On the basis of a fresh collation of the four primary manuscripts, this book presents a revised text of Plato's Ion, with full apparatus criticus. The commentary has a strong linguistic orientation; it includes discussions of Platonic vocabulary. Linguistic considerations are also the leading principle in the choice of one MS reading rather than another. Drawing on Byzantine practices and theories, the book pays special attention to questions of punctuation, an area too often ignored in editions of classical texts. The extensive introduction deals with, inter alia, Plato's attack on...

This volume is a collection of papers revealing the largely unexplored boundary between linguistic and literary approaches to classical texts. Eleven contributions by various scholars discuss a wide range of linguistic and literary apects of classical texts: the narratee in the prologues of Sophocles' Trachiniae and of Euripides, the chronology in Pindar's Odes, the relation between tense-aspect and Discourse Modes in Thucydides, Xenophon, Vergil and Ovid, the use of aspect in the Law Code of Gortyn, expressions of futurity and the word order of adjectives in Herodotus, and, finally, ancient...

On the basis of a functional analysis of the order and articulation of noun phrase constituents in Herodotus, this book tries to answer the question as to which factors determine word order variation in the Greek NP.

When Protagoras remarks "if you like, let us assume that justice is holy and holiness just," Socrates replies "No, I do not want this 'if you like' or 'if you agree' sort of thing to be put to the proof (-); our statement will be most properly tested if we take away the 'if'" (Plato Protagoras 331c3-d1). This passage may be considered one of the oldest passages reflecting on the pragmatic functions of 'if', and the importance of 'if' in human reasoning. This book develops a linguistic framework to analyse conditionals, for which the apparatus of Functional Grammar provides a basis. Within...

The arrangement of Catullus' Carmina is one of those controversial issues that in-cite respectable commentators to take up extreme positions. In 1914, the German scholar Bernhard Schmidt described the collection as 'a wild chaos'. Forty-five years later, his compatriot Otto Weinreich riposted with the laconic statement: 'Chaos? Cosmos ' Former attempts to detect a structure in the collection were based on rather subjective assumptions. While translating Catullus' poetry into Dutch, Dr Claes detected an objective foundation: the principle of concatenation, i.e. the recurrence of motifs and...

Allan, Rutger The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek. A Study of Polysemy. 2003 The great variety of usage types of the middle voice in Ancient Greek has excited the interest of generations of classical scholars. A number of intriguing questions, however, still have been left unanswered. What is the exact relation between the various middle usage types? How can the semantic element common to all usage types be defined? What is the relation between the middle voice and the passive voice in the aorist and future stems? To provide an answer to these questions, this study takes a novel approach....