Domitian, son of the war hero and emperor Vespasian and related to a large number of Roman soldiers, should logically have found himself as a young man in the army. His repeated requests to serve, however, were all denied, reportedly from fear of his political ambitions. A more immediate reason may have been physical inadequacy. Suetonius writes of Domitian's malformed toes, and of a lingering disease – here we suggest polio – that left Domitian with thin legs. Residual weakness and chronic pain could explain Domitian's preference for a litter and his perceived unsuitability for military service. His martial interests and desire to display virtus, manly courage, however, never wavered, and found their outlet in archery, a skill requiring dexterity of hand rather than fast footwork. Hostile writers played on this skill by relating it to an alleged habit of spearing flies for pleasure. Modern scholars may find the suggestion of a chronic disability useful in considering his character.

The passage 10.185–8 in the Aeneid raises two difficult issues, which have not been satisfactorily resolved so far. The first issue is textual and concerns the word Cinyras/Cunarus in 185. The second vexed issue concerns the meaning of crimen amor vestrum in 188. The present paper summarizes the main discussions on this passage and tries to offer a new interpretation to it.

This paper investigates Herodotus’ allusions to democratic tenets dear to fifth-century Athens in Books 7 and 8 and how democracy is there suggested as an actionable possibility for all peoples. The paper also explores what Herodotus might have thought about democracy and how reflecting on it was a means for him to examine his own writing (section II). A discussion of Herodotus’ broad meditations on democracy in 7.10, 7.101–3, and 8.140–3 considers their historiographic and practical implications, showing that the Athenian democratic tenets Herodotus may have had as references formed a nucleus from which he elaborated a complex view of democracy, i.e., as a peaceful counterpart to imperialism (section III). Section IV examines some trade-offs and implications one may derive from the intertwining of allusions to democracy and the writing of history. The paper’s chief conclusions are summarized in section V: that the use of allusions allows Herodotus to discuss constituent parts of a democracy, not only those specific to the Athenian democracy, but also those appropriate to all possible forms of democracy.

The Forum Augustum represents one of the most important examples of the public and material dissemination of Augustan ideology. This paper offers a new model for understanding how the Forum's spatial and architectural design communicated that ideology. Departing from scholarly emphasis on the Forum's statuary programme, it examines how the Forum's spaces set up a series of contrasts that structured visitors’ experiences. In the porticoes, the extensive statue programme granted viewers a wide range of choices about what they could see. In the central square and hemicycles (exedrae), however, visitors were compelled by the paucity of material to encounter certain images and ideas. This argument shows a new way of understanding the Forum, where movement into and between certain spaces structured how Augustan ideology was communicated, received, and understood.

Recent archaeological discoveries, as well as new readings of the epic, suggest that the poet of the Iliad was well aware of hero cult. The funeral of Patroklos in Iliad 23 has long been recognized as also representing the funeral of Achilles. But moving away from Neoanalysis and Neo-neoanalysis, I argue that the rituals Achilles performs on behalf of his friend point to the future establishment of Achilles’ own cult that will eternally link his name to that of Patroklos. Each action Achilles performs on behalf of his friend offers a blueprint or a script for the rituals intended to constitute the dromena of Achilles’ future cult. While no actual cult of Achilles may have followed this scenario, the Homeric audience would have understood its components – mourning, feasting, ritual impurity, hair offerings, holocausts, and funeral games – as an aition, a ritual foundation, inaugurating Achilles’ cult.

This article investigates the curious motley in Plato’s Statesman (291a–b) as a chorus of predators that threaten the statesman’s singular identity to govern. It identifies those quasi animals and hybrids – lions, centaurs, satyrs, and – for the first time scientifically – octopuses. It also unmasks them by literary criticism and linguistic scholarship as guises of Odysseus, the wily arch-deceiver of the Homeric epics. It discovers their choral leader as the ‘supreme wizard’, the Archon Basileus, the king-priest by lot who supervised the Athenian religious festivals and personally appointed Plato a chorus master. By casting the Archon Basileus as a ‘magician’ amid the seers and priests, Plato assesses his traditional role as deceiving the populace. The motley and its leader embody Plato’s distinction between mere appearances and the defined reality of the statesman. The article concludes that the motley was Plato’s clever ploy to unmask sophists by sophistry.

