This paper explores how the human form is depicted, objectified and contextualized, in order to clarify the complex relationship between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, and to investigate the various ways the body is bounded. Part one argues that objectification is not always a passive process, but that the body is deliberately presented to the world to be observed and evaluated. Part two focuses on the configuration of bodily boundaries, and how the body is framed, for example, by clothing, architecture and the mortuary context. The wealth and range of evidence (wall paintings, seals and sealings, figurines, stone vases and burials) render Knossos an excellent case study for this approach. This paper asks not who the Knossians were, in terms of identity and ethnicity, but rather how they wanted to be presented to the world and each other.

H. Meyer-Laurin has claimed that the Athenian courts took a stricti iuris approach to the law and did not take extenuating circumstances into account. Other scholars (Mirhady, Todd) have claimed that the courts sometimes ignored the law and took extra-legal considerations into account, which was called ‘fairness’ (epieikeia). The essay begins with a careful reading of Aristotle's analysis of ‘fairness’ (epieikeia) in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric and draws on an important essay by J. Brunschwig. Fairness was not a doctrine that attempted to undermine the authority of the law or placed the law of the city in opposition to the unwritten laws or the common law of mankind. Nor did the application of fairness introduce non-legal factors into adjudication. Rather, fairness dealt with the problem of treating exceptions to the general rule contained in a specific written law. The essay then shows how litigants used arguments based on fairness and how the courts sometimes took extenuating circumstances into account. When Athenian judges swore to decide according to the laws of Athens, they did not just consider the law under which the accuser had brought his case. They could also take into account general principles of justice implicit in the laws of Athens as a whole. In this way, they avoided a rigid positivist approach to law. Finally, the essay sheds some light on the relationship between Aristotle's Rhetoric and the arguments used in the Athenian courts.

Athenian funeral orations did not simply celebrate Athenian military achievements or renew and augment a specifically anonymous collective identity and hoplite ideology. Rather, the speeches also model the role and importance of sub-groups within the democratic polis and celebrate some individual generals for their attributes and achievements as leaders. Furthermore, internal and contextual evidence shows that the prominent leaders who were chosen to deliver these speeches were often promoting or defending their own particular involvement and advocacy of the military campaign in question. This stress on the importance of the individual ‘voice’ of the orator and the speeches' inscription of exemplary individuals (probably, but by no means certainly, much more common from the 380s downwards) offers a significant contribution to literary and historical understanding of this genre and its cultural and ideological functioning.

This article examines the fourth-century ‘Exeter pelike’ (ARV² 1516.80) by the Jena Painter, situating it within the wider debate over the relationship between vase-painting and tragic text and performance. The front side depicts the meeting of Orestes and Electra at Agamemnon's tomb, and is commonly interpreted as relating closely to Aeschylus’Choephori. However, a widely-missed inscription ‘Ism[ene]’ must be an error on the part of the painter for ‘Chrysothemis’, a confusion caused by knowledge of Sophocles. The inclusion of ‘Chrysothemis’ on the Exeter pelike alludes to Sophocles' Electra, but the painting is not a straightforward representation of any one play. Indeed, in tragedy Electra's recognition of Orestes becomes highly allusive, since both Sophocles and Euripides mediate their treatments of this moment through the corresponding scene in Aeschylus. In the same way, the Exeter pelike engages with numerous pictorial and textual traditions to create a complex and allusive re-telling.

Although previous scholarship has noted some verbal and stylistic allusions to Catullus in Propertius 1.3, the extent to which the poem offers a profound and detailed engagement with Catullus 64 has not been recognised. Through a close reading of the opening couplets, I hope to demonstrate the care, artistry and sophistication with which Propertius engages with Catullus 64, as he imitates and illuminates many of its key stylistic and intertextual features. I argue that this engagement with Catullus 64 is importantly programmatic, and that Propertius 1.3, like Catullus 64, is very much concerned with narrative authority and poetic control. This concern comes to the fore in Cynthia's speech at the close of the poem, and I hope to show through further close reading how its relationship to literature and art encourages us to question Propertius's portrayal of his relationship with Cynthia at this very early stage in the corpus.

This paper considers once more Mart. 11.104 and its use of mythological examples in 11.104.13–16. The paper focuses particularly on the significance of the audience of a group of slaves, an embellishment of the mythological examples peculiar to Martial, and uses this addition as a stepping-stone for a metapoetic reading. Through the reconfiguration of the mythological examples themselves and through the addition of an audience, Martial not only distinguishes his own epigrammatic text from his elegiac and epic intertexts but also reflects on the aims and workings of especially Ovidian elegy.