On 12th March, 1800 Charles James Fox wrote thus to Gilbert Wakefield, imprisoned for seditious libel in Dorchester Gaol. ‘I have lately read Lycophron, and am much obliged to you for recommending it to me to do so: besides there being some very charming poetry in him, the variety of stories is very entertaining. … There remain, after all, some few difficulties, which if you can clear up to me, I shall be much obliged to you. … The most important of these is, that which belongs to the part where he speaks of the Romans in a manner that could not be possible for one who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, that is, even before the first Punic war.’ Fox accordingly inferred that either the Roman passages (1226–80, 1446–50) were interpolated (which he thought the more probable hypothesis) or the poem as a whole was not the work of the author to whom it was traditionally ascribed, Lycophron the tragedian, who organised the texts of comedy for the Alexandrian library under Philadelphus. Wakefield, though normally a far from conservative critic, was not convinced: ‘Is it incredible, that an attentive observer of the times, and the rising greatness of the Romans, might venture to predict the extent of their future sway in the general terms of ver. 1229?’ Fox thought this ‘morally impossible’, and the subject continued to occupy their letters during the remaining months of Wakefield's incarceration. In this remarkable correspondence we find clearly adumbrated the main lines on which the Lycophron Question was to develop. If our hearts sink before the considerable bibliography generated by this controversy, we may find reassurance in the characteristic air of invincible common sense with which its initiator, having hit on a peculiarly happy expedient for cheering the enforced leisure of his imprudent friend, steadily maintained his position, armed against Wakefield's superior erudition by better judgement and a stronger sense of style.

The term Tabulae Iliacae is conventionally applied to twenty low reliefs scattered through museums from Warsaw to New York. The common name conceals a bewildering artistic farrago: the earliest Tabula, the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina (1 A; Plate II; Fig. 3), is mid-Augustan (cf. p. 48), the latest (19J) late Antonine (Sadurska 94). Five of the Tabulae bear the name Theodorus and I shall argue (p. 27) that he is the craftsman responsible for their execution. Where provenance is known, it is always Rome or the Roman Campagna. The materials of the Tabulae vary widely: most, but not all, are of some sort of marble, white, yellow, and Giallo Antico (Sadurska 13). Little can be said of their size, for not one survives complete. It would appear, however, that the largest rectangular Tabula, the calcite 1 A, was originally c. 25 cm by 42 cm (Sadurska 14). Two, portraying the Shield of Achilles, were circular (4N and 5O) and 5O may have had a radius of 20 cm (Sadurska 47). The name Iliacae is appropriate only in as much as eleven out of twenty Tabulae portray episodes from the Iliad (Sadurska 15 + 20Par.) and six the Sack of Ilium; others, however, represent (e.g.) Alexander's victory at Arbela and the apotheosis of Hercules. What the Tabulae do display in common is a combination of low reliefs in miniature and inscriptions, often extensive and not always on the same topic as the reliefs (see Plate II). In ancient art, only the Megarian bowls (cf. p. 47) stand comparison, and their ratio of text to illustration is substantially lower.

The work of Cherniss on Aristotle's criticism of the Presocratics may be compared with that of Jaeger on the development of Aristotle's own thought as contained in his Aristoteles of 1923. Jaeger modestly described that epoch-making work as a Grundlegung or foundation for the history of the philosopher's development, and as such it has been of value not only for itself but in the stimulus it has given to further study, in the course of which the balance of its conclusions has been to some extent altered. Cherniss's own study is of the same pioneer kind, and if I confess to a feeling that it goes rather too far, the comparison with the now classic work of Jaeger will, I hope, make clear my general admiration and appreciation of the fact that it is a permanent contribution with which all future scholarship will have to reckon.

I cannot at this stage even begin to discuss in detail the mass of erudition on which Cherniss's case is built up. Nevertheless, the very widespread acceptance of his strictures on Aristotle's historical sense suggest that anyone to whom they seem extreme should lose no time in giving voice to his misgivings, even in general terms, before they become irrevocably canonical. This thought has been prompted by the recent monograph of Mr. J. B. McDiarmid, Theophrastus on the Presocratic Causes, at the beginning of which we read simply that ‘the question of Aristotle's bias has been dealt with exhaustively by H. Cherniss’, whose views then become, without further remark, the starting-point of the younger scholar's own inquiry into the reliability of Theophrastus. Since in what follows I may speak critically of McDiarmid on several points, let me say that his main thesis, the dependence of Theophrastus on Aristotle in much of his φυσικων δόξαι and the consequent danger of regarding him as a separate authority for Presocratic thought, seems true enough. The derivation of Theophrastus's judgments from those of his master was already beginning to be recognised with fruitful results, and the time was ripe for a general review of the evidence.