This paper situates Ptolemaeus Chennus’ treatment of Alexander the Great in the Kainē Historia within the miscellany tradition, and demonstrates how he engages directly in the discourse of his day concerning Alexander. The Alexander anecdotes furthermore reveal the parodic nature of the text: rather than to inform those seeking knowledge as the author claims in the preface, the Kainē Historia provides an opportunity for the already erudite reader to flaunt their own pre-existing knowledge that is necessary to unlock the jokes that sit at the heart of each anecdote. Consequently, the Alexander anecdotes should be understood as a means through which Ptolemy mocks not only the miscellany genre, but also the obstruse knowledge contained therein and the role it played in the performance of paideia.

This article offers a reassessment of Varro’s treatment of servile flight in his De Re Rustica. It analyses and contextualizes the pervasiveness of juridical echoes of slave runaways in Book 3, in a section on snails and bees. It thus suggests that the topic of slave flight is not neglected by Varro, as previously assumed. Varro presents the tangible prospect of slaves escaping from the estate in animal disguise. By revealing the apparent obscurity with which servile flight is handled by Varro, the article also shows the centrality of this concern in the minds of Roman slave owners – detectable even in a text on the ideal management of agricultural estates, where the topic does not belong.

Taking its start from an argument of H. S. Versnel, that Greek expressions of disbelief in the existence of the gods are evidence of the possibility of belief, this article reviews the evidence of such expressions, and of ascriptions of atheism in Greek sources, and suggests that there was a difference of type, not only of degree, between Greek ‘atheism’ and our understanding of the term today. Atheist discourse in Greek sources is characterized by frequent slippages: for example, between the charge of ‘existential atheism’ and the failure to give the gods due acknowledgement; between introducing new gods and disrespecting the old. Ascriptions of atheism to third parties are commonly based on inferences from an individual's actions, lifestyle or presumed disposition – which in turn are rooted in a network of theological assumptions. The phenomenon of ‘Greek atheism’ is, fundamentally, a scholarly mirage.

Inscribed Greek verse epitaphs were produced in relatively high numbers in the city of Rome under the Principate. Although many were made for slaves and freedmen, their use was not confined to them. The individuals who opted to use them made a deliberate choice to emphasize their Greek cultural identity. They may have had several motives, but often the deceased or their (grand)parents had migrated from the eastern parts of the Roman empire to Rome, voluntarily or involuntarily. By presenting themselves as Greek in their language and use of mythological exempla, they claimed the paideia (‘education’) and culture associated with the Greek literary past. Yet despite the heavy emphasis on Greekness, the epigrams also display an awareness of the Roman context in which they were set up. Greek epigrams formed excellent vehicles to navigate the cultural ambiguities of ‘being Greek’ in Rome, and this explains why Rome became a major production centre of Greek funerary epigram.

‘There is no well-known individual in all Greek mythology except Alcestis [original emphasis] who dies and is returned to human life without cosmic repercussions which are soon remedied’ (John Heath). The ineluctability of death is not just a feature of Greek myth in general but is also one of the most prominent themes in Euripides’ version of the story in his play Alcestis (438 bc). A further problem is that Greek tragedy is a basically realistic genre which is not hospitable to violations of the laws of nature. Euripides thus set himself a remarkable challenge in Alcestis, to present an event which violates a law of nature which is so unbreakable that it is on the whole observed throughout Greek mythology as well as being repeatedly affirmed in the play. This article will examine how he succeeds in doing so in a way which is dramatically convincing.

There is a long-standing controversy in Greek History about whether the othismos, or ‘push’, of the hoplite phalanx mentioned by classical authors was real or metaphorical. Experimental archaeology – structural and finite element analysis with both physical reconstructions and computer modelling (presented non-technically here) – suggests that the archaic Greek hoplite panoply of bell cuirass, Corinthian helmet, and large bowl-shaped shield (aspis), which seems at first to present contradictory design choices, in fact offered important mechanical advantages under compressive force; that cuirass, helmet, and shield were designed or evolved to work together to allow the Greek warrior to survive and fight in a pushing mass of men without being crushed or asphyxiated. The hoplite othismos was, then, real and was presumably practised from the earliest era to which this equipment can be dated, the late eighth century bc.

