This article shows that Thucydides is deliberately enigmatic about the causal effects of his speeches, and that this enigma is central to understanding his account of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. First, it shows that Thucydides was fascinated by the way speeches might not only illuminate events but also contribute to causing them. This ambiguous aspect of the speeches has been underappreciated in recent scholarship, but it is a theme to which the historian frequently returns. Second, the article shows that Thucydides explores this ambiguity in particular detail through the debates in Book 1. Using echoes of the “truest explanation” from 1.23.6 in the speeches, Thucydides suggests that the war might have started through a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than—as some recent scholarship has suggested—self-fulfilling perception. Finally, this article suggests a new reading of 1.23.6, which reflects the ambiguous nature of the speeches in the ambiguous term πρόφασις, again hinting at the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This article therefore challenges not only the idea of the “Thucydides Trap,” which continues to dominate conceptions of Thucydides among political scientists, but also the way all readers of his work approach both Book 1 and the role of the speeches in general.

This article argues that the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, rather than being a lengthy and insufficiently historical digression, is a proportional response to the difficulties posed by the scale of Egyptian history and the unusual stability of Egyptian society to his understanding of historical change. To resolve these difficulties, I demonstrate that Herodotus develops an alternative framework for the interpretation of Egyptian history based on the Nile’s deposition of sediment, according to which historical change unfolds over the geologic timescale of millennia rather than the limited span of human lifetimes. In making this argument, I show that the Egyptian logos not only permits comparison to the modern intellectual project of deep history, but also makes a significant contribution to our understanding both of central themes of the Histories, such as the instability of human happiness and the influence of environments on human history, and of Herodotus’ methodology.

This essay explores the role of mourning in Euripides’ Alcestis in relation to the thematics of identification in the play and in tragedy in general. Drawing on comparative texts, including Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” it considers two topoi in the drama: first, that of a man mourning his first wife, and especially its peculiarity here, that the man firmly believes that she is dying in his place—that somehow she is he; second, that of a man anxiously taking a second wife, and especially its peculiarity, that the second wife turns out to be identical to the first wife—that somehow she is she. The essay engages both topoi for what they illuminate about identification and illusion in the play, but also metatheatrically about the role of identification and illusion for the audience of the play.

In this paper, I explore how the ithyphallic hymn for Demetrius Poliorcetes engages with conflicting interpretations of the Athenian literary past. I show how the hymn draws on Attic tragedy to associate Demetrius with two key figures of the dramatic stage: the divine Dionysus and the heroic Oedipus. I begin with a detailed analysis of the hymn’s intertextual engagement with Euripides’ Bacchae and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. On the surface, both Dionysus and Oedipus serve as flattering mythical exempla: the hymn exploits local literary idioms to legitimize and authorize Demetrius’ divine power, just as its theological reflections appropriate Athenian philosophical thought. Yet despite this overt praise, both figures are polyvalent and ambiguous models, through which the hymn also provides a more subversive undercurrent of coded Athenian resistance. The ithyphallic hymn not only seeks to secure Demetrius’ ongoing favor, but also hints at the king’s ultimate fragility and participates in a broader cultural contest between Athens and Macedon for control of the Attic tragic tradition.

This article examines public displays of reluctance during Roman electoral campaigns. It traces an uncommon but observable trend in which certain individuals claimed not to be canvassing for or desirous of the political office to which they were subsequently elected. Using the election of Scipio Aemilianus to the consulship of 147 BCE as a point of departure, the article argues that staged reluctance was employed as a canvassing strategy by several prominent Roman politicians. Reluctance could be feigned to circumvent electoral restrictions, to enhance the reputation of the candidate, or even as a route to victory through reverse psychology. Staged reluctance was therefore an unconventional but effective republican canvassing technique. The Roman people, for their part, were presented as the primary agents in the election. The people were capable of creating a magistrate, even if the latter had not registered as an official candidate, with apparently spontaneous manifestations of popular will. This article examines how the electorate could come to vote for a non-candidate (part I) and why a non-candidate might claim or feign reluctance (part II). It concludes with an afterword on Augustus’ employment of this republican phenomenon (part III).

