Historians have found the battle of the Granicus River the most puzzling of Alexander's battles. For this there are three reasons. First, the ancient sources are at variance over the time and purpose of Alexander's crossing of the river. Second, the purpose and the effect of Alexander's sideways movement in the river-bed have not been satisfactorily explained. Third, the topographical indications in the sources do not correspond fully with the present lie of the ground. It will be well to treat these matters in the same order.

In the spring of 1903 I was enabled by a grant from the Craven Fund of the University of Oxford to return to the site of Naukratis. Having left certain parts of the Mounds unexplored in 1899 because they were either too high, or too sodden with the infiltration of water, I intended to attack them whenever the sebakh diggers should have removed the unproductive upper layers, and a season of low Nile level had occurred. The results of this campaign, the last, I expect, that will be undertaken at Naukratis, I embody in the following Report, discussing at the same time certain points on which new light can be thrown from other sources.

The parasol, whatever the conditions of use, ultimately functions as a social symbol as it satisfies no utilitarian need. The operative mechanism of that symbol varies from culture to culture but the parasol is polysemous even at its least complicated, when held by the person to be protected without allusion to foreign social systems and in the context of single-sex usage. For example, as an implement of fashionable feminine attire of over a century ago, the parasol signified the maintenance of a standard of beauty that precluded extended activities out of doors and the delicate constitution of the lady thus protected, both with further implications of ‘good breeding’ and economic inutility; and the wasteful employment of items that must be changed with the costume and discarded before unserviceable to suit the dictates of fashion. Both facets—termed ‘conspicuous leisure’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ by Veblen—conjointly served to advertise the wealth of the individual man on the basis of whose property such extravagance and non-productive practice could be sustained.

In the ancient Greek city, was sacred land distinct from public land? Were there points of intersection or areas of overlap between the two or was there no distinction at all? First, evidence from Athens is examined through a discussion of N. Papazarkadas' recent monograph, Sacred and Public Land in Ancient Athens. Three criteria for classifying landed property as sacred are proposed in that study: the prohibition or authorization to cultivate sacred land; the use of revenues for cultic purposes; and the inalienability of sacred land. But this trio of criteria does not in fact allow us to establish a clear division between sacred land and public land. The evidence from other cities shows the existence of land defined simultaneously as ‘sacred and public’ and the possibility of co-ownership and joint possession between god and city; a distinct place within the city's total property could also be reserved for sacred property (either land or funds).

Il. xxiv 22–30

It is now almost half a century since Karl Reinhardt first published what must still rank as the most brilliant and perceptive attempt to explain the significance of the above passage for the Iliad as a whole.

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the (non)-reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’.

The period of Demosthenes has a special interest for the student of Greek politics; more evidence exists, in the form of speeches, for the actual working of Athenian affairs in this period than in any other. It should therefore provide the starting-point in any attempt to find out the presuppositions of Athenian politics, to find what sort of behaviour is habitually expected of politicians and what motives are taken for granted as the normal motives of public men. Here the political scene at the entry of Demosthenes into politics will be examined in the hope of contributing towards answering these questions. For the ascertainable facts, preserved mainly in Speeches xx, xxii and xxiv of Demosthenes; are comparatively plentiful, and so they may be used in order to criticise current assumptions about the nature of political parties and conflicts in ancient Athens.

A preliminary question concerns the dates of these three speeches. Dionysius of Halicarnassus assigns Speeches xx and xxii to 355/4 and Speech xxiv to 353/2. It is hoped to defend elsewhere the general credibility of the Dionysian dates for the Demosthenic speeches. That for Speech xxii has been seriously questioned by Mr. D. M. Lewis.

A large number of the most informative fragments of the Hellenistic Greek historians are transmitted by Athenaeus. Unlike the frequently jejune evidence provided by scholiasts, lexicographers and the like, these texts allow us to draw historiographical conclusions about lost writers: on this basis, scholars have posited, for example, the place of a given author in the Hellenistic ‘schools’ of history. The importance of Athenaeus as a source for history-writing between Xenophon and Diodorus calls for detailed study of the Deipnosophist's method of citing these lost authors. The present article focuses on Athenaeus' testimony concerning the downfall of Archaic Sybaris through luxury and excess in order to show that certain phrases, sentence patterns and even trains of thought can be reliably identified as belonging to Athenaeus rather than the cited authority. This discovery entails surprising results: traditions ascribing the destruction of Sybaris to morally corrosive luxury are late and of little historical value. More generally, the debilitating effects of luxury cannot serve as an exemplum supporting the claim that Hellenistic writers tended to explain historical events through moral causes; apparent evidence for this causal nexus is better assigned to Athenaeus than to the historians he names. In view of these conclusions, a cautious reassessment of all Athenaeus’ testimony on fragmentary historians is appropriate.

The first part of this paper briefly reviews current theories as to the origins of the Classical style, and proposes an alternative approach. The second part, making use of some rather neglected pieces of literary evidence, attempts to reconstruct the circumstances in which this distinctive sculptural style was created, and presents it in a new light: as the ingenious solution to a specific artistic problem which confronted fifth-century Greek sculptors as a result of their final rejection of archaic stylization.

