Since the decipherment of Linear B a number of scholars have argued, on the basis of supposed Mycenaean survivals in the Homeric poems, that the Greek legendary poetic tradition ran continuously from the Bronze Age through the Dark Age down to the singers of the Ionian towns in the ninth and eighth centuries. However, the directness of the connection between the narrative poetry of the Mycenaean Age, if indeed such existed, and the subsequent development of the Epic in Greece has been called into question. Thus Shipp, for example, has argued that most of the items listed by Chadwick in his article Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect in fact left their mark for a time at least on forms of Greek other than that of the Epic, and so could well have entered this tradition in post-Mycenaean times and in some other way than through a direct poetical current from the Bronze Age. A similar conclusion has been reached by Kirk, who has expressed his views forcefully in a series of publications. Consider the following:

The two objective criteria for dating elements within the Homeric poems, namely archaeology and language, require careful handling and reveal less than is generally claimed for them. They enable certain elements to be recognized as having existed as early as the late Bronze Age, but do not necessarily prove that these all passed into the Ionian Epic tradition by the medium of late Bronze Age poetry.

Three words of the Aristophanic lexicon, λαικάζειν, λαικαστής and λαικάστρια, are not fully explained by the contexts in which they occur. The remains of ancient learning known to scholars of the sixteenth century contained no clear and unambiguous doctrine about them. A considerable amount of fresh material however has accumulated during recent centuries. The Latinists W. Heraeus and A. E. Housman studied what was available to them around the years 1914 and 1930 respectively and came to firm conclusions but without persuading many students of Aristophanes' comic scripts in particular or of the Greek language in general. G. P. Shipp has recently drawn attention to a third century A.D. document, first published as long ago as 1925, which has the verb in a context leaving little doubt about the user's meaning. This paper attempts to consider systematically the evidence now available and to make clear how Aristophanes and other Athenians of the fifth, fourth and third centuries B.C. used the word group. It is argued that the verb remained alive among some speakers of Greek without change of function until very late and that Housman's explanation of the Aristophanic passages was correct.

This note is intended as a contribution towards a better understanding of the structure of credit relations in Greek society.

Diogenes Laertios: Life of Menippos 6.99 (Long):

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This passage has been consistently misunderstood by translators and commentators. Typical of the confusion is the translation by Hicks in the Loeb edition:

Hermippos says that he [Menippos] lent out money by the day and got a nickname from doing so. For he used to make loans on bottomry and take security, thus accumulating a large fortune.

Carian Aphrodisias has been known as a rich site since the eighteenth century from the inscriptions copied there by travellers, transcribing especially off blocks re-used in the city-wall. In the twentieth century excavation has very notably increased our information and has made a quite outstanding contribution to the epigraphy of the city since Professor Kenan Erim began to dig there in the early sixties. It is not simply a matter of numbers; the content of these inscriptions is unusually significant in the additions it makes to knowledge of the ancient world.

Publication of the inscriptions so far has concentrated on the Diocletianic texts, while a great series of documents relating to the city's formal relation with Rome is now in press. I offer here some notes on another aspect of that relationship, the early stages of imperial cult at Aphrodisias.

Ovid has advised his female audience to appear often in public, and to let pass no occasion for attracting admirers; now he warns that not every man who shows interest in them can be trusted. Critics have so far concerned themselves only with 439-40, and the problems of this couplet have been essentially solved. Goold's Priamo…satae is as neat a way as one could wish to introduce a reference to Cassandra, who must be the exemplar of unheeded advice to whom Ovid is alluding. The connection of these lines to their context – a question that perplexed Brandt – is also clear: they are an ironically portentous build-up to the next revelation (sunt qui mendaci specie grassentur amoris etc.).

‘Pindar was incredibly admired and honour'd among the Ancients, even to that degree, that we may believe they saw more in him than we do now.’ Abraham Cowley's rather ingenuous statement, introducing in 1656 a significantly curtailed translation of Horace, Odes 4.2, retitled ‘The Praise of Pindar’, pinpoints what was to become a dominant tension in Pindaric criticism, in the attempt to reconcile the reputation (drawn largely from Horace, with Quintilian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ps.-Longinus and many others in support) with the reality of the extant texts. The critical debate about Pindar has often read like a literary application of the tale of the Emperor's clothes: on the one side, in the words of an eighteenth-century Frenchman, ‘le sang froid’ is a poor judge of ‘l'enthousiasme’, and on the other, in the words of John Wolcot, the English Peter Pindar, some moderns ‘suspect his reputation, concluding it all to be a fable, invented by some idle enthusiast who was incapable of distinguishing between sense and sound, noise and sublimity, the bold thunder and the rumbling wheel-barrow’. In an age which saw itself as struggling to recreate the taste of antiquity, many were prepared to make the act of faith involved in accepting the ‘Horatian’ and ‘Longinian’ Pindar as a model of unapproachable poetic sublimity.