By the end of the first century A.D., the teachings of the philosophers as expounded by Cicero on the practice of liberalitas had been largely accepted, often even in detail, by members of the governing class at Rome. Such would not have been the situation in the last generation of the Roman republic. This paper will seek to explain the cautious attitudes to the quality shown in the last three quarters of the first century B.C., and the declining relevance of these reservations, with the consequent rehabilitation of the virtue, in the early principate.

Much has been written about the lengthy ecphrasis of the shield of Aeneas at the end of the eighth book of the Aeneid. It is less frequently remarked that the ecphrasis balances a shorter – but perhaps no less significant – description of Turnus’ arms at the end of the preceding book. If Aeneas’ shield is emblematic of the imperial destiny which rests upon his shoulders, a similarly symbolic value may also be attributed to the decoration on the armour of his opponent.

The basilisk, or cockatrice, is no longer a familiar animal. It was, however, well known in the Middle Ages from St. Isidore's alarming account, which was very widely quoted in the bestiaries:

basiliscus graece, latine interpretatur regulus, eo quod rex serpentium sit, adeo ut eum videntes fugiant, quia olfactu suo eos necat; nam et hominem vel si aspiciat interimit. siquidem et eius aspectu nulla avis volans inlaesa transit, sed quam procul sit, eius ore conbusta devoratur. a mustelis tamen vincitur, quas illic homines inferunt cavernis in quibus delitescit; itaque eo visu fugit, quem ilia persequitur et occidit. nihil enim parens ille rerum sine remedio constituit. est autem longitudine semipedalis; albis maculis lineatus. reguli autem, sicut scorpiones, arentia quaeque sectantur, et postquam ad aquas venerint, δροφ⋯ βους et lymphaticos faciunt. sibilus idem est qui et regulus. sibilo enim occidit, antequam mordeat vel exurat.

I think we have to accept that the term intertextuality serves a purpose. One of the terms it allows us to dispense with, allusion, has its disadvantages.

Up until recently I was happy with ‘allusion’: Vergil ‘alludes’ to Homer. The term was time-honoured, and, surely, unproblematical. Unproblematical, and not, so far as it went, and in the right hands, unsubtle. One meant that Vergil was not just using his source text (or his significant source text) as raw material. The source text became part of the new text, its characters and context were relevant to the new text. Thus, when in his opening speech Aeneas ‘quotes’ Homer's Odysseus, we sense that Vergil is casting Aeneas as a new Odysseus, comparing him and contrasting him with Odysseus, in a new Odyssey. And so the Aeneid proceeds: an allusive text, constantly alluding to Homer, re-forming Homer, remaking the Homeric characters, re-forming other texts in the same significant way … What texts? What texts does it not significantly re-form?

The Iliad proceeds from an idea of hero which is pure and simple: a hero is one who prizes honour and glory above life itself and dies on the battlefield in the prime of life. Indeed, in spite of what Achilles says at a bitter moment of the choice between a short and glorious life and a long and obscure one, his actual choice is made when, warned by Thetis that Hector's death is only a prelude to his own, he prefers to kill Hector and die himself rather than leave Patroclus unavenged. Hector behaves in a similar way: having chosen honour over life, he remains outside the walls of Troy to meet his death at Achilles' hands. Hundreds of minor Iliadic warriors make the same choice in a less spectacular way, by the very fact that they volunteered to come to Troy in order to win glory in war. This is true both of young Simoeisios, who came to Troy even before he had time to take a wife, and fell ‘like a black poplar' at Ajax’ hands, and of Lycaon son of Priamus who, having slipped away from nearby Arisbe where he was kept in safety as a hostage, returned to the battlefield only to be taught in his last moments the bitter lesson that death is after all the inevitable conclusion to life.

My subject concerns the practicalities of finding one's way round an ancient city. What aids were there to guide a stranger in town? How did he trace a particular house or other destination? I propose to examine the problem with reference to one of the best known of all ancient cities, Pompeii.

