The aim of this article is to briefly discuss the ingenious interpretations of Od. 13.104 and 11.122–3 that were put forward by Numenius of Apamea. As our understanding of this fascinating second-century forerunner of Neoplatonism has significantly improved over the last years, Numenius’ importance is now generally recognized to be twofold. First, he was instrumental in establishing a framework within which numerous philosophers from Plotinus onwards would operate. Second, he skilfully employed allegoresis for pedagogical purposes, which not only helped to promote his exposition of philosophy, but also stimulated critical investigations into the nature of myth and poetry. In that, however, Numenius’ hermeneutics marks a serious departure from Plato: when embracing allegoresis, Numenius combined Platonism with traditions sympathetic to the practice that Plato himself vehemently repudiated.

The Trojan cycle has been retold and re-envisioned many times from antiquity to modern times. The themes covered by these myths, especially the Homeric poems, have captivated the minds and hearts of poets, historians, authors, and others. Homer's Iliad extoled the grandeur as well as exposed the ugliness and folly of war. These humanistic virtues resonated with various cultures around the world. In this article we examine the reception of the Trojan cycle, especially the Iliad, on the noted manga artist Tezuka Osamu (1928–89). Recent reception theories focus on the creation of a new composition or artefact as part of the reception process; we shall thus discuss the Phoenix: Early Works manga as an example of such reception.

The way in which the Roman army, as a major factor contributing to relative mobility of individuals within the Roman Empire, may be thought of as a driver behind the diffusion and general dynamic of Roman poetry and song, has not sufficiently been explored. Similarly, regionalized approaches to poetry and song as a cultural practice, subject to local, ethnic, social, and cultural variation and change, have not yet been pursued in a research context in which Roman poetry has largely remained a domain of study in upper-class entertainment and intertextuality. Not only is the common approach at odds with a methodology that has long, and successfully, been adopted otherwise in historical and linguistic research: it also excludes the vast majority of surviving poems from the Roman world, the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, from consideration – a body of texts that provides us with information about a cultural practice that, subject to substantial regional variation, literary poets stylized and drove to its artistic extremes.

A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1072–7 ce) shows Earl Harold ‘Godwinson’ of Wessex (c. 1022–66), future king of the English (r. 1066), rescuing two Normans from drowning in the quicksand of the River Couesnon as they cross into Brittany on military campaign (see figure 1; Bayeux Tapestry Scene 17). Harold (Bayeux Tapestry Figure 152) is depicted standing more or less upright, upon embroidered lines that represent the waters of the Couesnon. As is typical for the representation of Anglo-Saxons in this, the earlier part of the embroidery, he has a ‘pudding-bowl’ haircut and is moustached. These features distinguish Harold from the Normans he saves, who have the backs of their heads shaven and are without facial hair. Harold carries one of the men ‘piggyback’ and drags the other, who has almost fallen on his back, up by his right hand. The Latin inscription above this scene is brief, but nonetheless tells us most of what we need to know to understand the imagery beneath: hIC VVILLEM DVX ET EXERCITVS EIVS VENERVNT AD MONTE[M] MIChAELIS ET hIC TRANSIERVNT FLVMEN COSNONIS. hIC hARLOLD DVX TRAhEBAT EOS DE ARENA (‘Here Duke William and his army came to Mont St Michel, and here they crossed the River Couesnon. Here Duke Harold pulled them out of the sand’).

In 1941, E. S. Forster wrote a short article, published in this journal, which compiled all of the instances he could identify in the ancient source material that described dogs being used in a military capacity. G. B. A. Fletcher, who had identified a few obscure references that Forster had not cited, responded to Forster's paper later that same year. The purpose of both papers was simply the compiling of a list, a purpose that had been inspired by Forster's interest in the French army's recruitment of dogs on the outbreak of the Second World War. The result was a thorough catalogue of known examples, showing the ancient dog being used for a variety of purposes such as patrol work or observation duties, or being used as combatants or despatch couriers. The primary aim, according to Forster was to ‘make a comparison with modern practice’ – that is, the French practice he had read about; the only exception for which he could find no ancient evidence was what he called ‘Red Cross’ work.

In the first half of the ode (1–8) Horace prays to Faunus and guarantees him an annual sacrifice. Nisbet and Rudd describe the prayer as a ‘summons’ and identify it as ‘kletic’, but this cannot be right, since in the same breath the god is asked to depart no less than to come (3–4: lenis incedas abeasque… | aequus). The fact is that lenis incedas does not mean ‘may you progress and be gentle about it’ but ‘may your progress be gentle’, just as abeasque…aequus means ‘and may your departure be favourable’. Horace is neither summoning the god nor sending him off: Faunus’ visit is taken for granted, which is hardly surprising since we were told in 1.17.1–2 that he visits Horace's estate ‘often’ (saepe). It is the manner of his visit for which the annual sacrifice constitutes the quid pro quo.

Readers of Greece and Rome will notice that some of the Review sections are either shorter than usual or are missing entirely in this issue. This is due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and the measures that governments and universities in the UK, Greece, and USA, where our reviewers are based, were forced to undertake. In some cases, the shutdown of university buildings happened quickly, and colleagues were left with only limited access to their books and offices, or with no access whatsoever. We very much hope that the next issue of Greece and Rome will go into production in better circumstances, and thank our readers, reviewers, and authors for their unwavering support.

