Although imagery from music and song is not uncommon in Greek poetry as a whole, it is usually of no more than superficial significance. In Aeschylus, however, its roots strike deeper, and for that reason I have chosen to concentrate on him here. For the sake of comparison, a briefer survey of its uses in Sophocles and Euripides will be added.

Aeschylus' method of using key images to sustain and develop a dramatic theme has for some time now been recognised as an important feature of his style. Whether he expected the subtleties of his technique to be appreciated by his audience—even by a perceptive minority—is another question. His painstaking craftsmanship would tend rather to suggest that he wrote with more in view than the immediate appeal of the spoken word, deliberately shaping his work as a κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί. A number of dominant images in his drama, such as the yoke in the Persae, the ship in the Septem and the alternating light and dark in the Oresteia, have already received their fair share of attention. But this has not been so with his musical symbolism which, although less apparent, is employed with greater consistency. In no drama is it entirely absent, and it permeates the substance of the Septem and the Oresteia.

The campaigns of Alexander in Asia have been extensively studied, but no one has given a detailed account of his campaign in Illyria. The reason is that for many years the interior of Albania has been less accessible than any part of Alexander's route in Asia. It was my own interest in Epirus and Macedonia and my travels in parts of south-eastern Albania which first led me to speculate on the location of Alexander's battle against Cleitus and Glaucias. I came then to the conclusion that the city of Pelion and the battle near it were to be placed by the upper Devoll in the plain of Poloskë. This conclusion was based on a study of the ancient literary evidence and generally on a second-hand knowledge of the terrain; for I had made only one trip and that by car from Florina to Bilisht in the plain of Poloskë and thence to Korcë (Koritsa). In September 1972 I was able to visit this plain through the kindness of the Albanian Government and of my Albanian colleagues. In Section A of this paper I describe the geographical features and the ancient remains in the relevant part of south-eastern Albania, and in Section B I try to reconstruct the campaign of Alexander in this region.

In a study earlier in this volume, ‘The Relation of Anaxagoras and Empedocles’, pp. 93–113, I listed the ancient evidence to the effect that Anaxagoras first gave the correct explanation of an eclipse, and that he was followed in this by Empedocles. A more extensive examination of the evidence raises certain difficulties. For what are, or might appear to be, Anaxagoras' theories are attributed elsewhere to earlier thinkers.

There are two principal elements in this contradiction, the one direct and the other indirect.

1. There is a direct contradiction when Thales, Anaximenes and some Pythagoreans are said to have given the correct explanation of an eclipse, at least if we suppose the Pythagoreans in question to have been earlier than Anaxagoras.

2. There has been thought to be an indirect contradiction when several thinkers before Anaxagoras are said to have derived the moon's light from the sun. For a theory of derived light for the moon has been thought, whether rightly or wrongly, to entail the correct explanation of an eclipse.

In what follows I shall attempt to solve these, and some other incidental difficulties.

In JHS xcix (1979) 103–14 Dr Rhodes published an article, ‘Eisangelia in Athens’, which is primarily a detailed and profound criticism of some conclusions in my Eisangelia. The Sovereignty of the People's Court in Athens in the Fourth Century B.C. and the Impeachment of Generals and Politicians (Odense 1975). His objections have forced me to reconsider the subject. In ‘Demos, Ecclesia and Dicasterion in Classical Athens’, GRBS xix (1978) 127–46, I have already dealt with the part of Rhodes' article based on the assumption that the Solonian Heliaia was a judicial session of the ekklesia. Here I discuss the eisangelia itself.

The name given by Aristophanes to the leading character in his Acharnians has given rise to much discussion, and I take the opportunity of the appearance in this Journal of another well-documented assessment to put forward briefly, and without a full and independent armoury of footnotes, a solution that contests the communis opinio that Dicaeopolis in some sense speaks for and as Aristophanes.

Kubeia and its congeners are often translated as ‘playing dice’ or ‘dicing’ because kuboi are ‘dice’. But sometimes kubeia has nothing to do with ‘dice’ (kuboi) at all, and so ought often to be translated simply as ‘gambling’. Pollux explains the nature of the word clearly in book 7, and his position is supported by earlier authors such as Theopompus, Diphilus, Isocrates, Xenophon and Aeschines. Not only is it possible to ‘gamble’ (kubeuein) with knucklebones (astragaloi) as well as cubic dice (kuboi), it is also possible to ‘gamble’ (kubeuein) by folding leather straps, by spinning coins and by guessing about small objects hidden in the hand; it is even possible to ‘gamble’ (kubeuein) during a cock-fight. The mistaken belief that the word means ‘dicing’ has affected not only centuries of translations and interpretations, but also the editing of texts since at least the early 19th century, as is shown regarding a crux in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus.