In 2008 the first annual Go Topless Day was organized in the US. In 2012 the #FreeTheNipple campaign was launched, prefacing Lina Esco’s 2014 film of the same name. Bruce Willis’ daughter Scout went shopping topless; Jean-Paul Gaultier sent a male and female model down the catwalk with their nipples on show and wearing the Free the Nipple slogan; and Miley Cyrus flashed Jimmy Kimmel. These movements argue, as they say on the tin, that it should be acceptable by legal and cultural norms for women to bare their breasts in public. The question is one of equality and bodily autonomy, and the movement is a way of making women’s voices heard. In our current fraught times, these voices are angry. At International Women’s Day just this year, women from the FEMEN activist group marched topless in Paris to protest against the ‘Fascist Epidemic’ (these words painted on their chests). In their mission statement, FEMEN declare that ‘Our Mission is Protest! Our Weapon are bare breasts’ – and they profess themselves to be a ‘modern incarnation of fearless and free Amazons’.

In my last review I discussed Mark Usher's How to Care About Animals, one of Princeton University Press’ volumes of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. The series’ rapidly growing roster now includes Sarah Nooter's book How To Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. Nooter selects, translates, and introduces a range of texts from Sappho and Plato (most heavily featured) to Homer, Pindar, Alcman, Anacreon, Theognis, and Theocritus (to name just a selection of the selection). There is an important ‘nothing new under the sun’ ethos to this volume, as is the case with many in the series. As Nooter puts it, ‘The past decade has seen a revolution in sexuality… sexual fluidity is now mainstream… And yet the Greeks got there long ago.’ (vii) The Greeks wrote about sexuality ‘with little angst and much wit’, and it is this that Stephen Fry picks up on in his endorsement of the book: ‘our ancestors often had clearer, less guilt-ridden, confused, prurient, and prudish attitudes to the rainbow of sexualities we wrongly think unique to our age’.

We begin from the beginning, or rather from the Romans’ interest in origins: Raphael Schwitter offers a monumental synthesis of Roman antiquarianism from the second century bc to the third century ad.1 Rightly identifying such a study as a gap in the scholarship, Schwitter approaches the subject in a comprehensive fashion, starting with a substantial section of introductory material, including an intriguing case study of the way the Romans explained the origins of the use of coins, and some methodological thoughts on what it means to deal with fragmentary texts, followed by an overview of antiquarian writing in Greece, before moving on to the main part of his study: a systematic overview of the contents, literary formats, and scholarly methods of antiquarian writing in the second and early first centuries bc, the first century bc, and the imperial age. As Schwitter himself admits, many of his conclusions necessarily have to remain in the realm of speculation, due to the extremely fragmentary nature of the evidence, but he still achieves his aim: i.e. to show that antiquarianism is a pervasive phenomenon, rather than the mere symptom of a crisis, and that is does not stem from scholarly curiosity per se or the aim to entertain, but to gain orientation in the present by elucidating its connection with the past. Throughout, his focus is on antiquarian monographs, i.e. works more or less exclusively dedicated to antiquarian questions, comprising aetiology, genealogy, and etymology, but also their interaction, e.g. with poetic texts. Schwitter’s study shows impressively that antiquarian writing was a pervasive facet of Latin literature, with a first, still somewhat experimental, phase especially focused on specialized disciplines such as grammar and law, a surge in interest and a growing specialization and differentiation in the first century bc, and a growing trend towards compilation and new contextualization in the imperial age.

When thinking about the current state of the study of Latin literature and about where the field might be heading next, the obvious place to start for this review is Roy Gibson and Christopher Whitton's Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature. At more than 900 pages, it is a very substantial and exciting read. In fifteen chapters, plus an introduction by the editors and an envoi by Mary Beard, the contributors – all well-known and established experts in their areas of research – discuss the canons (Peirano) and periodizations (Kelly) of Latin literature, some of its key questions and methodological tools (‘author and identity’, Sharrock; intertextuality, O'Rourke/Pelttari), as well as its relationship with adjacent fields: medieval Latin (Stover), Neo-Latin (Haskell), reception (Uden), linguistics (Clackson), material culture (Squire/Elsner), philosophy (Volk), political thought (Lowrie), Roman history (Lavan), Greek (Goldhill), as well as the national traditions that shape the discipline (Fuhrer) and, one of its key tasks, the editing of Latin texts (Huskey/Kaster). As the editors themselves admit in their introduction, the topics covered in the volume are by necessity selective and could very well have included others that are now only touched upon in individual chapters, such as questions of gender, rhetoric, religion, education, science, or law.

