They used to believe that mankind began in 4004 B.C. and the Greeks in 776. We now know that these last five thousand years during which man has left written record of himself are but a minute fraction of the time he has spent developing his culture. We now understand that the evolution of human society, its laws and customs, its economics, its religious practices, its games, its languages, is a very slow process, to be measured in millennia. In the case of Greek religious usage it is now appreciated that it has its roots not in Mycenaean but in Palaeolithic times. As for Greek poetry, comparative studies have shown that it goes back by a continuous tradition to Indo-European poetry.

This paper is primarily an attempt to study the Homeric evidence on houses, particularly on the , in relation to the relevant remains. The reverse procedure, illuminating the archaeological evidence by references to Homer, is a hazardous one, as we shall see. It is often unclear just what is represented by the descriptions in the poems, and what period, if any, the things described belong to. I shall be concerned with these questions here. Are the houses in the poems Mycenaean: genuine traditions from the period in which the stories are set? Or are they Geometric: contemporary? Or a memory of some time in between? Or a mixture? We know so little about the development of the epic tradition that any possible source of information is worth pursuing.

There has been apparently a universal agreement among commentators on Antigone that either Sophocles was wrong in having the early sun rise over Dirke, west of Thebes, or that he chose Dirke rather than Ismenos, which flows to the east, as the most representative waterbed. But, curiously enough, they fail to realize that Sophocles nowhere in the above passage mentions the sun, but rather the sunlight, , eyelid, may not necessarily mean but eyelashes, i.e. the outward-bound sunbeams.

In a brief article under the present title, Adam Parry raised a simple but profound question: were there certain things that the inherited vocabulary of oral poets did not allow them to sayF; The mere raising of this question, whatever his answer, is enough to make the article one of the more important contributions to Homeric studies in the last fifty years. As it happens, his answer was affirmative, and it has not been contested. Contested it will now be.

In C.Q,. xxii (1972), 199 Professor R. G. Austin has drawn attention to the short at the front, unusually long at the back. It must be related to that other heroic ‘long back and sides’, the Theseis, which is described by Plutarch (Thes. 5) who compares Homer's Abantes Il. 2. 542, and adds by way of explanation that the custom was not learnt from the Arabes, as some think, nor from the Mysians (which incidentally explains Hector), but because the Abantes liked close combat and short front hair denied their adversaries a hand hold. The same explanation probably serves the Hectorean hair style.

Aristophanes speaks in Equites 225 f. of the rancour borne Cleon by the cavalry: The scholiast at verse 226 cites Theopompus (F. Gr. Hist. 115 F 93) for the explanation: The curious words were (by implication) explained by Gilbert, Beitrdge, 133, as referring to Cleon's alleged entrance into the Boule of 428/7 so as to prosecute the cavalry en masse for desertion. This explanation was accepted by Jacoby in his commentary. Nevertheless, the best that can be said for it is that it is an apparently necessary means of imparting some sort of meaning to an inconsequential sentence. It makes no sense to say, on the face of it, that because Cleon was angered by the cavalry ‘he attacked the constitution’ or, worse still, ‘applied himself to the politeia’. What is needed is the assertion that Cleon attacked the cavalry in some manner or other.

The scene at the end of the Phaedo, in which Plato describes how Socrates dies by poisoning from hemlock, is moving and impressive. It gives us the sense of witnessing directly an actual event, accurately and vividly described, the death of the historical Socrates. There are, however, certain curious features in the scene, and in the effects of the hemlock on Socrates, as Plato presents them. In the Phaedo hemlock has only one primary effect: it produces first heaviness and then numbness in the body.

Dr. G. S. Kirk suggested (C.Q.xiii [1963], 51–2) that the last line here referred to ‘a fantastically ithyphallic bridegroom’. Professor Lloyd-Jones (C.Q,. xvii [1967], 168), while professing uncertainty as to the rightness of this suggestion, thought it ‘quite likely’, and adduced in support of it a story from Tzetzes on Lycophron 1378 (ed. Scheer, ii. 381 f.), a story told also, but in different words, in the Etymologicum Magnum s.v. (ed. Gaisford, 153, If.), and containing in this second version the words ‘used in just the sense which Dr. Kirk ascribed to it in Sappho’.

The twenty-seven fragments under this number ‘were assembled in the belief that they represented lyric verses in the Aeolic dialect and might contribute something to the text of Sappho or Alcaeus’ (Lobel). The only feature that is ‘unequivocally Aeolic’ is in fr. 2. 9 the letter following is, or possibly the division is not considered, no doubt rightly).

Is this indeed a text in the Aeolic dialect ? There is very little other indication: fr. 4. 3 in fr. 4. 5 would seem decisive if the reading were quite certain.

In recent years a great deal of scholarly and philosophical discussion has been devoted to the interpretation and evaluation of the regress arguments which Parmenides is made to deploy against the theory of Ideas in the first part of the dialogue which takes its name from him. By contrast, scarcely anything has been written about the infinite regress argument which Parmenides presents at the start of the second of the deductions which make up the dialogue's second part. Yet while it may contain less to reward the philosopher than the earlier regresses, it can hardly fail to perplex the scholar.

