The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse.

The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius deals with a band of heroes one generation before the great warriors at Troy, and the narrative does not really concern itself directly with the later generation. Some of the familiar heroes of Homer may never seem very far from Apollonius' narrative, but they tend not to appear in the poem themselves. One who does is Achilles, twice in fact: once in the first book and once in the last. Both of these passages deal with his early life: the first when he is in the care of Chiron and his wife (1.553ff.), the second when he is in the family home with Peleus and Thetis (4.869ff). In the former the gods of heaven and nymphs of Pelion are described as watching the departure of the Argo from Thessaly bound for Colchis. Chiron then comes down from Pelion and waves the heroes goodbye. His wife meanwhile holds Achilles on her arm and shows the child to his father Peleus as he departs with the Argonauts. The later passage describes the failed attempt of Thetis to make her son immortal. In this account Thetis addresses Peleus for the first time since their separation (4.856ff.), and then vanishes into the depths of ocean. Their separation occurred some time earlier when she disappeared in anger after her failure to make the young Achilles immortal. She tried to do this by placing him in the fire during the night, and anointing him with ambrosia during the day (4.869–72):

The attempt fails when Peleus happens to see his son's immersion in the flames, and gives out a terrible cry, whereupon Thetis throws the boy down, goes away herself, and does not return (873ff.).

On the subject of the Branchidae there are a few facts and some outstanding questions. The facts may be stated first. They are provided by literary evidence and one piece of archaeological evidence, which are generally accepted.

Much effort has been invested by scholars in defining the specific character of the Homeric values as against those that obtained at later periods of Greek history. The distinction between the ‘shame-culture’ and the ‘guilt-culture’ introduced by E. R. Dodds, and that between the ‘competitive’ and the ‘cooperative’ values advocated by A. W. H. Adkins, are among the more influential ones. Although Adkins's taxonomy encountered some acute criticism, notably from A. A. Long, it has become generally adopted both in the scholarly literature and in general philosophical discussions of Greek ethics. Objections to Adkins's approach have mainly concentrated on demonstrating that his denial of the cooperative values to Homer is untenable on general grounds and is not supported by Homeric evidence. Characteristically, Adkins's thesis concerning the centrality to Homer's ethics of the so-called ‘competitive values‘ has never received similar attention, probably owing to the fact that this is the point at which his picture of the Homeric society concurs with the influential reconstructions by W Jaeger and M. I. Finley. The present study of timē and aretē, generally held to be the two competitive values central to the Homeric poems, purports to address this issue.

This is the text of II. 18.603–6, the final scene on the Shield of Achilles, as presented unanimously by our manuscript tradition, five Vulgate papyri from the first to the sixth century A.D., our scholia, and in a quotation in Dionysius of Halicarnassus.1 As is well-known, a much discussed and contentious textual problem raised by Wolf2 is lurking behind it. It is prompted by a passage in Athenaeus providing an additional line after which mentions an and hisDiscussions of the controversial Iliad passage have concentrated on the authenticity of the information given by Athenaeus.3 This focus, I suggest, has been unduly narrow, and has led either to a neglect of other pieces of evidence or to a wrong assessment of their importance. I therefore propose to tackle the problem with a different strategy. Let us erase from our memories the very existence of Athenaeus' information for a while, and reconsider the passage in question accordingly.

The aims and performance of Xerxes' fleet in the period before Thermopylai are mostly taken by students of the invasion as they are set out in Herodotus. A closer look reveals much of interest, as well as some puzzles. In this paper I address in particular the curious mooring which the fleet adopted at the end of its first day's voyage from Therma: πρ⋯κροσσαι ὅρμεον τ⋯ ⋯ς π⋯ντον ⋯π⋯ ⋯κτὼ ν⋯ας (‘they came to anchor, facing the sea, eight ships deep prokrossai’: 7.188.1), their next intended port of call, and the attempt to circumnavigate Euboia. In offering an explanation of what was happening and why, I am conscious of the sobering advice given for such investigations by Whatley, that ancient campaigns cannot necessarily be reconstructed as if those in charge saw what was best to do and got it done. That advice is now reinforced by Lazenby. Both of them seem to me, however, to underrate the logistical competence of Xerxes' naval high command. Without good logistics no campaign with triremes was even possible.

The time is long gone when literary men were happy to treat literature, and tragic poetry in particular, as something which exists serenely outside time, high up in the empyrean of unchanging validity and absolute values. Nowadays it is conventional, and seems natural, to insist that literature is produced within a particular society and a particular social setting: even its most gorgeous blooms have their roots in the soil of history. Its understanding requires us to understand the society which appreciated it, and for which it came into existence. In the particular case of the tragic poetry of Athens, the most influential body of recent criticism focuses on the relation of the drama to the realities of political and social life.

