Those who write about early Greek literature often assume that each item in the ancient vocabulary answers to a single concept in the world-view of its users. It seems reasonable to hope that the body of ideas represented by a particular Greek word will frame one's discussion better than any question that could be asked in English: so that a cautious scholar might prefer to discuss the phenomenon called αἰδώς, for example, than to plunge into a study of Greek ideas (...) of ‘honour and shame' irrespective of whether those anthropologists’ labels mark off a single body of ancient ideas. But the question is not merely one of common sense: in recent years, for example, a strategy of extrapolating deep ideas from single words has been deliberately developed by such scholars as Gregory Nagy, who constantly moves back and forth between the semantic patterns of individual words and corresponding thematic patterns found in myths. Here is a recent example from his analysis of Pindar's conception of the unity between athletic victory and mythical heroism:In Pindaric usage ἂεθλος applies equally to the contests of athletes and to the life-and-death ordeals of heroes. We have already seen from the myth of the chariot race of Pelops that the ordeals of heroes on the level of myth correspond aetiologically to the contests of athletes on the level of ritual, in that the myths can motivate the rituals. Now we see that a word like ἂεθλος can collapse the very distinction between the myth and the ritual. (shrink)

The historian of ancient medicine has in recent years enjoyed one advantage over his more literary colleagues, the regular accession of substantial new texts by major authors. These have included not only fragments preserved on papyri and themembra disiectagathered from later encyclopaedias and medical writings, but also complete treatises, some consisting of several books. There is, however, one drawback. Very few of these new texts are preserved in their original language, or even in a mediaeval Latin translation; most are to (...) be found in versions done into Syriac, Arabic, or Hebrew, and hence they remain inaccessible to the average classicist without the intermediary of a further translation into a Western language. Besides, when such modern translations exist, they are not always easy to locate, even in the best-regulated libraries, and the supposed aridity of their contents acts as a further barrier to the dissemination of their information to students of ancient history and ancient philosophy. This paper is intended to bring to wider notice the most recent of such arrivals, and, by concentrating on what it has to say about Antonine society, to draw the attention of ancient historians to material that they might well overlook. (shrink)

In 1998, I suggested a new text for a notably corrupt passage in Pindar's Isthmian 5. This article is in effect a sequel to that earlier discussion. In the 1998 article, I proposed, inter alia, that the modern vulgate text of I. 5.58, ἐλπίδων ἔκνισ’ ὄπιν, is indefensible and the product of scribal corruption in antiquity, and that chief among the indefensible products of corruption there is the supposed secular use of ὄπις, as if used to mean something like ‘zeal’. (...) This is a sense for which there is no good evidence in classical Greek, where ὄπις always has a delimited religious denotation, meaning either ‘gods’ response’, ‘divine retribution’, or else ‘religious awe’ or ‘reverence’ towards the gods, through fear of that response or that retribution. If we discount I. 5.58 itself, all the pre-Hellenistic attestations can be straightforwardly listed under these headings: Il. 16.388 θεῶν ὄπιν οὐκ ἀλέγοντες, Od. 14.88 ὄπιδος κρατερὸν δέος, Hes. Theog. 221–2 θεαὶ... |... ἀπὸ τῷ δώωσι κακὴν ὄπιν, Pind. P. 8.71–2 θεῶν δ’ ὄπιν | ἄφθονον αἰτέω, sim. Od. 20.215, 21.28, Hes. Op. 187, 251, 706, along with, seemingly, a fragmentary fifth-century Thessalian verse inscription, CEG 1.120.1 Hansen; Hdt. 9.76.2 θεῶν ὄπιν ἔχοντας, 8.143.2. In addition, one other instance can be interpreted as either or, or in effect both: Od. 14.82 οὐκ ὄπιδα φρονέοντες... οὐδ’ ἐλεητύν. In all cases, though, ‘gods’ are specified, usually as a dependent genitive with ὄπις, or else separately but in the near context. Hellenistic and later occurrences of the word are few, and hints there of a secular reading can actually be taken to reflect misunderstandings based on, precisely, the early corruption in I. 5. (shrink)

The historian of ancient medicine has in recent years enjoyed one advantage over his more literary colleagues, the regular accession of substantial new texts by major authors. These have included not only fragments preserved on papyri and the membra disiecta gathered from later encyclopaedias and medical writings, but also complete treatises, some consisting of several books. There is, however, one drawback. Very few of these new texts are preserved in their original language, or even in a mediaeval Latin translation; most (...) are to be found in versions done into Syriac, Arabic, or Hebrew, and hence they remain inaccessible to the average classicist without the intermediary of a further translation into a Western language. Besides, when such modern translations exist, they are not always easy to locate, even in the best-regulated libraries, and the supposed aridity of their contents acts as a further barrier to the dissemination of their information to students of ancient history and ancient philosophy. This paper is intended to bring to wider notice the most recent of such arrivals, and, by concentrating on what it has to say about Antonine society, to draw the attention of ancient historians to material that they might well overlook. (shrink)