The idea of the ‘unity of opposites’ allows one to see important connections between phenomena normally treated separately: verbal style, ritual, tragic action and cosmology. The stylistic figure of Satzparallelismus in lamentation and mystic ritual expresses the unity of opposites (particularly of life and death) as oxymora. Both rituals were factors in the genesis of tragedy, and continued to influence the style and action of mature tragedy. The author advances new readings of various passages of the Oresteia, which is seen to advocate the replacement of a Herakleitean model of the unity of opposites with a Pythagorean model of their reconciliation.

The general view of the relationship between Euripides and his fellow citizens which seems at present to hold the field received its most recent, most extreme, and most eloquent expression in the Introduction to Professor D. L. Page's edition of the Medea. Here we read: ‘Foreshadowed, too, already in Medea is that great burden of unpopularity which was to oppress the poet throughout his life. The sequel was the ridicule and hatred which Aristophanes reflects: the climax was his voluntary exile to Macedonia in sorrow and disillusion. Euripides was not the only teacher whom the Athenians persecuted, though they returned to him again and again, admiring while they hated, moved while they mocked and slandered.’ After quoting vv. 292 ff., where Medea speaks of the φθόνος incurred by those with a reputation for σοφία, Page continues, ‘History traces a single undeviating line from this passage of Medea through the bitter pages of Aristophanes to the final scene of an old man wandering out into the world friendless and embittered.’ A similar picture had already been presented by Wilamowitz and Murray; though Wilamowitz, in his critical account of the life of Euripides published in 1899, thinks that it was chiefly in the last period of his life in Athens, from the production of the Troades in 415, that the tension between Euripides and his countrymen became acute, and Murray similarly notes as a significant point the production of the Troades, which ‘set a flame of discord for ever between his people and himself’. Of his last years in Athens Murray writes, ‘Whatever the cause, shortly after the production of the Orestes in 408 the old poet's endurance snapped, and at the age apparently of seventy-six, he struck off into voluntary exile.’ The general picture, then, is of Euripides spending the last twenty-five years of his life in Athens, especially from 415 onwards, in an atmosphere of increasing isolation, unpopularity, and persecution, shot through with occasional gleams of approbation, until in 408 the tension became unendurable and he left Athens in voluntary exile.

In a short article published one hundred years ago, J.W. Headlam presented the thesis that in Athenian law the function of the challenge to torture slaves was to propose an alternative method of trial outside the dikastêrion, a kind of ordeal. The thesis met immediate opposition and despite a brief rejoinder by Headlam to his first critic it has been rejected by those writing on Athenian law up to now, including G. Thür, whose monograph is by far the most important work on the subject. However, the significance of the issue compels us not to let it drop. For it touches not only upon the use of torture, which affects our understanding of the position of slaves, but also upon the Athenian rules of evidence, indeed, their entire method of dispute resolution. The purpose of the present paper is, first (I) to revive Headlam's thesis in a modified form and (II) to answer the criticisms against it. I shall argue that Headlam was essentially correct with regard to the judicial function of the challenge, but his association of it with the trial by ordeal was misplaced. Finally, (III) I shall touch upon the influence of rhetoricians in Athens, for they appear responsible for some of the disagreement.

This article examines social interaction in Homer in the light of modern conversation analysis, especially Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Some notoriously problematic utterances are explained in terms of their ‘off-record’ significance. One particular off-record conversation strategy is characterized by Homer as kertomia, and this is discussed in detail. The article focusses on social problems at the end of Achilles' meeting with Priam in Iliad 24, and in particular on the much-discussed word ἐπικερτομέων (24.649).

From the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE the Greeks settled an astounding number of new cities on foreign lands from the Black Sea to the coast of Spain, and these new civic foundations generated narratives designed to record and celebrate a city's origin. In general, the Greeks loved to speculate about beginnings; the births of heroes, the origins of cults, and the founding of cities all formed part of their aetiological repertoire. While tales of city foundations appear prominently in archaic literature, I will argue that foundation (or ktisis) poetry does not, as is commonly assumed, function as an autonomous literary genre in the archaic period. Genre is determined by type of occasion, not by content, at this time, and there is no evidence for any one specific occasion for which ktisis poetry was intentionally composed and performed. Instead, the foundation narrative always functions as part of a larger project; we find it embedded in many different poetic genres. For these reasons, the ktisis is better understood as a literary topos or theme which adds geographical detail and aetiological focus to a variety of poetic contexts and thus is performed on more than one occasion.

This article discusses the rationale and the implications of the inclusion of slaves as victims of punishable hubris in the law about the graphē hubreōs. It argues that hubris against slaves was a punishable offence in Athens not because slaves had institutionally and legally recognized rights or a modicum of honour, but rather because it was hubris, as a disposition to overstep and overestimate one's claims to honour (although manifested in concrete acts), that was deemed unacceptable. The article also investigates the implications of the law for our understanding of the connectedness of ‘legal’ and allegedly ‘extra-legal’ spaces, as well as advocating an understanding of honour that is not necessarily competitive and zero-sum, but also cooperative and aimed at securing smooth social interaction in all spheres of social life.

