Pindar's Eighth Olympian celebrates the victory of Alkimedon of Aigina in the boys' wrestling at Olympia in 460. This victory was the sixth won by a member of this family (line 76). The absence of detail about most of these victories suggests that the family had had little success in the great Panhellenic competitions and that the majority were won at minor festivals. However, one of the remaining five victories was certainly won in one of the four festivals which made up the periodos. In lines 15–18, after preparatory generalizations about the diversity of paths to achievement, all with divine aid, Pindar describes the path of achievement, and the source of divine aid, which features in the victor's family:

Tιμ⋯σθενες, ὕμμε δ' ⋯κλ⋯ρωσεν π⋯τμος

Zην⋯ γενεθλ⋯ωι. ὃς σ⋯ μ⋯ν Nεμ⋯αι πρ⋯πατον,

'Aλκιμ⋯δοντα δ⋯ π⋯ρ κρ⋯νου λ៹φωι

θ⋯κεν 'Oλυμπιν⋯καν.

Timosthenes, in your case fate allotted you to Zeus as your family god, who made you pre-eminent at Nemea and Alkimedon Olympic victor by the Hill of Kronos.

Solon's fragments 9–11 (West) are preserved in three late authors: frr. 9 and 11 by Diodoros Sikelos (fl. 60–30 B.C.), 9.20.2, Plutarch (fl. A.D. 46–127), Solon 3.6 and 30.3 respectively, and Diogenes Laertios (fl. early third century A.D.), 1.50 and 1.51 respectively; and fr. 10 by Diogenes Laertios alone, 1.49. They are all quoted in the context of Solon's reaction to Peisistratos. Stories on this theme were circulating by the time of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (AP), and Rhodes' scepticism about them is well founded. Its author did not garnish (Rhodes' very apt term) his version of events with these poems, nor indeed with any Solonian utterance, and he explicitly states that myth-making on this subject had already resulted in two stories about Solon and Peisistratos which were chronologically impossible (17.2).

This paper addresses itself to two transitional passages in Pindar which are frequently misunderstood. In both we appear at first sight to have an awkward change of direction, with the myth terminated abruptly and the following item of praise merely juxtaposed. In reality, both transitions are effected smoothly, and the same technique is employed in both odes.

If you look up οἶκος in Liddell and Scott, you find the instances classified in three main divisions: first those meaning a house, or sometimes other kinds of building; secondly ‘one's household goods, substance’, for which I shall generally say ‘property’, though Liddell and Scott do not actually use that word; and thirdly ‘family’. This threefold distinction is sound, and I shall adhere to it here. Admittedly one sometimes finds an instance where it is not easy to decide which sense the word has. Two of the senses, occasionally even all three, may overlap. But in the great majority of instances it is clear which sense is meant.

Malcolm Davies, CQ 37 (1987), 65–75, has argued strongly for the view, almost universally discarded since Fraenkel's Agamemnon appeared, that Aeschylus envisaged Klytaimestra as killing her husband with an axe. He succeeds in establishing a strong probability that, among the various pre-Aeschylean versions of the story of Agamemnon's death, those which had him killed in his bath with the help of an entangling robe always made Klytaimestra use an axe, not a sword, to strike the fatal blows; and Sophocles and Euripides when they specify the weapon invariably specify it as an axe. All that this proves, however, is that if Aeschylus did make Klytaimestra kill Agamemnon in his bath with a sword, he was innovating. We have still to determine whether he did in fact so innovate. It is fair to treat the pre- and post-Aeschylean evidence as establishing a presumption in favour of the axe, but a presumption only: if there is unambiguous evidence in the text of the Oresteia that the Aeschylean Klytaimestra used a sword, it must be taken as outweighing any amount of external evidence which can show only that other Klytaimestras, imagined by other poets and artists, did not use one.

The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of age and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households.

These lines are the first reaction to the false news of the death of Orestes. Their attribution has been much discussed. What prompts my intervention is the recent development, on this important problem, of a confident unanimity which seems to me certainly mistaken. I have been unable to find a single translator, editor, or commentator in recent years who gives the lines to Electra. The case for Electra was best made by Headlam–Thomson in 1938, and a few extra points were added very hesitantly by Winnington-Ingram in 1946. From the wealth of detailed argument in Headlam–Thomson, which has been ignored rather than refuted, I will mention and briefly develop just two points, before going on to add some of my own.