Academics have a professional need to be published; publishers have a commercial incentive to create demand. In recent years these convergent interests have released a flood of edited volumes, not all of which can demonstrate a compelling claim to intrinsic or lasting scholarly importance. So it is reassuring to be reminded that a publishing house that contributes liberally, if not recklessly, to the flood continues to produce heavyweight volumes of unquestionable scholarly importance. Consider, for example, the new edition of the Thucydides scholia, on which Alexander Kleinlogel worked from 1960 until a few months before his death on 1 January 2007. The complex task of bringing his material to publishable form was undertaken by Klaus Alpers; illness prevented Alpers from steering the volume through its final stages, which were overseen by Stefano Valente. The introduction comprises 202 pages (the chapter on transmission is incomplete, breaking off after four pages); the lavish edition of the scholia vetera occupies 705 pages. The material for a projected second volume containing the scholia recentiora was not left in a publishable state, except for the Lexicon Patmense, which is included as a forty-eight-page appendix to the present volume's introduction. Reviewing Karl Hude's Teubner edition of the scholia, published in 1927, H. T. Deas concluded: ‘obviously this is work which will not require to be done again. Indeed, were it not a praiseworthy task for the sake of completeness, one might be permitted to doubt whether it was worth doing at all’ (CR 42 [1928], 145–6). That reminder of the extremes of fallibility should strike terror into every reviewer's soul.

First up, a brace of major Teubner editions. Marcus Deufert's De rerum natura marks a significant moment in Lucretian studies. I suspect that most people, at least in the Anglosphere, are still using Cyril Bailey's venerable Oxford Classical Text (revised in 1922) for everyday reading, if not the equally antique Loeb (W. D. Rouse, 1924). In broadest outline, text-critical views haven't changed much since: a ‘closed’ tradition, in which two Carolingian manuscripts rejoicing in the workaday names Oblongus and Quadratus are prime witnesses, but often problematic ones; a mass of manuscripts from Renaissance Italy, which editors consult primarily for conjectures. But the last century has seen plenty of important work, and Deufert can report more precisely on the various corrections made in O and Q; affirm that all Italian manuscripts descend from O, and give them a stemma; pan many more humanist conjectures; wade in the muddy river (xxi) of modern interventions; and offer his own solutions to, or non liquet on, textual problems small and large. The result is a text with plenty of novelties (and many questions left open), and an edition with a very different look.

Mosaics have not fared well in the hands of classical archaeologists. Modern viewers have traditionally treated them as panel-paintings laid out on the floor: consider how mosaics are frequently displayed on museum walls, for example, or how book reproductions perpetuate the ideal of a ‘vertical’ bird's-eye view. Scholars, too, have been quick to identify mythological subjects, homing in on ‘figurative’ motifs. But we still lack an adequate framework for approaching more ‘ornamental’ components – or for challenging that segregation in the first place.

Many introductory courses on ancient, or indeed modern, philosophy begin from the observation that the word ‘philosophy’ itself describes a ‘love of wisdom’. Christopher Moore's wide-ranging, original, and fascinating new book sets out to examine the value of that etymology. He argues persuasively that philosophos does not, in fact, originate as a label applied respectfully to pick out a ‘lover of wisdom’ for emulation. Rather, the term is appropriated and developed from its origins as a pejorative name applied to those perceived to be striving too hard and in the wrong way to achieve the status of sophos, a ‘sage-wannabe’ as Moore has it. As he is careful to emphasize, his history of the origins of philosophos and philosophia does not and need not coincide with the origin story of ‘philosophy’ as a certain kind of discipline involving a certain way of talking about specific questions. Nevertheless, by scrutinizing the origins of these terms and their application in the sixth and fifth centuries bce, Moore sets himself up to offer some further enlightening discussion of the fifth- and fourth-century development of the discipline of ‘philosophy’.

Bloomsbury's Imagines series, edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner, focuses on classical receptions in the visual and performing arts. It has blazed into 2020 with three edited volumes and one monograph. The monograph by Carlà-Uhink is on the reception of classical Greece in theme parks, and the edited volume that has landed on our desk is Classical Antiquity in Video Games. In this attractive volume, clad in the stylish graphics of Alientrap's Apotheon (2015), Christian Rollinger has assembled a vital collection of essays on the underexplored subject. As he emphatically proclaims, ‘Video games are everywhere’ (xiii) and this book is a lifeline for countless university teachers faced with the task of supervising students enthusiastically writing about the ever-expanding mass of classically inspired games.

Structures of Epic Poetry is a monumental, four-volume compendium which aims to classify, analyse, and compare epic structures across Greek and Latin epic poems (and beyond) in a systematic and overarching way. While the individual Bauformen (‘structural elements’) have been the focus of the study of epic for decades, a comprehensive analysis providing a systematic overview of all structural elements in the totality of ancient epic is obviously not a one-person job. The editors, Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann, gathered an international group of experts for this herculean task. The compendium provides a set of broad cross-sectional papers on the individual epic structural elements, using a consistent terminology. It has to be said that the editors’ understanding of what constitutes an epic structural element is very broad: it includes the ‘type-scenes’, but also the narrative patterns such as catalogue and ecphrasis, and stylistic hallmarks such as similes; in fact, structural elements as understood by the editors come closest to genre markers.