If we look to the Protagoras for philosophical lessons, it may seem an irritating patchwork of niggling argument, irrelevant digressions, false starts and downright fallacy. Read as a play in which the most outstanding and individual minds of a brilliant period meet and engage in a battle of wits, it will give a different impression. That is how it should be read. A serious discussion of the nature of virtue, and how it is acquired, must be left, as Protagoras said, for another occasion - and, we may add, for different company: it is not to be achieved in the competitive atmosphere of a public gathering of Sophists.

The Protagoras is palpably interested in character, vividly reviving a lost intellectual generation. But it also seems to argue for a conclusion, albeit a very provisional one. How should we relate the dialogue's array of luminaries to its argument? A reader may be tempted, as in the quotation above, to use the dialogue's literary lustre merely to excuse its arguments from charges of philosophical clumsiness. But by the end of the work we have been shown apparently successful arguments for the unity of virtue, with Protagoras' attempt at a counter-example refuted (360d8–e5).

Pausanias' qualities as a historian have long been the subject of scholarly attention, not least because some of his historical accounts present modern commentators with seemingly insurmountable problems. In fact, there is no denying that at times, Pausanias gets his history spectacularly wrong. Such apparent errors are all the more problematic because Pausanias' version is sometimes incompatible with major historical works which he, as a very well-read man, should have known. Do we have to assume that Pausanias sometimes chose to present historical accounts which he himself could identify as inaccurate or at least as clashing with other literary works?

In this article I investigate Pausanias' description of Mantinea which contains two of the most blatant examples of his inaccurate historical accounts, both set in the third century BC, and both incompatible with alternative sources: we are offered a lengthy description of a battle that probably never took place, and Pausanias' version of Mantinea's fate after its defeat in 222 BC seems a complete reversal of what Polybius reported much closer to the time. I use these examples to demonstrate how such idiosyncratic versions of history could develop and survive within their local context, and why they may have seemed an attractive addition to Pausanias' Periegesis.

The whole question of the future of the East is full of interest, and is, perhaps, the greatest political question in the world.

(Benjamin Jowett)

… a corps of men specially selected, brought up in a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modern people have subjected their ruling class, trained by cold baths, cricket, and the history of Greece and Rome …

(Philip Mason)

In his essay ‘Comparativism and references to Rome in British imperial attitudes to India’, Javed Majeed shows how Greek and Latin figured prominently in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the prestigious administrative body that David Lloyd George called ‘the steel frame’. Greek and Latin were not just used to attract and shape a class of ruling ‘gentlemen’, but were also part of a complex structure of attitude and practice designed ‘to preserve the ICS as a monopoly of European officers’. Majeed's insightful essay sheds light on the role of ICS examinations and on the function of Classics in colonial contexts, although it is mainly about comparative approaches to the British and Roman empires.

Semonides fr. 7, for a long time one of the poor relations of archaic literature, has recently been basking in the attentions of both literary critics and historians. A comic catalogue of the types of women created by Zeus, each of them derived from an animal, insect or inanimate material and nearly all of them vicious, it has been connected with Hesiod's myth of Pandora and other stories in which women are seen as dangerously and subversively different from men. Along with other invective iambic poetry, it has been sited in the symposium, where scholars have suggested that the exclusion and degradation of women helped to create and reinforce male solidarity. Since as individuals men often like women, and need wives, and their sympotic invective therefore cannot be taken too seriously, readers have highlighted the poem's use of irony and paradox.

In what follows I hope to add something to our reading of both the poem and its context. I shall try to show that Semonides' picture of women and male–female relations is more complex than has been assumed, and that we can place it in a tradition of moralizing literature which is concerned not just to pillory aspects of its world, but to explore its problems and stimulate people to think about them.

We may begin with Quintilian 9.3.44: prioris sententiae uerbum ultimum ac sequentis primum frequenter est idem, quo quidem schemate utuntur poetae saepius. This is indeed a common phenomenon, and textual corruption is a common consequence; one of the two repeated words is lost by haplography and the gap is filled with a metrical interpolation; this type of corruption is as old as the archetype of Vergil; cf. Aen. 10.705, Cisseis regina Parin; <Paris> urbe paterna, where Paris was lost and creat inserted; Paris was restored by Bentley. Similarly at Ov. Tr. 1.11.12 all the MSS have omnis ab hac cura mens releuata mea est, and cura leuata is restored from CIL 6.9632; cf.