In the early part of the fourth century it was the regular practice for Athenian treaties to specify the authorities who were to swear the oath on either side, and, although the fifth-century material is more scanty, three clear instances suggest that the habit was already established by 425. The notable exception is the Peace of Nikias, and with it the Spartan alliance of 421, in which not the quality but the number is prescribed, seventeen from each city. Kirchhoff suggested that this odd number might be built up, on the Spartan side, from the two kings (who in fact head the list), the five ephors (the eponymous ephor Pleistolas comes third and the next four might be his colleagues; cf. Tod, GHI 99), and a board of ten. Kirchhoff refused to speculate about these ten beyond saying that it was a normal number, but this gap in his argument can perhaps be filled from a passage in Diodorus (below) which has received no satisfactory explanation. Normal Athenian practice would not oblige Athens to conform to the Spartan number, and if Kirchhoff is right we should perhaps suppose that Sparta asked for numerical parity. The next question will be, how the Athenians made up their seventeen.

Various attempts have been made to find a satisfactory alternative to Cornford's explanation of what the Sophist has to say about false statement, and in particular to his interpretation of the passage in which the statements ‘Theaetetus is sitting’ and ‘Theaetetus is flying’ are discussed. The difficulty with Cornford's view is that he wants to find the explanation of truth and falsity entirely in the ‘blending’ or incompatibility of Forms, but that in the examples Socrates chooses, while Sitting and Flying may be Forms, Theaetetus cannot be. Hence Cornford has to say, ‘It is not meant that Forms are the only elements in all discourse. We can also make statements about individual things. But it is true that every such statement must contain at least one Form’. Unfortunately, when talking about the ϵἴδων συμπλοκή at 259e, the Stranger seems clearly to envisage a blendin g of ϵἴδη with each other:. How can this be reconciled with an ‘example’ in which only one term stands for a Form?

I do not propose to discuss in detail the various solutions that have been offered, but to set forth my own interpretation of the whole passage. This may be regarded as to some extent a ‘blending’ of what has been said by Professor Hackforth and Mr. Hamlyn, but a number of points arise which deserve further discussion, and it may perhaps be hoped that such a σύνθϵσις as this may prove to be .

The incessant labours of British industrialists have sent up a pall of smoke over our larger cities. Sometimes the pall descends and causes fog. So it is also with scholarship; the incessant labours of modern scholars often cause a fog to descend upon our understanding of ancient philosophers. A case in point is Zeno of Elea. The paradoxes of Zeno have aroused much discussion ever since they were first propounded; the long history has been recorded by Florian Cajori (The History of Zeno's Arguments on Motion, reprinted from American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 22, 1915). But it was not until quite recent times that men began to doubt the correctness of Aristotle's account of the paradoxes. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of French writers built up elaborate reconstructions of Zeno's four arguments on Motion. Refusing to accept the explicit testimony of Aristotle on a number of points, they argued, first, that Zeno must have been more intelligent than Aristotle made him out to be; and secondly, that the arguments, when rightly interpreted and reconstructed, follow a certain pattern. Thus in their praise of Zeno they could not help including an element of denigration of Aristotle.

The tragic death of Dr. Michael Ventris in September 1956 has thrust upon me the task of answering the criticisms made by Professor A. J. Beattie of his decipherment of the Minoan Linear B script [JHS lxxvi (1956) pp. 1–17]. Reasons of time and space preclude more than a summary reply; but fortunately almost all his points are covered by our discussion in Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge University Press, 1956), to which the reader is referred. I judge it necessary, however, to correct some wrong impressions and comment on some of Professor Beattie's methods.

The account of the decipherment is tendentious and distorted. The need for brevity prevented a fuller account in Evidence [JHS lxxiii (1953), pp. 84–103]; a more detailed version appears in Documents; but the whole story as it unfolded month by month can still be traced in the duplicated work-notes which Dr. Ventris circulated during the period 1950–52. It should be enough to say that the crucial step of applying phonetic values to the grid was based upon the reasonable hypothesis that certain words found only at Knossos represented the names of important Cretan towns. At that stage the language was still unidentified; it was as the result of the values obtained from the place-names that Dr. Ventris was forced to the conclusion that the language was Greek. This led to the recognition of Greek declensions in the Linear B inflexions, not the other way about.

