At 3.60 Herodotus tells us that he has dwelt at length on the Samians because ‘they are responsible for three of the greatest buildings in the Greek world’: the tunnel of Eupalinos, the great temple, and the breakwater that protects their harbour. As successive commentators have pointed out, that is not the real reason for the length of his account. We hear about the tunnel for the first time in this chapter (60.1–3); Maiandrios escapes down a secret channel at 146.2, which may or may not be Eupalinos' tunnel; we hear about the temple of Artemis, not of Hera, at Samos in 48; dedications in the temple of Hera are mentioned in passing at 1.70.3, 3.123.1, 4.88.1, and 4.152.4, but the temple itself cannot be said to play a major part in Herodotus' narrative; naval expeditions sail from Samos (e.g. 44.2, 59.4) but there is no emphasis on the harbour or its breakwater. What Herodotus should have said is ‘I have dwelt at length on Samos, because I am interested in the island's history; and, by the way, they are responsible for three…’; but it is not our job to tell him what he ‘should’ have said. As David Asheri remarks, ‘We can explain it [the length of the Samian logos] most simply by supposing that the logos already existed before the final draft of the book’.

Chapters 50–2 of Herodotus' first book have been relatively neglected by scholars, presumably because they appear at first glance simply to list Croesus' sacrificial offerings at Delphi, rather than operating as a narrative imbued with the tragic motifs that scholars have long admired and explored in the Lydian logos as a whole. Only H. W. Parke has paid attention to these chapters, and even he considers them only from the perspective of Herodotus' historical veracity. Caroline Dewald, in an article on the misleading power of objects in Herodotus, does not include 1.50–2 in her discussion, while Gregory Crane notes that Herodotus' list is ‘surprisingly detailed’, but can only explain its specificity in terms of the presumed general appeal of such a list to his contemporaries. This note will suggest, however, that, as well as simply documenting Croesus' spectacular offerings, the narrative of these chapters is also shaped by some fundamental themes that run through the whole Croesus story.

In the early fourth century bc, a slave of possibly Phoenician origin, called Pasion, was owned by the Athenian bankers Antisthenes and Archestratos (Dem. 36.43). During the course of his slavery, Pasion quickly rose to become the trusted manager of his owners' money-changing and banking firm in Piraeus. After having been manumitted (Dem. 36.48), he took over the running of this bank (Isocr. 17, passim), became a very successful banker, and established a shield factory. His businesses prospered to the extent that by the time of his death in 370/369 he had assembled a fortune estimated at around 70 talents. With this money, Pasion made a number of generous benefactions to the Athenians, as a reward for which the Athenians passed a decree in his favour granting him a gold crown and the right of citizenship to him and his descendants ([Dem.] 59.2). As soon as he received his grant of citizenship, Pasion started to make use of his citizen rights and invested in real property. Although he was probably never actively involved in politics, he is known to have been a close friend of several members of the political elite, such as Agyrrhius of Collyte (Isocr. 17.31) and Callistratus of Aphnida (Dem. 49.47). Moreover, he had dealings with important public figures, such as Timotheus, son of Conon (Dem. 49, passim).

One of Xenophon's chief aims in Memorabilia is to defend his beloved teacher from charges raised both during and after his trial. Some readers have thought that he has gone so far in whitewashing Socrates that the resulting portrait makes it impossible to explain the hostility he aroused: Socrates appears here merely as an innocuous friend offering good advice on all sorts of mundane subjects. But the apologetic strategies employed by Xenophon are more complex and subtle than that. The widespread view of him as a simple-minded defender of conventional attitudes blinds us to the places where he speaks with a different, more radical voice. We should not be surprised to find that the enthusiastic student of Socrates, one of the most radical and unconventional thinkers of ancient Greece, has some radical thoughts of his own.

