In the Peristephanon, a collection of hymns in praise of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (a.d. 347/8–c. 405) refers back to a time more than a hundred years before he was writing, when Christianity was not the predominant influence in the Roman world but the religion of a beleaguered minority. In the course of Prudentius' lifetime, the trials that were suffered by that minority under emperors such as Decius and Diocletian became an important point of reference for increasing numbers of Roman converts seeking to identify with Christianity and its sectarian past. At the time, however, those trials were recorded in only meagre written accounts. Prudentius, whose successful administrative career might have culminated in elevation to a senior position in the imperial scrinia, displays particular interest in the extent of the official archival material in the Peristephanon. In a number of passages in this work, he comments on the fragility of historical documents, which are easily destroyed by acts of malice or the effects of time. The following discussion will examine the ways in which he reflects on the permanence, or otherwise, of his own written texts. Analysis of his imitation of elegiac verse inscriptions will demonstrate how he draws attention to the inadequacy of even the most monumental types of human writing. But I will argue that, by identifying his poems with the martyrs' perishable bodies, Prudentius claims that they too can be a medium for a divine presence not confined to any perishable physical form.

The account of the Battle of Thermopylae found in Diodorus Siculus (11.8.4–10.4) is remarkably different from the more commonly known Herodotean version of events (7.201–33). Most strikingly, his account includes details of a night raid on the Persian camp made by Leonidas and his men. Diodorus’ principal source for this section of the narrative, historians generally agree, was Ephorus of Cyme (c. 405–330 b.c.). This tradition was later taken up also by Justin (2.11.12–18) and Plutarch (De malignitate Herodoti 866a). But who was Ephorus’ source? Many believe that Ephorus simply made it up. However, Michael Flower, in a discussion of Ephorus and his sources, rightly I think, dismisses this verdict on a number of accounts. Firstly, he questions the willingness of Ephorus’ audience to accept this novel version without Ephorus providing a suitable source for it. Secondly, he points out that scholars have never conclusively demonstrated that Ephorus simply fabricated the events that he related. Instead, dismissing the Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus (‘It could not have come from Ctesias’), who was active during the last decades of the fifth and early part of the fourth century b.c., Flower argues for the possibility that the lyric poetry of Simonides of Ceos was Ephorus’ source. It is the argument of this paper that Flower dismisses Ctesias as a source for the Thermopylae nyktomachia too quickly, and that by combining information found in Dracontius (De laudibus Dei 3.279–95) and Tertullian (Apologeticum 9.6) it is probable to conclude that Ctesias is indeed the source for this alternative tradition.

The scholia to Wasps gloss τραχήλια variously as τὰ ἄκρα καὶ τὰ εὐτελῆ κρέα (‘cheap trimmings of meat’), τὰ ἀποβαλλόμενα τῶν ὄψων (‘discarded scraps of prepared dishes’), ὀστράκιόν τι βραχὺ τελέως (‘a tiny bit of bone’), and εὐτελὲς προσόψημα ἐν λοπαδίσκοις σκευαζόμενον (‘a cheap side-dish prepared in small pans’). These might all be guesses, but the absence of the definite article in the original text shows that Bdelycleon's reference is to something more generic than ‘the backbones’ in the next verse. The ancient commentators were thus probably right not to interpret the word ‘bits of neck’, vel sim., as if this were a diminutive of τράχηλος (‘neck’ or ‘head and neck’). Instead, these must be ‘tail-ends’ of food, scraps and leftovers of a sort that might be fed to a dog; compare Hippocrates, Epidemiae 7.62 (v.428.7 Littré), where βόεια τραχήλια (‘beef tit-bits’, vel sim.) are mentioned along with ham as part of the diet of a man recovering from illness.

