The anonymous Armenian commentary was transmitted together with the Armenian translation of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias (sixth century or earlier). It was composed in the Hellenizing style and commonly associated with the figure of David the Invincible, a philosopher of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria. This article presents a general structural analysis of the commentary followed by a comparative study and translation of its first chapter. It argues that the commentary was indeed written in the tradition of late antique Greek commentaries but was probably not associated with late Neoplatonism. The Armenian commentary shares many common features with Ammonius’ commentary, but also departs from it on many crucial aspects. From a philosophical standpoint, it has much more in common with Boethius’ and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentaries than with those of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria, thus suggesting an early writing date.

This article contributes to a discussion raised more than forty years ago in this journal by Richard Stoneman on how to interpret the unexpected image of an eagle at Pind. Nem. 3.80. Without excluding the possibility of a reference to the poet himself, this article argues, mainly based on a survey on the traditional elements used in that passage, that the eagle also refers—at least partially—to the victorious athlete Aristocleides. This is demonstrated by an internal investigation of the structure of the ode and the use of signal words (–θεν, δέδορκεν, φάος). Moreover, the image of the eagle stands in a series of other ancient and traditional motifs, such as the ‘song of milk and honey’ (77–9) and ‘(far-)shining fame’ (64, 81–4), which can be also found in the Rigveda and therefore can be regarded as an inheritance of the Indo-European (= IE) poetic tradition. Parallels from the Rigveda can be found for the avian imagery too, in which the eagle is compared to someone striving for fame in an athletic contest; this suggests that the image of the eagle is another traditional motif from IE times in Pindar, who uses it as a device to transition from a poetological to a laudatory part of the epinician, perhaps deliberately playing with the ambiguity of the image.

In Poetics 13, Aristotle claims that the protagonist in the most beautiful tragedies comes to ruin through some kind of ‘failure’—in Greek, ἁμαρτία. There has been notorious disagreement among scholars about the moral responsibility involved in ἁμαρτία. This article defends the old reading of ἁμαρτία as a character flaw, but with an important modification: rather than explaining the hero's weakness as general weakness of will (ἀκρασία), it argues that the tragic hero is blinded by temper (θυμός) or by a pursuit for fine, good and desirable things—that is, by what may be labelled ‘qualified’ weakness of will. The upshot is that ἁμαρτία ends up as being less blameworthy than ‘proper’ ἀκρασία, but still explains why morally outstanding people are unsuitable for the most beautiful tragedies.

This paper deals with the 24-line mythological epyllion Progne et Philomela (Anth. Lat. 13 R), an anonymous Virgilian cento of presumed North African origin, which is usually dated to the fourth or fifth century and is marked by considerable obscurity. The aim is to shed some light on the most intriguing parts of this elliptical retelling of the given myth, in particular the puzzling network of family relationships and the extended talking-blood metaphor. Offering a new perspective on the text, the author claims that its general ambiguity is, to some extent, a purposefully adopted authorial strategy rather than a by-product of the cento technique. For this reason, it is proposed that the poem might have been written as a sort of mythological riddle to be solved by its readers.

The article discusses Pausanias’ obscure statement (1.26.3) that the early Hellenistic Athenian general Olympiodoros ‘recovered the Piraeus and Mounychia’. By understanding the feat as an episode within the wider context of the Athenian stasis of 295 between the ‘tyrant’ Lachares and Olympiodoros’ democratic resistance, the article shows that the narrative of the enterprise (most likely based on an honorific decree) aimed to i) establish a parallel between Olympiodoros and the illustrious democratic recovery by Thrasyboulos, ii) rehabilitate Olympiodoros as a democratic hero after his involvement in the oligarchic years of the second regime of Demetrios Poliorketes in Athens, and iii) serve as a call to action to recover the Piraeus, which was under Macedonian control when the honours were bestowed.

This paper discusses ἐπιβολαὶ τῆς διανοίας, which later Epicureans are supposed to have elevated to a fourth criterion of truth to complement perceptions, preconceptions and feelings. By examining Epicurus’ extant writings, the paper distinguishes three different senses of the term: ‘thought in general’, ‘act of attention’ and ‘mental perception’. It is argued that only the sense ‘mental perception’ yields a plausible reading of ἐπιβολαί as a criterion of truth. The paper then turns to the textual evidence on ἐπιβολαί in later authors. While the term ἐπιβολή (or its Latin equivalent) is not used by Cicero, Lucretius and Philodemus in the sense of mental perception, it is argued that this still is the most plausible way of understanding ἐπιβολή as a criterion of truth.

This article reports a notable misprint in J.C.G. Strachan's Oxford Classical Text of Plato's Phaedo (1995).