This paper presents a new model for how the voting worked at the Athenian dramatic competitions, and demonstrates its viability mathematically. Previous proposals have either failed to take full account of the ancient sources or have not considered all the possible permutations of judging results. As is generally recognized, ten votes were cast, but in most circumstances not all were counted. Sections I–IV consider the tragic competition at the Dionysia, in which three competitors vied for the prize. For the questions we consider, two likely cases are examined (when the votes are divided 4–3–3 and 5–3–2), then a random distribution covering all possible cases, and finally the situation when two competitors are favoured against a third (when the votes are divided 5–5–0, 5–4–1 and 4–4–2). Section I presents the proposal and situates it within the Athenian cultural context. Section II asks how many lots are typically drawn before a victory is obtained. Section III considers how other places are determined. Section IV introduces the question of ‘fairness’: does the person who receives the most votes actually win? Section V considers adjudication for comedies and at the Lenaia. Section VI considers dithyrambic competitions.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the origins of a political catchphrase, ‘the freedom of the Greeks of Asia’. The opening section presents and analyses first the evidence of Herodotus for the period from the Lydian conquest to the Mycale campaign, then that of Diodorus, where extant, for the same events. The contrasting usage of these two authors poses the question: when did the Greeks of Asia first come to be regularly thought of as a corporate body? That question is studied in the second section through the evidence of Thucydides and later writers for the period of the Athenian empire and that of Xenophon for the Ionian War and the campaigns of the Spartans, especially Agesilaus, in Asia Minor, and an answer is suggested: that the Greeks of Asia first came to be consistently thought of as a unit, and their freedom to be regularly exploited as a slogan, in the years between 400 and 386. The third section attempts to answer the further question which at once arises: why should this have been so?

A generation or so back scholars were disposed to find in Asiatic Greece the origins of most of Hellenic culture and art: and though Panionismus is no longer as openly professed, belief in it is at least implicit in many more recent works. The purpose of this paper is to examine, so far as the evidence permits, the justice of the claim that Ionia was in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the infants' school of Hellas.

It is prudent to begin with a definition. The term ‘Ionian’ has been used in various senses, and this has made for confusion. First of all it is limited to the geographical area of Ionia; then it is extended to include many of the Cyclades and even Euboea; thirdly, though not often nowadays, it may embrace Athens also; yet again it sometimes covers all the Greeks of the East Aegean—Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian. In this paper ‘Ionian’ will be limited to the geographical Ionia: and the Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians of the East Aegean will be grouped together as ‘East Greek,’ according to current archaeological usage.

(1) Oidipous' self-blinding appears to be an act of madness, linked primarily with his incest, rather than with his parricide.

(2) Blinding for sexual trespasses is so common in tradition that its appropriateness cannot be discussed in the abstract.

(3) Greek data confirm the clinical finding that the eyes tend to symbolise the male organs, and blinding castration.

(4) This inference is further confirmed by the finding that blinding and castration are mutually exclusive punishments.

(5) Oidipous' total crime was a ritually patterned sequence of two crimes: the killing of the King (Father) makes incest with the Queen (Mother) possible—as it does also in infantile oedipal fantasies. In the Oidipous myth a patrilineal succession model is (temporarily) disguised as a matrilineal method of royal succession.

(6) Though the blinding of the criminal is not required by the Delphic oracle, and though Oidipous' final exile does execute the oracle's command, this does not imply that the self-blinding does not punish (in part) also the parricide, for it can be shown that death, castration and blinding can, and do, symbolise each other. This means that Oidipous' self-blinding is a heavily overdetermined (multiply motivated) deed of frenzy.

(7) The manner in which Oidipous blinds himself has a very exact clinical parallel which, together with other data, seems to suggest an unconscious nexus between sexual problems, self-blinding and a woman's breasts (or nipples, or brooches).

(8) The ‘dramatische Technik’ explanation does not exclude the possibility of justifying a seemingly illogical detail in tragedy also by means of depth psychological considerations.

