‘All political lives…end in failure’, as Enoch Powell said; and Themistocles son of Neocles died twice. His first life ended with his ostracism in the late 470 s, after which he was dead to an Athens enthralled by Cimon; but he would not lie down. This article considers his two afterlives: one which ended about 459 in Magnesia on the Maeander, and the other which commenced in the fifth century but continues to resonate today. The examination, however, will be in reverse order, considering first the Themistocles who at Athens was written into what Tim Whitmarsh would call ‘the archive’, then drawing inferences from that literary afterlife to comment on Athenian politics in Themistocles’ years of ostracism, then exile.

Ancient Athens developed democracy to a higher level than any other state before modern times. It was the leading cultural innovator of its age. This state is rightly revered for its political and cultural achievements. What is less well known is its extraordinary record of military success. Athens transformed ancient warfare and became one of the ancient world's superpowers. There is a strong case that democracy was a major reason for this success. The military impact of Athenian democracy was twofold. The competition of elite performers before non-elite adjudicators resulted in a pro-war culture, which encouraged Athenians in increasing numbers to join the armed forces and to vote for war. All this was offset by Athenian democracy's rigorous debating of war, which reduced the risks of Athenian cultural militarism. It also made military reforms easier and developed the initiative of the state's generals, hoplites, and sailors. Political scientists have long viewed Athenian democracy as a source of fresh ideas. At present they cannot satisfactorily explain the war-making of modern democracies. Consequently ancient history can provide political science with new lines of enquiry into how democracy affects international relations today.

Known to us only through the spectrum of hostile sources, Lucius Sergius Catilina (108–62 bc) is an enigma. Nevertheless, one aspect of his personality seems clear. However much they differ in their evaluation of the patrician's failed coup d’état in 63 bc, our main authorities, Cicero and Sallust, both assert his tremendous daring. This article will demonstrate that their agreement on this issue is deceptive. Reviewing their use of the word audacia (‘daring’) as an attribution typical for rebel behaviour, I will explore how its use in combination with words for madness and despair provides it with different positive as well as negative connotations. Although, as we shall see in more detail below, many scholars have either ignored the term or discussed audacia as a standard, mono-dimensional piece of invective, it is a dynamic and multifaceted word representative of the chaos of the Late Republic.

It is well known that Ovid's Amores begin with a reference to Virgil's Aeneid in the very first word, arma (‘weapons’, Am. 1.1.1 = Verg. Aen. 1.1), which implies that the elegist had been composing epic before Cupid, by stealing a foot, apparently forced him to write elegy. In spite of this incapacitation at the hands of the love god, Ovid continues to toy with Virgil's epic by making the first two poems of his collection of elegiacs into a mini-Aeneid, or – to be precise – by making the second poem of the collection into the second half of the Aeneid. One result is that the three-book edition of Amores threatens to be over even before it has begun. Another is that Ovid can be identified with the Latin enemies, on the wrong side of history, from the Aeneid. I restrict the argument largely to what can be observed in Amores 1.2, leaving aside, for instance, the possibility that Ovid shot by Cupid's arrow in 1.1 might be thought comparable to Dido, similarly shot and causing Aeneas to dally in Carthage with her in Aeneid 4.

Lucan's Bellum Ciuile dates from the Neronian period and is strongly rooted in that historical context, but, as is well known, it offers plenty of food for thought to the student of late Republican religion and intellectual culture. The reading of the Civil War that it puts forward has major implications for our understanding of the ancient interpretations of that period. This is fully in keeping with the ambitions of Lucan himself, who set out to impose his work as a pervasive master-narrative of the late Republican age. The aim of this article is to pursue a narrow but important and often under-explored angle, and to assess the role of divination, especially of the prophetic kind, in the poem.

Over the last thirty years, the development of disability studies as an academic discipline has in turn ensured that interest in disability in historical periods has steadily increased. Initially, scholars presented an overwhelmingly negative view of disability in antiquity, proceeding under the assumption that babies born displaying visible signs of deformity or disability were subjected either to infanticide or exposure, and that individuals who were subsequently identified as suffering from a deformity or disability, or developed either one later in life, were ostracized and unable to make any meaningful contribution to society. It is only over the last decade that this reductive approach has been gradually discredited, and the understanding of disability in antiquity has become increasingly nuanced. To date, one monograph has been published on deformity and disability in the Graeco-Roman world, one monograph on disability in the Greek world and one on disability in the Roman world, and one edited volume on disability in antiquity and another on disability in the Roman world. These have been complemented by investigations into disability in Judaism, Christianity and the Bible.

