It has been demonstrated by F. Herrmann that the earliest issues of Larisean coinage, which are earlier than those of any other Thessalian city, are struck on the Persian standard. The Athenian tyrants of the Chersonese struck coins which conformed to the Persian as well as to the Attic system, but the adoption of the Persian standard by an independent Greek state is, so far as can be at present ascertained, an unique phenomenon. Nevertheless, though his conclusion is remarkable, the arguments of Herrmann appear to be incontestable and are accepted by numismatists. The purpose of this article is to shew that this discovery corroborates rather than conflicts with the evidence of ancient literary authorities. It is hard to reconcile only with modern interpretations of this literary evidence and with reconstructions of the period, which must accordingly be somewhat modified.

‘The story, which ends with the poisoning and suffocation of Demetrius, has reached us in a form which suggests, as do also certain other features of the later life of Philip and of the reign of Perseus, that some author or authors wrote tragedies or historical novels dealing with the ruin of the Macedonian royal house.’ Such is the startling, if cautiously phrased conclusion of a recent historian, discussing the last years of Philip V in a standard work; it is a conclusion which deserves careful consideration, for if it can be substantiated, it will be necessary to revise seriously our usual estimate of Polybius' merits as a historian. And since no discussion of the problem can be fruitful until Polybius' own attitude towards tragedy and its relations to history has been considered, it is from this aspect that Benecke's suggestion must be approached.

When, towards the close of 1897, I, a freshman of St. John's College, Oxford, first met David Ross of Balliol in the room of a common friend, I little dreamed how long and how closely we should be associated in the life and work of another Oxford college and how immeasurably I should be enriched by his example, his help and his friendship. So I welcome wholeheartedly this opportunity of acknowledging, since I cannot repay, my debt by making a contribution, however slight, to the tribute of admiration, affection and good wishes embodied in this volume. Much of his time and ability has been devoted to the study and elucidation of the works of the Greek philosophers, and I offer him, γλαῦκ᾽ εἰς Ἀθήνας, some notes, which lay no claim to completeness, on the light thrown on that study by Greek inscriptions.

We regard the rise and development of philosophy as one of the supreme achievements of the Greeks, which has permanently and profoundly affected Western civilisation. Did the later Greeks share this view? Inscriptions offer some evidence which merits consideration. The author of the Parian Chronicle, who is for us, owing to the mutilation of the stone, anonymous, compiled a chronological table of the outstanding personalities and events in Greek history down to 264–3 B.C. The extant record is fairly complete from 1581–80 to 355–4 B.C. and again from 336–5 to 299–8, and if we examine the period after 1000 B.C. we are struck by the predominance of Greek tyrants and foreign potentates in the sphere of political and military history and of poets (prose authors are ignored) in the realm of culture; Terpander of Lesbos (A34) is the sole representative of music and Callippus, the astronomer (B6), of natural science, while sculptors, painters and architects are passed over in silence. Philosophy appears only in the persons of Socrates, Anaxagoras and Aristotle; a brief reference to two of these, is tacked on as an afterthought to the record (A60) of Euripides' first victory in 442–1 B.C., and the death of ‘Socrates the philosopher’ at the age of 70 is reported (A66) under the date 400–399, while in a paragraph (B11) relating to events in Asia Minor and Egypt in 321–20 B.C. occurs the phrase A fragment of another chronological table, drawn up in A.D. 15–16, survives in Rome and gives rather more recognition to philosophy; S[olon], Anacharsis, the Seven Sages and Aesop are mentioned in B2, 4 and 5, B7 tells of Pythagoras's capture by Cambyses in Egypt in 524–3, and B10 runs: where the year is unfortunately lost.

An inscription of major importance, now in the New Museum of Adana, contains an epigram on Apollonius of Tyana. Almost simultaneously, a preliminary text has been provided by E. L. Bowie, and a full publication with discussion and photograph by G. Dagron and J. Marcillet- Jaubert. I offer here a text, translation, and commentary, and look for a historical and cultural setting.

