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.

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.

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.

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’.

Studies on magistracies have emerged as a solid and important trend in the scholarship on the Roman Republic over the last quarter of a century, and have enabled important connections between institutional history, prosopography, and the exploration of political practice and culture. There are at least three recent additions to this distinguished body of work. Grégory Ioannidopoulos has written a full-scale treatment of the quaestorship, which appears a mere five years after the monograph on the same topic by F. Pina Polo and A. Díaz Fernández.1 While overlaps in coverage and argument are inevitable, there are also significant differences. Ioannidopoulos does not include a prosopography, but focuses at length on terminological issues. The whole first part is taken up by a discussion of the titulature of quaestors, and the focus then turns to the systematic treatment of the ‘institution’ (the function of the college, the rules on eligibility, the election process, and so forth) and the powers it entailed at Rome and overseas. The outcome is an impressively full and thorough treatment, which warrants as close attention as its predecessor, and will be profitably consulted side by side with it. Its central ambition is to elucidate a number of important issues of public law; the remit of the discussion is wider, though, and encompasses the contribution of the quaestorship to the development of the empire as well as issues of political practice and culture; the treatment of the bond between promagistrates and quaestors, necessitudo (pp. 633–3) is especially rewarding.

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.

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.

The wayfinding theory of Kevin Lynch, this article proposes, lays bare an underappreciated spatial modality deployed by inhabitants and visitors to the Roman city based on street-view navigation of the city’s legible topographical elements, ranging from natural to built features of the environment. In particular, wayfinding is positioned as a primarily non-elite and sub-elite – or subaltern – spatial modality that elites may have been aware of, but rarely had to make use of in their movement through the city. A survey of a diverse set of epigraphic corpora – graffiti, enslaving collars, dipinti, curse tablets, brick stamps, tesserae, and epitaphs – instead demonstrates the pervasive role of wayfinding across many aspects of subaltern Roman life, especially in connection to the practical conduct of business, and how this spatial modality was entangled in several matrices of domination. Ultimately, the theoretical lens of wayfinding should encourage us to reorient our approaches to the topography of Rome away from elite productions of cartography and towards subaltern, street-level conceptions of the space of the urbs.

It is perhaps a sign of the times we live in that there is an increased academic interest in weirdness, hybridity, and monstrosity. Just recently a colleague of mine from the English Department here at the University of Virginia mentioned in a casual conversation that he’s been drafting a syllabus for his new course entitled ‘Weird’. Noticing my surprise, he patiently introduced me to the world of Weirdcore literature (‘Think Lovecraft on steroids minus racism and xenophobia’), and aesthetics (‘Norm violating hybridity is the key, representations of human-mushroom bodies, rainbows with eyes, fish with human feet, surrealism meets low resolution anime and 80s video games graphics, basically’). The reason why Weirdcore is popular among Zoomers (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) became clearer to me after a while. What more suitable recourse does this brilliant (judging by my UVa students) generation of digital natives have, having been raised in a politically, environmentally. and economically volatile world, but to embrace the incongruity and celebrate the absurd?

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.

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.

The relationship between Rome’s built environment and the spatial practices of its inhabitants was always inherently political. Performative political protest was an integral part of the Roman psyche, and it was embedded in the dynamic interactions between actors and the spaces in which they protested. Multiple spatialities are co-implicated in contentious politics, and the Roman populace engaged with their civic spaces strategically to both legitimise and challenge existing power relations. The boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces and discourses was a permeable one, and when the hitherto unobserved collective strands of identity and informal communication were realised in the open, it was the tip of an iceberg of formed resistance. This article will explore the connectivity between neighbourhood spaces and discourses, with the discourses of the spectacle spaces and protest repertoires. This complex relationship between spatial practice, collective identity, and political action will be explored by integrating the sociological theory of contentious politics with Henri Lefebvre’s triad of socially produced space, with James C. Scott’s concept of ‘hidden transcripts’, which provides insight into the invisible discourses that underpinned popular resistance and participation in Roman contentious politics.

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.