For all its celebrity, Thucydides' Funeral Speech remains an enigma. ‘Unquantifiably authentic’ is how one scholar describes it, and the description betrays a measure of despair. We feel that the speech is authentic in some sense of the word. To some degree it corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery. All agree that Thucydides framed the speech in his own words and integrated it with his historical narrative, so as to recall and answer Archidamus' encomium of Sparta in Book I. It also anticipates the forthcoming description of the plague with mordant, subtle allusions.

The penultimate scene of Euripides' Troades, lines 1123–1250, presents the dressing of a child's corpse for burial. Even as the body is being carried away for interment, firebrands are seen on the heights of Troy (1256–9). All that remains is the commencement of the final burning of the city while the remaining Trojan captives are ordered off for embarkation and exile. The end of the play, therefore, enacts the annihilation of a city and its total abandonment; in such a context the funeral which immediately precedes surely makes a crucial contribution to the significance of the play and deserves close study.

There have been few issues in the contemporary analysis of Greek tragedy as hotly debated as what I shall call ‘civic ideology and the problem of difference’. By this I mean a nexus of interrelated questions concerning the political import of tragedy both for the fifth-century Athenians and for subsequent generations: how does the festival of the Great Dionysia—its rituals and dramatic performances—relate to the dominant ideological structures of democracy? How should critical or contestatory discourse be located within the dramatic festival and within the polis? How should the texts of tragedy be related to the society in which they were produced—and to the societies in which they are still being read and performed? The problem is not merely essential to our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but is also intimately connected to the history and theory of democracy and its discontents. To what degree can democracy respond to criticism and what space can it allow, in theory and in practice, for alternative viewpoints or opposition? In its most aggressive form, such questioning of the exclusions and repressions of democracy is sometimes articulated as a challenge as to whether the costs of (ancient) democracy outweigh its benefits.

With disarmingly open conceit, the Younger Pliny tells Pontius Allifanus that ‘my hendecasyllables are read, are copied, are even sung, and Greeks (who have learned Latin out of love for my poetry book) make my verses resound to cithara and lyre’ (Epist. 7.4.9). By Pliny's time, Greek musicians (and actors) were widely distributed and organized in a worldwide guild centred at Rome, so it will not surprise us that Greeks are the ones setting the verses to music. But what sort of music? When Pliny went out to hear his beloved poems sung to cithara and lyre, what did it sound like? Or, more generally, what did Pliny, or Martial, or, in an earlier generation, Horace see and hear when out for an evening's musical entertainment at the hands of a Greek troupe? Until fairly recently, we have known precious little. Literary sources give the odd anecdote, such as the reports of Nero's performances, but in general tell us little specific about the content or style of musical entertainment in the Roman era. And sources speaking more technically about music itself lend the impression that nothing significant happened after the ‘New Music’ was introduced in the fourth century BC.

The wandering philosopher is best known to us as a Romantic ideal that projects one's longing for physical and mental withdrawal. Rousseau's ‘promeneur solitaire’ does not cover great distances to bring a message to the world. His wanderings, most often in the immediate surroundings, rather convey spiritual alienation. But the ‘promeneur solitaire’ is not the only kind of wandering philosopher known in Western culture. Itinerant philosophers existed already in antiquity. During the Roman empire, many sages wandered all over the Mediterranean world. They went about for the sake of intellectual and spiritual enrichment, but essentially to spread their teaching and to intervene in local quarrels as religious consultants. Wandering connoted their ambiguous status in society—both in and out—and thereby enhanced their charisma and endowed them with an aura of superior power.

The subject of this paper is the relationship between the Demotic Egyptian Inaros-Petubastis Cycle and the Greek novel. I will not argue that the Greek novel as a whole arose from Egyptian literature; that theory has been rightly laid to rest by scholars working in the area, most recently by Susan Stephens and the late Jack Winkler in their edition of the fragments of the novel. What I want to do, rather, is to draw attention to a single motif that might have made its way from Egyptian narrative fiction to the Greek novel; to explore the background of this motif in Egyptian literature; and to discuss the mode through which this motif was appropriated by the Greek novelists. This motif concerns the boukoloi, outlaw shepherds who inhabit the Egyptian Delta and oppose central Egyptian authority.

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is the Dichterweihe at the beginning of the Theogony (22–35): when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

Euripides may not have been a darling of the ‘gallery’ during his lifetime, but once he was dead he became a classic, to be read, performed—and imitated. Aristophanes' half-serious attempts to show up the ‘depravity’ of Euripidean tragedy had no lasting effect: the many revivals of his plays from the fourth century onwards suggest that later audiences appreciated the purely sensuous appeal in Euripides' verbal dexterity, his rhetorical flourishes, his distraught characters on the brink of madness and self-destruction, no less than the iridescent beauty of his lyric imagery. In particular, the far-fetched melodramatic outpourings in his solo arias must have had a special appeal, their kaleidoscopic rhythms and lush phraseology blending in with the Euripidean monodist's stock in trade, self-pity. At the Athenian theatre of Dionysus, solo arias were felt to be so quintessentially ‘Euripidean’ that Aristophanes included monody in the ‘diet’ with which his ‘Euripides’ claims to have educated the audience's taste (Ran. 944). We have no way of knowing if Athenian theatre-goers really became the sophisticated connoisseurs of fine poetry whom Aristophanes' Euripides wished for. We may surmise, however, that by the early fourth century, as long as Helen and Iphigenia sang an aria which sounded loosely ‘Euripidean’, it did not matter that the said aria had not actually been written by Euripides.

This short article concentrates upon a very small part of the material culture of Thasos in an attempt to show how knowledge and discussion of the local archaeology can not only elucidate the study of Greek ‘colonization’, but also is vital to a clear understanding of the process. The Greek colonization of Thasos, and indeed of Thrace, is currently written from a wholly Hellenocentric and text-based perspective, behind which lies an unspoken and pervasive comparison with Western European colonialism. Behind my discussion lies the opposing conviction that Greek colonization must be considered at the local level, and in the context of an understanding of social developments within the area settled. This discussion of the cave of Pan thus indicates both how an archaeology that concentrates only upon Greek material culture can miss important features, and how an awareness of the archaeology of local populations can elucidate the processes of Greek ‘colonization’.

The Epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda is an intriguing monument. Here and in what follows, I stress its monumentality and physical form, not only because this is what ensures its uniqueness as a source for Epicurean philosophy, but also because it has not always been given due attention by those commentators who have chosen to write about Diogenes and his inscription. For example, in her recent monograph on Diogenes, Pamela Gordon hardly mentions the archaeological context of the find, nor does she seem to consider the fact of its inscription on a wall at least four metres high and up to eighty metres long to be immediately relevant to her discussion of Diogenes' ‘inimitable voice’.