In front of the house are two slaves, one of whom, the company's chief actor, has been commending the play to the public and explaining the situation. Bdelycleon, who has been asleep on the flat roof, wakes up and calls to the slaves: ‘One of you run round here quick; my father has got into the kitchen and he is scuttering around like a mouse inside; mind he doesn't get out through the waste-hole. And you, up against the door with you!’ Slave A, the chief actor, disappears round the side of the house, to take up position as Philocleon inside. A rapid change of mask would enable him to poke a head up through the chimney—144 —only to be extinguished by the bread-trough and log which his watchful son claps on. (How the chimney was represented, if at all, is anybody's guess.) Now comes a diversion from the ground floor, the exact form of which is unfortunately uncertain. RV give the unmetrical , (imperative): whether this is to be emended as Hermann , or whether it is a gloss on the following which has displaced the original text, it is clear that after being warned of the new situation Bdelycleon tells Slave B to press well and truly against the door—which implies that Philocleon is pushing from the inside. ‘I'll be down there in a minute myself,’ he goes on; ‘look out for the bolt, and keep an eye on the bar to see he doesn't gnaw out the pin.’ (βάλανος was edible as ‘date’, ‘acorn’.) Bdelycleon thereupon disappears down the back of the roof [there was of course a staircase or ladder giving access to the roof out of sight of the spectators, as required on occasion by tragedy too (Ag., PV, Psychostasia, HF, Or., Phoen.)] and comes round on to the stage presumably by the same way as Slave A left it. This would take one or two minutes, and of course the next few remarks in the dialogue with Philocleon are made by Slave B, not by Bdelycleon as in the Oxford Text; he would in any case not address his father as Philocleon (163). The ‘net’ which Philocleon threatens to gnaw through (164) cannot be stretched across the door, which has to open unimpeded the next minute; it is over the upper part of the house only, covering the window or windows, as we learn from 367 ff., having been put up to prevent him from hopping over the courtyard wall behind (130 ff.). 164 suggests that Philocleon is talking through a window during this exchange, which would make him more easily audible.

The vases published below were found during the excavation of foundation trenches for a seaside ‘kentron’ between the main road and the sea at the western limits of the site of Amathus. They were in clean sand, at a depth of about 2 metres; no traces of bones were observed. The finds were removed in the presence of Mr. Perikleous, Honorary Curator of the Limassol Museum.

There is little doubt that these objects constituted a tomb-robber's cache: Mr. Perikleous was convinced that there was here no question of a tomb, a fact which would seem to detract from the value of the find. Furthermore, the objects are not all contemporary: about half belong to the fifth century, the rest to Cypriot Geometric, with the exception of two imported Protogeometric vases.

In spite of this, it is quite possible that all the objects came from one tomb. Secondary burials after a long period are by no means infrequent in Cyprus. The vases obviously came from a tomb or tombs in view of their completeness—and the Amathus cemetery area is very close. Cypriot tombs are rich in vases, and one tomb would make a sizeable haul for a robber.

I do not propose to publish the later vases. But what I hope to show is that the earlier vases are sufficiently homogeneous to constitute a true burial group, and that the Protogeometric vases are most likely associated with them. So far as concerns the Cypriot vases of earlier type, I propose to set them against vases from Amathus Tomb 101 wherever possible, as this burial seems to provide vases nearest in type.

The humour of the passage in the Frogs (1419 ff.), in which the tragic poets reply with riddles on burning political issues, is explicable: research on the Eumenides shows that in this play Aeschylus projected political notions in much the way that he is presented by Aristophanes speaking in the Frogs: concentrating the attention of the spectator on the past of the Areopagus and on the circumstance of its foundation, he touches directly on the question which arose in 462–1 through the abolition of the political competence of this body, but he replies to it through a parable which is enigmatic for us. It is obviously such an expression as this that Aristophanes had in mind. It rests with philological and historical criticism to show whether in surviving tragedies other than Eumenides themes of an immediate public interest are put forward under the cover of myth, themes which, through ignorance of the date or of the exact conditions of the composition of the plays, have so far not been revealed. This essay examines from this point of view the Danaid tetralogy of Aeschylus.