The study of Athenian history in the fifth century, and particularly in the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, derives much of its flesh and blood from inscriptions, but most inscriptions lose their full value if they cannot be dated. From the Peace of Nicias in 421 onwards it was customary to include the name of the archon in the prescript of decrees, but before the Peloponnesian War the practice was rare and random. The alliances with Egesta, Leontini and Rhegium (IG i2 19, 51, 52) were dated in this way, but not the treaty with Hermione (SEG × 15). The settlement imposed on Chalcis by Athens after the crushing of her revolt is not dated (IG i2 39), whereas earlier regulations for Miletus (IG i2 22) include the name of the archon of the year. Sometimes a single archon's name will date a whole series of records: the first tribute list, for example, is explicitly dated by archon, but the name is lost and the lists that follow are numbered only in relation to the first; the archon, however, is recorded in the thirty-fourth list, and the name is preserved, Aristion archon for 421/0, and from this we can safely infer that the first list records the payments of 454/3. Similarly the early accounts of the Parthenon, while recording the first secretary of the Boule, do not mention the archon and merely add the number in the series; but from 437/6 at least the archon's name was added, and the survival of the name of Crates, archon for 434/3, at the head of the thirteenth list enables us to date the remaining records in the series.

Three movements of expansion can be distinguished in what we know of. the history of the Greeks. The first, that of the so-called Dorian, and Ionian migrations, left them in possession of the Greek mainland, the principal islands of the Aegean, and the western seaboard of Asia Minor. The second, that of Greek colonisation properly so-called, extended the Greek world to the limits familiar to us in the history of Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries. The third, in which. Macedonian kings act as leaders, began with the conquests of Alexander, and resulted in that Hellenisation of the East which was the permanent achievement of his successors. The general character of the second of these movements forms the subject of this essay.

The literary stock of Achilles Tatius has been increasing steadily in value since 1964, when an article about his romance Leucippe and Cleitophon in an encyclopedia of world literature began, ‘Das Werk weist alle Mängel seines Genres samt einigen zusätzlichen eigenen auf.’ To be sure, Leucippe and Cleitophon remains among the last and probably least read of the Greek romances; yet in the last decades critics have begun to draw attention to original and effective aspects of its composition. As is usually the case, this revaluation has been accompanied not so much by the discovery of new virtues which had previously been neglected, but rather by the redescription as virtues of what had always counted as vices. Thus Cleitophon's lack of heroism can now be welcomed as comic realism, the implausibly melodramatic twists of the plot praised as selfconsciously theatrical ironies, and the baroque frigidity of the style counted as loony metaphysical wit or as Brechtian Entfremdung seffekt.

No myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, none perhaps has been so completely misunderstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief: she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to; hope only remains. The box of Pandora is proverbial, and that is the more remarkable as she never had a box at all.

The myth of the making of Pandora we may reserve for the present and focus our attention on the famous ‘box.’ ‘Jupiter gave her a beautiful box,’ says Lemprière (p. 543). ‘In the house of Epimetheus was a closed jar;’ says the last edition of Smith's Classical Dictionary, but a little further down we read: ‘later writers relate that the box contained all the blessings of the gods.’ The reference given for this statement is Hyginus, Fab. cxlii., in which there is no mention whatever of any jar, casket or box, only an account of the creation and descendants of Pandora.

The following five notes deal with some neglected or controversial points concerning Alexander's operations in the two decisive years January, 332, to January, 330. Though independent of each other, they have a certain external unity, since all concern the crucial ‘third act’ of Alexander's career. Early in 332, the Persians, in spite of Issos, still hoped to recover Asia Minor, raise trouble in Greece, and transfer the seat of war back to the Aegean. Two years later, after Alexander's dash to Persepolis, Darius was no longer King of Persia; he was left indeed with virtually no forces except his Greek mercenaries and the troops of the Bactrian barons, who had ideas of their own.

I have found myself at certain points in disagreement with the views of Sir William Tarn. Tarn has indeed left little to be said about Alexander, except where one disagrees; and I would not wish to end this prefatory note without an expression of admiration for his great work.