It has long been noted that there are links between the Homeric portrayals of Odysseus' companions and the suitors. These two largely anonymous groups of Ithacans are connected not only by their ἀτασθαλίαι (‘reckless deeds’) but also by the fact that by the end of the Odyssey both groups will be dead. Clearly, these fatalities are – in their different ways – crucial to the story. Nagler regards the death of the suitors as a ‘grim inversion’ of the death of Odysseus' crew. Odysseus himself is depicted both by the primary narrator and in his own narrative in Od. 9–12 as making every effort to save his crew, all in vain. By contrast, he is the prime and highly effective instigator of the death of the suitors.

It is well known that in early Greek epic old age was something that could be scraped off a man, and it is the purpose of this note to explore the image and to suggest a possible origin. The idea is first attested in a counterfactual conditional sentence in Phoenix's speech at Il. 9.445–6: ‘nor even if [a god] himself were to undertake to render me young and flourishing after scraping off old age …’ (οὐδ' εἴ κέν μοι ὑποσταίη αὐτός | γῆρας ἀποξύσας θήσειν νέον ἡβώοντα …); in a description of Medea's magical rejuvenation of Aeson in the Nostoi (fr. 7.2 Bernabé = 6.2 Davies, γῆρας ἀποξύσας); and in the account of Eos' botched attempt to make Tithonus immortal in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (223–4):

οὐδ' ἐνόησε μετὰ ϕρεσὶ πότνια Ἠώς
ἥβην αἰτῆσαι, ξῦσαί τ' ἄπο γῆρας ὀλοιόν.

Although the manuscript tradition of Euripides’ Orestes is unanimous in preserving the reading Μυκηνίδες ὦ φίλαι at line 1246, recent editors have increasingly preferred the emendation Μυκηνίδες ὦ φίλ⟨ι⟩αι, first suggested by Gottfried Hermann in 1841. Thanks to the recent publication of new Michigan papyri, that emendation can now be unreservedly accepted.

The extended exhortation of Tyrtaeus fr. 11 W urges the audience to take up their shield and spears and fight in a defensive fashion, ‘placing foot against foot, leaning chest on chest’ (v. 31). The overt message of the poem is clear: do not shirk nor run away, but rather stand firm and fight. Within the poem, Tyrtaeus weaves a more subtle message, describing a hoplite group which derives its defining characteristics through possession of a stalwart, ‘passive’ courage and a shield with a ‘belly’ (v. 24). The cohesion that this poem calls for and reproduces through its use of the second person plural and description of close, hoplite fighting, however, is disrupted by the last four lines of the poem, which form a jarring address that sit uneasily alongside the remainder of the poem. In West's text they read:

ὑμεῖς δ', ὦ γυμνῆτες, ὑπ' ἀσπίδος ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος
πτώσσοντες μεγάλοις βάλλετε χερμαδίοις
δούρασί τε ξεστοῖσιν ἀκοντίζοντες ἐς αὐτούς,
τοῖσι πανόπλοισιν πλησίον ἱστάμενοι.   (vv. 35–8)

In his speech On the Crown (330 b.c.e.), the orator Demosthenes twice refers to his opponent Aeschines as a kinados (‘fox’), both times in the context of accusing him of flattery and slandering in the service of Philip of Macedon (18.162, 242). Although a number of scholars have studied the use of invective in the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, very little attention has been paid to the significance of this peculiar epithet. In this note, I investigate why Demosthenes calls Aeschines a kinados, suggesting that, in addition to painting Aeschines as devious, the word may also have served as a pun.

The overall sense is clear enough: the Pythagoreans called the fourth συλλαβή, the fifth δι' ὀξειᾶν and the octave ἁρμονία. We are also told that the octave is a σύστημα, which is a musical structure resulting from an acceptable combination of two or more smaller intervals – in this case, of a fourth and a fifth. But the received text appears problematic: in particular, the double accusative τὴν δὲ διὰ πασῶν … ἁρμονίαν occurring in connection with the dative τῷ συστήματι seems quite difficult to account for. The phrase is perhaps to be taken as meaning that the Pythagoreans ‘posed’ or ‘defined’ the octave as ἁρμονία ‘because of the σύστημα’; nevertheless, the syntax still sounds troubled and, as Andrew Barker has suggested, the text is very likely to be corrupt in some way. An easy emendation would be τὴν δὲ διὰ πασῶν τῷ σύστημα <εἶναι> … (‘they defined the octave as ἁρμονία because of its being a σύστημα, as Theophrastus also said’). The corruption could have taken place in two steps, the accidental loss of εἶναι having caused the correction of the ungrammatical τῷ σύστημα into the dative case.

