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.

The aim of this paper is to explore the suggestion that Parmenides's poem, or at any rate some of it, has light to throw on the difficulties of the myth of Er in the Republic. Parmenides descends to the underworld as a shaman-poet in search of knowledge, Er goes there by the fortuitous circumstance of his death-like trance; but both katabaseis share a common setting, and in both the hero is shown a glimpse of the real shape and mechanism of the universe. In the case of Parmenides the exhibit is two-fold, both ‘the unshakeable heart of rounded truth’ and ‘the opinions of men in which there is no true belief’. Interest has been mainly concentrated on the former, metaphysical, section, from which the greater part of our fragments derive; but the latter contained, in the system of stephanai, an account of the appearance of the universe, which is interesting, both on its own account and in view of the light it throws on the difficulties of Er's myth. I shall consider first (I) the setting of Parmenides's poem as it appears in the opening lines, then (II) propose an interpretation of the system of stephanai, and (III) seek support for some of its main features in the general tradition of cosmological speculation from Homer downwards. Finally (IV), I shall proceed to examine the myth of Er and offer an interpretation of some of its difficulties which will take account of this body of earlier thought.

In a somewhat polemical article on ‘Solstices, Equinoxes, and the Presocratics’ D. R. Dicks has recently challenged the usual view that the Presocratics in general, and the Milesians in particular, made significant contributions to the development of scientific astronomy in Greece. According to Dicks, mathematical astronomy begins with the work of Meton and Euctemon about 430 B.C. What passes for astronomy in the earlier period ‘was still in the pre-scientific stage’ of ‘rough-and-ready observations, unsystematically recorded and imperfectly understood, of practical men’ whose chief concern was to fix the seasons for ploughing, seed-time, sailing voyages and religious festivals. Ionian speculation, says Dicks, took very little note of such observation: ‘some of its wilder flights of fancy might have been avoided, if it had taken more’. In this account of the rise of Greek astronomy, the natural philosophers have no part to play. Their theories represent a speculative enterprise without a scientific future, a philosophic sideline with no impact on the development of observational science from Hesiod to Meton or the development of mathematical astronomy from Meton to Ptolemy.

I believe that such a dichotomy between early philosophy and early science in Greece is misguided in principle, and that it seriously distorts our picture of the initial phases of each discipline. It also imposes a considerable strain upon our credulity. Take the case of Anaxagoras who, according to Plato and Theophrastus, had given a causal explanation of eclipses of the moon a generation before Meton.

Εἰσαγγελία, ‘impeachment’, has regularly had a few pages devoted to it in books on Athenian law or the Athenian constitution. Recently a book has been published on the subject, one of a series on Athenian legal topics by M. H. Hansen: in it he assembles the evidence for 144 certain, probable or possible instances of εἰσαγγελία between 500 and 323 B.C., and his analysis leads him to disagree with much that has been said hitherto. However, I am not persuaded that all his own conclusions are correct.

One note of warning should be sounded at the beginning, εἰσαγγέλλειν, like γράφεσθαι, φαίνειν, ἐνδεικνύναι and other verbs used of initiating legal proceedings, is a word within whose normal range of meaning one or more technical senses developed. The existence of a technical sense did not, of course, put an end to the non-technical use of the word, and we must always be alert to the possibility that even in a legal context a word may have been used not in its technical legal sense, or that in part or all of the period with which we are concerned a set of technical terms, each with its own distinct meaning, may not have fully crystallised: for instance, unless the word is corrupt, Lys. x 1 uses εἰσήγγελλε of a prosecution which was not an εἰσαγγελία in any technical sense of the word (Gernet and Bizos therefore emend to ἐπήγγελλε); within a single speech, Isae. xi, a charge of maltreating an orphan is referred to both as an εἰσαγγελία (§§6, 15) and as a γραφή (§§28, 31, 32, 35).

This paper analyses one aspect of Xenophon's representation of space, focusing on the famous stages-and-parasangs formula employed by Xenophon in the Anabasis. It starts by discussing the meaning of his terms, and then explores patterns of repetition and variation in his account of the march, split into three sections (the marches upcountry, to the sea and along the coast). Rather than explaining Xenophon's usage in terms of sources, it suggests that variations in the marching formula elaborate the successive stages of the Greeks' encounter with the spaces of the Achaemenid Empire.

