Volume 57, Issue 2

T. Maslowski's edition of Cicero's Catilinarians is the first to incorporate readings of the famous Papyrus Barcinonensis containing the end of the first and the complete second Catilinarian. In this article I discuss certain passages in which Maslowski, following the medieval transmisson, rejects some attractive readings of the papyrus which, I argue, deserve to be adopted in the text.

The close of Theocritus 24 (Herakliskos) is preserved only in the Antinoë codex of the 5th or 6th century and is re-examined here. It is apparent that Teiresias' speech came exactly in the middle of the poem. The ending of the poem described Heracles' apotheosis, his wedding with Hebe and the poet's wish for a victory; it turns out to be an important model for the ending of Virgil's fourth Eclogue.

In Hellenistic times theatres, along with gymnasia, were unique features of Greek poleis and an emblem of Greek culture. By the 1 st century BC, the Greek theatre had become the generally accepted symbol of ancient Mediterranean culture, its synonym that survived the political decline of the Hellenistic world and functioned as the starting point of the Roman theatre.

This article deals with the history of the former private papyrus collection of the pastor Julius Kurth from Berlin, which is now in the Archaeological Museum of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. It gives a short overview of the collection's papyri and their content.

Interpretation of the isolated fragment of Menander 630 K-A and its hypothetical connexion with a famous scene in the Sicyonius papyrus concerning the relationship between fathers and daughters, masters and slaves, shame and honour.

An 1895 painting by the Bavarian general and artist Karl Wilhelm von Heideck includes a German inscription written in Greek letters, which has remained unnoticed until now. The hidden message of this inscription seems to be a mild criticism of Ludwig Ross, the ephoros of antiquities, who had removed all later architectural additions from the Athenian Acropolis in order to restore the ancient site, and had also introduced an admission fee for visitors.

In 1913 Carl Robert staged a German translation of Sophocles' Ichneutae with students from the university of Halle at the Goethe Theatre in Bad Lauchstädt. Robert took a large risk in freely replacing the missing conclusion, but its success confirmed his daring.

Fragment of a collection of the sententiae of Menander containing monostichoi 467 and 652. The verses are not arranged in alphabetical order.

The Artemidorur papyrus provides crucial evidence for our understanding of the art of drawing in the ancient world. Academic discussion has clarified the function of the drawings on the papyrus (pattern book or sketchbook). The sketches of body parts and animals give an impression of what an ancient sketchbook looked like. The artists used examples from Greco-Roman wall painting.

Based upon Wolfgang Luppe's argument that Euripides wrote two dramas entitled Medea – in the first of which, now lost, Medea kills her children on the stage – this contribution identifies differences between the two versions of the play. It also deals with the question of visible and non-visible presentation of murder and acts of violence in Euripides' two Medeas and in other Athenian tragedies of the 5 th century BC.

This article examines a 3 rd century AD funeral inscription (epigram + prose text) from Amorion in Phrygi. It argues that Wilhelm's reading and interpretation of the text, followed by Merkelbach and Stauber, but doubted by Robert, must be rejected.

Continuity and independence in the treatment of the ancient Philoctetes story give the text of Heiner Müller's Philoctetes – with its perfect interlacing of Sophoclean Neoptolemos and Euripidian Ulysses – an important place in the story of the reception of these fifth century tragedies.

The Phoenissae of Euripides is a play that has interested not only Classical scholars, but also historians of European Theatre. In this article I examine its political and philosophical meanings, and argue that while it is a kind of family tragedy, to some extent it is also a political manifesto.

This article offers a new interpretation of the main conflict of Euripides' Andromache . In the Classical period it was regarded as giving serious offence to a wife if a female sexual partner of her husband stayed in the house of the couple. Recognition of this has consequences for the play and for our understanding of Greek tragedy in general.

Edition of P.Berol. 10568, Homerus τ 534–599

According to Aristotle, in the Oedipus Tyrannus the protagonist meets misfortune because of hamartia . He does not specify the nature of this hamartia . Recent interpretations have taken it to refer to a character trait of Oedipus that manifests itself at various points in the events preceding the action of the play as well as in the play itself. However, from Aristotle's definition of hamartia in the Nicomachean Ethics it would seem that he was thinking of a very short time frame in which the spontaneous decision to commit the act that leads to misfortune is immediately followed by the act itself.

Work on modern lyrics is similar to the work of papyrologists: the point is to understand the sense and significance of a text, to bring unspoken thoughts into the open or reconstruct lost memory. This article seeks to discover the meaning of a complicated text.

In P.Oxy. LXXI 4811 (2 nd century AD) we read of a young man and a young woman talking about declamation; the piece has been convincingly ascribed to some lost novel. It is the aim of this article to re-edit P.Oxy. 4811, to elucidate some of the technical details it contains about ancient declamation, and to reconstruct the fictional frame of this fragment and its probable relationship with another ‘romance papyrus’, PSI XI 1220.

A very fine mosaic emblema in opus vermiculatum is interpreted as a still life of two masks of the New Comedy: the fourth mask for old men and the Hermonios after Pollux. The dating seems to be the first half of the first century B.C., the provenance perhaps Italy. Some comparisons with other representations of masks in marble reliefs and of later date follow.

The view that Simonides' Plataean Elegy was performed on an occasion honouring the dead of the war against Persia is supported by the importance Achilleus is given in the proem of the elegy: just as Achilles' bravery and death were crucial for taking Troy, so the courageous death of Spartan warriors' brought victory over Mardonios and his troops. As the known parts of the elegy clearly focus on Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies, the likeliest occasion for its performance is the funeral of the Spartan warriors who fell in the battle of Plataea.

Carl Maria Seyppel, a German caricaturist, invented and named ‘Mumiendrucke’ (mummy prints). These books were specially treated to create the illusion that they are ancient books fresh from an excavation. This article investigates their contents and production.

The article deals with the volume Fasciculus poematum Graecorum edited in 1715 for the first time by Hieronymus Freyer. Freyer's volume contains not only poems written by ancient poets, but also some by modern scholars, such as the polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze who taught as professor at the university of Halle. The poems of Schulze and Freyer are presented as examples of Posthumanist Greek Versification and of the phenomenon we would like to call ‘New Ancient Greek Literature’. At the end there is discussion of three modern Greek poems written by Robert, Friedländer and Peek, whose work is also linked with the university of Halle.

In Acharnians 393–489 Aristophanes, parodying Euripidean tragedy, develops a metapoetics of the use of costume and props in tragedy. In Props (Skeuai) Plato comicus probably devoted a whole comedy to this subject.