In his commentary on the Timaeus, the Neoplatonist Iamblichus argues that time is logically antecedent to change inasmuch as time is no mere aspect of change. Naturally, scholars appraise this thesis in light of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Nevertheless, they neglect the philological framing of this thesis, and thence the philosophical implications thereof. Only J.M. Dillon acknowledges this framing, though even Dillon does not acknowledge the philosophical implications thereof. This article illustrates the logic of said thesis vis-à-vis the Iamblichean exegesis of Ti. 38b7–c1 (Iambl. apud Simpl. in Phys. 1.794.21–7 Diels, Iambl. in Ti. fr. 67 Dillon). Beginning from the intuition that time is no mere aspect of change, Iamblichus argues that time can persist apart from change, and thereupon, given the Platonic notion that time is the everlasting image of Eternity qua paradigm, Iamblichus intuits that time is no mere image but everlasting in its own right, being itself a paradigm. Yet this thesis rests upon the indeterminateness of the Platonic title τὸ παράδειγμα τῆς διαιωνίας φύσεως (‘the paradigm of a thoroughly everlasting nature’) at Ti. 38b8 and, still more so, upon the reflexiveness of the ambiguous ΑΥΤΩΙ (that is, αὐτῷ ‘to it [the paradigm]’, if not αὑτῷ ‘to itself [as paradigm]’) at Ti. 38c1. Inasmuch as the subject of the Platonic title is indeterminate between Eternity and Eternal Being qua intelligible everlastingness, Iamblichus construes ΑΥΤΩΙ not as a mere reflexive but as self-reflexive, with αὑτῷ referring to Time qua intelligible paradigm. In this light, the Platonic lemma grounds the Iamblichean thesis.

This paper draws on Euripides’ Alcestis to propose a new way of approaching the tragic agōn. It reads the debate scene of that play not as a rhetorical showpiece but as a piece of dialogue and an interaction that follows the principles of communicative pragmatics. In this interpretation Admetus and Pheres do not aim to persuade each other about whether it would have been right for Pheres to sacrifice his life for his son; instead, father and son are engaged in redefining their relationship, at the same time hurting each other as much as possible. Therefore, analyses that focus on ethical arguments concerning Pheres’ refusal to die and on how they reflect on the two persons' characters fail to capture an essential aspect of the quarrel. If, however, the communicative nature of the agōn is taken into consideration, illogical and seemingly idiosyncratic passages of the speeches can be explained as functional, and its transformed purpose chimes with Euripides’ rearrangement of the traditional myth, as he places the debate after Alcestis’ death.

In his dialogue Statesman (= Plt.), Plato first sets out one way of thinking of the statesperson, on the model of a nurturer of a herd such as a shepherd; then he sets out a very different way of thinking of him, on the model of a weaver of a social fabric. Critics have long been wondering whether Plato wants to combine the two models or, on the contrary, to abandon the nurturing model in favour of the weaving model.

This article shows that a particular passage in the dialogue, 275d8–e1, is crucial for this question. As this passage is understood by all commentators and translators, it says that the statesperson is not a nurturer. This ought to have settled the question. But the article argues that we cannot read the passage like that. For an adjacent passage, 275b1–7, says that the statesperson is a nurturer. There is no way out of this contradiction, unless we reconsider the traditional reading of 275d8–e1.

The article defends a different reading of 275d8–e1, which avoids the contradiction. On this new reading, the passage does not say that the statesperson is not a nurturer, it says that her/his being a nurturer is not the grounds for her/him deserving the title ‘statesperson’.

This article offers a new interpretation of the Athenian institution of ostracism and explores its significance for our understanding of democratic politics. A popular scholarly trend interprets ostracism as an instrument for pursuing (or regulating) conflict among aristocratic politicians, in accordance with a view of Athenian democracy as dominated by a restricted elite competing for power and prestige. This article aims to reassess this picture by investigating ostracism in the light of recent studies of honour, which have stressed honour's potential for balancing competition and cooperation within communities. By using the ostracism of Themistocles as a case study, it argues that ostracism was a manifestation of an institutionalized concern for honour in Athenian democracy. On the one hand, ostracism could punish politically active citizens who, in excessively enhancing their own honour, failed to respect democratic equality. On the other, it could be employed for tackling shameful behaviour which placed the agent below the community's standards of honour. The article then sets ostracism against Athens’ broader institutional framework and argues that Athenian democracy was not so much concerned with policing intra-elite conflict as much as it was designed to foster a balance between competitive and cooperative values and ensure broad participation in the political domain.

The paper offers a new approach to utopia in early and classical Greek texts from Homer to the fifth century. The model is based on four motifs regularly occurring in ‘utopian texts’, that is, descriptions of places that are distant in time and/or space. A comparative analysis of such texts (drawn from Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Old Comedy and Herodotus) and of how they manipulate the four motifs sheds new light on specific problems (as, for example, the relevance of Herodotus’ Ethiopian episode, or the role of the myth of Perseus in Pindar's Pythian 10) and encourages more nuanced readings of famous texts, such as Homer's account of Scheria.