The inscription is cut on a single large block, now damaged on the left, which originally served as an architrave or lintel. The photograph (PLATE Ib) makes detailed comment on the palaeography superfluous: but it is worth noting the sign of punctuation (:) after ἐπώνυμος and of elision (∾) after τὸ δ᾿; the leaf filling the vacant space at the end of line 4; and generally the very affected script, notably the rho shaped like a shepherd's crook, the complicated xi and the lyre-shaped omega. This strange lettering makes it more than usually hazardous to date the inscription from this feature alone. A date in the third or fourth century seems roughly right, and would accord with the content of the epigram.

More than a century ago the great German scholar Welcker tried to confirm the tradition that amongst the sophists the real master of Socrates had been Prodicus. Welcker called him his ‘forerunner’. In our century this valuation was once exaggerated to the extent of maintaining that the ‘principle of Prodicus’—that is, the care for the exact distinction and usage of the meanings of synonyms—had been the starting-point for every sound development in logic, whereas the methodical pattern presupposed by Socrates in his discussions was, on the contrary, a Prinzip der absoluten Vieldeutigkeit, a principle of absolute equivocation and ambiguity, and therefore the starting-point for every kind of trouble in that field.

Of course, the connection of Socrates with Prodicus was justified by the fact that both, in their conversations, appeared frequently to be dissatisfied with certain answers or expressions of their interlocutors, and therefore discussed the meanings of certain terms used by them. But the difference between the two approaches was very sharp, as appears from every passage of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, in which Prodicus is introduced to explain the demands of his synonymies in the midst of the debate. He wants everybody to use, for example, the verb εὐφραίνεσθαι in some cases and the verb ἥδεσθαι in some others, following what he thinks to be the right usage, the ὀρθότης ὀνομάτων; whereas Socrates does not care what kind of words one may use, but is only interested in what one really expresses by these words, that is, the meaning which he gives to them. Both search for meanings of words: but Prodicus' question is: What does it mean?—and Socrates' question is: What do you mean?—Prodicus says: ἀνδρεία means this, θρασύτης means that: so you shall use ἀνδρεία in the first case and θρασύτης in the second. Socrates asks: What do you mean by ἀνδρεία? (τί λέγεις τὴν ἀνδρείαν;).

Given the increasing interest in ancient military history it seems timely to set Perikles' Peloponnesian War policy of avoiding major land battles in the context of the military options available and how these worked in practice. I should, however, sound one note of caution from the start. My discussion (especially sections I and II) represents a modern assessment of the defence strategies and options available to Athens in 431. While Perikles and his successors undoubtedly considered how best to fight the war, it would be misleading to even imply that their thought processes involved conducting an analysis anywhere near as sophisticated as the one which follows. Quite simply they lacked the theoretical concepts and even the technical vocabulary to do so. There was no history or tradition of staff college appreciations in fifth century Athens and no body of technical or theoretical military literature, and it seems clear that even experienced and successful commanders did not look at war with the same sort of theoretical constructs which we take for granted today.

Xenophon's Cyropaedia can be read as a proto-novel, a biography, or as an essay on leadership or constitutional theory. This article argues that the Cyropaedia can and should also be read as a pamphlet on practical military reform with special relevance to the Spartan state.

The inclusion of a series of proposals for the reform of the Spartan army in the Cyropaedia has not heretofore been recognized because Xenophon presented those proposals in the guise of a reform of the Persian army undertaken by Cyrus. There was no historical basis for this part of the Cyropaedia, and there is no trace of a major military reform in either the Greek or the Persian tradition about Cyrus as it existed before Xenophon. Cyrus' military reform was thus an authorial invention that presumably served some important narrative purpose.

Xenophon inserted a military reform into the Cyropaedia as a way of presenting a proposal for the restructuring of the Spartan army. When Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia, the Spartans were struggling desperately to maintain their position in the face of a powerful Boeotian army. The Boeotians could put many more hoplites into the field and had a large cavalry force that they were using to excellent effect. The obvious response on the part of the Spartans was to take whatever measures were necessary to increase the number of men in their phalanx and to assemble a sizeable, highly trained group of horsemen. The programme of military reform enacted by Cyrus in the Cyropaedia produces just this result. If implemented in Sparta, this programme would have involved the wholesale addition of non-Spartiates to the Spartan phalanx and the conversion of the Spartan homoioi into an all-cavalry force.

