A. Frr. 1+47

col. i

The poem represented in P. Oxy. 2619 is self-evidently the work of Stesichorus, presumably his Iliou Persis. From the fragments as originally published not a single complete line or sentence could be reconstructed; the style and structure were, as Mr Lobel said, ‘quite unrecognisable’. There was really nothing to be done; it was a great disappointment.

To this gloomy picture Mr Barrett, with extraordinary ingenuity and skill, succeeded in restoring two quite substantial patches of bright and clear colour. He joined fr. 47 to the second column of fr. 1, and frr. 30 and 31 to fr. 15(b), in each place creating an intelligible context for seven consecutive lines. The texts of these two pieces as restored by Barrett read, with only slight modifications, as shown on pp. 47 and 50.

‘The modes of music are never disturbed without disturbance of the most fundamental political and social nomoi’. This dictum of the influential fifth-century musical theorist Damon, friend and adviser of Perikles, reflects the deep-seated relation that was felt to exist between the modes of music and the fundamental conventions governing social and political life in ancient Greece. This relation deserves much further exploration. Our present thesis is that elaborate linguistic and semantic play between the registers of the musical and the social order is to be found in the Oresteia far more than in any other surviving work. It is, perhaps, not surprising that in this trilogy, where the claims of conflicting nomoi are powerfully dramatised, the musical order is also exploited in complex and subtle ways to reflect upon the social and political order; and that disruptions or distortions in the social order find their counterpart in the musical order. Though some have noted the operation of this interpenetration of registers, it has not been studied in the depth it deserves.

This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate education and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.

This paper looks beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria to consider the literary dynamics of another Hellenistic kingdom, Attalid Pergamon. I offer a detailed study of the fragmentary opening of Nicander's Hymn to Attalus (fr. 104 Gow–Schofield) in three sections. First, I consider its generic status and compare its encomiastic strategies with those of Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17). Second, I analyse its learned reuse of the literary past and allusive engagement with scholarly debate. And finally, I explore how Nicander polemically strives against the precedent of the Ptolemaic Callimachus. The fragment offers us a rare glimpse into the post-Callimachean, international and agonistic world of Hellenistic poetics.

As recent scholarship on the poem has demonstrated, the Aeneid is punctuated by reiterated episodes of opening. These ruptures, often violently produced, release violence into the world of the poem, prolonging the epic action by postponing its appointed end. The pattern is set in the first book when Aeolus strikes at the mountain that houses the winds, unleashing the storm that drives Aeneas off course, from Italy to Carthage. What is ‘opened’ here is at once something within the poem (the cavernous prison of the winds) and the poem itself, which restarts, as it were, when it seemed on the verge, with Aeneas' approach to Italy, of shutting down. Much valuable work has been done to illuminate and complicate this convergence of the action in the poem with the action of the poem, with one focus being the agency of Juno, a figure especially closely linked here with openings and beginnings.

In 1920 Ernst Langlotz proposed a scheme for dating Greek vases in terms of absolute and not merely relative chronology. His monograph was entitled Zur Zeitbestimmung der strengrotfigurigen Vasenmalerei und der gleichzeitigen Plastik and was dedicated to his teacher Franz Studniczka. Studniczka's own essay, ‘Zur Zeitbestimmung der Vasenmalerei mit roten Figuren’ had itself represented a landmark in the chronological study of Greek vase painting. As Langlotz's title suggests, he thought it possible to derive a dating system for Greek vases based on stylistic comparisons between the medium of Greek vase-painting and that of sculpture. The Siphnian Treasury, the Marathon Tumulus, and the Persian sack of Athens, however, provided the only supposedly fixed points in Langlotz's framework. He therefore sought other evidence which would link vase-painting to the known facts of Greek history and decided to develop Studniczka's investigation of the extent to which the subjects of kalos-inscriptions possessed an independent historical identity.