So begins one of the most engaging, and variously controversial, musical scenes in Euripides. The Messenger's narrative of the Phantom Helen's disappearance has proved to Menelaus that the Helen standing before him is the real Helen, altogether innocent of elopement to Troy, from whom he has been sundered for seventeen laborious years. The ensuing embrace is developed in a duet (Hel. 625–59) which is followed without a break by the so-called ‘Interrogation’ (660–97), the two together constituting the so-called ‘Recognition Duo’.

In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound (assuming that it is by Aeschylus) might seem to be an exception, since all but one of its characters are gods. But nonetheless the intervention of the gods in the life of the one human character, Io, brings pain and trouble as well as promise of benefit. Io has been driven mad because she has refused to obey the dreams that tell her to go to the meadow where Zeus wants to have intercourse with her. The god does not make his request in person, and it is only in the course of her wanderings that Io learns how Zeus will bring a gentle end to her sufferings. Her informant is another god, Zeus' adversary Prometheus, who answers her questions, at times grudgingly (778), and in ways that are not immediately clear to her (775).

A number of Democritean fragments may loosely be called ‘political’, concerned as they are with questions to do with the π⋯λις – with government, with the duties and dangers of public office, with justice, law and order. The majority of them (B 248–66) have been preserved in chapters of Stobaeus’ anthology entitled ‘On the State’ (iv 1), ‘On Laws and Customs’ (iv 2), ‘On Government’ (iv 5).

Our starting point is a somewhat obscure incident which has lately attracted some attention. The year is 429 B.C., and the place is Athens in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. The plague, which had broken out only a year before, was still claiming its victims. Yet military operations were in full swing, and the general Phormio operating in the Corinthian gulf against a Peloponnesian fleet was able to score an impressive victory. The Lacedaemonians were deeply dissatisfied. This was the first sea-fight they had been engaged in, and they found it hard to believe that their fleet was so much inferior to that of the Athenians. They dispatched three advisers to Knemos, the admiral in charge, instructing them to make better preparations for another sea-fight. Additional ships were solicited from the allies, and those already at hand were prepared for battle. It is at this point that the incident in question occurred. Not to prejudge the issue, I quote the text in full leaving the controversial phrases untranslated:

4. And Phormio on his part sent messengers to Athens to give information of the enemy's preparations and to tell about the battle which they had won, urging them also to send to him speedily (δι⋯ τ⋯χους) as many ships as possible, since there was always a prospect that a battle might be fought any day.

5. So they sent him twenty ships, but gave τῷ δ⋯ κυμ⋯ξοντι special orders to sail first to Crete. Nικ⋯ας γ⋯ρ Kρ⋯ς Γορτ⋯νιος πρ⋯ξενος ⋯ν persuaded them (αὺτο⋯ς) to sail against Cydonia, a hostile town, promising to bring it over to the Athenians; but he was really asking them to intervene to gratify the people of Polichne, who are neighbours of the Cydonians.

6. So ⋯ μ⋯ν λαβὼν τ⋯ς να⋯ς. went to Crete, and helped the Polichnitans to ravage the lands of the Cydonians, and by reason of winds and stress of weather wasted not a little time.

Recent discussions of Aristophanes' early career raise again the question who was recognized as a victor with the Babylonians and the Acharnians and his name officially recorded, Aristophanes the poet or Kallistratos his didaskalos. This old-new controversy has brought back into focus the City Victors' list (IG II 2325) and the reconstruction of' API [in the second column of the comic poets. The inscription itself has not been studied anew and the reader is referred to earlier examinations of it, especially to two articles of E. Capps and to the verdict of A. Pickard-Cambridge, who maintains that it is needless to follow the controversy in detail: ‘For the fifth century, the name of Aristophanes is restored with practical certainty in the list of victors at the Dionysia, between those of Hermippus and Eupolis, it now being proved that the first victory of Aristomenes, the other candidate for the place, fell much later. One can hardly blame Pickard-Cambridge and others for evading the intricate calculations and boring details. Yet, it seems that they deserve, or rather require a re-examination, for Capps, although a meticulous and distinguished epigraphist, had the tendency to jump easily to rash conclusions. Indeed, his frankness in readily admitting his mistakes and recanting untenable positions evokes admiration, but, since his work belongs to a period in which hypotheses were more easily advanced and less rigorously defended than today, an attempt should be made to take a look at his argumentations and see whether they are still valid.