In adapting the story of the Great War to the taste of his own age Ephoros, himself a pupil of Isokrates and a professional historian, was led astray by the combined influences of rhetoric and rationalism; as neither the rationalism nor the rhetoric was of the best quality, the intrusion of both at this stage could have inflicted irreparable damage on the tradition of the war if the text of Herodotus had not survived to refute the inventions grafted on the authentic record by Ephoros.

‘Flute’, as Jenny Strauss Clay notes, is a mistranslation of αὐλ⋯ς since the ancient Greek aulos consisted of ‘two reed mouthpieces and two pipes, sometimes of different lengths, played simultaneously. Its dual structure permitted antiphonal execution; one pipe could produce the melody, the other, some sort of accompaniment or perhaps a drone.’ She believes (perhaps correctly) that the dual structure and dual sound of the aulos are implicit in the following passage in which Pindar describes Athena‘s invention of the art of playing this instrument (P. 12.6–17).

Aristophanes' Peace is preserved in ten manuscripts, the oldest and most complete of which are the tenth-century Ravennas 429 (R) and the eleventh-century Venetus Marcianus 474 (V). A third manuscript, Venetus Marcianus 475 (G), is almost certainly a direct copy of V and can therefore be eliminated. The seven remaining manuscripts of the play, along with the Aldine edition of 1498, share numerous variant readings, as well as lacunae at 948–1011 and 1076b, and can accordingly be described as a family. As I will argue in detail below, the stemmatic relationship among the members of this family can be most economically represented as shown in Figure 1.

Athenaeus (637a) records these lines from the dithyramb Hymenaios, along with a number of other snippets of poetry, in the course of an inconclusive discussion about the characteristics of the instrument (if it is an instrument) called the magadis. Athenaeus had good reasons for being puzzled; the word first appeared in Greek, so far as we know, in the seventh century b.c., and its sense was already a matter of some doubt in the fourth. As to this particular fragment, even Telestes' original audience might be forgiven some bafflement in the face of the third line, on which I shall initially focus here. What can be meant by ‘the five-rodded joining of the strings’?

The issue of the recognition scene in Euripides' Electra, if not as ‘eternal’ as the controversy over the relative dating of the Sophoclean and Euripidean plays of that name, is certainly recurrent. After Eduard Fraenkel's resurrection of the problem at the end of his great commentary on Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the contributions of Hugh Lloyd-Jones and the late Godfrey Bond seemed to have settled the case in favour of authenticity. But soon after, David Bain and then M. L. West, G. Basta Donzelli and finally David Kovacs, all writing in the same journal, raised some new and awkward questions, which, at the very least, require more in the way of answers than they have yet received. The last word, as the saying goes, has not yet been spoken. In this article I try to provide the last word—no, that would be too much to expect, but further reflections on the issue—yes. In particular, I try to set the matter in a wider context, seeking analogies (both dramatic and extra-dramatic) for what, if w. 518–44 are Euripidean, the playwright may have been aiming at in this particular scene. Such analogies should be important, for scholars have generally by contrast stressed the uniqueness of the recognition scene: ‘in the extant remains of Greek tragedy we have indeed nothing’, says Bond, ‘comparable to the Electra parody’.

Near the climax of the ascent passage of the Symposium, Plato describes how the lover turns to gaze at the great sea of the beautiful and . While the phrase has been variously interpreted by commentators and translators, none has regarded it as particularly significant. In what follows we examine the contribution that the immediate context makes to the meaning of the phrase and take note of the link between the adjective ἄφθονος and two subsequent uses of φθον⋯ω, both with reference to Alcibiades. We conclude that in the two final scenes of the dialogue the repetition of ἄφθονος and φθον⋯ω has the same effect as the repetition of the well-studied adverb ⋯ξα⋯φνης. By virtue of these contextual associations, we suggest, the prepositional phrase acquires a new significance. Furthermore, on the interpretation developed here the dialogue's two final scenes encapsulate the view of the incompatibility of jealousy and philosophy that Plato sets forth more explicitly and at greater length in the Phaedrus and Republic.

The Lives of the Ten Orators (), preserved in the manuscripts of Plutarch's Moralia (832b–852e) but almost universally acknowledged not to be the work of Plutarch himself, have been much maligned by modern scholars, and the information they provide has been treated with extreme caution, not to say disdain. My purpose here is to demonstrate that the first of these biographies, the Life of Antiphon (832b–834b), repays close study and, far from being worthless, reliably preserves a tradition which provides useful material on its subject. Some of what appears below is inevitably going over well-trodden ground, but there is, in my opinion, sufficient material in the Life which has been overlooked or misinterpreted to justify the following re-examination.

There are various features of the language and exposition of the Eudemian Ethics (EE) that allow us to impute what might be called an ‘egalitarian’ outlook to its author. Each of these features, on its own, might be dismissed as of little significance, or as significant yet anomalous; but taken together, they constitute a body of evidence that cannot easily be put aside. The term ‘egalitarianism’ is of course imprecise, yet it serves its function well enough. I shall take it to signify a certain cast of mind which consists of at least the following cluster of dispositions: (i) being unwilling to view society as divided into ranks or classes (e.g. ‘the good’ vs. ‘the bad’; ‘the better sort of people’ vs. ‘the rabble’) or even to use language suggestive of such a division; but rather (ii) having a tendency to see the similarity of everyone with everyone else, by finding some good even among those reputed to be bad, and some bad among those reputed good; furthermore (iii) wishing to identify with the general run of humanity, or at least not being averse to doing so; and (iv) insisting on the fundamental equality and likeness of human beings, so that their inequalities and differences are regarded as secondary.