This article argues that the attribution to Lysias of the erōtikos (230e6–234c5) in Plato's Phaedrus is more significant than has generally been acknowledged. The erōtikos is attributed to Lysias because he is a logographer, whose success is dependent on writing speeches for other people. A careful consideration of both the context and the content of the speech encourage us to consider its relevance to Socrates. By attributing an (underwhelming) attempt at Socratic rhetoric to Lysias, the Phaedrus frames his speech as an example of the potential pitfalls of putting words into Socrates’ mouth. As such, the speech has broader significance for our understanding of what it means to write Socratic logoi.

Almost four decades ago, Donald Russell published in this journal an analysis of the first sixteen chapters of the Life of Alkibiades, which consist largely of short self-contained anecdotes about Alkibiades' childhood, youth and early career (Russell 1966b). As Russell demonstrated, most of these anecdotes are juxtaposed without any causal link. Although there are the occasional chronological markers – indications, for example, that Alkibiades is getting older and passing from childhood to early manhood – some are plainly out of chronological order and it is impossible to extract a clear chronology from them. Russell argued, however, that to try to extract such a chronological narrative would be to misunderstand the function of this material, which is not to provide a narrative of Alkibiades' early years but rather to illuminate and illustrate his character.

Russell's argument, in particular the stress on Plutarch's interest in character, was seminal; together with two other papers published at roughly the same time, it marked the beginning of a new appreciation of Plutarch as an author of literary merit. But Russell was rather less convinced of the logic of selection of the first five anecdotes, which relate to Alkibiades' youth and comprise some one-and-a-half pages of Teubner text (Alk. 2–3).

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

T.S. Eliot, Four quartets (Burnt Norton V)

The poet gives voice to the action of words as they reach out to attain expression. He observes the dangers inherent in this effort: words can break, can become simply unintelligible. Such broken words can no longer function within the fixed constraints of grammar and thus ‘will not stay in place, | Will not stay still’. A.J. Greimas in Structural semantics defined an ‘actantial’ model of language:

If we recall that functions in traditional syntax are but roles played by words – the subject being ‘the one who performs the action’, the object ‘the one who suffers it’ – then according to such a conception, the proposition as a whole becomes a spectacle to which homo loquens treats himself.

This article attempts to account for the fact that nemesis occurs only once in Herodotus. It connects the term to Phrygia and the importance of Nemesis there, esp. as seen in ‘confession-inscriptions’ (Beichtinschriften). It argues that the Atys-Adrastus story is meant as an interpretative guide to the rest of the History through its use of significant names, comparable to the use of significant names in the Old Testament.

In this paper I shall be considering the relationship between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, particularly with regard to man's attitude towards and use of the natural resources of the material world he inhabits.

1. The shape of the world

There are two basic spatial metaphors that we frequently use in analysing notions of value and morality: one is the scale of up and down, with high and low or top and bottom as alternative ways of referring to the same type of hierarchy; the other is the notion of a centre, the bull's eye: if we are self-centred we value ourselves more highly than other things; if we have an anthropocentric view we value humanity above other animals. Thus we usually suppose that we put whatever we value most highly (on the one set of metaphors) at ‘the centre of things’ (on the other set).

‘The core of practically every problem in textual criticism is a problem of style, and the categories are still far less settled than those of textual criticism. And there is the further danger that the editor in making his recension may fall into the habit of forgetting his responsibility for being continually alive to the author's style. Here I may be allowed to end by recalling a remark of Richard Bentley's in his note on Horace, Odes 3.27.15, nobis et ratio et res ipsa centum codicibus potiores sunt. This remark has always tempted some scholars to misuse it, and it will always continue to do so; but it is true.’ (P.Maas, Textual criticism (1958) 40 f.)

That there were interpolations in Petronius' text was recognised early, although it was not until Eduard Fraenkel's more scientific, if controversial, views on Petronian interpolation were communicated and published in K.Müller's first edition of the Satyricon (1961) that an attempt was made to classify and date more serious and unnoticed interpolations.

In Lucian's Symposium, one of the wedding guests is a philosopher and another is a grammatikos. The grammatikos provides a bad elegiac epithalamium; the philosopher, who is called Ion, improves the occasion with a speech in which he declares that pederasty offers the best way of life, and the system of communal wives, as recommended in Plato's Republic, is the next best thing.