In the critical years that followed the death of Kimon, it is clear that Thoukydides son of Melesias played an important role in opposition. It is less clear what he stood for positively, and Wade-Gery's brilliant and controversial article (JHS lii [1932] 205–27 = Essays in Greek History 239–70), for all its sensitivity to the values of the Athenian aristocracy, did not succeed in settling this issue. My argument here is mainly negative, that Plutarch's description (Per. 11–12 and 14) of the conflict between Thoukydides and Perikles, our only detailed witness, is worthless and has seriously distorted our picture of this period and of Athenian attitudes to the empire; and that the colony at Thourioi, as Ehrenberg maintained, was meant to serve strictly Athenian interests.

1. Plutarch and the Anti-Imperialists

For Ed. Meyer (Forschungen zur alten Geschichte ii 86; Gd A iv2 1.690 n. 1) it was beyond doubt that Plutarch here preserves an authentic account of the debate over the building programme. Wade-Gery assumed the same (240–3, cf. Hesp. xiv [1945] 224–5), and D. L. Stockton (Hist. viii [1959] 69), arguing against Wade-Gery, still calls this a good and possibly contemporary source.2Since the most notable characteristic of these chapters is their vehement rhetoric and the high proportion of nonsense, this position needs more defence than it has received.

Among the manifest improbabilities in the tale of Aristeides' message to Themistocles on the night before Salamis, most notable, certainly, is that the information Aristeides imparted supplied indeed a lack but effected no response until its duplication by the crew of a Tenian trireme. The rejection with which the episode has been met is thoroughly deserved. But a problem, that of motive, remains, and other questions arise. For unlike the setting of the story, which has some claim to dramatic, though not to historical, validity, the supposititious message cannot, as it neither illustrates character nor exaggerates truth, simply be explained as a fanciful and harmless accretion to the Aristeides legend. How, then, came the story to be told? One possibility is worth considering. As it is likely prima facie that Herodotus derived his account of Aristeides at Psyttaleia (viii 95) from the same source that brought him to Salamis with his message, the message may have been intended to smooth his way to Psyttaleia. The story of his deed on that island, therefore, deserves attention.

The account arouses suspicion. Its context, the epilogue to the battle, where Herodotus metes out blame and praise, is not reassuring. Whatever information was related to Herodotus about the exploit, it was not embedded, apparently, in the sequence of events of which the battle of Salamis consisted. He seems to have only the vaguest notion of the relation of the exploit to the battle as a whole— viii 95; and lightly does he accord to Aristeides, apparently a private person, the leadership of the landing party.

In discussing the transition from bronze to iron in Anatolia, Dr. Stefan Przeworski incidentally identifies Homeric conditions with the stage in the historical development of metallurgy which he calls Chalcosideric. Professor Nilsson and Miss Lorimer have argued briefly but effectively that the poems contain elements from different periods; but belief in an historical ‘Homeric Society’ dies hard and justifies a more detailed examination of all the references to metals in the poems.

Przeworski's transitional age began about 1300 B.C. in Anatolia and about a century later in Greece; in both it ended about 700 B.C. Before it began, bronze was the useful material for all industrial purposes, and the rare uses of iron were ornamental or magical. After it ended, iron was the normal industrial material, and the more malleable bronze was used for fine work or elaborate modelling. The characteristics of the intermediate period are: 1. Imitation of Late Bronze Age types in iron. 2. Simultaneous appearance of bronze and iron objects of the same purpose and type. 3. Inlay of bronze objects with iron. 4. Combination in the same weapon or tool of iron working and bronze ornamental parts. 5. Addition of iron working parts to bronze objects such as cult-wagons and utensils. 6. Use of bronze rivets on iron weapons and tools. 7. Repair of bronze objects with iron parts (Przeworski 175–6.) Most of these characteristics are so technical that they are unlikely to be reflected in poetry. Moreover, so many bronze objects were in common use at all periods, including the full Iron Age, that the most significant evidence may be taken to be the relative value of the metals, the relative frequency of bronze and iron weapons and tools, and the degree of familiarity shown with the methods of the forge as distinct from the foundry.