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth.

Apollo's oracle gives specific instructions concerning the treatment of the murderer of Laius. Oedipus issues an edict of excommunication and bindshimself under a curse. I wish to examine the relationship between these three pronouncements as they occur initially and as they are used throughout the play. The basis of what I have to say is tentative in that it consists in a particular interpretation of Oedipus' addres, 216 ff., and in the assumption that Sophocles employed a distinction between an edict, that is a secular command of the kingas governing authority, and a curse which, once pronounced, is felt to operate independently. However, both the interpretation and the assumption are farfrom arbitrary, and if they are acceptable the resulting analysis reveals whatmight be called Sophocles' creative use of past episodes. The terms of the oraclegive way to an edict of excommunication, and this in turn, becomes the contentof a curse which initially had a different content.

Thucydides describes Antipho (8. 68. 1) as ‘inferior to no one of his time in and more capable than any of initiating ideas and giving expression to them’. What does he mean here by? Does it refer to ability? or does it refer to courage and consistency of principle? and in either case how are we to relate this description of Antipho to Thucydides description of Nicias (7. 86. 5) as less worthy than any other Greek of the historian's day to meet with the misfortunes that he did?

It is notorious that Xenophon omitted all notice of the foundation of the Second Athenian Confederacy, and alluded to Athens' alliances in the 370s so sparingly that if the Hellenica was the only evidence for the period it would hardly be possible to infer the existence of the Confederacy. All that could be said would be that the raid of Sphodrias so embittered the Athenians (5. 4. 63) that they joined with the Thebans in resisting Sparta (5. 4. 34), rinding in the course of the war the allies who mysteriously appeared in the account of the Peace of 372/1 (6. 3. 19) and who probably included the Corcyraeans (5. 4. 66). By contrast, Diodorus (15. 28 and 29) was explicit, and the best modern account of the foundation, that of Accame, is rightly attentive./

The eschatological myth in the tenth book of the Laws (903 b–905 d) contains a paragraph which purports to explain why, in the next world, efficient treatmentof souls according to their deserts is ‘marvellously easy’

Nearly forty years ago I wrote to the editors of Liddell and Scott, pointing out that in Apoll. Rhod. I. 685 was a future, not as they thought of , but of , and that it was so explained e.g. by V. Magnien, Le futur grec (Paris, 1912). The correction, slightly muddled, is to be found in their Addenda, new Supplement, s.v. , but it seems to have escaped Dr. Giangrande and Mr. M. Campbell, not to mention Schwyzer e tutti quanti, and should therefore perhaps be repeated here.

Ii is a well-known fact that the men of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander were known collectively as or ‘foot companions’. Our first reference to the name comes from Demosthenes, who in his second Olynthiac tries unconvincingly to disparage the fighting qualities of Philip's mercenaries and Demosthenes adds no explanation, and it was left to commentators and lexicographers to unearth a relevant fragment from the Philippica of Anaximenes of Lampsacus

It once seemed almost self-evident that the extraordinary progress of Greek astronomy and mathematics in the Hellenistic age were, at least in part, the result of contact with Babylonian and Egyptian culture. But, whatever they may have owed to Babylonia in the exact sciences, there is now a growing consensus that even as early as Eudoxus the Greeks had advanced beyond the point where they might have profited from Egyptian help, and it is not easy to find a solid basis for the widespread Greek belief in the superior wisdom of the Egyptian hierarchy. Yet the preface to the famous Calendar for the Saite nome, P. Hibeh 27, provides circumstantial evidence that one Greek, at least, in the fourth or early third century B.C., found in Egypt an instrument for measuring the time at night which was new to him and which he may well have found impressive in its accuracy.

Fifteen magistrates of the gens Veturia are recorded during the Republicanperiod in our sources; the earliest is C. (or P.) Veturius Geminus Cicurinus, the consul of 499; the latest is Ti. Veturius B(arrus ?), a monetalis of c. 110–108 B.C. Mommsen thought that the Veturii Calvini were plebeian, as were Veturius the curule aedile of 210, Ti. Veturius Gracchus Sempronianus who became augur in 174, and the monetalis. He considered the other Veturii patrician, and apparently assumed that the gens had two branches, one plebeian and one patrician. Münzer, however, held that the Veturii were patrician, and that it was only T. Veturius Calvinus, cos. 334 and 321, who had become plebeian. He sought to show that all the other supposedly plebeian Veturii were in fact patrician.

Many books have been written on Greek dance. The fault which bedevils a large number of them is that their authors have tried to recreate the movements of the dances from the artistic evidence without taking into account the conventions of Greek vase-painting and sculpture. Other books, and they are the most useful, set out the literary and the artistic evidence without attempting to reconstruct the dances. Rarely, however, are the wider implications considered, and it is these which I wish to discuss here. More analysis and discussion of the evidence for many of my statements is no doubt required, but the place for that is a book rather than an article which ranges over a comparatively large field.