Few would dispute that Frogs is one of Aristophanes’ supreme achievements; many would further claim as one of his most successful and famous scenes Dionysos’ encounter with those eponymous amphibians, the frogs themselves. This, however, brings us face to face with a major paradox which critics of Aristophanes frequently fail to emphasize in anything like adequate terms: quite simply, and astonishingly for such a well-loved scene, there is no scholarly agreement, even on the broadest level, as to how it was actually presented in the theatre. Apart from the fact that it is far from clear how Charon's boat was represented, we do not even have a sure answer to an even more basic question—whether those famous characters the frogs were visibly presented to the audience as yet another of Aristophanes’ coups de theatre, or whether they were only heard singing from offstage, thus altering the emphasis (or at least the focus) of the scene very considerably. Lack of agreement among scholars on such an important point is lamentable enough, but, worse, some recent criticism appears to have been developing a dangerous tendency not only to assert without adequate argument that the frogs were indeed visibly represented but, further, to build this highly insecure element into the foundations of various theories of wider significance as if it were a piece of orthodoxy. This suggests that a careful re-examination of the whole scene might not be out of place in an attempt to support or refute the ancient scholiastic opinion (Z Frogs 211), for long unquestioned, which states quite unequivocally ‘…the frogs are not seen in the theatre, nor is the chorus, but rather they imitate the frogs from offstage. The true chorus is composed of righteous souls of the dead.’ I will argue, from close consideration of the actual wording of the scene, and of its setting and action, that the frogs were indeed unseen and were only heard singing from somewhere offstage. To support this view, I believe important considerations of comparative dramatic practice, and even of natural history, can be adduced.

This of course was Renaissance enthusiasm. The fame and influence which Plutarch enjoyed in the days of the rediscovery of antiquity could not survive the revolutions in historical and scholarly attitudes that marked the nineteenth century. Instead of being thought of as a mirror of antiquity and of human nature, he became a ‘secondary authority’, to be used where the ‘primary sources’ failed, himself to be quarried by the Quellenforscher and left a ruin. The present neglect of the Lives in education is a consequence of this. And yet it should be obvious that, for the very historical purposes for which the book is now chiefly studied, it is misleading and dangerous to use what is plainly one of the most sophisticated products of ancient historiography without constant regard to the plans and purposes of its author. Fortunately, a good deal has been written, especially in the last twenty years, to redress the balance.

A great deal has been written recently on Aristophanes, and the Achamians in particular; inevitably, this has not produced agreement on how to interpret the plays. Among the questions to which different answers are still being given, and probably always will be, are the following: How far did Aristophanes seek to persuade the Athenians of his own political views, whatever they may have been? If there was a conflict between the presentation of his political views and the development of comic inventions or the desire to win the prize, which took precedence? Did the Athenians expect serious political persuasion in their comedies, and was Aristophanes innovative or traditional in these respects? More particularly, what were Aristophanes' attitudes to the Peloponnesian War? Did they change? How far did he seek to push a particular view in favour of making peace in any of the surviving three so-called peace plays?

A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts. In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.

The theme of the building and destruction of cities is a conspicuous one in the Aeneid. The poem opens with a paragraph which summarizes the suffering that is to lead to the building of ‘the walls of lofty Rome’, and this passage is linked by verbal echoes to Aeneas' entry not much later when he bewails the fact that he has not died a heroic death beneath ‘the lofty walls of Troy’. The city which is to rise and the city which has fallen are in their very different ways inescapable features of the Aeneid's geography.

The Phormio, if we consider it from the viewpoint of artistic originality, is the least interesting of all Terence's works, because more than any other it approximates to the conventional type of New Comedy. Although it is characterized by a very complicated intrigue full of vivacity and animation, it lacks any particular delicacy in the psychological delineation of the characters.—M. R. Posani, ‘Il Formione di Terenzio’, Atene e Roma, ix (1941), 29.