The centuries before the Greeks began to write history are of the greatest interest and significance, but they are also for the historian full of uncertainty, obscurity and dispute. The reason is mainly the simple inadequacy of the information with which the historian has to work, and it is partly because of that inadequacy that the colonising movement is uniquely valuable. Part of this value lies in the revealing nature of colonial activity in itself. Think what it tells us about geographical knowledge, seafaring, if not seapower, military achievements, state organisation, economic conditions—to mention only a few broad and obvious categories. But in a period so inadequately known the colonising movement is also extremely important to the historian as a source of a relatively large amount of clear and unequivocal facts. In the context of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the fact that such and such a city sent a colony to such and such a place constitutes a rare piece of definite and valuable knowledge. Since it is also possible to assign dates to large numbers of colonial expeditions, we can say that the colonising movement provides a large amount of extremely significant historical information, which is in general terms clear and definite and relatively well dated.

Plutarch (probably following Aristotle's lost Constitution of the Megarians) associates several episodes of riotous behaviour with the existence of a radical democracy in Archaic Megara (Moralia 295c-d, 304e-f). Modern historians, in turn, have accepted that Megara was ruled by a democracy in the mid sixth century BC. I suggest that this conclusion is unjustified because the connection between riotous behaviour and democracy in Plutarch is based on fourth-century anti-democratic political thought. I propose instead that anecdotes describing the insolent behaviour of the poor towards the rich are better interpreted in terms of customary rituals of social inversion and transgression. Drawing on comparative examples from the ancient world and early modern Europe, I show that popular revelry involving role reversal and transgression of social norms was an important locus for the negotiation of relations between élites and masses. I argue that such rituals provided temporary release from the constraints of the social hierarchy, and served to articulate symbolically the obligation of the powerful to protect the weak. The comparative examples show that such rituals were usually non-revolutionary, but could turn violent in times of rapid social and economic change. I argue that the violent episodes reported by Plutarch reflect the escalation of ritual revelry into real protest and riot in response to the breakdown of traditional relations of reciprocity between rich and poor in Archaic Megara. I suggest that élites in Archaic Megara successfully warded off more far-reaching rebellion and political reform by enacting new measures for the economic relief of the poor (e.g. the return of interest legislation). In conclusion, I address the broader historical question of why subordinate groups use ritual forms to express discontent.

Through the generosity of the descendants of Robert Wood (1716–71) the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies now possesses a number of note-books, diaries, sketch-books, etc., the records of a long tour which he made in 1750–51, in the company of John Bouverie and James Dawkins, and which bore fruit in Wood's publications of the ruins of Palmyra (1753), of Baalbec (1757) and in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767).

Little is known of Wood's history before this tour; according to Horace Walpole he was originally a travelling tutor, and from scattered references in his published works and in his note-books we learn that between May 1742 and the spring of 1743 he had made a long tour which embraced Constantinople, many of the islands in the Aegean Sea, Egypt and some towns in Syria and Mesopotamia. He himself tells us it was for this reason that Messrs. Bouverie and Dawkins, with whom he had travelled in Italy, invited him to accompany them. The diaries and note-books shew that he was a bom traveller with a quick eye for the salient features of a landscape and a keen appreciation of its natural beauties. He was also an excellent classical scholar, and, as such, interested in the identification of ancient sites and in the inscriptions found there, but this interest was literary rather than antiquarian; his real interest lay in comparing the statements of ancient geographers and modern travellers with the physical conditions as he found them, above all in identifying any river he crossed and, wherever possible, tracing it to its source.

My business is with a poem preserved on two wax tablets from Egypt in Berlin (Inv. no. 14283), dating from about the first century A.D., and first published by Hermann Diels in 1898. Here is a bibliography:

(1) H. Diels, S.B. der Berl. Akad. 1898 847 f. (with photographs of both tablets).

(2) R. Ellis, American Journal of Philology xxi (1900) 76 f. (irresponsible conjectures on the text; utterly worthless).

(3) W. Crönert, Archiv für Papyrusforschung i (1901) 517 f. (brief general comments).

(4) W. Schubart, Papyri Berolinenses (1911) no. 17; photograph of the first tablet with transcript of that part of the text which it contains (all except the last five lines).

(5) W. Schubart, Symbolae Philologicae O.A. Danielsson octogenario dicatae (1932) 290 f. (new transcript, account of the manuscript, brief commentary and critical discussion).