From the sixth through the mid-fourth century BCE, many Greek communities used an eight-year cycle or ἐννεατηρίς (literally “nine-year,” by inclusive Greek reckoning) to intercalate civil calendars, which were lunar in nature. Such calibration kept lunar calendars aligned with the longer solar year. This study, the first article on the enneatēris in its own right, has two aims: to assemble evidence from across the Greek world for the enneatēris, and to demonstrate how the enneatēris helped coordinate local, regional, and Panhellenic calendars through interlocking festival rites. New documentary evidence allows us to understand this more clearly than ever before, and to make sense of an important social, religious, and astronomical mechanism by which individuals and communities reckoned time and ensured that local calendars maintained synchronicity with one another and with the seasons. The study bridges work on early Greek scientific knowledge and socioreligious institutions, while transcending modern distinctions between the two realms of discourse.

As has often been remarked, writing was vital in Cicero’s ambitious project of self-fashioning and the canonization of his oratory. Through writing, Cicero was able to overcome the problems associated with his novitas and to transform his oratory into a paradigm by constructing texts as replacements of his embodied presence. This paper complicates constructionist approaches towards Cicero’s self-fashioning by reflecting on Cicero’s self-citing from his poetic texts in his theological trilogy. What makes citational practices compelling is how they affect the citing agent’s subjectivity through dynamic processes of assimilation and distancing triggered by the replication. Methodologically, the complexity of these processes unsettles the possibility of approaching the citational episode as the expression of a single, self-contained individual. Matters get even more complicated when agents like Cicero cite themselves through other figures and include a variety of remarks and observations along with their citation (see Balbus in the De natura deorum and Quintus in the De divinatione). My analysis reveals that each bit of text cut out from one work and inlaid into another contains manifold links to the original context, to other textual bits, to Cicero’s past and present, to other agents, and to the new text, simultaneously. What this means from a subjective point of view is that our textual Cicero does not emerge as a unitary identity but as a key node of transactions constituted by multiple realities and subjectivities. This multiplicity frustrates any attempt to recompose Cicero and his existence into a neat puzzle; however, self-citing creates a space where the subjectivities constituted by their relationship with the citation come to be condensed into textual substances. Ultimately, Cicero’s texts are less a straightforward replacement of his embodied presence than an emotionally dense “remnant” of his attempts to salvage a world going under.

This article examines Euripides’ portrayal of Heracles in his eponymous play, exploring how the once-excellent and glorious hero, favored by Zeus as his son, falls from grace and rejects all ties to divinity. This turning point in his characterization and its departure from the traditional Homeric paradigm are analyzed against the background of Euripides’ typical manipulation of mythical tradition. In this tragedy, Heracles, who is now also the biological son of Amphitryon, rejects his problematic divine heritage and instead chooses his human father. Since resilience in the face of pain, which Heracles sees as the last vestige of his virtue, is a quality he shares with all humankind, the Euripidean Heracles no longer embodies the characteristics of an exemplary hero. The article concludes with an analysis of the tragedy’s reception by the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, and the resonance of Euripides’ conception of Heracles in her recent work, H of H Playbook (2021).

This article is not the first to examine the relationship of art and text in Heliodorus’s novel. But rather than reduce the text’s engagement with visual culture to the paragone of word and image, or to the conjuring of specific object after specific object, it asks what happens if we take seriously the piling in of different media from different periods and different places, emphasizing the shifting perspectival planes and modes of engagement that these demand of the reader/viewer. Revisiting some of the most frequently discussed passages of the novel, it shows how these harness the effects of this visual culture in ways that keep the reader/viewer engaged and enargeia “enactive.” This is of a piece, it argues, with a text that has been described as being “beyond interpretation” (Hunter 1998: 40–59 and Whitmarsh 2022: 4–5), a text that is self-conscious about following in Philostratus’s footsteps.

This article argues that the thinking accomplished in Pindar’s epinician poetry pertains as much to the domain of the sensory as to the conceptual. The claims that characterize this poetry are experiential as well as propositional, insofar as they draw attention to and aim to inflect the affective and attitudinal processes which occur when epistemic or ethical positions are adopted. My readings locate the poems’ capacity to accomplish interventions into the lives of their listeners or readers in the formal means that they employ to structure and organize thought. Particularly important in this respect are their use of metaphor and narrative, and their presentation of temporal experience. In order to examine these techniques, I look first at a truth claim, a description of aging, and a metapoetic metaphor (fr. 205, Isthmian 7.40–42, and Olympian 6.80–82), before discussing Pindar’s account of witnessing Hagesidamus’ victory at Olympia (Olympian 10.97–105). I then consider the depiction of Achilles’ youthful exploits in Nemean 3.