This article discusses an engagement between the worlds of classical poetry and contemporary empirical psychology. What starts with a return to a classical text through the lens of psychology turns into a review of psychology through the lens of the Classics, inspiring some fresh ideas about subjectivity and how to handle it in psychological research. The question of subjectivity is, of course, a key one for the humanities, because the personhood of the reader, the interpreter, or the researcher exerts a vital influence on the way in which any text is read and its meaning extracted.

Over the last thirty years, the development of disability studies as an academic discipline has in turn ensured that interest in disability in historical periods has steadily increased. Initially, scholars presented an overwhelmingly negative view of disability in antiquity, proceeding under the assumption that babies born displaying visible signs of deformity or disability were subjected either to infanticide or exposure, and that individuals who were subsequently identified as suffering from a deformity or disability, or developed either one later in life, were ostracized and unable to make any meaningful contribution to society. It is only over the last decade that this reductive approach has been gradually discredited, and the understanding of disability in antiquity has become increasingly nuanced. To date, one monograph has been published on deformity and disability in the Graeco-Roman world, one monograph on disability in the Greek world and one on disability in the Roman world, and one edited volume on disability in antiquity and another on disability in the Roman world. These have been complemented by investigations into disability in Judaism, Christianity and the Bible.

In his early Byzantine Chronicle, Johannes Malalas fills out the figure of Cyrus, Croesus' silent antagonist in Herodotus. While Croesus is consulting the Delphic oracle, Cyrus enjoys a quite different divine audience:

And the prophet Daniel came to the King of the Persians, Cyrus. And Cyrus says to him: ‘Tell me, am I going to conquer Croesus King of the Lydians?’

When the Christian prophet hesitates, Cyrus throws him to the lions – only swiftly to repent. Daniel returns the favour by confirming that Cyrus will defeat Croesus because God breaks the ‘might of kings’. Malalas' version of divine counselling clearly draws on Christian moralizing traditions; but it also flags up the confrontation between the powerful king and the word of god in Herodotus' narrativisation of Croesus' downfall. At the same time, however, it offers a radically different interpretative model. Here we don't just have a Croesus consulting the oracle and failing to comprehend it; Cyrus is told what will happen – and why – by the prophet Daniel! From Croesus (mis)reading the oracle to Cyrus receiving instruction from God, narrative dynamics have undergone a fundamental shift. It's now the gospel…

Scholarship on Croesus testing Delphi, and on oracles more generally, has tended to focus on reconstructing the ‘original’ oracular texts and assessing Herodotus' role as a historian (in the modern sense of the word) in the light of how accurate his record is deemed to be. Notwithstanding the fact that such positivist approaches to historical writing have been challenged and that recent studies have been far more nuanced, the oracles themselves remain the focus of investigation. In tracing their ‘changing representations’ I want to look exclusively at how they function within Herodotus' narrative.

The Odyssey is principally the story of a return. A man has spent ten years fighting a war in a distant country and another ten years trying, against all sorts of obstacles and distractions, to get home to his wife and family. Will he make it?

It is a very remarkable fact that, in the register of Chinese cities and counties for the year a.d. 5, there should appear a city and county with the most ancient Chinese name for Rome. The Chinese, then as now, did not give foreign names to their cities. In that list, with its over 1,500 cities, there are only two other Chinese places with foreign names. We know that both those localities were populated by immigrants who came from those places outside China. It follows that people from the Roman Empire must have emigrated to China and founded this city.

These two men – the statesman ruling Athens in her glory, and the philosopher of the man-measure dictum, the ‘first humanist’ as he has been called – are on anyone's reckoning two of the greatest of European history. They not only knew each other, but appear to have been friends. Ehrenberg managed to spin a whole book out of what he imagined was the friendly relationship between Pericles and Sophocles, even though there is no evidence that they liked each other, and indeed positive evidence that they did not. For the only two anecdotes relating any communication between them (both to do with Sophocles' fondness for young boys) suggest that Pericles rather resented having the playwright as a fellow general on the military expedition they made against Samos in 440.