In the latest Cambridge Green and Yellow Homer, Angus Bowie tackles Odyssey 13–14, intent on ‘rescuing the reputation of these books’ (ix): a worthy project, to which he makes a significant contribution. He has good things to say on the dovetailing of the two parts of the epic, and provides illuminating analyses of some of the conversations in Book 14. He places particular stress on the major roles given to lower-status characters, in which he discerns ‘a new type of epic’ (16) – a phrase qualified by a cautious question mark. Caution is abandoned, however, when he goes on to say that ‘the ideology of the Odyssey…represents a parity of status of the rich and poor’ (22): the hyperbolic ‘parity’ distracts from a valid underlying point. As in his commentary on Herodotus 8 (G&R 56 [2009], 99), Bowie is generous in providing linguistic support. In this case, perhaps over-generous: is the attention paid to historical linguistics disproportionate to student needs? It is true that ‘if one has an idea of how linguistic forms and constructions came about, they are more comprehensible and so easier to learn and retain’ (ix); my own Greek teacher applied the principle to good effect – but less relentlessly, and with a lighter touch. (The introductory section on Homeric language has four subsections, the third of which has up to five nested sublevels: incorrect cross-references in the glossary under ‘grade’ and ‘laryngeal’ suggest that even Bowie struggled with this elaborate hierarchy.) Some points are forced. When the Phaeacians put Odysseus ashore asleep in a blanket, Bowie comments: ‘Od. is treated almost like a tiny child coming swaddled into the world for the first time; again, the idea of a new start is evoked’ (117): I am not a qualified midwife, but am fairly sure that babies do not come into the world ready-wrapped and slumbering soundly. In his note on 13.268 Bowie cites three passages in the Iliad in which ambush ‘is presented as a cowardly tactic’: one is about the use of distance weapons, not ambush (11.365–95), while the other two celebrate the target's victory without reference to the ambushers’ courage or lack of it (4.391–8, 6.188–90). Ambushes are hard to execute successfully, and therefore dangerous. That is why the best men are chosen for operations of this kind (6.188–90, 13.276–86), and why Achilles is not paying Agamemnon a compliment when he claims that he takes no part in them (1.227–8).

James Uden's impressive new study of Juvenal's Satires opens up our understanding not only of the poetry itself but also of the world in which it was written, the confusing cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian, with its flourishing of Greek intellectualism, and its dissolution of old certainties about identity and values. Juvenal is revealed as very much a poet of his day, and while Uden is alert to the ‘affected timelessness’ and ‘ambiguous referentiality’ (203) of the Satires, he also shows how Juvenal's poetry resonates with the historical and cultural context of the second century ad, inhabiting different areas of contemporary anxiety at different stages of his career. The first book, for instance, engages with the issues surrounding free speech and punishment in the Trajanic period, as Rome recovers from the recent trauma of Domitian's reign and the devastation wrought by the informers, while satires written under Hadrian move beyond the urban melting pot of Rome into a decentralized empire, and respond to a world in which what it means to be Roman is less and less clear, boundaries and distinctions dissolve, and certainties about Roman superiority, virtue, hierarchies, and centrality are shaken from their anchorage. These later Satires are about the failure of boundaries (social, cultural, ethnic), as the final discussion of Satires 15 demonstrates. For Uden, Juvenal's satirical project lies not so much in asserting distinctions and critiquing those who are different, as in demonstrating over and again how impossible it is to draw such distinctions effectively in the context of second-century Rome, where ‘Romanness’ and ‘Greekness’ are revealed as rhetorical constructions, generated by performance rather than tied to origin: ‘the ties that once bound Romans and Rome have now irreparably dissolved’ (105). Looking beyond the literary space of this allegedly most Roman of genres, and alongside his acute discussions of Juvenal's own poetry, Uden reads Juvenal against his contemporaries – especially prose writers, Greek as well as Roman. Tacitus’ Dialogus is brought in to elucidate the first satire, and the complex bind in which Romans found themselves in a post-Domitianic world: yearning to denounce crime, fearing to be seen as informers, needing neither to allow wrongdoing to go unpunished nor to attract critical attention to themselves. The Letters of Pliny the Younger articulate the tensions within Roman society aroused by the competition between the new excitement of Greek sophistic performance and the waning tradition of Roman recitation. The self-fashioned ‘Greeks’ arriving in Rome from every corner of the empire are admired for their cultural prestige, but are also met by a Roman need to put them in their place, to assert political, administrative, and moral dominance. This picture help us to understand the subtleties of Juvenal's depiction of the literary scene at Rome; when the poet's satiric persona moans about the ubiquitous tedium of recitationes, this constitutes a nostalgic and defensive construction of the dying practice of recitatio as a Roman space from which to critique Greek ‘outsiders’, as much as an attack on the recitatio itself. Close analysis of Dio Chrysostom's orations helps Uden to explore themes of disguise, performance, and the construction of invisibility. Greek intellectual arguments about the universality of virtue are shown to challenge traditional Roman ideas about the moral prestige of the Roman nobility, a challenge to which Juvenal responds in Satires 8. Throughout his study, Uden's nuanced approach shows how the Satires work on several levels simultaneously. Thus Satires 8, in this compelling analysis, is not merely an attack on elite hypocrisy but itself enacts the problem facing the Roman elite: how to keep the values of the past alive without indulging in empty imitation. The Roman nobility boast about their lineage and cram their halls with ancestral busts, but this is very different from reproducing what is really valuable about their ancestors and cultivating real nobility – namely virtue. In addition, Uden shows how Juvenal teases readers with the possibility that this poem itself mirrors this elite hollowness, as it parades its own indebtedness to moralists of old such as Sallust, Cicero, and Seneca, without ever exposing its own moral centre. In this satire, Uden suggests, Juvenal explores ‘the notion that the link between a Roman present and a Roman past may be merely “irony” or “fiction”’ (120). Satires 3's xenophobic attack on Greeks can also be read as a more subtle critique of the erudite philhellenism of the Roman elite; furthermore, Umbricius’ Romanness is revealed in the poem to be as constructed and elusive as the Greekness against which he pits himself. Satires 10 is a Cynic attack upon Roman vice, but hard-line Cynicism itself is a target, as the satire reveals the harsh implications of its philosophical approach, so incompatible with Roman values and conventions, so that the poem can also be read as mocking the popularity of the softer form of Cynicism peddled in Hadrianic Rome by the likes of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom (169). Both Juvenal's invisibility and the multiplicity of competing voices found in every poem are thematized as their own interpretative provocation that invites readers to question their own positions and self-identification. Ultimately Juvenal the satirist remains elusive, but Uden's sensitive, contextualized reading of the poems not only generates specific new insights but makes sense of Juvenal's whole satirical project, and of this very slipperiness.