Xenophon thus used Cyrus' army in the Cyropaedia to show what a revamped Spartan military might look like. The use of fictional narrative to explore ideas with immediate application to the real world has long been recognized as an integral part of the Cyropaedia. This aspect of the Cyropaedia has in the past been explored largely in regard to Xenophon's thinking about leadership and ethics, but it can and should be extended to include military reform in Sparta.

Interpretation of the Agamemnon in general and of its first choral sequence in particular has tended to proceed on two assumptions: first, that Aeschylus could have given an answer (not necessarily a simple answer) to the question, ‘Was Agamemnon free to choose whether or not to sacrifice his daughter?’; and secondly, that he composed the play in such a way that if we try hard enough we can discover his answer. I submit in this paper an interpretation which replaces both these assumptions with an alternative trio of hypotheses for which, I think, a case can be made: first, that Aeschylus was well aware that in real life we cannot know the extent to which an agent was able to choose whether or not to commit a particular act; secondly, that in Ag. 104–257 he has portrayed realistically the manner in which people respond to the commission of an extraordinary and disagreeable act by a respected agent; and thirdly, that the aspect of Agamemnon's predicament which made the most powerful impression on Aeschylus and his audience is an aspect to which modern interpreters of the play have seldom alluded even by implication. I would not be so rash as to assert that Aeschylus never concerned himself with the question of responsibility, nor that his concepts of justice and retribution are of small interest, but I am not satisfied that ‘with all the powers of his mind’, as Professor Lesky puts it, ‘he wrestled with the problem arising from the conflict between human existence and divine rule’, nor do I take the view that a dramatist passionately involved in metaphysics and theology is a wiser and greater man than one who devotes the powers of his mind to concrete problems of poetic and theatrical technique. The scale of values adopted by interpreters of early Greek tragedy has certainly been affected, and has perhaps been somewhat distorted, by the dominant position of philosophy in European culture and education.

To attempt to relate the fantasies of Old Comedy to reality is no doubt a hazardous business. But the burlesque must have been based on facts, and familiar facts at that, if it was to be effective; and it may enlarge our understanding of the Frogs, and heighten our appreciation of its humour, to inquire what relation the journey of Dionysos may have had to places which were known to Aristophanes' audience. The places alluded to in the course of the journey have been identified in various more or less conflicting ways since at least the time when the Arguments to the play were written. There has been little hesitation over accepting at any rate some of these identifications, for it would certainly have been funny to see Dionysos call on Herakles in, say, Thebes or Tiryns; proceed from there to the Acheron or the Styx; and finally meet the souls of the Initiates in the underworld, moving in an everlasting procession to a ghostly Eleusis. But the fun would surely have been much more pointed had it been more consistent and relevant to the everyday life of the Athenians themselves; and it is the purpose of this article to suggest that it did in fact possess this consistency and relevance—that Dionysos was actually represented as following a route perfectly familiar to the audience, visiting places well known to them and indeed even in view to them as they sat in the theatre. At the beginning of the play Dionysos is on his way to call on Herakles and ask him what route he followed when he went down to the underworld to fetch Kerberos. Dionysos quickly reaches the house of Herakles, and if we take the indications of the play literally at this point we may conclude that this house was not far from Athens. It soon becomes clear that this conclusion is right. Herakles shows by his intimate knowledge of affairs at Athens that he lives in or near the city, and it is easy to see where he lives. He is not the Herakles at Melite, from whom he is sharply distinguished (501); but since Xanthias, when impersonating him, claims to be thinking of the Herakleia in Diomeia (650 f.), he must be the Herakles honoured in that festival. The Herakleia in Diomeia were the principal festival of Herakles at Athens, and were held at Kynosarges, a place outside the walls and not far from the Diomeian gate. There was a Herakleion there, between the city wall and the llissos; and that is evidently the house of Herakles in the Frogs.

Since 1856, when Schaefer declared that the text of Diodorus contains two parallel accounts of the opening of the Sacred War, the history of the years 357–352 B.C. has been the subject of controversy. At the present time two contentions have gained general acceptance: firstly, that Schaefer was correct in the divination of a doublet, and secondly, that the doublet having introduced a superfluous year of narrative, the two-year interval in Diodorus' chronology, between the seizure of Delphi by Philomelus and the declaration of the Sacred War by the Amphictyony, should be reduced to an interval of one year.