Accounts of the campaign and the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC have in general two serious defects: they do not consider the problems of supply on both sides, and they make no attempt to match the topographical details of the ancient accounts with the presumed scene of the engagement. When I came to study the problem of supply, I reached the conclusion that the place of the engagement had to be farther west than had hitherto been believed, and in October 1985 I visited that place and matched the details with it. The result is this article, which is divided into four parts: the campaign, my reconnaissance of the ground, the battle, and some criticisms of earlier interpretations. There are three Appendices: the Battle of 364 BC, ‘Dog-heads’ and the Roman Encampment.

Herodotus’ narrative of the testing of various Greek oracles by King Croesus of Lydia (1.46–54) has long been viewed with justifiable scepticism. A newly published verse dedication from the sanctuary of Apollo Ismenios at Thebes (Papazarkadas 2014: 233–48) sheds welcome light on Herodotus’ sources for this part of his Croesus-narrative. Herodotus’ account of Croesus’ testing of the oracle of Amphiaraus at Thebes appears to have been an imaginative extrapolation from the text of this inscription. But there is good reason to believe that Herodotus significantly misinterpreted the historical context and significance of the epigraphic text he had before him; in particular, the real author of the dedication is unlikely to have been King Croesus of Lydia, and may instead have been an Athenian aristocrat of the Alcmaeonid family. The new inscription from Thebes sheds light both on Herodotus’ use of documentary evidence and on the creative misreading of early epigraphic texts by Theban sanctuary personnel in the mid fifth century BC.

The Cycle of sixth-century epigrams edited by Agathias Scholasticus is the subject of a recent article by Mr and Mrs A. Cameron (JHS lxxxvi [1966] 6 ff.), who argue cogently that it was published in the early years of Justin II, and not the later years of Justinian, as has hitherto been supposed. Ca. also suggest identifications for many of the poets and imperial officials who figure in the Cycle. They do not, however, exhaust all the identifications that can be made, and some of those suggested by them require amplification or correction. Furthermore, Ca.'s view of the dating of the Cycle leads them, it seems to me, to underestimate its Justinianic character. The following observations are offered without prejudice to the merit of Ca.'s article as a whole.

Among the Cyclic poets, only Julian the ex-Prefect of the East stands in close relationship to the political life of the age. His involvement in the Nika insurrection of 532 is attested by historical sources and, as Ca. claim (13), by two epigrams of the Anthology. The latter, however, contain difficulties passed over by Ca. In the first place, of the two epigrams on the cenotaph of Hypatius, only AP vii 591 is certainly from Julian's pen; vii 592 is unattributed in the Palatine MS., a fact which Ca. omit to mention. (It is absent from the Planudean MS.) The state of affairs in P is no accident, vii 591, though eulogising the dead man and alluding openly to the casting of his corpse into the sea, is moderate in tone, and would have caused no more offence to Justinian than Procopius's published account of the affair.

In the village of Beşköprü, about five kilometres to the south-west of the town of Adapazari in western Turkey, and just to the north of the main Istanbul–Ankara highway, there stands a large well-constructed bridge; its fabric is generally in good condition apart from the destruction of a short section of the causeway near its eastern end to permit the passage of the branch railway line to Adapazan. Although the bridge now only spans two minor side channels of the small stream called the Çark Deresi, which drains Lake Sophon (modern Sapanca), there is no doubt that the bridge was originally designed on the orders of the emperor Justinian to span the mighty Sangarius (modern Sakarya) which at present flows in a south–north direction about three kilometres to the east of the bridge. The only detailed first-hand account of the bridge is still that by Texier, whose description has to be corrected on some important points.

Professor R. T. Hallock generously allows me to publish here his text and translation of the hitherto unpublished Persepolis Fortification Tablet Q-1809, to which he has referred in Cahiers de la delegation francaise en Iran viii (1978) 115.

