The Byzantinist has one advantage over the student of classical antiquity—unless the latter happens to be a papyrologist. With a little diligence and a minimum of good luck he can easily unearth unpublished texts and find himself producing an editio princeps. And however often one has turned over the leaves of a manuscript and laboriously read words which have remained unread for perhaps five centuries or more, it never loses its thrill. Yet one must admit that the advantage is less than it seems. The classical scholar's texts are usually worth reading from some point of view, while what the Byzantinist finds is so often empty rhetorical verbiage. Byzantine funeral orations are notorious for their lack of information on the life of the deceased. Yet they never tell us absolutely nothing if we read them alertly, and they are sometimes remarkably informative on the ideas and values of the times. When the subject is a major figure of medieval Greek literature about the details of whose life we are very much in the dark, even the most trifling addition to our knowledge is welcome. It is this thought which encourages me to present a hitherto unknown Byzantine writer of the middle of the twelfth century—George Tornikes, Metropolitan of Ephesus—and to dwell in particular on his funeral oration on Anna Comnena.

Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 15 provides a detailed account of a mutiny of Cypriot soldiers serving under Conon in 395 B.C., our only other record of the event being a brief statement by Justin. The question which prompts this paper arises from some lacunae in 15, 4 and concerns the activity of the mutineers, where they went, or proposed to go, and for what purpose.

All Conon's troops had been deprived of their pay for many months, no unusual experience for those in the service of Persian kings, and accordingly Conon had sailed from Rhodes to Caunus and from Caunus had gone to visit Pharnabazus and Tithraustes to discuss the financial situation. Some of the Cypriot soldiers had been among those who accompanied Conon to Caunus and while awaiting his return were persuaded by some unspecified persons that pay was only to be provided for the rowers and marines and not for themselves.

The orthodox theory about the Dorian invasion and the Ionian migration is that the Dorians broke into the Peloponnese and destroyed the Mycenaean castles—a destruction, incidentally, that is not mentioned in the ancient tradition—and that the Ionians (or the people who became the Ionians) took refuge in Attica and after an interval moved on to Ionia; this interval is generally put at sixty years by the ancient chroniclers, though not apparently by Thucydides (1, 12, 4), and at from 125 to 200 years by modern archaeologists. The interval by itself makes this theory improbable. Could Attica have supported many refugees for sixty or more years, particularly if (as the pre-historians assert) the Late Mycenaean period was one of high population? And if they could have been supported, would they not have been absorbed into the Attic community, so that the migration would have been essentially Attic and not ‘Ionian’? There are, besides, die Ionian traditions that by-pass Attica.

This inscription was published with commentary by Dr H. W. Pleket in The Greek Inscriptions in the ‘Rijksmuseum van Oudheden’ at Leyden (Leiden, 1958), as no. 57. The principal discussions of it since that of Pleket have been by Mrs K. M. T. Atkinson in Revue Internationale des droits de l'antiquité, 3e sér. VII (1960), at pp. 227–72, and by Prof. W. Kunkel in Studi Betti, at pp. 593–620.

Juvenal's First Satire is programmatic, a statement of why he proposes to write satire and what kind of satire he proposes to write. Obviously it is important for our understanding of Juvenal as poet and satirist to interpret it correctly. Much of what I have to say on the subject is not new, and I do not flatter myself that I am advancing a ‘solution’ in die sense of an answer that has eluded all other interpreters. My purpose is to suggest fresh emphases that may lead to a more just and satisfying appreciation. In particular I believe that the concluding section of die satire, vv. 147–71, stands in need of more careful appraisal, and it is my primary purpose to discuss that section. That I am considerably in the debt of previous writers on the subject will become clear as the discussion proceeds.

First, a few preliminary (and I fear somewhat polemical) remarks on method and principles.

Xenophon records that in 371 an embassy was sent from Athens to Sparta in order to negotiate a settlement. His account contains several peculiar features concerning both the procedure of the embassy and the personnel employed. To submit the historical writings of Xenophon to close and detailed scrutiny is often an unrewarding task, yet it is well to bear in mind that at the time of the events under discussion Xenophon, who had been exiled from Athens, was resident in the Peloponnese and he ought therefore to have been in a position to combine an understanding of the political workings of Athens with a knowledge of what went on in Sparta.

We read that Callias the son of Hipponicus, Autocles the son of Strombichides, Demostratus the son of Aristophon, Aristocles, Cephisodotus, Melanopus and Lycaethus, seven names in all, were sent as envoys, and further that the popular orator Callistratus was also present in Sparta. Included in the account are three speeches which at first sight are discordant and which Xenophon attributes to Callias, Autocles and Callistratus.

In Hesperia, XXIV (1955), 305–19 (with plate 85) Sir John Beazley published five fragments of a hydria from Corinth dated ‘between 480 and 450, and in all probability between 470 and 460 or 450’.

Fragment A represents the upper part of a man in oriental dress, with both arms bent at the elbow, forearms raised, apparently supporting the body by grasping two vertical staves, one on each side. The lower part of his body is concealed by the upper part of a pyre consisting of courses of logs laid alternately lengthwise and head-on. ‘The pyre is alight: flames are shown in red.’ Partly concealed by the man's uplifted left arm are the hand and wrist, outstretched horizontally, of a second Oriental (the cuff of his sleeve is visible); this second Oriental is evidently helping the first (who is helping himself by means of the staves) to rise from the blazing pyre.

The new text gives a lengthy continuation of a passage of Pindar much quoted in antiquity and much discussed by modem scholars (lately, by Dodds in his commentary on Plato's Gorgias, pp. 270 ff.). The general sense of the first two dozen of the new lines is clear; even the detail is often determinable. The certain supplements are all in Lobel's edition; it is mere Spielerei to go beyond them, which is what I do here:

The following is a discussion of some characteristic features of Greek science. In singling out any one such characteristic one is, of course, in danger of over-emphasizing its role and of blacking-out the background of other equally characteristic features, some of which may well be effective in a very different and indeed opposite way. The argument presented here must therefore not be understood as a complete description or analysis of the character of Greek science. What is described here is only one tendency; a tendency observable in the work of many different thinkers; but also a tendency often counteracted, balanced, and sometimes almost submerged by opposite tendencies in the same thinkers. What is claimed here is no more than that certain characteristics are proportionately more prominent in ancient scientific thought and practice than they are today; it is not claimed that they were always dominant in antiquity or that they are completely foreign to modern science.