(6) D. L. Page, Greek Literary Papyri i (Loeb Classical Library, 1942; reprinted 1950) no. 114, p. 470 f. (brief discussion, text and translation).

(7) C. A. Trypanis, Classical Review n.s. ii (1952) 67–8 (note on authorship with brief remarks on text).

(8) W. Peek, RE xxii 1 (1953) 430, 440 f., s.v. ‘Poseidippos’ (general discussion).

(9) E. Heitsch, ‘Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit’, Abh. der Ak. der Wiss. in Göttingen, phil.-hist. kl., dritte folge no. 49 (1961 1) 21 (text and apparatus criticus based on Schubart).

1. P. Amh. 11 and P. Berol. 7504: History of the Problem of their Relationship.

‘Too small to have more than a palaeographical interest’: thus marked, the Amherst Papyrus 11 was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1901; they assigned it to cent. I B.C. For all its smallness, however, Wilamowitz remembered this text when he found a similar one in the Berlin Papyrus 7504, which he edited in 1907, dating the hand ‘spätgriechisch.’ But in quoting from the Amherst Papyrus he relied too much on his memory; that, and some mistakes which he made in editing the Berlin Papyrus, prevented him from making full use of his discovery.

A considerable step forward was taken by Adam Abt in 1910. He supplemented convincingly ll. 8–12 and 17–18 of the Berlin Papyrus from the text of the Amherst Papyrus. He even envisaged, and for excellent reasons, the possibility that the two papyri were parts of the same roll, but eventually decided against it because he thought that ll. 13–16 of the Berlin Papyrus could not be made to fit on to the Amherst Papyrus. Here he was wrong, as will be shown presently.

By 446/5 the Delian League had become the Athenian empire. Peace had been made with Persia, but Athens had firmly retained her hold over the allies. More important, Sparta recognised the Athenian claim in the Thirty Years' Peace. ‘We will allow the cities their independence,’ Pericles could say on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, ‘if they were independent when we made peace.’ So much is clear, but the chronology and nature of the development of Athenian imperialism are both uncertain. We are coming to know or reasonably to guess considerably more of the decisive transition to empire following the Peace of Callias, but the imperial measures of those crowded years can only be appreciated in true perspective if we have a right understanding of the preceding period. The main purpose of this study is to re-examine the development of Athenian imperialism in the fifties.

In his concise summary of Athens' rise to power, Thucydides emphasises the significance of the reduction of Naxos: to contemporaries Athenian action may have seemed less questionable. The Persian danger was still serious, and history had shown that the largest of the Cyclades might be a menace to the Greek cause, if it got into the wrong hands. Certainly the League was still popular after the collapse of Naxos, as Cimon's Eurymedon campaign clearly shows. From Caria to Pamphylia the Greek cities welcomed freedom from Persia and gladly entered the League: only at Phaselis was the show of pressure needed.

Seven years ago nothing was known in Egypt which could be attributed to a Greek origin before the Alexandrine times; the early notices on the monuments, which seemed to refer to the peoples of the Mediterranean, stood alone, and their relation to what was known on Greek soil appeared vague and unreal. But now the main light on the chronology of the civilizations of the Aegean comes from Egypt; and it is Egyptian sources that must be thanked by classical scholars for revealing the real standing of the antiquities of Greece. Without the foreign colonies on the Nile, they would still be groping in speechless remains, which might cover either a century or a thousand years, for aught that could be determined in Greek excavations. Egypt has done for the pre-historic ages the same great office of conservator which she has performed for the historic period. To Egypt we are indebted for the manuscripts, the paintings, and the textiles of the Greek and Roman times; from Egypt have just come the fragments of Plato and Euripides which show the original text, and the letters and private papers which tell of the daily life of the Greeks dwelling there.

This paper examines the evidence for the life and career of the Lesbian tyrant Myrsilos. Following an examination of the ancient testimonia for Myrsilos in the text of Alcaeus and later sources, the name Myrsilos is then considered in relation to the Hittite royal name Muršiliš, Myrsilos as an alternate name for the Lydian king Kandaules and various toponyms in Lydia and Caria that appear to be derived from the same underlying name or title. The consequences of the distribution of these names is then considered in the cultural and historical context of the Aegean-Anatolian interface, with implications for early Lesbian history and cultural continuity from the Late Bronze Age down to the Archaic period.