The subject of the Danaid tetralogy is taken from the story of Danaos and his daughters. For this, Aeschylus could draw on both a literary source, the Danais, and probably also on Argive traditions.

Very little is known about the Danais. It did, however, include an account of the events which took place in Egypt between the houses of Danaos and Aigyptos, and it is likely, therefore, that it traced the course of this quarrel from the beginning.

The ransacking of Tragedy for indications of the political views of tragic poets is seldom profitable and may be disastrous. But Eumenides, like much that Aeschylus wrote, is unusual, and one of its unusual aspects is the clarity and persistence with which the hearer's attention is engaged in the political present as well as in the heroic past; one might almost say, directed away from the past and towards the present. The nature of this re-direction, and its implications, if any, for Aeschylus's own standpoint, are no new problem. My reason for discussing it once more is that not enough attention has been paid to the immediate dramatic context of the passages by which this re-direction is effected or to the relation between these passages and the language of Greek politics in general.

I. The Central Stasimon 490–565

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Editors of Aeschylus have assumed that these words cannot mean what they appear to mean: ‘Now new ordinances are overthrown, if the cause pleaded, and the injury done, by this matricide are going to prevail.’ The old laws, not the new, it is said, are in danger of overthrow, and it can only be the old laws which the Chorus defend and lament. Attempts to escape the prima facie meaning have taken the following forms:

(a) Emendation to give the sense ‘overthrow of old ordinances’ (ἕνων κ. θ., Cornford), ‘overthrow of ordained laws’ (κ. νόμων θ., Ahrens), ‘overthrow of my ordinances’ (ἐμῶν κ. θ., Weil), or ‘change to new ordinances’ (μεταστροφαὶ ν. θ., Meineke).

The capture of Salamis from Megara in the sixth century B.C. can safely be said to mark a turning-point in Athenian development. Considerations both of economics and defence would lead one to expect the island to be a natural bone of contention between the two mainland cities, and hence for it to be controlled by the one which was temporarily stronger. The surprising thing is that in the early part of the sixth century the stronger should have been Athens.

We have, it is true, one piece of evidence which suggests that Athenian naval power and interests were already considerable in this period. This is the account, in Herodotus, Diogenes, and Strabo, of the struggle against Mytilene for Sigeion, a struggle terminated by the arbitration of Periander in favour of the Athenians. The causes and aims of the Athenian venture are a matter for speculation, but whether they went as traders, pirates, or settlers, or as all three, their going underlines the fact that there were in the Athenian community at the time a number of men who had invested their capital and were prepared to risk their lives in a distant naval venture: their successful opposition to the forces of Mytilene in its turn suggests that the naval strength at the disposal of the Athenians was correspondingly formidable. It is possible that the expedition began as a private venture, financed, directed, and executed by a band of interested Athenians without any official backing. In view of the position of Sigeion it seems most probable that the venture was connected with the flow of trade to and from the Pontus: Sigeion was perhaps the base at which friendly ships bound for Attica could find rest and refuge, and from which other ships coming from the straits could be raided with the object of diverting corn cargoes to the home market.

The editorial introduction to a Greek play will often include a section on the characters, in which their various traits are collected into a series of sketches. There may be sketches not only of the main characters but of minor, anonymous personages together with a sort of collective sketch of the chorus, and they are commonly made without fuss or discussion of critical theory. There has, of course, both here and in general books on the tragedians, always been room for differences of interpretation: as to whether, for example, Pentheus is moral or prurient. It is round such differences that discussion revolves, and the arguments have been heated enough. Why is the Aeschylean Agamemnon made to tread the purple carpet? Professor Thomson suggests that it is by reason of Clytemnestra's irresistible feminine charm. But since this charm, so far from being explicitly attested, is only an inference from three lines of dialogue; since the king has said a little earlier (in Thomson's own translation):

Seek not to unman me with effeminate

Graces and barbarous salaams agape

In grovelling obeisance at my feet—

from which any susceptibility to Clytemnestra's charm seems singularly absent; since, moreover, he has brought with him a concubine who is—

of many chattels the elect flower,

—one might be tempted to maintain that even if the charm is accepted as a help towards interpretation, there must be other reasons also for Agamemnon's acting as he does. Very well, you may say, modify the sketch to suit your taste.