This fantasy, of course, tells us nothing about what went on at weddings. Lucian's main motive is literary parody, of Plutarch's Erotikos or something of the kind. But it may serve to recall something of which we have evidence enough in Greek rhetoric, namely the practice of delivering speeches of some literary pretention at high-class weddings. The educated classes of the cities of the eastern provinces evidently cherished this habit: a display of culture, as well as of wealth, was admired, and elaborate orations took their place, alongside abundance of food and wine, music and song, elaborately decorated bridal chambers and beds, as concomitants of a wedding that was to do both families credit. This is true of the period of the ‘Second Sophistic’, and of its fourth-century and early Byzantine continuations. How far the practice was common before, say, the Antonine age is much less clear.

‘The absence of Roman comedy … from the influences which the [Augustan] poets like to name proves only that they were not creditable, not in fashion, not that they had made no contribution.’ So Jasper Griffin in his recent book on the Roman poets. Griffin observes that scholars have been deterred from postulating Roman comic influence on the Augustan poets merely by the ‘magisterial pronouncements of the great scholars’, and he amasses considerable circumstantial evidence to support his theory that the Augustan poets, and especially the elegists, were indeed indebted to Roman comedy. He observes, for example, that Cicero provides evidence for the continuing popularity of Roman drama; that (a very important point) Horace complains of the popularity of the Roman comedians whom ‘powerful Rome learns by heart’ (Epist. 2.1.60-1); that the same poet, despite his denigration of Roman comedy, obviously knew and referred to it; that Roman comedy seems to be the source, or a source, for the ‘naughtiness’ of elegy and the rejection of traditional Roman values (with the comic amatores distressed by contemporary mores and the elegists flouting them); that if the elegists do not acknowledge their debt to the Roman comic poets, then no more does Horace in the Odes acknowledge his manifest indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry, claiming instead to be following Sappho and Alcaeus.

The Melian Dialogue is too eccentric to be explained solely in terms of its immediate context. It will here be maintained that it represents primarily a stage in Thucydides' struggle to reconcile his admiration for the Athenian empire with his feeling that empire was somehow immoral. This essay is thus necessarily concerned with his general views on empire; for which the last speech assigned to Perikles is important evidence.

I. THE DIALOGUE AND ITS CONTEXT

The Dialogue falls into two parts which overlap. The first, dealing with the reasons why Athens found it necessary to suppress the independence of Melos, ends roughly at v, 105, 2: it is this part that seems so remote from real life and raises the main problems. The second, roughly from v, 102, dealing with the prospect that Melos might be saved by Spartan help or by mere luck, is comparatively plain sailing: the possibility of Spartan intervention is a real topic, in no sense out of place at such a conference.

When Gregory of Nazianzus composed the Poemata Arcana in the early 380s AD, he had long been through the ‘moral and intellectual boot camp’ of Greek paideia. He was both a man of (Greek) culture and a Christian. He had plucked the ‘roses from the thorny field’ of paganism, and could now turn to the pressing issues of the day: the impieties of heretics. It is important to keep this in mind when reading Gregory's Poemata Arcana. Written in the form of didactic epic, these poems set forth the orthodox doctrine of the ineffable nature of Godhead and its manifestation in this world. In 713 hexameters, they expound the essential unity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (poems 1 to 3), Christian cosmology (poem 4), Providence (poem 5), the relationship to God of human beings and angels (poem 6), the soul (poem 7), and finally the unity of the two Testaments and (the circumstances surrounding) the incarnation of Christ (poem 8). Because of this peculiar combination of Greek literary form with Christian content many modern critics have felt encouraged to pit Christian (content) against pagan (form) and locate the Arcana in the context of an on-going struggle of Christian writers anxious to appropriate Greek culture. But this entails not only a misplaced historical emphasis which overplays ‘struggle’ and ‘antagonism’. It has also led to an impoverished and truncated sense of the poems' literary style: a sizing up of Gregory against the didactic tradition of which to these critics he seems so anxious to be thought part.