As long ago as 1893, Dieterich, in a famous article on the ‘initiation’-scene in Aristophanes' Clouds, pointed out that there are a great many echoes of ritual hidden in ordinary works of Greek literature, especially in comedy and tragedy. His hint was followed up in 1900 by F. Adami, whose paper remains a storehouse of such echoes, but who has by no means exhausted the subject. G. Thomson's article in a recent issue of this Journal collects a number of instances in the Oresteia of Aeschylus in which similar echoes can be heard. The purpose of the present contribution is partly to criticise the interpretation put by Thomson on certain of the references to mystic rites which Headlam and he have noted, and partly to attempt to carry the search a stage farther.

The point in Thomson's valuable paper on which most doubt will be raised in his readers' minds is his tendency to attribute to the Eleusinia all allusions to mysteries in the Oresteia. In his zeal for the exclusive glory of Eleusis, he assumes that its mysteries involved both rites and doctrines which the general consensus of scholars has denied to them. In one place he dismisses this general agreement by lumping modern authorities together as ‘archaeologists’ (p. 22, n. 13), a title which most of them, probably, would humbly deprecate. His procedure raises an important problem in method, and for this reason I may be excused for discussing some of his conclusions.

Those who have written upon the Greek Oracles in this country have been content, for the most part, to accept without criticism the traditional accounts of the procedure at these institutions. Where the meaning of a custom appears entirely strange and unsympathetic, there seems to be little to choose between one account of its details and another. Truth is hard enough to discover when the subject is intelligible; when the whole sphere of enquiry is dark its claims yield to those of the picturesque. This has been the fate of the oracles; their place in the life of the Greeks cannot be explained to the satisfaction of our reason and therefore they demand that they should be represented to our imagination with all possible violence. But the very reason which makes us prone to accept any account of the oracles and their procedure if it be sufficiently lurid and effective, should make us exercise the greatest caution before we endorse any traditional account as a fact. We are not the first to refuse our approbation to the oracles, and to demand in the place of intellectual conviction a striking appeal to the imagination.

The red-figure plate in the Ashmolean Museum bearing the inscription Μιλτιαδες καλος (Fig. 1) has been ascribed, by the scholar to whom these pages are dedicated, to the Cerberus Painter; and dated to 520–510 B.C.

We ask ourselves inevitably: is this the great Miltiades? and he who tries to answer is unusually incurious if he does not ask the second question: is the beardless mounted archer, here depicted, Miltiades himself? He looks to be under twenty, Marathon was fought twenty to thirty years later. What age was Miltiades at Marathon in 490? what age was he between 520 and 510 B.C.?

Type-scenes have been studied and analysed for over seventy years. This paper presents a more detailed analysis of one type-scene, the ‘recognition scene’, than has previously been attempted, with the aim of moving towards a better-structured understanding of the ‘syntax’ of type-scenes generally. The structure of the recognition scene is dissected into motifs and ‘moves’, all of which are tabulated; this is the core of the analysis. The ensuing points of clarification elaborate on the definitions and assumptions built into the analysis. Following this is an assessment of the ‘syntax’ and quantifiable elements of the recognition scene. The discussion closes with a general assessment of the more literary face of recognition scenes, discussing them in the context of the plan of the second half of the Odyssey.

It is some years now since I had occasion to enter on the question of the value of the List of Thalassocracies, attributed to Diodorus and to Castor, in connexion with an enquiry, not yet completed, into the history of Cyprus in early Hellenic times; and it seemed to me then, first, that it would be of considerable importance, elsewhere than in Cyprus, if this list should turn out to have historical value; and second, that the evidence for its credibility was considerably stronger than was currently supposed. But it was not until the appearance of Dr. Hugo Winckler's paper on the Euphrates-lands and the Mediterranean in the popular German series entitled Der Alte Orient, that it seemed worth while to say anything about this formally; and I only do so now because with all the respect due to so distinguished an Orientalist, it does not seem to me that Dr. Winckler's interpretation satisfies all the conditions of the problem.

My purpose in this article is to call attention to the inconclusive nature of the evidence for the view that the proper accompaniment of early Greek elegiac poetry was the flute. The elegiac couplet has been aptly called ‘a variation upon the heroic hexameter in the direction of lyric poetry’. But how far did it go in this direction? In particular, did early elegiac poetry have a close connexion with music? A distinction is commonly drawn between poetry written κατὰ στίχον, for example the epic hexameter and the iambic trimeter, which was spoken or at most intoned, and poetry in lyric metres which was sung to musical accompaniment: to which group does elegiac poetry belong?

Passages in Plutarch and Pausanias and hints in the lexicographers and in the early elegists themselves have suggested to some scholars that there was a connexion between elegiac poetry and the flute.