I.G. xii (2). 1. 13–15.

These lines come from the well-known unique inscription, in Aeolic dialect, recording the terms of a monetary union between Mytilene and Phokaia, whereby each agreed to issue, in alternate years, an electrum coinage for circulation in both cities. The inscription is, on the evidence of letter forms, accepted as belonging to the early years of the fourth or possibly to the end of the fifth century B.C. The story of the poet Persinos, attributed to Kallisthenes, implies that the treaty was still in operation within the period c. 373–55 B.C.

The present note re-examines the meaning of τὸ χρυσίον κέρναν here, and in 11. 4–6 convincingly restored by G. N. Papageorgiu (Unedierte Inschriften von Mytilene, 16, no. 53) as:

This fragmentary vase was discovered in 1895 in a tomb at Curium by the British Museum Expedition (Turner Bequest) and was first published in the Excavations in Cyprus. Since then references to it have been made by various scholars, chiefly because of its unusual decoration with female figures inside ladder-pattern frames; these frames have been commonly interpreted as windows', hence the name ‘window-crater’.

The same tomb in which the ‘window-crater’ had been discovered was re-excavated by the expedition of the University Museum, Philadelphia, in 1939, and thirty-five new fragments of the same vase were found. These have now been restored to the main body of the crater in the British Museum, and it has been suggested that in its more complete form it should be re-examined and published with better illustration.

A detailed description of its form and fabric is given in BMC Vases and the CVA It is probably the largest of its kind (height, 43·5 cm.; diameter, 43·2 cm.); the fabric represents Mycenaean ware at its best: buff pinkish clay, dark red lustrous paint. Each panel between the two handles is decorated with a chariot scene flanked with groups of female figures.

Amongst the unattributed Apophthegmata Laconica of Plutarch is one (no. 67, 236D) which seems to refer to an episode in Spartan history not recorded elsewhere in the extant sources. The text is as follows:

The details of the affair are lacking, but it is clear that the apophthegm presupposes a Spartan embassy to a tyrant named Lygdamis, on a subject which made him unwilling to receive it. The identity of the tyrant in question is not immediately certain; in addition to the famous Lygdamis of Naxos, the adventurer who assisted Pisistratus in his final attempt at securing power and was in return himself installed as tyrant of his native island, there was a Halicarnassian tyrant of that name, the son or (less probably) grandson of Queen Artemisia; and her father, who was also called Lygdamis, was quite possibly himself a tyrant. However, the chance that the reference here is to a Halicarnassian tyrant is I think remote. There is no tradition of Spartan dealings with Halicarnassus either in the time of Artemisia's father or in the generations immediately following her, nor can any plausible occasion be suggested; the former period is marked by Sparta's concentration on home affairs, the latter by her complete abdication from trans-Aegean politics in favour of Athens after 478 B.C. Thus whether the apophthegm be genuine or invented it seems unlikely that a Halicarnassian tyrant is meant; for even invented Laconisms, if credited with specific circumstances, are usually made to have reference to something either historical or at least plausible.

The purpose of this article is to try to show that the legend of the rape of the Delphic tripod by Herakles became associated as symbolic with the First Sacred War and that this association is a chief factor in the great popularity of that subject in late archaic art.

We should begin with the First Sacred War itself, an event whose historical importance is inadequately matched by the quality of our literary sources. The earliest account of it occurs in Aeschines' speech against Ktesiphon (iii. 107 ff.), where he introduced the subject because it provided the theological justification for the line which he had taken when attending the meeting of the Delphic Amphictyony in the autumn of 340. So it is not a simple narrative, but a tendentious statement, carefully designed to bring out the points which suited the orator's case. At the same time it has real value as historical evidence, because it is based to some extent on an ancient stele, a memorial of the war, to whose text Aeschines had referred in his original speech at Delphi. A copy of the inscription was read to the jury, and the extant speech contains quotations and paraphrases of portions of it.

