Volume 153, Issue 1

Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale remains a scholarly problem: its “might is right” moral seems to counteract the point that the poet appears to be making in this part of the Works and Days . Moreover, it is introduced with an address to the kings but finishes immediately prior to a dislocated appellation to Hesiod’s brother Perses. We have no clearly analogous fable to set next to this one. In this paper I step outside the Greek tradition and present a comparable story from the Indic Mahābhārata that involves not only a hawk and a dove but also a king who protects the latter. I argue that the material it supplies can help us in our interpretation of the Hesiodic fable by opening up the possibility that there is in fact a third character within the drama – absent from the text itself but essential for our understanding of it – who had the power to protect the nightingale from the hawk but who failed to do so.

This article defends the authenticity of lines 1424–1523 of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the face of a recent attack, and establishes that doubts about this section were first raised at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

This article deals with a mosaic from ancient Zeugma on the Euphrates found in 2002 and recently published with interpretive commentary. Its subject is the story of Theonoe and Leukippe preserved only in Hyginus and nowhere in Greek. Despite this, the authors argue that the myth, in its unique form, can for over one thousand years be connected with romance, mime, pantomime, tragedy and derives ultimately from early Cretan rituals of transvestism. Its immediate inspiration however is imperial pantomime along with the transvestism notorious in that genre, as can be argued from the layout of the mosaic and the iconography of Theonoe, our first clear picture of a pantomime. But the main thrust of the article, especially in appendix B, is to demonstrate that the Hyginus story must now be considered to represent the plot of a lost tragedy, which derived many of its elements from late Euripides, but in its over-enthusiasic use of these represents a post-Euripidean artificially complex plot-type, for which hitherto we had limited evidence.

In Epictetus 3. 23. 33 the original reading of the codex unicus Bodleianus Auct. T. 4. 13, ἐκλεκτικός, is certainly corrupt. All the editions accept the reading ἐλεγκτικός, which is a correction by a later corrector of Bodleianus Auct. T. 4. 13. It is shown that this reading is to be rejected because ἐλεγκτικός is equivalent to the immediately preceding προτρεπτικός and because it leads to unsurmountable discrepancies with the closely related passage 3. 21. 19. As an alternative for ἐλεγκτικός, the emendation ἐπιπληκτικός is proposed: with this reading all problems disappear. The new reading has important consequences for the evaluation of Epictetus’ educational system.

This paper argues that the emendation ὑπερερῶν for ms. ὑπερoρῶν in Them . 2. 3, although rejected by many editors and commentators, should be accepted. The manuscripts have Themistokles ‘despising’ practical studies, that is studies which promoted ‘intelligence and action’. But this makes little sense in context and disrupts the logic of the whole chapter, which presupposes a contrast between real education, which Themistokles rejects, and practical activities, on which he concentrates and for which he was suited by nature. It is much more plausible that Themistokles is presented as having ‘an excessive love’ for practical studies. Indeed, this combination – rejection of true education and enthusiasm for practical training – characterises several other subjects of Plutarch, while erotic metaphors are used to describe Themistokles’ obsession with practical success in the next chapter.