an address of the intrapoetic “I” of the poet to the intrapoetic “you” of the concentric, progressively widening circles of victor, family, clan, polis, and Hellas’ (56). The intrapoetic poet has a structuring function only as one of the structuring devices that the poem uses to compose itself. And the poem is strikingly self-obsessed: ‘the core underlying structure of Pindar's song is preoccupied with revealing and displaying the creative poetic effort whereby the song comes to be’ (83): that is (since this Pindar is ex hypothesi intrapoetic), whereby the song brings itself into being by means of its own ‘perpetual self-construction’ (84). When ‘Pindar lays bare and demands appreciation of his arduous poetic labor’ (85), it is not easy to believe that Sigelman is keeping her exclusively intrapoetic promise. But acquitting her of inconsistency entails convicting her of the ontological extravagance of a poem that is ‘a living creature engrossed in the ongoing process of creating itself’ (120), which, as Aristotle impishly said of Plato's Forms, is ‘empty verbiage and poetic metaphors’ (Met. 1.9, 991a20–2) or meaningless ‘tum-ti-tums’ (An. post. 1.22, 83a32–4). Nor, I confess, could I make much sense of her account of the semantics of attributive and predicative adjectives (22–3), which leads to the claim that

The dullest book of the Aeneid? Certainly not, insist Stephen Heyworth and James Morwood in their commentary on Aeneid 3. There can't be many students at school or university level who cut their teeth on epic Virgil with his third book, but Wadham College, Oxford, where H&M were colleagues, has been the glorious exception for a quarter of a century, and the rest of us now have good reason to follow suit. I don't just mean the ‘thrilling traveller's tale’ (so the dust-jacket) that carries us from Polydorus to Polyphemus by way of such episodes as the Cretan plague, the Harpy attack, and a pointed stop-off at Actium, nor the ktistic and prophetic themes that give this book such weight in Virgil's grand narrative. There's also the simple matter of accessibility. Doctissimi lectores of Aeneid 3 can consult Nicholas Horsfall's densely erudite and wickedly overpriced Brill commentary, but others have had to make do with one of R. D. Williams’ more apologetic efforts. (True, there is an efficient student edition by C. Perkell, but that seems to have made little headway in the UK, at least.) Now Aeneas’ odyssey takes a place among the few books of the Aeneid for which undergraduates and others can draw on commentaries which are at once accessible, sophisticated, and affordable.

Political and military history used to be the main staple of ancient Greek history. This review includes a number of volumes devoted to the subject. Matteo Zaccarini's book focuses on Cimon and the period between 478 and 450 bce. Sandwiched between Herodotus’ Persian Wars and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, the Pentekontaetia (478–431) is the most problematic period of classical Greek history, primarily because of the lack of a continuous narrative and our reliance on much later and fragmentary sources. Zaccarini has divided his work into two sections: the first studies the development of narrative traditions concerning Cimon and his age, from the fifth century to the Second Sophistic, and presents a context for interpreting the shaping of the information provided in these traditions. This is undoubtedly the most profitable part of the work, and a good model that others could imitate. The second part attempts to present a historical reconstruction of the period 478–450 on the basis of the conclusions of the first part. Many of Zaccarini's arguments are, in my view, correct: he shows the need to emancipate our narratives from models based on competition between aristocratic/popular or pro- and anti-Spartan leaders and programmes; he argues that the late 460s–450s is the crucial period of change in the balance of internal and external forces; and he minimizes the actual significance of Cimon's role. These sensible conclusions could have been strengthened by engaging with the rethinking of the nature of early Athenian imperialism by scholars such as Lisa Kallet and John Davies. But the volume is still a worthy contribution towards reassessing this crucial period.

This crop of books is Republic-heavy, with a strong showing for political history. No fewer than three demonstrate a notable trend in current Roman history writing: the focus on a particular term as a means to examine a key ideological concept. John Richardson's 2009 study of the words imperium and provincia was clearly a landmark (and is explicitly cited as a model by one of this year's crop). In 2013 Myles Lavan examined Roman conceptions of imperialism through looking at a slightly broader range of terms, focusing on the formation of different paradigms of power. Two years later Clifford Ando explored the same subject with a more distinctively cognitive and linguistic approach. In the crop of books for review here, we have one focusing on the word foedus (most broadly: ‘alliance’), one on pax (‘peace’), and one on the term res publica. Roman history, it seems, is finally fully and perhaps belatedly embracing the ‘linguistic turn’.

