Although the role of competition in Greek cultural and social practices has been well documented and studied, it is only in the last decades that the extent to which it permeates Athenian drama has been realised. The element of competition in Athenian dramatic performances is now widely used as an interpretative tool, especially in Old comedy, where the competitive conditions of performance are overtly articulated. As research on the fragmentary comic poets proliferates, Aristophanes' rivals have become a far more visible element in the scenery of Old Attic comedy and, as a result, the fiercely competitive dimension of comic performances is more easily traced. We are now able to ask questions from new perspectives, and understand better such issues as authorial collaboration, charges of plagiarism, claims of degeneration and decline in the quality of plays and their authors, as well as illustrate the enormous role of audience reception in the interpretation of Old comedy. Aristophanes' bombastic and self-righteous comments regarding himself and his poetry are now read in a more nuanced manner, as a competitive poetic strategy which constructs a fictionalised ‘Aristophanes’.

At M. 7.433 the sceptic Sextus Empiricus infers from the statement that the early Stoics did not profess themselves to be sages that ‘Cleanthes did not know whether he was a human being or a beast more complex than Typhon.’ Since in two other passages, at M. 7.264 and PH 2.22, Sextus ascribes (variations upon) this confession of ignorance to Socrates rather than Cleanthes, whom Sextus otherwise obviously presents as one of his dogmatic adversaries, it has been alleged that the reference to one of the heads of the Stoic school must simply have been a ‘wilful misreading’ on Sextus' behalf. As I hope to show, there are good reasons for Sextus to refer to a Stoic here, or rather even better reasons for a Stoic to have brought up this reference himself.

As has been picked up well in modern scholarship, Sextus' inference at M. 7.433 (as in the other two passages) ultimately refers back to the beginning of the Phaedrus, at 229e–30a, which contains an image (or perhaps even self-portrait) of Socrates.

The Eclogues are universally regarded as a highly structured literary artefact, and some scholars believe that Virgil's summa manus modified the contents of individual poems at the book's final stage to achieve balance and symmetry. Whether or not such modification took place, the pattern of addressees/honorands in the collection – where they exist – ought to have some significance. The following table sets them out:

1. 1. deus (7) = iuuenem (42), usually identified as Octavian

2. 2. None

3. 3. C. Asinius Pollio (84–9)

4. 4. C. Asinius Pollio (esp. 11–14)

5. 5. None

6. 6. P. Alfenus Varus (6–7); C. Cornelius Gallus (64–73)

7. 7. None

8. 8. tu (6–13), often identified as C. Asinius Pollio, but by some as Octavian

9. 9. P. Alfenus Varus (26–9); L. Varius Rufus and C. Helvius Cinna (35–6); (?)‘Caesar’ (cf. Dionaei … Caesaris astrum, 47–9)

10. 10. C. Cornelius Gallus (passim)

Lecture one: Reading Horace, or L'homme et l'oeuvre

All criticism is also biography: and telling a story about a text is also telling a story about oneself. This is particularly true of Horace. When one writes about Horace, one is constructing a Horace, making the man: and constructing a Horace is inevitably also constructing oneself. Consider for example, Colin Macleod, whose last graduate class before his suicide was on Horace's Epistles, and who wrote extensively on Horace. Macleod's Horace was complex, often contradictory, morally serious – which fits Macleod of course.

The earliest surviving poetic representation of Euripides, outside of comedy, appears in a piece of early third-century Alexandrian poetry and the picture it paints of the Athenian tragedian is in some ways a surprising one. In his ‘Catalogue of loves’, a terribly corrupt fragment from the third book of the Leontion, Hermesianax of Colophon introduces his lines on Euripides' doomed romantic infatuation with the affirmation that ‘even he’ (ϰἀϰεîνον), that notorious hater of women, was once ‘struck by the crooked bow’. Night did not relieve his suffering,

ἀλλὰ Μαϰηδονίων πάσας ϰατενίσατο λαύρας
Αἰγάων μεθέπων Ἀρχέλεω ταμίην, 66
εἰσόϰε <δὴ> δαίμων Εὐριπίδῃ εὕρετ᾿ ὄλεθρον
Ἀρριβίου στυγνῶν ἀντιάσαντι ϰυνῶν. (7.65–8)

66 Αἰγάων Bergk: αἰγιεων A

Rather he went down all the alleyways of Macedonian Aegae
in pursuit of the housemaid of Archelaus,
until a daemon found death for Euripides
when he came across the hated hounds of Arribius.