The modern literature on divorce in Classical Athens is slight, the only detailed discussion that of W. Erdmann, Die Ehe im alten Griechenland (Munich 1934; repr. New York 1979) 384–403. A rare certainty in our knowledge is the ease with which a husband could terminate marriage. He had only to send his wife away, that is, back to her paternal family, and the marriage was at an end. From this it is tempting to infer that divorce in Athens was frequent, even casual. Not surprisingly that view has had a long tradition in works on marriage and family, law, society, and ancient Greece in general. It is a view almost surely incorrect, however, as the following examination of the evidence will show.

Thucydides' digression (i 126–38) on the later careers of Pausanias and Themistokles is deservedly famous for the lucidity of its style and the interest of its subject matter, but the chronological difficulties of the apparently perspicuous narrative are notorious. A. W. Gomme singles out the date of Themistokles' flight to Asia Minor as the major difficulty of the first half of the Pentekontaetia, ‘a difficulty which, if it could be solved, would lead to the solution of most of the others’. He concludes his discussion by saying: ‘The question remains unsolved.’ However, some simple facts (for which Thucydides is himself the authority) about the number and ages of Pausanias' sons have a direct bearing on the time of Pausanias' death and so on the date of Themistokles' flight; curiously enough their importance has not been noticed.

After the deaths of his uncle Leonidas and his father Kleombrotos in 480, Pausanias became regent for his nephew Pleistarchos, the son of Leonidas and Gorgo, who died in 459/8 or 458/7 and before the battle of Tanagra. Pausanias' eldest son Pleistoanax then succeeded as the king of the Agiad royal house. Thucydides (i 107.2) says that he was still a minor and that his uncle Nikomedes, the younger brother of Pausanias, commanded for him at Tanagra in 458 or 457. Pleistoanax did, however, command the Peloponnesian forces which invaded Attica in 446, just after the revolt of Euboia (Thuc. i 114.2).

Widely differing opinions have been expressed on Plato's place in the history of Greek science, as on many other features of his work. The view that Plato's attitude and influence were nothing short of disastrous for science has been widespread. Platt, for instance, put it that ‘Plato, being first and foremost a metaphysician with a sort of religious system, would not have us study anything but metaphysics and a kind of mystic religion’. Dampier-Whetham believed that ‘Plato was a great philosopher, but in the history of experimental science he must be counted a disaster’. In his History of Ancient Geography J. O. Thomson spoke of Plato's ‘positive contempt for observation, upon which natural science rests’, and in his influential book on Greek Science Farrington put it that ‘from the scientific point of view the Timaeus is an aberration’.

On the other side Plato has found almost as many defenders from among those who were primarily philosophers, or philosophers of science, or even practising physicists, as from among the specialist Greek scholars themselves. In such books as Science and the Modern World (1926) and Adventures of Ideas (1933) Whitehead granted that Plato was responsible for diverting interest from the observation of particular facts in physical science, but suggested that ‘Plato had another message … An intense belief that a knowledge of mathematical relations would prove the key to unlock the mysteries of the relatedness within Nature was ever at the back of Plato's cosmological speculations’. There is a sense, then, in which ‘Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than does Aristotle’. In 1927 Shorey quoted Whitehead and substantially developed this line of interpretation in his paper ‘Platonism and the History of Science’, still probably the most outspoken vindication of Plato's reputation as a scientist.

In his Presidential address to the Hellenic Society in 1914, Walter Leaf expressed the hope that a study of the history of ancient Corinth might be undertaken. He directed special attention to the economic history, to be interpreted mainly from the material remains of Corinth and of Corinthian industry. This task has not yet been carried out. Much has been written on Corinthian art and industry, but the historical conclusions of these archaeological studies remain still to be drawn. The Corinthians, more than other Greeks, had an individual way of life, recognised by their contemporaries, which can be used as a point from which to survey the Greek world; it is expressed by Herodotus in a single phrase, ἤκιστα δὲ Κορίνθιοι ὄνονται τοὺς χειροτέχνας. The economic approach should therefore be especially suited to the history of Corinth. But before this interpretation can be written, we must acquire a solid body of fact about Corinthian history and economic life, drawing chiefly on the material remains. What follows is the first chapter of such a study, dealing with the beginnings and early history of Corinth down to about 750 B.C. Most of my conclusions are not new, but I hope that some of the arguments are. The basis is the archaeological evidence uncovered by the Americans at Corinth, by Payne at Perachora.

