While it is dangerous to generalize about so vast a field as Homeric scholarship, it is perhaps safe to say that before the 1970s interpretation of the Wanderings of Odysseus was dominated by the larger question of the Odyssey’s moral and theological coherence, particularly as this pertains to the justice of Odysseus’ and his companions’ sufferings. The controversy between Analysts and Unitarians did much to determine how this question was asked and answered, with Analysts viewing moral incoherence as a symptom of multiple authorship and Unitarians striving to demonstrate coherence. First-generation anthropology introduced the idea that incoherence might reflect not (only) different authors, but (also) different stages of cultural development. This development was conceived mainly as an advance from primitive ‘savagery’ to more enlightened ‘humanity’, albeit with a tinge of nostalgia for savagery's more holistic ecological consciousness.

Plato's Gorgias might as well have been named On Shame. The word appears sixty-nine times in the course of the dialogue with a lion's share of references to shame being made by Socrates’ character. Callicles comes in second in his use of the term. Cairns notes that in the corpus of the lyric poet Theognis of Megara (sixth century BC) we have ‘the first instance of the noun aischunē.’ Cairns goes on to comment on Theognis’ use of αἰσχύνη and says that ‘[h]ere it appears in the objective sense, but later it will also be found in a subjective sense, as the reaction to or mental picture of disgrace and so as equivalent of aidōs.’ Although it is important to differentiate αἰσχύνη and αἰδώς, the terms, as Cairns suggests, are capable of expressing interchangeable meanings. Hence, in our comparative study of shame in the Gorgias and in the Clouds, we pay close attention to and examine the context in which a given term appears. The central role that shame plays in the Gorgias is the subject matter of analyses by Race, Bensen Cain, McKim, and Dodds. Race is confident that ‘of all the motifs running through the work, the most insistent is that of shame, for the word aischyne (along with verbal forms of aischynomai and the adjective aischros) occurs over 75 times.’ In line with the view that shame is central in the Gorgias, we offer a further contribution, which focuses on the affinity between the treatment of shame in that dialogue and in Aristophanes’ Clouds. We argue that either the ostensible subject of the Gorgias, which is usually identified as rhetoric, is not the dialogue's true concern or the explicit subject matter cannot be understood without its accompanying element, which is shame. To support this thesis, we undertake a comparative analysis of the thematic, heuristic, and conceptual use of shame in the Gorgias in view of Aristophanes’ play. We argue that the characters in the Clouds portray the same perennial attitudes to life as do the interlocutors in the Gorgias and, what is more, the characters in both works evoke with more than incidental clarity certain historical figures (Alcibiades and Pericles). Thus, both works, as we claim, are commenting on and, even though the Clouds is a comedy, serve as the ground for our philosophical reflection on the political, educational, and cultural ideals of ancient Greece. Moreover, the Clouds makes light of, instead of endorsing, such distinctions as shameful/laudable, natural/conventional, old/new, education/didacticism, and moral/prudish. We draw on the humor of the Clouds, which allows us to withhold immediate judgment about these dichotomies in order to then examine these same notions which are problematized in the Gorgias.

At some point in the early second century CE Suetonius set out to compose biographies of important Roman literary figures. The largest surviving section of this work—known as the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus—opens with what is generally considered an account of the early beginnings of philology in Rome.

In 167 BCE, L. Aemilius Paullus celebrated a triumph in Rome following the defeat of King Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna in the previous year. All of the accounts of the procession enumerate the incredible volume of booty that was paraded into Rome—wagons loaded with shields, weapons, statues of gods and men, golden bowls, livestock, luxury goods. Perseus himself, the defeated king, marched in this procession, as did his two sons and a daughter. Plutarch writes that ‘the children of Perseus were led along as slaves’: τὰ τέκνα τοῦ βασιλέως ἤγετο δοῦλα (Aem. 33.6), and that they were accompanied by their tutors who wept, taught the royal children to beg, and stretched out their hands to the Romans, who are here called ‘spectators’ (θεατάς, ib.). Perseus himself comes next, dressed in the black of mourning. Plutarch goes on to give a psychological picture of Perseus—he is dumbstruck and gaping, unable to process how his life had been turned upside down (34.1). Because Perseus could not face suicide, Plutarch says, ‘he converted himself into part of his own spoil’ (34.2).

The lively discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, the presentation of a theory of writing dialogues that combine elements from different genres and a dramatic frame that presents this theory in an Athenian setting as philosophical schools such as the Stoa and the Academy explain to the citizens their contributions to civic virtue make the Twice Accused not only one of the most important dialogues for understanding Lucian's project but also one of the most important literary treatments of the reception of philosophy in Athens and the status of philosophy in the Imperial period. Because many of the philosophical elements Lucian uses to create his drama—common arguments, well-known attitudes and standard portraits—are conventional, the creativity and originality of the work consists in the combination of these elements and juxtaposition of different scenes and frames; understanding each scene and its significance depends on establishing its relationship to other scenes. This paper will examine the role the Twice Accused plays as part of a trilogy of dialogues together with the Sale of Lives and the Fisherman; the trilogy presents a reflection on the introduction of philosophy and a progressive analysis of the attitudes between citizens and philosophers in the Athenian civic context. Considering the three as a trilogy not only reveals a central tragic intertext but also illuminates the way that the methodological statement at the end of the Twice Accused completes the schema connecting attitudes towards the philosophical tradition to Athenian topography by moderating the extremes of the previous two dialogues and explaining the role of philosophical writing as a mediating force between the demands of philosophy and the needs of the larger civic community.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch (1919–99). She has been celebrated as one of Britain's most important postwar writers with twenty-six prose fiction novels to her name. Murdoch was also an ancient philosopher who was primarily interested in issues of moral philosophy. Pinning down her place in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, however, is not a straightforward task. On the one hand she cut a conventional figure, holding a tutorial fellowship at St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963. On the other hand, her philosophical writing increasingly departed from the coordinates of analytical philosophy. As Martha Nussbaum notes in her deeply ambivalent review of Murdoch's The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Murdoch is ‘a novelist whose best work is deeply philosophical, a philosopher who has stressed…the special role that beauty can play in motivating us to know the good, …a Platonist believer in human perfectability, and an artist.’ Nussbaum points us towards understanding two key elements in Murdoch's thought: her commitment to Plato and the manner in which Murdoch's activity as philosopher and novelist should be considered as interdependent.