The study of the women of classical Athens involves an evidentiary paradox. Women and their pastimes were prominent subjects in this state's literature and in the pictures on its painted pottery, while its comedies and tragedies regularly had articulate and forthright female characters. But none of this gives us access to the ways in which women conceived of their own lives; for they were – as the late John Gould explained so well – ‘the product of men and addressed to men in a male dominated world’. What is more, we lack any works from democratic Athens by female writers to counter this persistently male perspective. Two further biases complicate the study of Attic women. What evidence we have focuses almost without exception on the girls and the wives of Athenian citizens and so provides limited insight into the different circumstances of female slaves and female resident aliens. Typically this evidence also presents the life of wealthy females as the norm for every Attic woman, hampering our ability to reconstruct how exactly the daughters and the wives of poor citizens lived their lives.

In a passage from the late rhetorical treatise generally known as De optimo genere oratorum, Cicero defends his past forensic competence in the face of Atticist critique by praising his Pro Milone as an example of grand style (9–10):

This article is about a young man of whom we know almost nothing. He never said or did anything that was recorded, we do not know for certain what he looked like, and his personality is entirely lost to us. He was killed at the age of seventeen, but even that event is passed over in fleeting comment. However, the very mention of his demise tells us something: that despite our almost total ignorance about the youth himself he was not without some importance. He was at least in name a king, though it can hardly be said that he ever ruled. Yet his birth and death were equally planned, and from his birth onwards he was someone who figured in the plans and dreams of mighty people. Those plans and dreams shifted with the politics of the day, and he was always a pawn on the chessboard of life. What follows here examines how the personalities of the great people around him and their changing fortunes governed how he was seen, and the uses to which he was put.

In an article in The Classical Quarterly in 2009 I suggested that it was high time that those Euripides scholars who believe that the demagogues were ‘a bad thing’ woke up to the fact that historians of the fifth century had long since discredited that view and had been portraying them in a favourable light. The Euripideans' conviction that the passages in the plays which denounce democracy were objectively justified had led them to confuse what the playwright's characters say with what he himself felt, which of course is unknowable. I focused then on Suppliant Women and Orestes. In this article I turn the spotlight onto Hecuba, understanding of which I feel has been damaged by a failure to take on board the clear polarizing of democratic Greeks and royalist Asians upon which the tragedy insists.

In the second half of the third century bce Roman historical epic (notably that written by Naevius and Ennius) and Roman historiography (notably that of Fabius Pictor) came into being at roughly the same time. Whether and in what ways these two literary forms may have mutually influenced each other in their early development is a matter of debate, but it is obvious that there are both similarities and a generic difference, demonstrated by the use of prose or verse respectively and the accompanying style. Such characteristics enable a distinction between different types of narrative, even if the same events in Roman history are covered.

In a letter famous for outlining the genesis of his work The Prince, Machiavelli responded to his friend's description of his day as a courtier in Rome by describing his own daily routine on his farm. The morning he spent bird-catching, taking a book of poetry to pass the time, ‘Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, or some such’. The afternoon was spent at the inn in noisy arguments over games. However, in the evening he goes on:

Bertold Brecht's wonderful poem Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters (Questions from a Reading Workman) begins by posing (or making his ‘reading workman’ pose) a number of awkward questions:

Wer baute das siebentorige Theben?
In dem Büchern stehen die Namen von Königen.
Haben die Könige die Felsbrocken herbeigeschleppt?
Und das mehrmals zerstörte Babylon –
Wer baute es so viele Mal auf?

Who built seven-gated Thebes?
In books one only finds the names of kings.
Did the Kings haul the blocks of stone all the way up?
And Babylon, the much-destroyed city –
Who was it built it up again so many times?

The Seleucid Empire was the largest and most ethnically diverse of all the successor kingdoms formed after the death of Alexander the Great. The relationship between the Macedonian dynasty and various subject peoples is therefore a central question of Seleucid historiography. This article focuses on the relations between king and native temples, arguing that temple despoliation was standard procedure for Seleucid rulers facing fiscal problems. I explore various instances in which Seleucid kings removed treasures from native temples under coercive auspices, suggesting that this pattern problematizes recent scholarship emphasizing positive relations between Seleucid kings and native priestly elites.