The starting point of this brief discussion is the emendation in line 782 of Aeschylus' Septem proposed by M.L. West in his 1990 Teubner edition. In the fifth strophe of the second stasimon, the chorus recollects the misfortunes that struck Oedipus when he finally discovered the truth about his marriage. This severely corrupt passage, whose original meaning was lost at an early stage of transmission, runs as follows:

ἐπεὶ δ' ἀρτίϕρων ἐγένετο         [στρ. ε]
μέλεος ἀθλίων γάμων,
ἐπ' ἄλγει δυσϕορῶν             780
μαινομέναι κραδίαι
δίδυμα κάκ' ἐτέλεσεν
πατροϕόνωι χερὶ τῶν
†κρεισσοτέκνων δ' ὀμμάτων† ἐπλάγχθη.
τέκνοις δ' †ἀραίας† ἐϕῆκεν        [ἀντ. ε]
ἐπίκοτος τροϕᾶς, αἰαί,         786
πικρογλώσσους ἀράς.

Scholarship has long argued that the Batrachomyomachia (BM) is to be dated to the Hellenistic period or later, but the question of its literary affiliations in this context has only recently been addressed. Usually considered an example of παρωιδία, the poem is a unique example of that genre in several respects, including the extent to which it develops its own formularity rather than merely mirroring the Homeric exemplar with minimal change, and the fact that it was passed off as the work of Homer himself instead of being self-consciously distanced from the parodied author. It is therefore fitting that the BM is also unusual for ancient parody in dealing with the scholarly discourse surrounding its primary exemplar. This note offers, as an(other) example of this tendency, the BM's engagement with the Homeric arming scene, and its reception in Hellenistic poetry and scholarship.

Dicaeopolis brushes the informer aside and closes his deal with the starving Megarian:

ΔΙ. … λαβὲ ταυτὶ τὰ σκόροδα καὶ τοὺς ἅλας
καὶ χαῖρε πόλλ’. ΜΕ. ἀλλ’ ἁμὶν οὐκ ἐπιχώριον.
ΔΙ. πολυπραγμοσύνη νῦν ἐς κεϕαλὴν τράποιτ’ ἐμοί.   833

A conjecture made by Lambinus in 1565 proposes replacement of difficilest (present in the three authoritative manuscripts O, Q and V) at 3.361 with desiperest. Although commonly printed until the end of the nineteenth century (including in Lachmann's famous edition and Heinze's edition of Book 3, but excluding Wakefield's and Munro's), in the twentieth century the conjecture fell out of favour, both in editions of the entire De rerum natura (DRN) and of Book 3; the manuscript reading of difficilest has been kept by editors since 1900: Duff, Bailey, Martin, Kenney, Müller, Smith and Brown. But with this consensus there are problems, and there are several reasons for preferring Lambinus' conjecture.

There is a widespread practice of spelling the forms κεχρώσμεθα in Euripides' Medea 497 and ϕώζειν in Strattis, fr. 9 K.–A. with the long diphthong omega–iota, that is, κεχρώισμεθα or κεχρῴσμεθα and ϕώιζειν or ϕῴζειν. These spellings are not correct from the etymological point of view, but are recommended by ancient grammarians. In this note I identify the foundation on which these recommendations rest, and provide an assessment of its philological solidness.

