The construction of the Frogs of Aristophanes is of a normal conventional type. From the appearance of Dionysus in his strange garb, appropriate to the patron of a heroic stage run mad on realism, to a Dionysus whose wine is new and his bottles old, the customary series of comic incidents develops the conventional situation. This introduction presents us with the antecedents, the background, and the grouping of a comic dispute, The contest forms the main part of the drama; and, quite conventionally, it is separated from the introduction by a parabasis which offers a mixture of serious and comic advice. That the background is the nether world: that the disputants are so eminent a pair as Aeschylus and Euripides: that the judge is the god of all tragedy and comedy himself, and the chorus blessed spirits of the sanctified—all this illumines the old forms with a fresh and unrivalled originality. But the mechanical structure is simple and conventional, as has been said.

Cette figure, d'un beau dessin, est peinte en noir sur un fond blanc. Les traits de l'intérieur, au lieu d'être tracés à la pointe, le sont ici en relief noir, comme sur les figures rouges. This is the Duc de Luynes' description in 1840 of the technique of a lekythos, with a hoplite in black swinging his lance, wearing a helmet and holding a shield, in outline, and wounded by two arrows. It was then in his collection, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. This description, in which so distinguished an amateur can hardly have made a mistake, the object being in his own hands, is fully corroborated by Plate XVI. of his work, made as all those of this publication, not with a view to the subject, but in the intention of rendering the art. Here this design of black on black has been rendered by deeply bitten etched lines, standing out in velvet-black relief on an even tint of gray so dark that it looks black on the white paper. I need hardly add that a mechanical reproduction of this plate is impossible.

That this technique is not altogether unknown I shall soon show by a few examples.

A variety of ancient sources suggest that there was more than one Aristophanic play entitled Πλοῦτος, and the scholia on the extant Plutus show that one ancient commentator erroneously thought that he was working on a comedy of 408 BC when in reality he had the comedy of 388 BC in front of him. This error, which most likely arose because there were two similar versions of the late Plutus, has often been attributed to the first-century BC scholar Didymus Chalcenterus. It is here argued that the basis for this ascription is weak and that there are in fact substantial counter-arguments. Instead of Didymus, a later commentator such as the second-century AD scholar Symmachus may have been responsible for the mistake, which probably had more to do with the evolving transmission history of Aristophanes’ comedies than with careless scholarship.

This paper re-evaluates the narrative roles occupied by Geryon and Herakles in Stesichoros’ Geryoneis in the light of contemporary thinking about Herakles’ apotheosis. It proposes that Stesichoros activates his audience's awareness of Herakles’ fated divinity in order to reframe the hero versus monster encounter not as a duel between two mortal heroes – the usual interpretation – but as a showdown between a hero and a god. This reorientation destabilizes an audience's sympathies and self-identification, forcing a re-evaluation of the nature of both heroism and humanity. Following a discussion of the potential narrative roles in play, the prominence of Herakles’ apotheosis in the sixth century and its salience for Stesichoros’ audience is established. The apotheosis is then applied as a complementary lens to the long-recognized Iliadic intertexts in a reinterpretation of the encounter between Geryon and Herakles on Erytheia. Finally, the use of the apotheosis as a lens for interpreting two fragments beyond Erytheia is considered.

While scholars have long acknowledged the limitations of Herodotus’ Histories as a historical source, Herodotus’ topography of the Persian Wars is still usually seen as historically reliable information. This article, by contrast, aims to show that memory studies offers an attractive means to understand this layer of information, as the alleged locations of events do not, in many cases, necessarily reflect the historical situation. Instead, these places may, for various reasons, have been designated as such in local traditions in the ca. 50 years between the wars and Herodotus’ research. As a case in point, this article discusses the topography of Herodotus’ story of the Persian shipwreck along the coast of Thessaly before the Battle of Artemision in 480 BC (Hdt. 7.183, 7.188, 7.191–92). It argues that the attitude among scholars automatically to regard the locations in this account as historically correct has created various problems. In doing so, it identifies the elusive place of Sepias with the coast near the town of Veneto where a remarkable cluster of sea caves (the so-called ‘Ovens’) plausibly formed an ‘anchor’ for the myth of the abduction of Thetis by Peleus, as well as for the Persian shipwreck.

According to Herodotus, the expression phoinikeia grammata means ‘Phoenician letters’ and refers to the Phoenician origins of the Greek alphabet. This account has found general acceptance, but it is not the only interpretation possible and other theories circulated in antiquity. The adjective φοῖνιξ does not only mean ‘Phoenician’; it can also refer to a palm tree or the colour red. This article argues that the expression phoinikeia grammata did not originally refer to the alphabet, but to Linear B writing on palm leaves, as already suggested by Frederick Ahl. It is shown that the account of Herodotus is the result of a ‘learned reinterpretation’, triggered by the ambiguity of the word φοῖνιξ. The new understanding of phoinikeia grammata proposeds here has some important consequences: it implies that Linear B, as has long been suspected, was primarily written on palm leaves (hence ‘palm-leaf writing’) and that in classical antiquity there was at least a limited historical awareness of the existence of pre-alphabetic writing systems in the Aegean. This paper adduces additional evidence to substantiate these claims. Lastly, a case will be made that Herodotus’ incorrect reinterpretation has led to the ‘Phoenicianization’ of Cadmus, who was originally a Greek hero.

Lysias 10 Against Theomnestos is the only surviving example of a classical Greek speech on a charge of slander (dikē kakēgorias). The case turns on establishing communal consensus in evaluation of meta-discursive claims: assertions as to what the law says about what citizens can say about their fellow citizens. I adapt Marmor’s account of the pragmatics of legal discourse to illuminate the litigants’ strategies as they seek to control interpretation of the legal question in this much-discussed case from 380s BC Athens. We see how each party used different assumptions about the law’s implicatures as well as its declarative meaning and presented these assumptions as grounded in common sense. The persuasive methods used by Lysias’ client are illuminated by means of cognitive narratology’s application of Lewisian possible-world logic to the creation of story-worlds and the relationships they generate between narrator and reader/audience. So understood, Lysias’ speech helps answer questions about the role and limits of free/frank speech (parrhēsia) in democratic Athens and about the relationship between individual agency and the collective agency of the dēmos, questions crucial to an understanding of the place of legal discourse and legal conflict in the ideology and day-to-day praxis of the democratic city.