The separate entrances of the male and female semi-choruses in Aristophanes' Lysistrata are marked by an unusual bit of stagecraft whose importance to a general theme of the play the salvation of Athens–has never been fully appreciated. The old men enter the stage at v. 254 each carrying a pair of olive-wood logs, a vine torch and a small pot of live embers. Having heard that Lysistrata and her comrades have taken control of the Acropolis, they come intent on burning down the gates of the citadel and removing the women, whom they liken to the Spartan general Cleomenes who occupied the citadel in 510. The men pile their logs before the closed gate, ignite their torches in the hot coals and then try to set fire to the logs (vv. 307-11). But after a few minutes of hilarious bumbling their plans are foiled for good by the sudden appearance of a semi-chorus of old women who rush in with water-jars on their shoulders or in their hands; these women threaten the men and then finally–with an invocation of the river-god Achelous douse them and their fire (vv. 381-82), thus effectively ending the threat of incineration. In the past, this entire choral routine has been explained in one of two ways: either it is a standard bit of slapstick humour with no importance whatsoever to the development of the comic plot, or it is part of an elaborate sexual pun of Freudian proportions in which the closed entranceway to the Acropolis assaulted by men symbolically prefigures the battle of the sexes that is about to ensue. Of course given the wonderful richness and polyvalence of Aristophanic comedy, it is extremely difficult to deny either of these interpretations. I shall argue here, however, that the staging of the parodos also reflects a very popular type of Greek salvation myth, known to the Athenians from the tragic stage, from the visual arts and from rituals associated with local mystery cults. In light of these parallels drawn from the theatrical and religious life of the city, I shall argue that when the audience saw the women rush onto the stage with their hydriai, they would have undoubtedly seen them in a very positive light as saviours of the city–precisely the role they claim for themselves later in the play.

In one sense the Second Athenian Confederacy did not fail. It was simply abolished in 338 by Philip in the Peace of Demades (Paus. i 25.3), but up till then it continued actively enough. In 346 we see the synedrion engaged in the deliberations on the Peace of Philokratcs (Aisch. ii 60, 86 iii 69–70, 74); a Tenedian went on both the embassies to Philip, representing the allies (Aisch. ii 20, 97, 126); the Peace was made by Philip with Athens and her allies, i.e. the Confederacy. In 346 Mytilene chose to resume membership (GHI 168) and in 343 the synedroi were available in Athens to give evidence about the events of 346 (Aisch. ii 86). In the later 340s, as the fifty-eighth speech of the Demosthenic Corpus shows (cf. §§37–8, 53–6), the machinery of the Confederacy continued to work, and the impression gained from the two surviving decrees which concern the Tenedians (GHI 175, and IG ii2 232) is of willing co-operation between allies and hegemon.

En 1953, P. Amandry résumait ľopinion commune au sujet des adversaires sur mer des Grecs pendant les guerres médiques en écrivant: ‘la marine phénicienne de cette époque est mal connue’. Mon but principal, dans une étude publiée en 1969, était de combler cette lacune irritante: je crus pouvoir démontrer ľexistence, en Phénicie, ďune architecture navale originale et, surtout, ďun type de trière différent du type grec. Ce n'est que de façon incidente que je crus pouvoir attribuer les trières de Nechao au modèle phénicien, ce qui permettait de conserver les conclusions raisonnables de J. A. Davison quant à la date de ľadoption de la trière en Grèce sans mettre en doute la véracité du récit ďHérodote au sujet de ľexistence de trières en Egypte vers 600.

Il n'est pas indifférent de noter que M. A. B. Lloyd, en abordant ľexamen du même probléme, a suivi une démarche très différente: son but principal, en 1972, était ľétude de la marine saïte. Etant donné qu'il n'envisageait pas la possibilité de types de trières différents, qu'il n'acceptait pas la date traditionnelle de ľinvention de la trière à Corinthe que fournit apparemment Thucydide (704 av. J.-C.) et qu'il considérait également comme authentique ľinformation ďHérodote, il ne lui restait plus qu'à déterminer une nouvelle date de naissance de la trière, soit le milieu du 7e s. A ce moment, M. Lloyd ignorait ľexistence de mon article de 1969, auquel il devait consacrer une réfutation en 1975: souhaitant maintenir intégralement ses conclusions de 1972, M. Lloyd était contraint de soutenir que la trière phénicienne, telle que je ľavais décrite, n'avait jamais existé.

Thucydides reports the capture of Skyros ‘next’ (ἔπϵιτα) after that of Eion under the generalship of Cimon, as the first events in his digression (έκβολή) on the Pentekontaëtia. Further details are added by Diodorus (presumably following Ephorus) and Plutarch. It is of some importance to try to determine the date of this event, of even greater importance to see it in correct perspective for Cimon's rising star and Themistocles' falling one.

The only specific indication of time we have is Plutarch's reference to an oracle ‘given to the Athenians when they made an inquiry after the Persian Wars in the archonship of Phaidon’ (i.e., 476/5 B.C.). This has generally been taken to provide a date for the capture of Skyros, and the transference of the bones of Theseus to Athens, which Plutarch says followed it. But it is worth pointing out again, with Busolt, that Plutarch's words give a ‘date’ only for the oracle. Diodorus dates the Skyros campaign (along with Eion before and the Eurymedon victory after) to the archonship of Demotion, 470/69, but his evidence is worth very little on a point of chronology such as this.