Within this modicum of agreement there has been ample room for dispute. The doublists, if I may so describe those who attribute a doublet to Diodorus, differ widely when they endeavour to set precise limits to their doublet: for instance, Schaefer, Kahrstedt, Cloche, and Beloch are at variance.

Just in case there were any hardened sceptics who still doubted, in the second half of the twentieth century, that our world is ruled by an inept and rather junior God with immature judgment and a nasty sense of humour, He did his best to convince them by arranging for the discovery of the Derveni papyrus in 1962. The soldier who was cremated and buried in that Macedonian village towards the end of the fourth century bc had intended that the text of this papyrus be devoured by the flames of his pyre; but as it happened one of the burning logs fell onto the roll, covering and charring its top third and thereby saving that part both from immediate annihilation by the fire itself and from subsequent destruction by organic decomposition; then the Greek excavators sharp-wittedly recognized that the roll was not wood but papyrus, and the restorer of the Viennese papyrus collection managed to put together the more than 200 fragments into 26 columns of text. As A.E. Housman wrote in another connection, such a series of highly unlikely incidents can evidently not be ascribed to ‘chance and the common course of nature’, but only to divine intervention: ‘and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere’.

A charming black-figured olpe in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford shows two warriors playing a game (PLATE IIc). Between them stands the goddess Athena, an alert figure looking sharply to the left while holding her shield to the right. She holds it rather tactlessly, for the shield entirely obscures the head of the right-hand warrior. Although Cassandra, clinging desperately to the statue of Athena, sometimes has her head obscured in a similar manner behind the goddess's shield, it seems more likely that the painter here has simply misjudged the space available than that he has conflated two iconographical types.

The Oxford olpe, though imperfectly planned and executed, is clearly an example of the subject which is best known through the beautiful amphora in the Vatican painted by Exekias (PLATE IIIa). Exekias represented two warriors playing a game at least twice, and is generally believed to have been the first to paint this theme on a vase.

The Old Academy developed in an unplanned fashion and, as its structure evolved, changes in leadership and institutional culture were mirrored by shifting Academic historical traditions. As the Old Academy became an institution that presented a systematized philosophy, its leadership placed increased emphasis upon traditions about Plato and other Academic leaders that illustrated the power and practical application of this Academic teaching. This suggests a conscious attempt by the scholarchs of the Old Academy to craft a distinctive institutional identity centred as much upon the character and exemplary lifestyle of its leadership as upon its specific doctrinal teaching.

In 1938 Sir William Max Muller of London, son of the Oxford philologist Max Müller, lent me a volume containing some seventy letters by Schliemann to use in my publications of Schliemann's correspondence. In January 1945 I deposited these in one of two suitcases, full of original letters, copies, and photographs, in the official bunker at Schwerin, for safety from air-raids. In the next three years all my efforts, and those of the museum staff, to recover the suitcases were of no avail, and on March 5, 1948, the administration of Mecklenburg replied to my renewed queries that they had both been lost. In the summer of 1958 an agent from Schwerin discovered this collection, all that has survived from the two suitcases, in a book-shop in West Berlin. It was recovered and returned to the widow of its previous owner in London. Agamemnon Schliemann (the son) and Sir William Max Muller had at the time given me permission to use the letters as a supplement to my two books, Schliemann-Briefwechsel i (1953) and ii (1958) and a selection of them is published here.

Ten other letters from Schliemann to Müller of the years 1874–83 which were not in the collection have been found after renewed study of several volumes of Schliemann's letter-books.

Professor J. D. Beazley recently discussed in this Journal (xlix. 1 ff.) a fifth-century Attic relief now preserved in Cairness House, Lonmay, Aberdeenshire. He appended a short account, partly from the pen of Colonel C. T. Gordon, of General Thomas Gordon (1788–1841), who brought to this country that relief and various other antiquities, and of the dispersion of the collection in 1850. The relief, however, remained at Cairness, together with two inscribed stelae, one of which has not been published hitherto, while the other has been regarded as lost. These form the subject of the present article.

