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“... There is a disease which affects young girls, particularly around the onset of menstruation. It is known colloquially as ‘the horrors’, and its symptoms are evident. The disease makes adolescent girls violently aggressive, and commands them ‘to leap around, to fall down into wells and to hang themselves’ – to ‘take on a desire for death, as if it were a good thing ...”

“... Greece has its canonical witches. There is Medea, barbarian and jilted lover, with her flaming poisons. Homer’s Circe, often allegorised as a figure of lust, who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs and takes him to bed for a year. In the Alexandrian poet, Theocritus, the deserted Simaetha, a petit-bourgeois woman, is desperate to enchant her lover back to her bed ...”

“... challenge universalising notions of sexuality depends on universalising interpretations of sex. As Simon Goldhill shows in his subtle and complex new book, Foucault’s Virginity, antiquity was not immune to the argument from nature, although there it turns up in strange and unexpected guises that might not be familiar to modern sociobiologists. In a ...”

“... should be left at his side.) Or perhaps it is both simpler and more complicated. ‘Writing,’ Simon Goldhill declares in his slippery new book about the Bensons, ‘is a pathological response to being in a family.’ There are​ other questions worth asking. Why do we care? What exactly is the point of the Bensons? ‘A very odd brotherhood,’ the ...”

“... Renaissance London or Sixties Indonesia or an Internet discussion-group, in its performativity? Simon Goldhill, editor of an extremely diverse collection, conscientiously emphasises the ‘different levels and sites’ of Athenian performance, its ‘complexity and range’, ‘so much more dynamic than many of the cases that have been used in ...”

“... rode up in the Eighties. Chief among the leaders of this mission are the Cambridge classicists Simon Goldhill and Richard Hunter, who has written a book on Apollonius (The ‘Argonautica’ of Apollonius: Literary Studies, 1993) as well as producing a scholarly edition of Book Three and a translation of the whole thing (which is ...”

“... held but a flap of skin, the head swung loose to the side as Lycon slumped down to the ground. Simon Goldhill, who advised the creators of the event, told us at the start that what was being done ‘was remarkably Greek’, that at the Great Panathenaia, Homer was recited in the theatre on the Acropolis. The sound of these works matters; the harmony ...”

“... cannot be seen as the enemy of history; if anything, they are part and parcel of the same subject. Simon Goldhill’s Reading Greek Tragedy, for example, published in 1986, is a book born out of the tradition of the ‘new’ Classical philology. It does not claim to be a work of history, but by showing how Athenian drama acted as a privileged arena for ...”