I will start this review with a major development for the study of ancient Greek history: the publication of the first volume of the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (OHAGW), edited by Paul Cartledge and Paul Christesen. The range of the available evidence can no longer keep pace with the theoretical frameworks and the syntheses of individual scholars. A huge part of the evidence remains known to a few specialists, while wider interpretative frameworks rarely make the effort to incorporate the diversity and complexity of the evidence. Big data digital projects are certainly one way forward; the editors of OHAGW have chosen an alternative path: to offer a collection of syntheses on the archaic history of thirty Greek communities for which the available evidence makes this possible. The adoption of a common format for all local syntheses will make possible the focused comparison between individual cases; alongside the serious effort to systematically combine archaeology and history, which OHAGW editors call ‘archaeohistory’, this project has the potential to revolutionise Greek history.

The city-state (polis) is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental aspects of Greek history. John Ma’s book is a monumental study of the history of the Greek polis in the very long term.1 It starts from the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces around 1200 bce and takes the story to the end of ancient poleis around 600 ce; alongside the immense temporal extent, Ma impressively covers the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean. In my view, this is unquestionably the most significant contribution to the study of Greek history over the last two decades. It is the first attempt to focus the history of the polis not on the archaic and classical periods, but on the Hellenistic and early imperial poleis. The reason for this, and the most significant contribution of the book, is Ma’s concept of the ‘great convergence’: the spread across the eastern Mediterranean between 400–200 bce of a democratic model of the polis based on citizen equality, assemblies, the provision of public goods, and the disappearance of older models based on oligarchy and characterized by disenfranchised citizens, subject communities, and serf populations. At the same time, the dominance of large-scale geopolitical actors such as the Hellenistic kingdoms and later Rome put an end to the ‘Hundred Years War’ between 450–350 (another important conceptual innovation), in which dominant poleis tried to subjugate and conquer other poleis; after 350 bce, poleis’ attempts at expansion usually incorporated smaller communities on equal terms. The book is structured around the great convergence: earlier chapters examine the diverse world of the poleis before the convergence, while later chapters explore the transformation of the polis and its employment by the Roman Empire, once the Mediterranean stopped being a multipolar world. This very rich book functions both as an excellent survey of numerous Greek communities, as well as an impressive synthesis offering a new periodization of Greek history. It will undoubtedly generate major new debates among Greek historians, which are urgently needed in our field.

The first two books of this review are part of the Bloomsbury ‘Cultural History’ series, which has now been around for several years. In this series, a cultural theme is explored over the course of a six-volume set that moves progressively through time from antiquity to the modern age. Each volume works as a stand-alone book exploring that particular era but, to facilitate cross-referencing, each volume is organized in the same way, with a standard sequence of chapters. It is a clever idea, but the two books here, on the theme of furniture and colour, show some of the problems of having to squeeze antiquity into categories designed for the study of later periods.

Two books came out in this review period that set out to investigate monuments that were once considered amongst the wonders of the ancient world but of which no trace remains today: the Pharos of Alexandria is reconstructed by Andrew Michael Chugg and the Colossus at Rhodes explored by Nathan Badoud.1 These monuments were initiated within a few years of each other and both were completed around 283 bc. The Colossus was short lived, destroyed by earthquake in the 220s bc; the lighthouse lasted much longer, perhaps surviving several earthquakes in an increasingly depleted state, the initial, most damaging one occurring in the late eighth century ce. Their complete absence from the physical landscape since then has always fuelled imaginative and academic speculation as to their form. Both authors spend considerable time on the legacy of these speculations and the way that subsequent fantasies have shaped our imagination, particular in terms of the Colossus of Rhodes straddling the harbour, a foot on each promontory. Maerten van Heemskerck’s 1570 illustrations of the Octo mundi miracula was key to the creation of this fantasy, one that Badoud traces not only in European tradition but also to early nineteenth-century Japan and of course to the Statue of Liberty with her rayed head. Heemskerck’s image of the Pharos was equally influential. It shows the Pharos as a spiral tower springing from a wide cylindrical base leading up to a colonnaded rotunda from which spews smoke, omitting the sculpture that is so prominent on ancient coins.