This paper examines Plutarch's treatment of education in the Parallel Lives. Beginning with a close reading of Them. 2, it identifies two distinct ways in which Plutarch exploits the education of his subjects: in the first, a subject's attitude to education is used to illustrate a character presented as basically static (a ‘static/illustrative’ model); in the second, a subject's education is looked at in order to explain his adult character, and education is assumed to affect character (a ‘developmental’ model). These two models are often associated with two different forms of discourse: anecdotal for the static/illustrative model and analytical for the developmental. The developmental model, furthermore, is closer to Plutarch's thinking in theoretical discussions of character in the Moralia; the static/illustrative model to Plutarch's treatment of character in the Lives more generally, where anecdotal treatments predominate. The coexistence of these two models is probably to be seen as the result of a tension between Plutarch's philosophical thinking and his biographical practice: those few passages in the Lives which assume a developmental model occur in contexts where either Platonic texts or the activity of philosophers are being discussed.

Recently, archaeologists have been focusing on material relics as evidence of a historical consciousness. This article examines the Iliad and the Odyssey from the point of view of this ‘archaeology of the past’. Various material objects, ranging from tombs to everyday objects, evoke the past in the epic poems, thereby enriching the narrative and providing reflections on the act of memory. In turn, Homeric evidence sheds new light on the hermeneutics of relics in archaic oral society.

The four best-preserved aulos pipes unearthed at Pompeii are examined and their original pitches are as far as possible determined by mathematical analysis. It is argued that the scales of the instruments as well as specific details of their mechanism fit well with our knowledge of music from the Roman Imperial period.

This article examines two funerary monuments associated with the battle of Chaironeia in 338: first, the mound, covering a mass cremation, by the Kephissos; second, near the town of Chaironeia, the mass burial surrounded by a stone enclosure and topped by a colossal stone lion. The accepted identifications are confirmed (the mound is that of the Macedonian dead, the lion monument that of Theban dead, in all probability the Sacred Band), and two propositions developed: the mound does not relate to the tactical dispositions of the battle, and hence the generally accepted reconstruction of the battle must be discarded; the lion monument must date to much later than 338. In developing these propositions, I examine material which has been long known, but never considered in depth; I notably present what I believe are the first photographs of some of the osteological material from the mass burial under the lion monument. More generally, the two monuments, located at different points of the battlefield, set up by different actors and at different moments, offer the opportunity for considerations on the different functions of ‘memory’ surrounding an historical event: the Macedonian mound reflected the needs and self-imagining of the victorious army, imposing a trace in the landscape; the lion monument embeds itself in preexisting topographies, for a more reflective, and more troubled, effect.

This paper discusses the burial of Herodes Atticus as a well-attested case of élite identification through mortuary practices. It gives a close reading of Philostratus' account of Herodes' end in c. 179 (VS 2.1.15) alongside the evidence of architecture, inscriptions, sculpture, and topography at Marathon, Cephisia and Athens. The intended burial of Herodes and the actual burials of his family on the Attic estates expressed wealth and territorial control, while his preference for Marathon fused personal history with civic history. The Athenian intervention in Herodes' private funeral, which led to his magnificent interment at the Panathenaic Stadium, served as a public reception for a leading citizen and benefactor. Herodes' tomb should be identified with a long foundation on the stadium's east hill that might have formed an eccentric altar-tomb, while an elegant klinê sarcophagus found nearby might have been his coffin. His epitaph was a traditional distich that stressed through language and poetic allusion his deep ties to Marathon and Rhamnous, his euergetism and his celebrity. Also found here was an altar dedicated to Herodes ‘the Marathonian hero’ with archaizing features (IG II2 6791). The first and last lines of the text were erased in a deliberate effort to remove his name and probably the name of a relative. A cemetery of ordinary graves developed around Herods' burial site, but by the 250s these had been disturbed, along with the altar and the sarcophagus. This new synthesis of textual and material sources for the burial of Herodes contributes to a richer understanding of status and antiquarianism in Greek urban society under the Empire. It also examines how the public memory of élites was composite and mutable, shifting through separate phases of activity — funeral, hero-cult, defacement, biography — to generate different images of the dead.

Two fragments of a vase by Sophilos are remnants of the earliest extant representation of the myth of the contest between Athena and Poseidon at Athens.

This study concerns navigation in a geographical sense and in the sense of the reader finding a way through a complex text with the help of points of reference. Recent studies in Athenaeus have suggested that he was a more sophisticated writer than the second-hand compiler of Hellenistic comment on classical Greek authors, which has been a dominant view. Building on these studies, this article argues that Athenaeus' approach to his history of ancient dining draws on traditional poetic links between the symposium and the sea, and expands such metaphors with a major interest in place and provenance, which also belongs to the literature of the symposium. Provenance at the same time evokes a theme of imperial thought, that Rome can attract to herself all the good things of the earth that are now under her sway. Good things include foods and the literary heritage of Greece now housed in imperial libraries. Athenaeus deploys themes of navigation ambiguously, to celebrate diversity and to warn against the dangers of luxury. Notorious examples of luxury are presented – the Sybarites and Capuans, for example – but there seem to be oblique warnings to Rome as well. Much clearer censure is reserved for the gastronomic poem of Archestratus of Gela, which surveys the best cities in which to eat certain fish. The Deipnosophists deplore the immorality of the poet and his radical rewriting of their key authors Homer and Plato, while at the same time quoting him extensively for the range of his reference to geography and fish. This commentary on Archestratus is a good example of the Deipnosophists' guidance to the reader, Roman or otherwise, who wishes to ‘navigate’ the complicated history of the Greek deipnon and symposium.

After a brief discussion of earlier etymological theories, this article proposes a new analysis of the Greek noun Vóσoζ ‘disease’ as a possessive compound *n-osw-os ‘not having *(h1)osu’, the second constituent of which is cognate with Hitt. ässu ‘well-being’; just like the latter, Greek Vóσoι are characteristically sent or removed by divinities. Moreover, the reconstruction of an abstract noun *(h1)osu ‘well-being (resulting from divine favour)’ can serve as the etymological basis for the somewhat obscure Greek notion of óσιη, which refers to the state of something that is endowed with such *(h1)osu; in fact, phraseological parallelisms between texts from various parts of the Greek world as well as ancient Anatolia point to a common conceptual framework behind all these words.