Greek myth
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Abstract
have been helpful to carry out a control test, jumbling up the andriantopoiika, for example, handing them out to a bunch of bright graduate students and watching them confect a justification for the new sequence; what if it were more persuasive than the one you had yourself elaborated for the papyrus order? Though Posidippus was concerned about his Nachleben, as the sphragis-poem demonstrates, even in his wildest dreams he can hardly have hoped for the spotlight that would so suddenly, so late, and so fortuitously fall on his work, or that he would become the cynosure of such a gathering of intelligent critics. All this progress, and all their good ideas, are not, however, without a downside. Two items in the debit column should be noted. About the first there is nothing to be done: the pressure to publish ideas on such a juicy, highprofile new topic as soon as possible, simultaneously pushed by scholars' perfectly understandable desire to secure tenure or to carve out a career niche for themselves, and pulled by target-imperatives of their employers like the British 'Research Assessment Exercise', means that an unstoppable torrent of publications has followed the appearance of the ed. princ: Martijn Cuypers' indispensable on-line Posidippus bibliography listed over a hundred items from the beginning of 2004 to June 2005 alone. This Drang nach Schreiben means not only that poor contributions threaten to swamp and obscure the really original ones, but that in order to get any kind of grip on the secondary literature it helps to be enjoying research leave or retirement; amateurs or working teachers will find it almost impossible to keep pace. The second development that worries me, on the other hand, is one which could perhaps be mitigated by a touch more self-discipline in the profession: it is the increasing tendency for the same bunch of specialists the ones who enjoy the just-mentioned dollops of research leave to engage in a carousel or carousal of conferences whose proceedings are subsequently published in volumes like the ones under review. It is fair enough for Hunter's Italian essay on the Lithika in (5) to reappear, tweaked, and with proper acknowledgment, in English in (6); less so when Obbink recycles great lumps of his piece in (6) into (8). There is a danger here of co-dependency or cosying-up, with the usual suspects meeting yet again, via different airports, to hear and to present tarted-up versions of earlier papers. The danger is no more than a wispy cloud drifting over these generally excellent collections, but it is much worse elsewhere, and is likely to grow darker. The solution is for more conference participants to sign up to a self-denying ordinance which would sacrifice speed, convenience and complaisance to proper peer review in independent journals like this one.