At the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, knowledge of ancient Greek for most educated Englishmen was something one could aspire to but not necessarily attain. Greek was learnt for reading alone and so less time was spent on its study than Latin, which at this period was learnt also for conversation: this might explain why today, Greek remains a second language in schools, to be learnt after Latin. Even in continental Europe, for one as learned as Erasmus, difficulties could be encountered in the study of the new language. ‘My Greek studies are almost too much for my courage’, he wrote in 1500, ‘while I have not the means of purchasing books nor the help of a master’. What Erasmus lacked – namely a teacher and reading material necessary to learn from – was paralleled across Europe, but nowhere more so than in English schools in the mid-sixteenth century. Without these, the schools in England also found it hard to introduce and maintain Greek in the classroom.

Geoffrey Bakewell finds in Aeschylus' Suppliants ‘an invaluable perspective on Athenian attempts at establishing their own identity in the late 460s bce’. The play presents a ‘displaced self-portrait of Athens’, and the ‘ambivalent welcome to exotic immigrants’ and ‘wariness towards outsiders’ makes that portrait ‘not entirely flattering’ (ix). I am not sure whether this judgement is meant to express a modern perspective, or that of Aeschylus' audience. Bakewell claims that metics ‘by their very nature constituted an existential threat to the democratic city and its self-understanding’ (8), and that they were perceived as ‘threatening’ (19), but provides no supporting evidence. To illustrate Athenian attitudes to metics he appeals to the Old Oligarch (not, perhaps, the most representative of witnesses), citing his frustration at not being allowed to assault foreigners; there is no mention of Dicaeopolis (Ach. 507–8). It is, of course, true that in Suppliants Argos is imperilled by the refugees' arrival: but that is because they are pursued by an army determined to enforce a legal claim on them, which Athenian metics typically were not. The view that tragedies gave spectators a ‘mental license to think through a pressing issue in an extended way, and at a safe remove’ (123) is widely held, and may be right. But its application ought not to depend on disregarding crucial features of a play's distinctively tragic scenario.

‘Who, pray, had previously collected literary references to cucumbers?’ Martin West once again hits highly quotable form in his commentary on the Trojan poems of the Epic Cycle (50). (The answer, of course, is no-one – so Athenaeus’ evidence is unlikely to be derived from a secondary source.) A characteristic boldness of hypothesizing is also on display. For example, West puts a name (Phayllus) to the (pre-Aristotelian) compiler who assembled and summarized the epics of the cycle. Since he credits Phayllus with conjectures about the names of the poets (27), one might expect a certain fellow-feeling on the part of West. But the naming of the poets, ‘not based on any established consensus or firm tradition’ and drawn from sources that ‘cannot have been unanimous or decisive’, is described in terms that sound reproachful: ‘bluff assertiveness…bold constructionism’. καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει καὶ τέκτονι τέκτων, / καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ ϕθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ (‘So potter is piqued with potter, joiner with joiner, / beggar begrudges beggar, and singer singer’). Which of Hesiod's rivalrous professions (Op. 24–5) has most affinity to scholars engaged in conjecture is, perhaps, open to debate; but the ἀοιδός (‘singer’) peeks out from West's own exercises in creative writing. Admittedly, he provides only one extended piece of Greek verse composition (201–11), but prose summaries are supplied on at least ten occasions (e.g. 183: ‘It is possible to imagine a defiant speech on these lines: “Leaders of the Achaeans…”.’). Acknowledging that his ‘imaginative reconstructions’ are ‘highly speculative, a flight of fancy’ (281), West pleads that they ‘serve to illustrate how the thing could have been done’. But since it could have been done otherwise, these reconstructions also serve to plant in readers’ minds an insidiously vivid but possibly misleading image. As West observes in another context, ‘the reconstruction of Wilamowitz…goes too far beyond the evidence’ (94). The same could be said, for example, of West's identification of passages in the Iliad and Aethiopis that are ‘variants on the Iliad poet's original, unwritten account of Achilles’ death’ (149): West's own confidence in this hypothesis fluctuated in The Making of the Iliad (G&R 59 [2012], 245–6) between confidence (‘doubtless’, 346) and caution (‘may have’, 390). On a point of detail: Aristotle does not describe the Cypria and Little Iliad as ‘episodic’ in Poet. 1459a37 (60): he explicitly says that they are about ‘a single action’, a judgement which excludes ‘concatenation…without organic connection’ (166). Yet, whatever one's reservations, West's scholarship is, as always, profound, original, and indispensably provocative. Moreover, this book provides an added bonus in the form of an exercise in another of West's areas of expertise: readers must become textual critics, transposing a misplaced line of text (308) and emending the puzzling reference to an ‘undermined species of stingray’ (309).