Four volumes in this review constitute important contributions to the study of ancient documents and their employment in antiquity, as well as their value for modern historical research. Paola Ceccarelli has written a monumental study of letter-writing and the use of writing for long-distance communication in Ancient Greece; Karen Radner has edited a volume on state correspondence in ancient empires; Christopher Eyre's book concerns documents in Pharaonic Egypt; and Peter Liddel and Polly Low have edited a brilliant collection on the uses of inscriptions in Greek and Latin literature. The first three volumes have major consequences for the study of the workings of ancient state systems, while those by Ceccarelli, Eyre, and Liddel and Low open new avenues into the study of the interrelationship between written documents and literature.

Let's start at the very beginning: that is, at the beginning of the history of Rome. This latest volume of the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies makes a clear case for the virtue of reprinting old articles even in an age of supposedly wide digital availability. An obvious virtue here is the fact this collection includes no fewer than seven articles that have been translated into English for the first time. In making this collection, the editors hope to show the continuing lively debate on the nature of the ancient historiographical tradition. Rather than taking a particular editorial line, the collection includes scholars with differing views as to the reliability of this tradition when it comes to early Roman history. That being said, it is not surprising that scholarship that aims wholeheartedly to uphold the historicity of the traditional accounts is definitely outnumbered by studies demonstrating instead the construction of historiographical tradition(s). Nonetheless, Andrea Carandini begins the collection by arguing once more for the congruence of the archaeological evidence and the literary tradition. The articles that follow vary somewhat in approach and in degrees of scepticism – for instance, Fausto Zevi admits a historical core to stories about Demoratus and the Tarquins, whereas Michael Crawford is forthright in his rejection of historicity in the earliest list of Roman colonies. The editors have taken the helpful decision to focus rather more on ‘stories’ than individual authors and this certainly helps shape a thought-provoking collection that can be read with profit rather than just put on the shelf for future reference. In particular, the editors’ suggestion that this volume could profitably be given to students in place of a single ‘authoritative’ version of the history of early Rome, so that they can see that there are indeed different ways of ‘doing’ ancient history, is persuasive. Finally, any selection of papers is, of course, subjective but an article focusing rather more particularly on non-literary historical traditions might have rounded out the picture more fully.

Poiesis is the simple title of the first book under review, and its front cover carries a view of that well-known Attic red-figure kylix in Berlin, ‘the Foundry Cup’, showing bronze sculptors at work. But librarians may wonder where exactly to classify Peter Acton's monograph on craftsmanship in classical Athens. The author himself is categorically unusual: a Classics graduate who became vice-president of a major global management consultancy firm before undertaking his doctoral dissertation, he clearly enjoys the transfer of intellectual property from academia to the world of commerce, and vice versa. ‘The ancient economy’ is probably where this belongs, though its most substantial case study is focused upon pottery production. Some of Acton's opening declarations are made over-confidently: that ‘craftsmen were well-regarded’ (7) is debatable, given the various literary instances of patent disregard for those engaged in ‘banausic’ activity (both concept and reality of the banausos are conspicuously avoided throughout). And there is carelessness in the presentation of details: the potter Cachrylion becomes ‘Cachsilion’ (281), for example, and the account of bronze and stone sculpture (215–25) is somewhat muddled. Nonetheless, Acton does well to insist upon a city of creators, not consumers. A famous passage in Plutarch concerning the multiple trades involved in building the Parthenon (Vit. Per. 12) implies as much, but our stereotypical image of Athens tends to exclude all workshop smoke and grime.

