It is widely agreed that Thucydides’ Melian dialogue presents the Athenian invasion of Melos, and the Athenian justification, in a negative light. Attention tends to focus on the immorality of ‘the rule of the stronger’ that the Athenians present in the dialogue. This essay argues that another feature of the dialogue triggering negative judgements of the Athenians is their criticism of the Melians’ resistance: it is voiced by the Athenians themselves and therefore provokes in readers a ‘speaker-relative’ normative judgement of the Athenians. Philosophers have explored how our normative judgements about statements often depend on the speaker. Because the Athenians have deliberately put the Melians into their perilous situation, and because part of Athenian self-mythology was heroic resistance against overwhelming numbers in the Persian Wars, Athenian criticism of the Melians is hypocritical and applies an asymmetrical ethics to the Athenians and the Melians. Reaction against these features of the dialogue exacerbates the moral abhorrence of the Athenians felt by many readers. Hence I disagree with Bosworth’s view of the dialogue as primarily critical of the Melians. Instead we see Thucydides here condemning not only the Athenian imperial project but also the rhetoric used to defend and sustain it.

This article revisits the mainstream scholarly view that the Greek Hestia is the least anthropomorphic deity among the Olympians, an idea that owes much to a short reference to her in Plato’s Phaedrus. The analysis is based on textual and visual sources from the Archaic period: I first review two references to Hestia in early hexameter poetry, in Hesiod’s Theogony and in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, before turning to the depiction of her in two early Attic black-figure vases, the Sophilos dinos at the British Museum and the François vase, which have been neglected in discussing Hestia’s anthropomorphic nature in early Greek thought. While the study of individual Greek gods has returned to the fore in the field of Greek religion in the last 20 years, it seems that not enough has changed in the current conceptualization of Hestia.

This article revisits the question of how the epigraphic culture of the fifth-century BC Athenian Empire impacted on the epigraphic cultures of other communities. Through consideration of the late fifth-century epigraphic cultures of Thasos and Rhodes, it argues that allied communities interacted with the epigraphic manifestations of Athenian authority in different ways, producing diverse epigraphic responses. Further, it argues that the first traces of the shift from the heterogeneity of archaic epigraphic cultures to the epigraphic convergence of the late classical world can be found in the tension between local and Athenian influences in late fifth-century public inscription beyond Athens.

In a scene of father-son conflict in Aristophanes’ Clouds, father Strepsiades supports his right to be treated well by his son Pheidippides by reminding the boy of how well he was taken care of as a baby. Even before Pheidippides could talk properly, his father catered to his every wish. If he said ‘brū’, his father would get him something to drink, ‘mammā’ would make him get food, and ‘kakkā’ would lead to his being taken outside to relieve himself. These baby-words have always been taken for what Strepsiades claims they were: meaningful and intentional baby requests.

Starting with brū, we discuss ancient and modern interpretations of the passage and contextualize it within the history of ancient and later Western thought about child language. We then propose a new interpretation of brū as the conventional rendition of a universal baby vocalization, what is known as a ‘raspberry’. In performance, this would lead to a mimetic ‘depiction’ in the middle of Strepsiades’ sentence. Finally, we return to the utterances mammā and kakkā to show that there, too, Strepsiades may be demonstrating parental devotion by interpreting the virtually unintelligible and by acting out baby activities that lend plausibility to his mantic performance.

This article examines how and why the Ptolemies, soon after they succeeded Alexander in Egypt, orchestrated the return of Egyptian statues supposedly stolen by the Persians, drawing on the cultural memory of different population groups: Egyptians and Graeco-Macedonians. First, it argues that the Ptolemies invested energy in searching for Egyptian objects and gods’ statues in the Levant, which they distributed among the temples, though some may have been newly fabricated statues. Second, the study aims to reconstruct what the Ptolemies knew about earlier Greek and Near Eastern traditions of seizing and returning statues, which mixed elements of truth with topoi. This reconstruction serves to explain how meaningful it was to Egyptians and Graeco-Macedonians to bring back statues after each campaign. Finally, comparing the tale of Bentresh, the account of Sarapis’ origin by Tacitus and the Ptolemaic stelae, the article suggests that these narratives highlighted Egypt as the centre of the world with the most powerful ruler, a claim appealing to all its inhabitants.

This article argues that Andocides’ speech On His Return (Andocides 2) makes use of themes drawn from tragedy, including a near-quotation from Sophocles, in order to present the orator as deserving of pity and forgiveness. This neglected speech is therefore an ingenious work of rhetoric in its creation of ēthos and evocation of pathos. Moreover, it is a key document for the development of religious argumentation in the Athenian courts, and for the early reception of Sophocles. This also affects our interpretation of the two extant speeches from Andocides’ later trial in ca. 400, Against Andocides ([Lysias] 6) and On the Mysteries (Andocides 1), which both develop similar tragic themes in new directions.

Repetition is a critical issue in interpreting the work of Herodotus. Detlev Fehling, for one, has pointed to recurrence of motif and scene as evidence of the historian’s ‘free invention’. Words that occur twice in Herodotus are an efficient way to consider pressing issues at the centre of how and why Herodotus put together his narrative in the way he has. Pairs where the uses are close together in stories with a lot in common suggest that we may be seeing Herodotus’ ‘habit of presentation’, especially when phrasal repetition is also found. Where pairs are found further apart, the issue of deliberate linkage between discrete episodes may be indicated through the strategic redeployment of a key term. Finally, with Xerxes’ invasion, recurring terms help us to see how Herodotus could operate over large portions of text, deliberately linking one episode to another through the deployment of twice-occurring words, thereby also connecting the whole account of the campaign to the largest project of the History.

A neglected, anonymous and undated epigram on the world map of Ptolemy’s Geography, here critically edited for the first time on the basis of all existing manuscripts, proves a rare case of reception of Callimachus’ Lock of Berenice, with an emphasis on the bonds between geography and astronomy, and with so-called ‘geographical astrology’. It may stem from Late Antique Alexandria.