Volume 20, 2026

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One of the more puzzling problems in Greco-Roman historiography is the very strong tradition that Numa Pompilius, creator of the Romans’ religious system, was a pupil of Pythagoras, who set up his school in south Italy about 530 bc. The idea was denounced by Cicero and Livy as an anachronistic fiction—but how could it have come to be so widely believed? This article draws attention to the very extensive Pythagorean material reproduced in Plutarch’s life of Numa, and Plutarch’s own reasonable doubts about the accuracy of the received chronology of the Roman kings. The tradition of Numa the Pythagorean evidently predated the creation of the chronology, so why should it be dismissed as unhistorical? An innovating religious legislator at Rome in the late sixth century bc is a hypothesis that deserves to be taken seriously.

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This paper argues that Herodotus does not stigmatise cannibalism in his ethnographies. Rather than ‘Othering’ cannibalistic peoples like the Massagetae (1.216), Callatiae (3.38), Padaeans (3.99), and the Issedones (4.26), Herodotus’ depictions encourage his audience towards a stance of tolerance, while his depiction of the Androphagi (4.106) illustrates his reluctance to attach any particular custom as a marker of ‘Other’. In contrast, Herodotus denigrates cannibalism in his accounts of Cyaxares (1.73), Harpagus (1.119), and Cambyses’ Ethiopian campaign (3.25). I conclude with the suggestion that Herodotus’ depictions of distant peoples following their own custom even in this extreme case should be taken as further evidence of the historian’s cultural relativism.

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This paper analyses Thucydides’ catalogues both as a narrative and analytical device within The Peloponnesian War. In particular, this study aims to show their authenticity or functional coherence and cohesion despite the fact that they have been understudied or not always fully understood to varying degrees. Through this close examination, I illustrate how Thucydides adapts the traditional catalogue structure and patterns (ethno-geographic or political-hierarchical) to serve his new kind of historiography. By slightly echoing Homeric and Herodotean models, the author innovates within the catalogic sub-genre, highlighting political alliances, military logistics, and imperial dynamics in the war he is recounting.

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A number of Suda entries (s.v. ἀθέμιστα (Α 714 Adler) and s.v. Πίασος (Π 1549 Adler), and possibly also s.v. ἔωσεν (Ε 1909 Adler) rather than s.v. ἕρμα (Ε 3022 Adler)) deal with the myth of Larissa and her father Piasus, who fell in love with her, raped her, and was murdered by her. The anonymous quotations these entries preserve have been attributed to either Nicolaus of Damascus or Aelian. A linguistic investigation confirms the authorship of the latter.

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Whereas most scholarship interprets Philo’s De vita Mosis as a biography or encomium written in the context of a polemic about Judaism, this article proposes instead that the work serves to establish Philo more broadly as an authoritative Graeco-Roman writer of history. To this end, I analyse Philo’s comments about his literary competitors in the proem, his use of historiographical genre conventions, and his engagement with contemporary literary criticism; further corroboration is provided by his comments about the Mosaic Pentateuch in the second book. This article thus provides a foundation to consider De vita Mosis in relation to Graeco-Roman historical writing in its full breadth.

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A programmatic passage in the preface of Procopius of Caesarea’s Wars (1.1.6–17) focuses on how the work will be received by its implied audience. Procopius’ narrator posits two contrasting figures: one, an open-minded reader disposed to reason from historical evidence and to recognise the extraordinary qualities of contemporary events; the other, a recalcitrant reader whose valorisation of the past and immersion in linguistic archaism render him incapable of appreciating the present. The polemic against the latter is not a mere caricature, but a pretext for airing and displacing scepticism about the Wars’ axiological aims—that is, about what is most worth narrating and why it matters—especially with regard to the classical tradition in which the work participates.

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This paper explores the portrayal of the Germani in Tacitus’ Germania and in his historical works. It highlights how in the Germania’s first half they are presented as a remote and free people, while in the second they appear as less distant and less homogeneous. These different strands can also be traced in Tacitus’ Germanic narrative in Annals 1–2, especially in his depiction of Arminius, whose complex relationship with freedom, and role in what seem to be characteristically Germanic cycles of civil strife, are linked back to the Germania and forward to other episodes in the Histories and Annals. In the end Germanic discord seems more compelling than Germanic libertas, and this may have implications for Tacitus’ own time.