It has become necessary to enter any discussion of the date of the Kallias decrees, IG i3.52, armed with apologies and justifications merely for bringing up the matter again; such is the result not so much of the quantity of articles and chapters written on the subject as of the belief that the orthodox date, 434/3, has been proved, despite reliance on circumstantial evidence and some forceful objections levied against it.1 Indeed, that the case is considered closed can find no better reflection than the assignment of the date 434/3 in IG i3 without even a question mark.

One of the most striking features of Athenian laws regulating commercial activities is the absence of any concept akin to the modern legal notion of the partnership or corporation. Despite the presence in Athenian society of numerous koinoniai, groups of individuals cooperating for some purpose, be it commercial or otherwise, Athenian law concerned itself solely with individual persons and did not recognize the separate legal existence of collective entities. And just as Athenian law did not recognize the legal existence of partnerships or corporations, it also did not possess the notion of corporate liability. This meant that if someone entered into an agreement with a group of individuals and one of those individuals violated the terms of the agreement, the plaintiff proceeded only against the individual who acted contrary to the agreement, not against the group as a whole. If the plaintiff won his suit, he only had a right to receive compensation from the defendant's private property; he did not have a claim on all the funds held in common by the group.

My aim in this paper is to reconsider a number of aspects of Aristotle's thinking on comedy in the light of the acknowledged Aristotelian corpus. I shall have nothing to say about the Tractatus Coislinianus, an obscure and contentious little document which must (despite Janko's energetic attempt to restore its credit) remain an inappropriate starting-point for discussion. There is still, I believe, something to be learnt from the extant works.

Polybius in a familiar passage, lists goods moving past Byzantium between the Mediterranean. world and the Black Sea region; among these goods, slaves are accorded a prominent place:

…as regards necessities it is an unidsputed fact that the most plentiful supplies and best qualities of of cattle and slaves reach us from the countries lying round the Pontus, while among luxuries the same countries furnish us with an abundance of honey, wax and preserved fish; from the surplus of our countries they take olive-oil and every kind of wine. As for grain, there is give and-take – with them sometimes supplying us when we require it and sometimes importing it from us

Euboulos' 'αγκελ⋯ων is represented by only four fragments (frr. 1–3 frr. 1–4 Hunter), all culled from Athenaeus, which tell us nothing about the plot of the play or about the identity of its titular character. R. L. Hunter, in his recent commentary on Euboulos, discusses at length the name 'αγκελ⋯ων and concludes that it could belong to either (1) a humble and poor man; (2) ‘a character from folklore notorious for sexual relations with his mother’ ; or (3)’ a wily slave such as those foreshadowed in Aristophanes and familiar from New Comedy'. In view of our ignorance of the play's plot, each of these possibilities has an equal claim to our consideration. I believe, however, that the context in which the fragments are embedded in Athenaeus allows us to refine our understanding of the name even further.

There is little evidence to support any estimate of the sizes and number of the phratries in Classical Attica. According to the author of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, there were four tribes, 12 phratries and 360 gene, corresponding respectively to the seasons, months and days of the year. Most older discussions of the tribal organization of Attica were based on this passage. More recently, however, scholars have come to agree that this information is too schematic to be historical, and in any event was not intended to describe the constitution of Attica in the Classical period. Currently, in spite of this passage, many contend that there were probably numerous phratries in Classical Attica (perhaps as many as there were demes or gene), which varied greatly in size.

The death of Socrates gave birth to an industry of biographical literature which often took the form of a defence (apologia) or prosecution (katēgoria), sometimes purporting to be the actual defence or prosecution conducted at his trial. Plato and Xenophon wrote works in his defence. Among his critics, one Polycrates had a certain notoriety. Lysias, Theodectes and Demetrius of Phalerum, orators and rhetoricians like Polycrates, were credited with further works of apology. There were doubtless many others. The aim of this paper is to show that Xenophon wrote his Defence in the light of the rhetorical theory that required that a speaker utter words and thoughts appropriate πρεποντα to his character.

Illusions play a central part in Epicurean philosophy. One of its fundamental assumptions is that men are the victims of a certain grand illusion and, as long as they remain so, can never aspire to a happy life. This is the illusion that pleasures can be increased in intensity without limit. It is as a result of this that men go to enormous lengths to enlarge their capacity to procure more pleasure, struggling in pursuit of goals that can rarely, if ever, be achieved. But here mankind has made a disastrous mistake: the limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of pain, and after that point it cannot be increased, only varied. The illusion has therefore led to a tragic state of affairs, a sad history of fruitless war, struggle and ambition and it is a vital part of Epicurus’ programme to rid men of this evil by teaching them the true limits of pleasure.