Elegy 1.8 is Propertius' propemptikon for Cynthia, which starts with the poet begging Cynthia not to go off to Illyria with his rival. Once Propertius has abandoned hope of her staying, he modulates into the good wishes for Cynthia's voyage (17–18) which are standard in this genre of content. He himself will continue his elegiac outpourings at her door (21–2), and will accost and interrogate sailors about which sea-port Cynthia has reached on her journey (23–4). Then in lines 25–6 Propertius fantasises about Cynthia settling abroad; he mentions two potential foreign locations – in the MSS they are denoted by Atraciis (25) and Hylaeis (26) – but he remains confident that she will nevertheless be his in the future. In the Teubner edition of Propertius, Paolo Fedeli retained the MSS reading Atraciis (NFL) and the reading Hylaeis implied by the MSS (Hi(y)le(y)is NFL), and he printed the couplet as:

et dicam ‘Licet Atraciis considat in oris,
et licet Hylaeis, illa futura mea est.’

The Pandora myth as told in Hesiod's Works and Days (59–105) has been criticised since antiquity as internally inconsistent. In the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century this led editors to propose radical atheteses and emendations to resolve the inconsistencies. Although in recent decades the impetus has swung more towards conservative editing, and seemingly endless work has been done on the myth, the passage still has not been fully understood in terms of its purpose within the Hesiodic corpus. In this paper I argue that the ‘suspect’ lines are perfectly consistent when understood in terms of the intertextual relationship between Hesiod's Works and Days and his Theogony, a relationship which has been established by scholars such as Jean-Pierre Vernant (1980), Glenn Most (1993) and Jenny Strauss Clay (2003). I argue that, in representing Pandora in Works and Days, Hesiod is engaged in a project of expansion which had its roots in his Theogony. Pandora is of more importance to the Iron Age Works and Days than to the divine Theogony; so she is described in greater detail and becomes more of a prominent figure in her own right. Furthermore, I argue that Hesiod does not stop there, but enacts an expansion of the expansion within Works and Days itself, from Zeus' commands to the gods for Pandora's creation at Op. 60–68, to the execution of those commands at 70–80.

quodsi in animum quis inducat, tormentis quibus et quibus machinis simulacrum omne formetur, erubescet timere se materiem ab artifice, ut deum faceret, inlusam. deus enim ligneus, rogi fortasse vel infelicis stipitis portio, suspenditur, caeditur, dolatur, runcinatur; et deus aereus vel argenteus de immundo vasculo, ut saepius factum Aegyptio regi, conflatur, tunditur malleis et incudibus figuratur; et lapideus deus caeditur, scalpitur et ab impurato homine levigatur, nec sentit suae nativitatis iniuriam, ita ut nec postea de vestra veneratione culturam. nisi forte nondum deus saxum est vel lignum vel argentum. quando igitur hic nascitur? ecce funditur, fabricatur, sculpitur: nondum deus est; ecce plumbatur, construitur, erigitur: nec adhuc deus est; ecce ornatur, consecratur, oratur; tunc postremo deus est, cum homo illum voluit et dedicavit. (Minucius Felix, Oct. 22)

The Life of Aesop is an anonymous text of the first century BC / first century AD, which narrates how Aesop, an ugly slave from Phrygia, gains his freedom thanks to his intelligence, and how he later comes to enjoy fame and popularity, until he arrives at Delphi, where he is falsely accused and finally killed.

Critics have already pointed out that at a crucial point of the narrative, the encounter between Aesop and the inhabitant of Delphi (ch. 124), the author of the Life reaches back to the text of Homer to produce an effective parody. In order to describe the pale faces of the people of Delphi, Aesop quotes Glaucus' words to Diomedes at Iliad 6.146: οἵη περ φύλλων γενεή, τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν (‘As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity’). Nor does Homer's influence seem to be limited to this one conspicuous instance.

In the present paper I hope to show that the meeting between Aesop and his mistress (chs. 29-33) in the Life of Aesop (hereafter the Life) is a comic reversal or parody of a Homeric narrative episode, the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope (Odyssey 19.96–316, 19.508–604). The author of the Life presents the lecherous wife of Xanthos in satirical terms, whilst his allusions to the particular Homeric hypotext produce a clever parody that makes for an even more effective satire.

