James Davidson

Oh dear. ‘Easily misled’ and ‘sadly deficient’ in representation of data, Brian Bosworth (Letters, 3 January) says of me. I see now that a footnote hailing a singular and most important ‘discovery’ referred to the scholarly consensus, over the ‘last two centuries’, ‘that there is a common tradition’, ‘plausibly ascribed to Cleitarchus of Alexandria’, ‘used selectively and...

I feel I must take issue in the strongest possible terms with Peter Parsons’s view (LRB, 18 September) that the Greek obsession with fish is a mirage created by the peculiar obsessions of the anthologist Athenaeus writing at the beginning of the third century CE: ‘How would British society look if its historians focused on an anthology of literary references to cod and caviare?’ The implication...

Daniel Kinney and Bracht Branham (Letters, 18 July) are worried that when, in the course of a generally favourable comparison, I noted that P.G. Walsh’s translation of Petronius’ Satyricon ‘hugs the Latin more closely’ I was casting aspersions on the accuracy of their own version. It would be nice to keep both the spirit and the letter of a translated text (and every other level of meaning...

I am relieved that an authority on ancient sexual images like Robert Sutton and an expert on sexual graffiti like David Bain have between them been able to come up with only such meagre and familiar evidence for the connection between power and penetration in classical Athens (Letters, 14 December 1995). The well-known vase that is supposed to commemorate the victory at the river Eurymedon in southern...