Anyone who has ever taught or studied the Aeneid will be familiar with student gripes that the protagonist, Aeneas, does not meet their expectations of a hero: stolid, boring, wooden, uninspiring, lacking in emotional range. Likewise, students of Lucan's Civil War often find it hard to get a handle on the figure of Cato, and his hard-line heroics are usually met with a combination of disbelieving horror and ridicule. The important and deceptively simple suggestion of J. Mira Seo's new monograph is that such apparently two-dimensional and unsatisfactory ‘problem characters’ in Latin literature (19) are the result not of the failure of the ancient poets to depict their protagonists successfully, but rather of the different expectations that Romans held about literary characterization. Her book sets out to explore the possibility that Roman writers were not attempting to present characters who are psychologically ‘rounded’ in the way that we moderns expect, with our Cartesian approach and our high regard for radical individuality and subjectivity. Rather, she argues, Roman characterization was based on a distinctively Roman approach to self as ‘aemulatory, referential, and circumscribed by traditional expectations of society’ (15). For Seo, characterization is a literary technique (4) rather than mimetic of real people (5) and, like genre, characters in literature are established through reference to earlier material. Indeed, characterization is a form of allusion, and characters in literature are ‘nodes of intertextuality’ (4) created out of generic expectation and familiar schemata, and the significant and creative modification of these. This technique is often evident in ancient literature (the intertextuality of Virgil's depiction of Dido is well known); however Seo pursues its implications through close readings of five case studies: Virgil's Aeneas, created through the conflicting voices of fama, with effeminate Paris as his ghostly doppelganger; Cato as Lucan's lethal exemplum; Seneca's Oedipus, becoming ‘himself’ under the pressure of decorum and the literary tradition; and two of Statius' most stereotypical and over-determined characters, the archetypal ‘doomed beautiful youth’, exquisitely intensified in the figure of Parthenopaus, and the doomed prophet Ampharius. In her series of illuminating and insightful readings, Seo shows how such characters are built up through schematization, through articulation from a variety of perspectives in the texts, and through the evocation and skilful modification of familiar literary motifs. Although I am not sure she has entirely cracked the problem of Roman characterization, her book opens up a stimulating new approach to Roman poetry and characterization, which I hope will inspire others to take up the call for more research in this area.