While one of the themes Hermesianax' catalogue foregrounds is how lovesick poets of the past left home to pursue their beloveds abroad, the lines on Euripides are remarkable for their elision of this poet's native Attica.

The female readership of the Ars amatoria has been for two millennia a subject fraught with problems both historical and theoretical. For example: in antiquity, did respectable women read the poem? Almost certainly, and they were almost certainly expected to. Were they intended to? Here less certainty is possible, not only because of the problem of divining authorial intention. Did non-respectable women, the real life analogues to the poem's fictive courtesans, read the Ars? Some of them – the elite ones – must have, but lower-level courtesans would have had less opportunity to acquire copies of the poem. On the textual, rather than historical, level, other questions remain, most of them unanswerable, such as the sincerity of the poem's disclaimers to matronae, the No-Wives-Allowed signs. The deliberate textual confusion between matrona and meretrix in Ars 3 blurs clear distinctions and makes it impossible to tell if the praeceptor Amoris anticipates or seeks respectable, elite women, in addition to his declared readers, the courtesans.

This paper sets out to contribute to our understanding of the way exempla functioned in Roman culture through a close study of ethics in our only major extant collection of exempla from ancient Rome, Valerius Maximus' Facta et dicta memorabilia. I develop what Matthew Roller in a recent article calls the ‘discourse of exemplarity’ by demonstrating what Valerius Maximus can tell us about the dynamic process of reading and learning from exempla in ancient Rome, and also by suggesting that one role of exempla in Roman culture was to promote ethical deliberation within a tradition of ‘controversial thinking’. The main part of the paper analyses Valerius' treatment of the theme of seueritas and his presentation of pertinent exempla (especially in chapters 2.7 and 6.3) in order to illustrate the claims about Valerius' work and about Roman exempla more generally that I shall outline in this introductory section. In summary my contention is that Valerius' arrangement of exempla in sequence under ethical categories is designed to tell Roman readers not simply what to think but how to think ethically, enabling Roman readers both to explore the scope of those moral categories and to develop their skills of moral reasoning.

The ‘Black Hunter’ is an expression proposed by P. Vidal-Naquet, to understand certain phenomena within ancient Greek society: it designated a cunning, youthful figure haunting the borders, which was meaningful in implied opposition to a ‘normal’ adult male citizen living in the civilised world. He represents an attempt to interpret Greek culture through Levi-Straussian structural polarities.

As examples of Black Hunters, Vidal-Naquet pointed to the Spartan kruptos (young Spartiates sent out for a short time to roam the countryside and kill helots) and the Athenian ephebe (young men, about to become adult, sent into military service for two years, between eighteen and twenty). The kruptos and the ephebe belonged to Greek rites of passage, where youths become inverted ‘Black Hunters’ before integrating in the community. Another, very interesting case occurs in late Hellenistic Chaironeia, where a local youth, Damon, threatened with rape by a Roman officer stationed in the city, banded up with coaevals and ambushed the Roman: the youths smeared their faces with soot, drank pure wine and slaughtered their man at dawn during a sacrifice, before running away and plundering the territory (they returned to kill the city magistrates at their evening meal) – all marks of anomie, marginality and extremeness.

A familiar controversy in modern science centres on the problematic relationship between the ‘rhetoric’ and the ‘rationality’ of scientific argument. ‘From the dawn of modern science’, writes Philip Kitcher, ‘strenuous announcements have advocated that thinkers are not to be diverted from the conclusions that they ought to reach by the enchantments of language used to clothe a chain of reasoning. Hence the need for a restrained idiom that will “let the facts speak for themselves.” Science is to be a rhetoric-free zone.’ The broad aim of this paper is to suggest certain ways in which Seneca contributes to the ancient end of a controversy that Kitcher traces back to the beginning of the modern scientific era.

When translating the ‘potential’ Homeric Greek optative into English, ‘could’ is often the best modal verb to use, to be preferred to the more usual ‘would’. I will argue that, in some cases, this reveals that the optative expresses what is termed in the literature ‘dynamic’ modality. Examining several examples in more detail I will claim that the optative expresses a wide range of meanings, the differences between which are subtle and not always clear-cut.