It has long been known that the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as divine in Egyptian culture. He was the son of Re and the mediator between the gods and humankind. During the royal coronation, he was transformed into a manifestation of the god Horus. He could be referred to as a ntr (‘divine being’, ‘god’), and was regularly described in inscriptions as ‘the good god’ or ‘perfect god’ (ntr nfr). By the New Kingdom period, the king's divinity was believed to be imbued by his possession of a divine manifestation of the god Amun-Re called the ‘living royal ka’, which came upon him at his coronation, and which was also renewed during the yearly opet festival held in the Luxor temple in Thebes. As late as the period of Persian domination over Egypt in the fifth century b.c., Egyptian temple texts continued to describe their foreign king Darius I as a divine being, owing to the ‘living royal ka’. This hieroglyphic formula proclaiming the king's divinity continues for Alexander the Great and even in Ptolemaic temple reliefs.

Cicero is narrating various proposals advanced by Servius Sulpicius Rufus in an attempt to save his failing consular campaign of 63. In addition to the lex Tullia de ambitu discussed in the preceding section, he mentions this proposal that was blocked in the senate. The text printed is that of Clark, who compares [Sall.] 2.8.1, citing a law promulgated by C. Gracchus in his tribunate: ut ex confusis quinque classibus sorte centuriae vocarentur. On this basis Clark suspected that the transmitted praerogationum conceals a reference to the praerogativa (centuria), the first to vote in the comitia centuriata, traditionally chosen by lot from the centuries of the first class and the twelve classes of equites, and thus highly influential. Certainly this is more plausible than Mommsen's perrogationem (‘the successive asking for opinions’: OLD s.v. perrogatio), which is not attested in any classical author.

The conclusion of Chrysalus' famous canticum comparing the successful duping of his master Nicobulus to the sack of Troy has often been suspected by critics (Plaut. Bacch. 976–7):

nunc Priamo nostro si est quis emptor, comptionalem senem
uendam ego, uenalem quem habeo, extemplo ubi oppidum expugnauero.

Amores 1.1, as usually understood, ends in a way that seems a little flat: after an amusing account of how falling in love made him turn from epic to elegy, the poet concludes by ponderously invoking an elegiac muse. In this note I will argue that the ending is more entertaining, and more significant: the muse invoked in the last couplet, who is to inspire the poems to come, is none other than Corinna herself.

non, si Cambysae redeant et flumina Croesi,
dicat ‘De nostro surge, poeta, toro’.

Trimalchio's fabulous epitaph, recited in full by Petronius’ colourful host towards the end of the Cena (Sat. 71.12), has long attracted abundant comment. Similarly, allusions to the underworld in much of the decoration leading to and in Trimalchio's dining room have been the object of intense scholarly discussion of the freedman's morbid characterization. In consequence, it is now accepted that epitaph and funereal allusions make for a deliberate mirage of the netherworld – so much so that ‘… Trimalchio's home is in some sense to be regarded as a house of the dead’. As John Bodel has shown, ‘Petronius signalled his intention to portray Trimalchio's home as an underworld earlier in the episode’. Examples for this include the procession from the baths to Trimalchio's house that preceded the banquet (Sat. 28.4–5) – ‘resembling nothing so much as a Roman cortege’, and the wall paintings in the porticus of Trimalchio's house which made Encolpius stop and pause, as Aeneas had done at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae (Sat. 29.1). The example of the pairing of the Cerberus-like watchdog encountered by Encolpius and friends during their escape (Sat. 72.7) and the painted dog in Trimalchio's vestibule that frightened Encolpius upon his arrival (Sat. 29.1) makes it moreover clear that Petronius engaged in some elaborate ring composition concerning Trimalchio's portrayal as a dead man walking. It is surprising, then, that Petronius should have failed to square the circle as regards Trimalchio's epitaph: Sat. 71.12 appears to lack an earlier match – and this despite the fact that a visitor to a Roman tomb might well expect to be informed about the name of the deceased, and perhaps a few other details, at the moment of entering the tomb.