I start this review, which focuses for the most part on publications on Hellenistic philosophy, with a survey of some recent studies on Stoicism. René Brouwer's The Stoic Sage introduces itself as ‘an attempt to bring the early Stoic notions of the sage and wisdom to the fore again’ (1). ‘Again’ alludes to the fact that those notions, which attracted considerable philosophical and scholarly interest at various stages since antiquity, have not received sufficient attention in recent times (specialists in the area will judge the merits of this assessment). The book is divided into four chapters, dealing respectively with the Stoic definitions of wisdom; the ancient puzzles surrounding the nature and very possibility of the change from ‘folly’ to ‘wisdom’; the controversial question of whether the Stoics themselves believed they had achieved the ideal of perfect wisdom; and the intellectual, Socratic background against which the Stoics developed their notion of wisdom. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain, in expanded and revised form, material published by Brouwer in self-contained essays between 2002 and 2008. Chapter 1, with its analysis of the Stoic definitions of wisdom as ‘knowledge of human and divine matters’ and ‘fitting expertise’, is fundamental to set the stage for the more focused inquiries of the rest of the book. From this point of view, it succeeds only partially. It helpfully covers a reasonable amount of ground, but because of Brouwer's choice to focus exclusively on the Stoic definitions of wisdom (sophia) at this stage, and not, say, on the descriptions of the Stoic wise man (sophos: Brouwer's preferred translation ‘sage’ hides the etymological connection), it also problematically leaves some fundamental aspects untouched. I was especially surprised not to see the key notion of infallibility discussed at all in this context, despite the fact that Brouwer correctly clarifies that Stoic wisdom is not to be interpreted as a form of omniscience (33–4). This ultimately springs from an insufficiently detailed analysis of the Stoics’ notions of katalēpsis (which Brouwer translates as ‘cognition’, without ever explaining its distinctive status), and then, in turn, of epistēmē and technē, and their Stoic definitions (see also the puzzling reference to ‘weak cognitions’ on p. 62). (I only note here that Paolo Togni's 2010 monograph Conoscenza e virtù nella dialettica stoica examines much more extensively and systematically the psychological and epistemological ground which needs to be covered by a discussion of Stoic sophia.) The attempt to map exhaustively the three key terms of the first definition – knowledge, human and divine – into the three parts of Stoic philosophy, respectively logic, ethics, and physics, is ingenious but too crude and ultimately unconvincing, since logic had for the Stoics its own separate subject matter (not to be identified with ‘human and divine matters’, and not even with knowledge itself, pace Brouwer), and ethics and physics can themselves be described as forms of knowledge. The interconnected nature of Stoic philosophy, which is helpfully emphasized throughout the book, need not be mirrored in the very definition of wisdom. From a broader methodological point of view, the attempt to reconstruct an early Stoic theory of wisdom constantly clashes with the nature of our evidence, and although in several cases Brouwer does carefully justify why a certain late source can be taken to bear witness to such an early theory, in other cases the reader is left to wonder whether such a justification could be given (for example, in the case of some passages from Seneca). There is still much worth pondering in Brouwer's insightful analyses in Chapters 2–4, although one is left to wonder how much added value has been generated by integrating this previously published material into a single monograph.

The first title in this issue's batch of classical reception publications sees Lucy Pollard take us on an engaging and colourful tour of early modern travellers' experiences in Greece and the Levant. This area of scholarship is well trodden, and many readers will be familiar with David Constantine's Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (1984); but Pollard brings new material to bear by her extensive use of the unpublished diaries of John Covel, the Cambridge scholar and minister who served as chaplain to the Levant Company in Constantinople in the 1670s. These are supplemented with accounts of other seventeenth-century travellers such as George Wheler and Paul Rycaut. Successive chapters cover the logistics of travel, scholarly and archaeological approaches, and perceptions of Greeks and Turks. Pollard tends to let her sources speak for themselves; her arguments about the emergence of a ‘proto-archaeological’ approach to antiquities in the last third of the century, about the importance of perceived religious affinities between Anglican travellers and Orthodox Greeks, and about admiration of the Ottomans as a model for empire are interesting, but made with a light touch. Above all, this provides us with a richly detailed survey of the experiences, challenges, and preoccupations of early modern Englishmen travelling east.