My warm thanks are due to the late Professor J. Harrower for calling my attention to the inscriptions and supplying me with excellent photographs of them, as also to Colonel Gordon for granting me permission to publish them and for his hospitality at Cairness, where he kindly gave me every facility for examining the stones with a view to verifying and completing the texts I had already deciphered from the photographs.

I think that we all know about the Colossus of Rhodes—one of the Seven Wonders of the World. We remember him from our childhood's days. Was there not some story of a great statue standing astride the harbour of that old-world port—Rhodes, somewhere among the Isles of Greece? And if we look up a Classical Dictionary we shall find him described as being a bronze figure of the sun god, Helios, and as standing 70 cubits, that is, more than 100 feet in height. We read that in the year three hundred and three before Christ, Demetrios Poliorketes, King of Macedon, becoming tired of his long-protracted Siege of Rhodes, returned to Greece, leaving his siege-train behind him. The citizens of Rhodes sold the weapons for 300 talents, and devoted the money to the erection of a statue of their god: a statue, moreover, which they hoped would compare favourably with those of their great ally, Egypt. The citizens of Rhodes called upon the sculptor Chares of Lindos: a town on the island of Rhodes not far from the capital. He was a pupil of the Greek sculptor, Lysippos, who had just constructed at Tarentium a bronze statue of Zeus, about 70 feet in height. Chares undertook the work. The colossus took twelve years to erect, from 292 to 280 B.C. It was thrown down by an earthquake some sixty years later, and remained on the ground, as one of the sights of Rhodes, for nearly 900 years. When the Saracens conquered the island in A.D. 653, their general broke up the figure and sold the bronze to a Jewish dealer. Not a fragment of the Colossus remains to-day, and no complete copy of the figure exists.

At the close of the Cyclops adventure Odysseus piously sacrifices to Zeus the ram that has carried him out of Polyphemus' cave. Yet the god spurns his offering and ponders instead the destruction of Odysseus' ships and their crews (ix 553–5):

These lines need explaining, as they present two difficulties, one formal, the other thematic. How can Odysseus know what Zeus is pondering? As a first-person narrator Odysseus assumes temporarily the role of the epic poet, yet without being given the latter's omniscience. He retains therefore the restricted perspective of an epic character which precludes any precise knowledge of supernatural processes.

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is the Dichterweihe at the beginning of the Theogony (22–35): when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

Considering the attention now paid to the geography ot Asia Minor, it has struck me that a collection of the notices relating to the Arabic invasions of that district, which are scattered here and there in the Arabic annalists and must be sought through thousands of pages of Arabic print, would serve a very useful purpose. These extracts not only throw light on geography and the Arabic nomenclature of the localities, but, when compared with the accounts of the same events in Greek and Syriac writers, are of great value for the study of chronology.

The writers from whom extracts are given under years are the following:—

The Second Stasimon holds a central position in the play. It follows the elaborate preparatory scenes and immediately precedes the rapid march of the action towards its catastrophe. The ode is difficult to understand and has been variously interpreted.

We expect a Sophoclean Chorus to react to the preceding episode; and the themes of this ode are indeed related to the long scene that has just been played. Interpreters are not agreed, however, on the precise character of this relationship, except in one particular. It is abundantly clear that the fourth stanza (898–910) relates to the scepticism on the subject of oracles and prophecy which was expressed by Jocasta at the end of the preceding scene. The concern of the Chorus arises, however, not so much from the fact that she expresses a sceptical view which might be thought shocking as from the grounds on which her view was based. On the face of it, and on the facts as stated, an oracle given by Loxias at Delphi has failed, once and for all, to be fulfilled. They feel that, unless facts and prophecy are shown to be in full agreement, this will be the end of oracular authority and the end of religion (if that is how we should translate τὰ θεȋα); and they pray to Zeus the supreme king to give the matter his attention. It is the facts—the apparent facts—that cause their concern. But, when in the first stanza they sing about reverent purity of word as well as of deed, it is commonly—and I think rightly—held that they have in mind, among other things, the impious words of Jocasta. It may be a useful preliminary to the examination of the stasimon as a whole, if we first examine the ‘impiety’ (if that is the right term) of Jocasta, endorsed, as it appears to be, by Oedipus.