In the course of examining Roman imperial medallions and coins in connexion with a study of Roman cult images, representations of Herakles Crowning Himself, a figure which appears on the reverses of medallions of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus (Plate I, 2), and Commodus (Plate I, 3), merit further comment. These reverses, whether with or without legend, exhibit identical compositions. In the centre a young, beardless Herakles stands facing, his right hand raised in the act of placing a crown on his head; his left hand, close to his left hip, holds the club upwards in the crook of the elbow. Between club and elbow, the lion's skin hangs down over the forearm to a point midway along the left leg. The head, both forepaws, and tail are clearly visible dangling below. On all the medallions the die designer has made very clear the, important point that Herakles rests his weight on the left foot, with left hip thrown out and the right foot slightly back and out, giving a pronounced bow curve to the right side of the body from foot to shoulder. To Herakles' right and slightly behind him appears an apple tree on one branch of which hang the hero's quiver and bow; to his left rear is seen a square altar, festooned with garlands and with an offering burning on the top, and in her comprehensive monograph on Roman medallions J. M. C. Toynbee suggests that ‘the picture as a whole had been inspired by some bas-relief or painting now lost to us’. The question of relating the central figure to the whole composition will be taken up in Part II, in reappraising the general problem of famous statue types in medallion compositions. For the moment we may see what further progress may be made in identifying the statue type of the young Herakles Crowning Himself.

Basic Structure: A broad flight of twenty-one steps leads up from the south-west angle of the Temple of Apollo to a partially paved court immediately in front of the lower face of the scarp. This is given a quadrilateral delimitation by the angular revetment of an irregularity in the scarp to the west, and by the monumental water tank to the east of the entrance to the grotto. The entrance was hewn in the cliff face in the form of three arches (now much destroyed), and was revetted with large well-draughted limestone blocks. Of these, only the lower two courses are now in situ, but individual blocks of the upper courses have been collected and amongst them are those with crowning mouldings and one bearing the fragment of a Greek inscription (height:of letters, 25 cm. approximately).

The interior of the grotto consists basically of a central oblong depression, paved and cemented, surrounded on the two sides and the back by a raised staging—thus giving rise to the term of reference ‘TRICLINIUM’—while between the staging and the walls are the tanks and channels: associated with the water supply and drainage.

Considered longitudinally, the interior may be divided into three entities. The first extends from the entrance to a pair of rock-hewn columns bearing rude inscriptions. Immediately above this compartment lay the terrace of an ancient rock-cut path and its collapse has breached the path and totally unroofed this section of the grotto.

In Map I of my article on the Battle in JHS lxxvi, p. 32, the position of the Greek fleet's front line c. 8 a.m. was incorrectly shown. It should be as shown here by the dotted line, in accordance with the text of the article on pp. 46 and 50.

In his article on the Colossus of Rhodes in JHS lxxvi, Mr. Herbert Maryon argues that the statue was not cast as is usually assumed, but formed of hammered bronze plates. He bases his argument on the figure of 500 talents given by Philo Byz. (iv. 6) for the weight of bronze used in the statue. A statue 120 feet high using this quantity of metal would, he calculates, have walls rather less than one-fifteenth of an inch thick, which would be impossibly thin for a large casting.

On the 27th November, 1951, at a little distance outside the ditch which marks the walls of the Roman town of Melita (now Rabat-Mdina), in an area covered with Roman tombs, a huge stone was found measuring 60 in. in length, 27½ in. in height and 19½ in. in breadth (152·4 cm. } 73·6 cm. } 53·3 cm.). It is a funerary altar with a simply decorated mensa and sides. The back has no decoration and its surface is rough. When excavated the altar was found in a place where the rock was cut to allow of its being placed against it and between it and the wall of rock there was an empty space of a little depth, clearly indicating that the space must have been filled by some architectural structure of a nature slight enough to be completely destroyed at a later date.