The title is unashamedly plagiarized from Stephen Todd's excellent book, The Shape of Athenian Law. The plagiarism is slightly misleading, however, since my interest is in law as enactment (Gesetz) while Todd's title expresses his interest in law as system (Recht). The issue I wish to address is the formulation of written laws in Athens during the late archaic and classical period, specifically the balance between procedural and substantive law. Substantive law deals with rights, obligations, offences, etc. Its role is to define behaviour which is required, allowed, or prohibited. These are what Hart terms ‘primary rules’. Procedural law, on the other hand, deals, as the name suggests, with the administration of justice, that is with jurisdiction, process, etc. Hart's term for these is ‘secondary rules’. The two cannot be separated quite as neatly as I have suggested, of course. A procedural law can scarcely avoid mentioning the offences or rights whose punishment or protection it regulates, while a substantive law may need to address issues such as jurisdiction. This is therefore an issue of orientation, not a simple binary division. However, as a broad basis for classification it is of value.

In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect (nous), which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is in fact a coherent structure and focus to this chapter, which has therefore unjustly been criticized as disorganized or corrupt; and secondly that, in the light of such a coherent understanding of the chapter as a whole, we can resolve the difficulties in interpreting the central passage concerned with cross-modal perceptual judgements, and thereby also throw some further light on the related passages in the second chapter of De anima 3, which had been directly concerned with that topic.

The accepted restoration of the Stele of Aristoteles, first suggested in 1855, stood for more than 100 years; in 1967, J. Coleman and D. Bradeen remeasured the stele and noted the impossibility of the restoration. Though these scholars thereby corrected a sustained error in the historical record, they consequently cast into the realm of conjecture an established parallel between the literary tradition and the epigraphical remains of the Second Athenian League. If it is not possible to restore Kerkyra to the extant stele, should scholars deny Kerkyraian membership in the League? There are four pieces of evidence to consider in answering this question. The IG ii2 96–7 inscriptions suggest that the League admitted Kerkyra as a member. An evaluation of the literary evidence ends in indecision because of an inexactness of language; however, this is ultimately unimportant for evaluating the membership of Kerkyra. Finally, IG ii2 43 needs to be reassessed with regard to the present question. As this paper will show, the crux of the problem is deciding what is to be made of Kerkyra's absence on IG ii2 43 and the appropriate weight which should be given the other evidence.

Socrates' last words are a microcosm of the riddle his character poses to the philosophical reader. Are they sincere or ironic? Do they represent an afterthought prompted by a belated sense of familial responsibility or a death–bed epiphany? Are we to determine their reference in relation to the surface logic of the Phaedo or take them as the sign of a concealed discursive depth? In what follows, I will argue that the answer to these questions depends upon acknowledgement and clarification of the pedagogical challenge Socrates faces in conversation with Simmias and Cebes. What I have to say is prompted, in large measure, by Glenn Mosts recent article which both undertakes substantial analysis of the riddles treatment by the tradition and develops a plausible solution. I do not accept this solution. But the struggle to articulate my misgivings about his argument was indispensible to the development of my own. In view of this, it seems prudent to begin with a brief summary of the position he takes.

In Poetics chapter 9, Aristotle claims that the poet's function differs from the historian's. The historian should describe what has happened, but the poet should say ‘what sorts of thing might happen, that is, the things possible according to likelihood or necessity’ (1451a36–8). The difference is not between fiction and non-fiction. Some past events happened according to likelihood and are thereby candidates for poetic representation (1451b29–32). Rather, the poet differs from the historian with respect to the level of abstraction at which he considers the actions and experiences of agents. The historian should engage in accurate and thorough ἱστορ⋯α—‘research’ or ‘fact-gathering’—by carefully recording his or others' observations of particular events. The poet, on the other hand, looks for causal relations among fictional or non-fictional events, for he cares whether his composition has a plot with events that happen because of other events and not merely after them (cf. 1452a20–l). The poet may discern in the historian's materials some causally related events fit for dramatic or epic representation, but that is not the historian's concern. As Aristotle says in chapter 23, the historian should report ‘whatever befell one or more people during a particular period of time, each of the events relating to the others by chance’ (1459a23–4). The last clause is an overstatement; we have just noticed Aristotle's admission that some past events were likely to happen. Also, he elsewhere says that ‘future events will for the most part be like past events’, presumably because they share a similar causal structure (Rh. 1394a8). The remark's point is clear enough, though: the historian should report what happened whether or not the events exhibit explanatory coherence.