First up for review here is a timely collection of essays edited by Joseph Farrell and Damien Nelis analysing the way the Republican past is represented and remembered in poetry from the Augustan era. Joining the current swell of scholarship on cultural and literary memory in ancient Greece and Rome, and building on work that has been done in the last decade on the relationship between poetry and historiography (such as Clio and the Poets, also co-edited by Nelis), this volume takes particular inspiration from Alain Gowing's Empire and Memory. The individual chapter discussions of Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, and Horace take up Gowing's project of exploring how memories of the Republic function in later literature, but the volume is especially driven by the idea of the Augustan era as a distinct transitional period during which the Roman Republic became history (Gowing, in contrast, began his own study with the era of Tiberius). The volume's premise is that the decades after Actium and the civil wars saw a particularly intense relationship develop with what was gradually becoming established, along with the Principate, as the ‘pre-imperial’ past, discrete from the imperial present and perhaps gone forever. In addition, in a thought-provoking afterword, Gowing suggests that this period was characterized by a ‘heightened sense of the importance and power of memory’ (320). And, as Farrell puts it in his own chapter on Camillus in Ovid's Fasti: ‘it was not yet the case that merely to write on Republican themes was, in effect, a declaration of principled intellectual opposition to the entire Imperial system’ (87). So this is a unique period, where the question of how the remembering of the Republican past was set in motion warrants sustained examination; the subject is well served by the fifteen individual case studies presented here (bookended by the stimulating intellectual overviews provided by the editors’ introduction and Gowing's afterword). The chapters explore the ways in which Augustan poetry was involved in creating memories of the Republic, through selection, omission, interpretation, and allusion. A feature of this poetry that emerges over the volume is that the history does not usually take centre stage; rather, references to the past are often indirect and tangential, achieved through the generation and exploitation of echoes between history and myth, and between past and present. This overlaying crops up in many guises, from the ‘Roman imprints’ on Virgil's Trojan story in Aeneid 2 (Philip Hardie's ‘Trojan Palimpsests’, 117) to the way in which anxieties about the civil war are addressed through the figure of Camillus in Ovid's Fasti (Farrell) or Dionysiac motifs in the Aeneid (Fiachra Mac Góráin). In this poetry, history is often, as Gowing puts it, ‘viewed through the prism of myth’ (325); but so too myth is often viewed through the prism of recent history and made to resonate with Augustan concerns, especially about the later Republic. The volume raises some important questions, several of which are articulated in Gowing's afterword. One central issue, relating to memory and allusion, has also been the subject of some fascinating recent discussions focused on ancient historiography, to which these studies of Augustan poetry now contribute: How and what did ancient writers and their audiences already know about the past? What kind of historical allusions could the poets be expecting their readers to ‘get’? Answers to such questions are elusive, and yet how we answer them makes such a difference to how we interpret the poems. So Jacqueline Febre-Serris, for instance, argues that behind Ovid's spare references to the Fabii in his Fasti lay an appreciation of a complex and contested tradition, which he would have counted on his readers sharing; while Farrell wonders whether Ovid, by omitting mention of Camillus’ exile and defeat of the Gauls, is instructing ‘the reader to remember Veii and to forget about exile and the Gauls’ or whether in fact ‘he counts on having readers who do not forget such things’ (70). In short this volume is an important contribution to the study of memory, history, and treatments of the past in Roman culture, which has been gathering increasing momentum in recent years. Like the conference on which it builds, the book has a gratifyingly international feel to it, with papers from scholars working in eight different countries across Europe and North America. Although all the chapters are in English, the imprint of current trends in non-Anglophone scholarship is felt across the volume in a way that makes Latin literature feel like a genuinely and excitingly global project. Rightly, Gowing points up the need for the sustained study of memory in the Augustan period to match that of Uwe Walter's thorough treatment of memory in the Roman republic; Walter's study ends with some provocative suggestions about the imperial era that indeed merit further investigation, and this volume has now mapped out some promising points of departure for such a study.

The interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks is an increasingly popular subject among Greek historians, as shown by four important books reviewed here: their significance lies in the various challenges that they pose to the still dominant structuralist approach, which focuses on polarity and alterity and privileges certain discourses in literary texts over the diversity encountered when one examines the totality of the evidence. All four books put at the centre of their attention the significance and consequences of real-life encounters and interactions between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Two important recent books re-examine long-standing orthodoxies which have come under fire in recent decades. Julia Kindt challenges the orthodox model of Greek religion which has put the polis as its central organizing principle, as manifested in the work of Christianne Sourvinou-Inwood and the Paris school. The book combines methodological and theoretical discussion with a series of case studies ranging from the Archaic period to the Second Sophistic. Kindt does not deny the value of the polis-centred model for major aspects of Greek religious life; rather, her main disagreement is that it creates simplistic polarities and leaves aside or treats as exceptions many important aspects of Greek religion. While the polis model sees religion as embedded in the structures of the polis, Kindt argues persuasively for the need to conceptualize Greek religion as a series of interrelated but distinct layers. She rightly stresses the autonomy of religion as a symbolic and figural system; and she emphasizes the significance of personal experience and agency and the ways in which practices such as magic illustrate the multiple links between personal experience and agency and the religious community of the polis. Finally, of particular significance is her challenge to the standard polarity of local versus Panhellenic and the need to adopt a wider spectrum of layers and identities.