Abstract This article examines the connections between the arguments against the fear of death in Plato’s Apology and the first book of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. It argues that Cicero’s dialogue adapts and develops Socrates’ arguments and dialectical method. Cicer...

Abstract This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of the political ramifications of Pythian 10 by drawing attention to two less studied features of the ode’s mythical narrative: the glossing over of King Polydectes within Perseus’ story, and the attribution of t...

Abstract Greek periplography appears to have been an almost exclusively prosaic phenomenon. The single exception to this is Zenothemis (4th/3rd cent. BC) whom John Tzetzes credits with the production of an elegiac distich (SH 855 = Tz. H. 7.765f.) apparently sourced fro...

Abstract Historians writing in Latin show only intermittent interest in mystery cults; but when they do, their approach falls broadly into three different patterns. At times the cults are described in their local context, and treated as alien to a greater or lesser degr...

Abstract This article reviews two monographs recently published on the subject of Cicero’s reception in the imperial period: Keeline’s 2018 The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire and La Bua’s 2019 Cicero and Roman Education. As Cicero’s Nachleben is assuming ...

Abstract In a topos found in a range of Greek texts spanning the archaic period to the sixth century AD, a speaker links the attainment of a cherished goal to a declared desire for death. This sequence of ideas is often dismissed as formulaic or rhetorical; I argue that...

Abstract The Greek γραµµατικός combined several functions: as editor and expounder of texts, linguist, librarian, lecturer, courtier and sometimes as ambassador for his monarch or city. In due course Latin-speaking grammatici applied philological skills developed at Ale...

Abstract Quintus’ literary reputation is on the rise, in the wake of a general reappreciation of late antique literature. In my article I discuss Quintus’ use of embedded focalization: when we look at events through the eyes of one of the characters. Quintus uses this n...

Abstract In the pamphlet On Salaried Posts in Great Houses Lucian of Samosata analyzes the problem of the impossible relationship between misthos, ‘money’, and paideia, ‘culture’ and ‘teaching’. Money is an indispensable asset for the necessities of life. But starting w...