‘It's such a pity that we don't have
Anything like a photograph
Of her about whom the ancients rave …’
…
Fragments, copies, our museums still hold
Of statues she modelled, or so we're told

(from Phryne by Robert Conquest, 2000)

Phryne, the celebrity hetaira who is said to have lived and loved some time during the fourth century BCE, was reputed to be ‘by far the most phenomenal of the hetairai’ (ἐπιφανεστάτη πολὺ τῶν ἑταίρων). This article aims to examine the anecdotes told about Phryne and argues that collectively they constitute a discourse on viewing that illuminates a significant aspect of the production and interpretation of art: the ethical and aesthetic problems involved (for the artist, subject, model and other viewers) in making and describing naturalistic art, especially that which represents the gods. A rich repertoire of written material on Phryne, and on the statue of the Aphrodite of Cnidus for which she was said to have been the model, has survived, although mostly by later rather than contemporary writers. Among the descriptions of the statue there is a group of epigrams collected in the Greek Anthology whose authorship and dating are largely uncertain. On Phryne we have accounts and imaginative scenarios in Alciphron, Lucian and Pausanias, all presumed to be writing in the second century CE; Athenaeus, who most probably wrote in the third century CE; and quotations from earlier writers.

Questions of how ancient books were produced, how they were valued and what they represented in particular contexts, and how they interacted with the texts inscribed on them have been increasingly to the fore in recent years. This article will focus on the last of these questions, firstly examining the local role of material inscription in a single poem of Propertius, and then moving on to consider issues pertaining to the structure of the collection and how approaches to the poetry book are conditioned by and interact with its materiality. Central to this analysis is a conception of the book not as a neutral purveyor of meanings which exist outside it, but as a part of the processes by which meaning is created and maintained.

Comme tous les Grecs, il n'a pas pu ne pas embellir ce qu'il a touché. On retrouve en lui cet éminent esprit d'une race privilégiée qui dans les sujets les plus arides fait pénétrer l'art et même la poésie. … même en quittant … le Périple d'Arrien, nous pouvons dire comme Fuséli en quittant les marbres du Parthénon: ‘Ah! les Grecs, les Grecs, c'étaient des dieux.’ H. Chotard, Le Périple de la Mer Noire par Arrien

Arrian's Periplus maris Euxini (Circumnavigation of the Euxine) is an ambitious and unusual work. Written in the 130s AD in the form of a letter to the emperor Hadrian, who had himself visited the Black Sea a few years earlier, it was a literary complement to a report Arrian made in Latin, as governor of Cappadocia, on Rome's military position in the Black Sea. It is also unusual in its form: unlike most periploi, which are marked by continuity of movement and by a highly repetitive style, it is discontinuous both in its spatial movement and in its narrative style.

In a familiar passage at the end of Plato's Apology, Socrates offers an account of what he believes will happen to us when we die. As in the Phaedo, it is his impending death that prompts Socrates to speculate about the nature of the afterlife: as soon as his verdict is announced, Socrates turns to the jury to gloss on his sentencing. It was unprecedented, as far as we know, for a defendant in the Athenian court to end his trial by addressing the members of the jury, but the Apology has Socrates doing just that. While his defence in the Apology was already audacious, Socrates' closing speech appears even more provocative. Among other things, he declares that he has no reason to fear death, but that, on the contrary, the death penalty he received only moments before may well be considered a blessing. Socrates supports this claim with an argument in the form of a constructive dilemma: either death involves the cessation of consciousness, in which case our afterlife existence will resemble a single night of dreamless sleep, or after our death we will go to a place where all the dead are ruled over by just judges. Since either scenario constitutes a good state, death should be considered something good (40C5–41C7). This article will examine Socrates' argument in detail and discuss a number of salient problems that arise from it. Commentators have typically attempted to tackle the interpretative problems one by one, but I shall argue that they resist satisfactory resolution and instead alert us to an ironic reading of this passage.