In the years immediately following the discovery of the ‘Stele dei Fondatori’ at Cyrene (SEG ix 3) considerable work was done on it, especially on the text, though the condition of this is still not entirely satisfactory. Some attempt was also made to establish whether the ὅρκιον τῶν οἰκιστήρων, which is included in the fourth-century Cyrenaean inscription, may be taken for what it claims to be, namely a seventh-century decree of Thera arranging for the foundation of the colony at Cyrene. The two main works devoted to this were articles by Ferri and Ferrabino. Neither of these can be said to give a final or satisfactory picture, and in fact scholarly opinion has for the most part simply followed Wilamowitz's conclusion, given in his short note appended to the first publication, that the ὅρκιον was invented for this occasion and is comparable with the later κτίσις Μαγνησίας The most that they allow the ὅρκιον is to represent a fifth-century source for Theraean history, used both by Herodotos and the composer of this document. Meiggs is an exception in believing ‘the main substance of the document … to be original’.

In the opening paragraphs of Plato's Parmenides (126A–128E) we learn of a work by Zeno which could be read comfortably at a single sitting. As we know from the surviving fragments, it was full of extraordinarily compressed material. So we could hazard the guess that it could not have taken more than an hour or so to read, since the reading was to be a preliminary to extended discussion. Such a length would match that of the earliest works of scientific prose which have survived intact: the Hippocratic treatises. On Ancient Medicine is about 5,000 words; On Airs, Waters, Places about 6,800. A work of even 5,000 words would have contained the originals of all of Zeno's arguments of which we know and many more besides. From the way the book is talked about here we get the impression that it contained the whole of Zeno's oeuvre. The references are to a single work written when Zeno was still ‘very young’ (say, twenty or a little more). Zeno is made to say it had been ‘stolen’ from him (i.e. put into circulation by unauthorised third parties) before he had made up his mind to publish. If he had put out other works thereafter we would expect some reference to them to drive home his point that the pugnacious temper of that youthful work should not be thought to represent his present outlook. Diogenes Laertius (9, 26) speaks of βιβλία, but in a context which gives no indication that he is following a reliable source. The four titles listed by Suidas (a very late source, perhaps of the tenth century A.D.) inspire no confidence.

This paper is an attempt to interpret certain stones, which have come to light recently on ancient sites in Karia, as parts of ancient oil-presses, on the ground that they are well adapted to fulfil certain purposes which are still essential to the modern native process of oil extraction in that part of Asia Minor and in the adjacent islands. The inference is that the ancient process closely resembled the modern in the principal features which are recounted below.

The Modern Method of extracting olive oil consists of the two processes of grinding and pressing.

In the most primitive mode of grinding which is still in use, the olives are crushed either on a flat stone by a roller, or in a stone trough by a millstone rolling on its edge. In more modern grinders two mill-stones are used, which revolve in a circular trough, as in the grinding of kaolin or cement. The process of grinding seems never to have varied, except as regards the power which is employed; horses having been substituted for men, and steam for horses. In Algeria and Tripoli the circular trough goes back at least to Roman times.

With few surviving Greek sources from Hellenistic Babylonia, we are often ill-informed about the details of Seleucid imperialism ‘on the ground’ — in particular, about the Seleucids' relationship with the Babylonian priestly elites and Babylonian cult and culture. This makes the cuneiform sources all the more important. One of the most intriguing is the Antiochus (or Borsippa) Cylinder, a clay cylinder in the form of a traditional Mesopotamian royal inscription recording Antiochus I's restoration of a Babylonian temple. Although the Cylinder was previously seen as evidence for the adoption of Babylonian cultural forms by the Seleucids, recent readings have analysed it as a product of interaction between Babylonian tradition and Seleucid imperial ideology. Yet the accuracy of such readings crucially depends on situating the Cylinder correctly within its cultural context. Here the inscription is reassessed with close reference to earlier and contemporary Mesopotamian sources. While evidence for ‘copy-and-paste’ redaction imposes significant methodological constraints on textual analysis, certain elements of the Cylinder which are non-traditional from a Babylonian perspective can persuasively be interpreted in terms of Seleucid royal ideology. Ultimately, however, we must question the extent to which the inscription's ideological maneouvres are broadly ‘Babylonian’ or ‘imperial’, rather than shaped by and targeted at a specific local context.

Virgil in the first Georgie, at an early stage of his enquiry into the service of Ceres, enumerates first various heavy agricultural implements, the ‘ponderous strength of the plough-share,’ the ‘slow-rolling waggons of the Eleusinian Mother,’ ‘hurdles’ and ‘harrows,’ and the ‘grievous weight of the mattock.’ Next he passes on to tell of the husbandman's lighter gear.

Virgea praeterea Celei vilisque supellex, Arbuteae crates, et mystica vannus lacchi.

The object of the following paper is to discuss three questions that arise out of Virgil's statement.