Time has done almost its worst with the cultural and social history of Western Greece in the period from Hieron's succession in 478 to the death of Aeschylus in 456. It has left us no complete work by any Western Greek author; and for a chronicler of the period it has been able to do nothing better than a Diodorus Siculus. As a result, most of those details in the picture that are not missing are obscure. Close observation is fruitless, except only at one or two points where there still falls the brilliant but fugitive light of a Pindaric ode. Even so, if we step far enough back, a general composition emerges about which, I believe, there will not be much disagreement.

This was a precocious culture, largely called into being by artificial means, and hence short-lived. But while it lived it anticipated in many ways the culture and the problems of Old Greece a generation and more later. Here already was at least one city-state swollen to outsize proportions, with a fluid population for which the moral and social patterns of the close-knit archaic community must inevitably have been losing their meaning. Here already was that violent confrontation of old and new, tradition and free inquiry, which is more familiar to us from the Athens of the late fifth century, from the time of Euripides, Socrates and Aristophanes. There is a religious background of essentially rather primitive mortuary beliefs—that whole region, of course, is the demesne of the Two Goddesses—though these beliefs themselves are taking on new and far from primitive shapes in the minds of the Pythagoreans and their associates. In abrupt contrast to them stand the utterly modern and sophisticated minds of the native Epicharmus and the immigrant Xenophanes; and half-way between there is a Sicilian who embodies in one man the contradictions of the epoch: Empedocles, poet and scientist, author (to the consternation of the learned in modern times) both of the Περὶ Φύσεως and of the Καθαρμοί. The same time, in Syracuse, sees the beginnings of a school of rhetoric—rhetoric, carrying in itself all those fearsome questions as to the relation between the word and the thing, between beauty and truth, which were to perplex Plato well into the fourth century.

The site of Caunus has been much neglected by the field archaeologists. The ruins at Dalyan have been known and identified for more than a hundred years, since Hoskyn found there an inscription mentioning ‘the Council and People of the Caunians’. In this period they have been visited and described twice, by Collignon in 1877 and by Maiuri in 1920. These descriptions are confined to the obvious visible remains; no excavation, and little research, has yet been undertaken. In particular, the inscriptions hitherto published have been few and undistinguished.

The material for the present article was collected during a series of visits to Dalyan from 1946 to 1952. I am much indebted to the active help of the accountant to the fishery, Bay Muharrem Türköz, whose intelligent interest in the antiquities of Caunus was of the greatest assistance at all times. Many of the inscriptions were actually discovered by Ali Demir of Çandir.

A recent article by Dr H. Plommer (‘Shadowy Megara’, JHS xcvii [1977] 75–88) has once again brought to our attention one of the many unresolved architectural problems at the Argive Heraeum—the date of the megalithic terrace on which the archaic temple was built. This terrace has been variously assigned to the Mycenaean, Geometric and Archaic periods and its role in the foundation of the cult has never been ascertained. In view of this continuing lack of consensus among modern scholars and the murkiness of the history of the origins of the Hera sanctuary, a restatement and re-examination of the evidence are in order. In this article I will first consider the date of the terrace and then attempt to place it in the perspective of early cult activity in the Argolid. This will require a survey of the proposed dates for the terrace and a close look at the remains of the Archaic Hera temple and its stratigraphic and architectural relation to the terrace. An inquiry into the form of the terrace will lead to an explanation of its unique architectural form and to a hypothesis for the reason for its construction. Inspection of the remains and a reconstruction of the original form of other early cult centers, notably Mycenae and Tiryns, will provide a context for understanding the origin and architectural form of the early Heraeum. In conclusion I will suggest that the presence of Mycenaean monuments in the Argolid, more than elsewhere, played a crucial role in the formation and architectural organization of the principal cults.