If asked to cite a single image as symbolic of Athenian democracy, many Classicists would probably suggest the Tyrannicides group. It seems the obvious choice. Yet while no one would deny the ideological value given to the statue(s) raised in commemoration of the event, there are some well-known historical reasons for being sceptical about any democratic ideals harboured by Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they assassinated Hipparchus in 514 bc. In that sense, the Tyrannicides group is inappropriate. So what alternatives come to mind? Here is one possibility, which was once visible, like the Tyrannicides, in the Athenian agora: a fourth-century bc marble relief showing several figures engaged in making footwear (Agora inv. I 7396). The piece carries an inscription, worth quoting:

Sarah Broadie writes on ‘The Knowledge Unacknowledged in the Theaetetus’ for Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Her paper makes two main claims: first, that Plato in the Theaetetus rejects the ‘additive’ picture for knowledge, namely, that knowledge is true judgement with something else (e.g. an account); and second, that in the Theaetetus true judgement relies on prior knowledge, especially if that knowledge is arrived at methodically. Thus, true judgement is not necessary for knowledge and sometimes knowledge is necessary for true judgement. Broadie's argument, roughly, is that, in the Theaetetus, true judgement is already a high-level epistemic achievement. She has a number of pieces of evidence for this. The first is Theaetetus 189e4–190a6, where Socrates stresses that a judgement is an assertion that results from a soul having a silent, internal debate. Broadie infers from this that a judgement involves reasons even if those reasons are not good reasons; judgement, for Plato, is more than a mere doxastic attitude (95–6). This already looks unfriendly to the additive picture. Once I have a judgement I have reasons, and when I have a true judgement, I have good reasons. If I have good reasons then what I have is reliable and secure. So, what more could I add to upgrade this cognitive achievement to make it knowledge? Broadie goes on to explore the alternative to the additive picture given in the Sophist and the Statesman. There it turns out that there may be topics that simply cannot be captured by the additive picture: cases where there must be knowledge of an object in the absence of true judgements about that object. This is Broadie's knowledge unacknowledged.

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.

I start with two Routledge publications. My general remark has nothing to do with the authors but is directed at the publisher: these books are very expensive as hardbacks, so a paperback, at a third of the cost, might appear to be an attractive alternative. However, my own paperback copy of Understanding Greek Religion fell apart on the second opening and continues to disintegrate with every use because the paper is very thick and the pages are glued instead of bound. In the light of the fact that Larson's book aims to be ‘essential resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Greek culture and ancient Mediterranean religions’ (i), the publisher's ‘caveat emptor’ approach is especially jarring. In addition, the format of both books (each chapter is followed by the endnotes and a separate bibliography) is not only impractical as it forces the reader to jump forwards and backwards constantly, but also contributes significantly to the further disintegration of the book. I hope that Routledge will be able to correct this problem with its paperbacks.

‘The truth is out there’: the tagline of The X-Files, the iconic spooks'n'aliens TV show from the nineties, is twice borrowed by Jan Kwapisz in his Introduction to Fragments, Holes and Wholes: Reconstructing the Ancient World in Theory and Practice, an edited volume resulting from a conference organized at the University of Warsaw in 2014. The epilogue of this volume consists of a re-enactment, and a record, of discussion exchanges between Han Baltussen and S. Douglas Olson, entitled ‘A Conversation on Fragments’, which indeed is partly a conversation on what constitutes a fragment, but also a conversation on issues of the truth – S. Douglas Olson's pointed claim, printed on the last page of the epilogue states that ‘Greek poetic texts…do not matter much.… There may be no truth, but there is methodology’ (406). Well then, if these two statements are anything to go by, there must have been some lively debates taking place in Warsaw in 2014.