Early in 1894 the Committee of the Cyprus Exploration Fund offered the small balance which remained from the excavations of 1891, to the British School of Archaeology in Athens, for use in Cyprus if possible. As a student of the School was then watching the excavations which were being carried on at Amathus on behalf of the British Museum, this sum was applied to defray part of the cost of several small excavations, the principal object of which was to test certain theories current in Cypriote archaeology; though some new ground was broken incidentally.

Five sites were examined in all; none of them exhaustively, but all with distinct and definite result.

I.—Agia Paraskevi (Nicosia District): Bronze Age Necropolis.

The celebrated Bronze Age Necropolis which occupies the edge of the plateau S.W. of Nicosia seemed the most suitable site for making practical acquaintance with the Bronze Age of Cyprus, and for verifying previous observations, with a view to the re-organisation of the Cyprus Museum which took place in the course of the summer.

Fourteen tombs were opened along the northern edge of the plateau, half a mile north of the Church of Agia Paraskevi, to the west of the Larnaka road, and between it and the stone quarries in the direction of the village of Agii Omologitádes. The tombs in the surface of this part of the plateau were found nearly exhausted by Dr. Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavations in 1883–4: but enough evidence was collected to illustrate the general character of the site. Tomb 12, as explained below, was an intruder of Hellenistic or Graeco-Roman date. Similar tombs have been opened on the low hills west of the road to Strobilo village.

This article investigates the scope and meaning of ancient Greek personal religion as an additional dimension - besides official (polis) religion - in which the ancient Greek religious experience articulates itself. I show how ‘personal religion’ is a rather broad and amorphous scholarly category for a number of religious beliefs and practices that, in reflecting individual engagement with the supernatural, do not fit into our conception of polis religion. At the same time, I argue that personal religion should not be seen simply as that which is not official Greek religion. Nor is personal religion simply ‘private’ religion, oikos religion or the religion of those who had no voice in the sphere of politics (metics, women). Rather, ‘personal religion’ combines aspects of public and private. It is a productive category of scholarly research insofar as it helps us to appreciate the whole spectrum of ways individuals in the ancient Greek city received and (if necessary) altered culturally given religious beliefs and practices. Indeed, the examples discussed in this paper reveal a very Greek conversation about the question of what should count as a religious sign and who was to determine its meaning.

Less than two years after the brilliant victories of Plataiai and Mykale, the Athenians and their Ionian kinsfolk, grown weary of the arrogance of Pausanias the king, declined to serve further under Spartan command and in effect withdrew from the Grand Alliance. Instead, they formed an association of their own, centred upon the shrine of all Ionians at Delos, and swore to fight the Mede till iron should float. The date, 478/7 B.C., is contained in the Aristotelian Ἀθηναίων Πολιτϵία, and it is to be trusted. The first military action of the new alliance was to besiege and take Eion upon the Strymon, a Persian fort, its second the capture and resettlement of the island of Skyros, a nest of Dolopian pirates. In both campaigns the allied commander was Kimon. The siege of Eion is dated to the archonship of Phaidon, that is to the year 476/5; and the capture of Skyros followed an oracle which the Athenians had received in this same archonship. The god had commanded them to recover the bones of Theseus and to watch over them in honour among themselves. Driven from Athens by Menestheus the Erechtheid pretender, Theseus had gone to Skyros and there met his death at the hands of King Lykomedes.

The dates of performance of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae are still not generally agreed. The most widely accepted opinion is perhaps that of Wilamowitz, that Lysistrata was produced at the Lenaia and Thesmophoriazusae at the City Dionysia in the same year, 411 B.C. But both Schmid and Gelzer, in their authoritative works on Aristophanes, have given reasons for reversing these assignments and putting Th. first; Russo holds that both plays were produced on the same occasion; and Rhodes has recently revived the view—which goes back to Dobree and beyond—that Th. is to be dated to 410, during the régime of the Five Thousand.

The one unequivocal and undisputed datum we have comes from Hypothesis I to Lys., which tells us that that play was produced in the archonship of Kallias (412/1). Further information can be elicited from a variety of sources:

(1) statements by scholiasts giving the date, relative to one of the plays, of an event whose date is independently known;

(2) references (or, less safely, failures to refer) in the plays themselves to datable events;

(3) references to the season of the year at which the performance took place;

(4) considerations of the type of play more likely to have been produced at one or the other festival;

(5) references in one play to the other;

(6) the political, military and diplomatic conditions, movements, prospects and attitudes reflected in the plays, considered with reference to contemporary events.