οἱ δ᾿ ὲφ᾿ άρπαγῆισιν ἧλθον ὲλπίδ᾿ εἶχον ἀφνεήν, κάδόκ[ε]ον ἕκαστος αύτῶν ὅλβον εύρήσειν πολύν, καί με κωτίλλοντα λείως τραχὺν ὲκφανεῖν νόον. χαῦνα μὲν τότ᾿ ὲφράσαντο, νῦν δέ μοι χολούμενοι λοξὸν ὀφθαλμοῖς όρῶσιν πάντες ὥστε δήϊον. οὺ χρεών ἃ μὲν γὰρ εἶπα, σὺν θεοῖσιν ἤνυσα, ἄ‹λλ›α δ᾿ οὺ μάτην ἔερδον, οὺδέ μοι τυραννίδος άνδάνει βίηι τι[..].ε[ι]ν, οὺδὲ πιεί[ρ]ης χθονὸς πατρίδος κακοῖσιν ὲσθλοὺς ἰσομοιρίην ἔχειν

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 name ‘Minyan’ has recently been given to a kind of pottery which was first noticed at Orchomenos by Schliemann in 1881. In the report of his excavation which Schliemann contributed to the second volume of the Hellenic Journal, he carefully described the nature and position of this ware. ‘It is very remarkable that at Orchomenos painted pottery, with spirals and other Mycenean ornamentation, also cows with two long horns and the same variegated colours as at Mycenae, as well as goblets of the very same form and colour as at Mycenae, are generally only found down to a depth of about six feet below the surface of the ground, and that at a greater depth, monochrome, black, red, or yellow, hand-made or wheelmade pottery is found almost exclusively, analogous to some of that collected by me in the royal sepulchres at Mycenae. Very frequent here are the large hand-made black goblets or bowls, with a hollow foot and horizontal flutings in the middle, which I also found at Mycenae. . .

The identification of the Early Helladic civilisation has been the most notable advance made in Greek prehistory since the war. Our knowledge of this earliest Aegean culture on the Mainland is still very fragmentary. But the Louvre has possessed for nearly fifty years a precious document which can now be assigned its true place and sheds an unexpected light on the epoch. It is a gold ‘sauce-boat’ of the form already so familiar in clay at Korakou and Tiryns. Thanks to the courtesy of M. Etienne Michon, Conservator of the Greek and Roman Antiquities, I am permitted to publish this remarkable object (Fig. 1).

Save for the handle, our vase has been beaten out of a single piece of metal. The walls are exceedingly thin, not more than ·3 mm. thick, but, as with the gold beakers from Troy, measuring more at the rim, the edge being ·9 mm. across. The base is cupped to form a ring foot, a procedure also adopted by Trojan and Sumerian metal-workers. The handle is formed by a strip of gold with rectangular cross section, flattened at either end to receive the rivets which attach it to the vase. Its three outer sides are engraved with a herringbone pattern. The complete vessel weighs 125·2 grammes.

This article challenges the conclusion of Kovacs (2009) that Oedipus Tyrannus 1468–1523 is an interpolation, arguing that the evidence he brings is insufficient (except possibly in regard to 1500–02), that his proposal regarding Sophocles' original conclusion to the play is unsatisfactory and that in 1468–1523 several significant features of the play's opening scenes are repeated or reversed.

This article investigates how flight in battle is presented in the newly discovered Archilochus fragment (P.Oxy LXIX 4708) and compares it to the Homeric treatment of the issue. It argues that the traditional dichotomy between scholars who see Archilochus as ‘subverting’ epic values and those who see him as continuous with them is too simplistic, and that the new poem provides clear evidence of a more nuanced approach to epic material. The fragment's approach reflects many of the subtleties found in Homeric attitudes to flight, and in this respect we see Archilochus using the cultural authority of epic to add weight to his argument. Nevertheless, the choice of the Telephus myth, which tells the story of a mistaken conflict, is an ironic one, and the narrative foregrounds the ways in which the Achaeans at Mysia fall short of heroic norms and perhaps casts aspersions on the contemporary scenario to which the mythological conflict appears to be compared. Hence the poem contains competing strands of consolation, celebration of an aristeia and mockery in a way which demonstrates Archilochus' varied and subtle relationship to epic.

In a recent article in this journal (JHS cvii [1987] 51–57) Garth Fowden has argued that the obelisk from Karnak erected by Constantius II in Rome in 357 had been promised to that city by his father Constantine, as Ammianus Marcellinus states, and was not originally intended, as was claimed in the (lost) inscription on its base, for Constantine's new foundation at Constantinople. The interesting suggestion is made that Constantine might have been in touch with Athenian religious experts over the matter, and the project is seen as an earnest of ‘his desire to conciliate the pagan Establishment of Old Rome’. The point of this piece is to enlarge on the possible significance of the obelisk to contemporary Christians that is hinted at by Dr Fowden.

Constantine paid three visits to Rome as emperor, in 312, after winning the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, in 315 during the celebration of his Decennalia, and in 326 for his Vicennalia; on at least one of these occasions, he gave offence to non-Christian Romans by declining to perform the customary procession to the Capitol to offer sacrifice.

My attention was called recently to an account by G. M. Vizyenos of a Carnival festival celebrated in the district about Viza (ancient Βιζύη) in Thrace so remarkable that it seemed worth while to verify the author's account by a personal visit. This I was able to do at the Carnival of 1906, and the account below has been drawn up from my notes, supplemented by this article, from which I quote everything of value.

Of the writer's good faith there is no doubt, and of almost all the points he mentions I had ocular confirmation. He was a native, not of Haghios Gheorghios, the village whose festival he describes, but of Viza itself, the chief place in the district, lying some two hours to the west. He left his native place while still a boy, and died at Athens in 1896, aged forty-two. The middle part of his life he spent in Germany, and he does not seem ever to have returned to Thrace. His account is therefore probably a description of the festival as it was in his youth some forty years ago, when modern conditions had affected the district even less than' at present. He calls it σαλό and makes as many classical comparisons as possible. All these I have omitted, and drawn upon him only for matters of fact.

The seal impressions here described were obtained in 1906 by Mr. C. T. Currelly for the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, from a native dealer in Egypt, who stated that they had been found in a large pot at Edfu. This account of their finding is possibly correct. The impressions are on lumps of clay, which have evidently been used for sealing rolls of papyrus: in most cases the back of the clay shows the traces of the papyrus fibres, and nearly all the lumps have longitudinal holes through them, in which calcined remains of papyrus binding can sometimes be discerned. Presumably these impressions are the remains of a collection of rolls similar to those found at Elephantine, which were bound round and secured by lumps of clay placed on the binding and sealed with signets: the rolls have been burnt, and thereby the clay was baked and the sealings preserved. As regards the find spot being Edfu, this is to some extent corroborated by the internal evidence of the types, more especially those of the Egyptian class, as will be seen below.

The subject of this paper is the relationship between the Demotic Egyptian Inaros-Petubastis Cycle and the Greek novel. I will not argue that the Greek novel as a whole arose from Egyptian literature; that theory has been rightly laid to rest by scholars working in the area, most recently by Susan Stephens and the late Jack Winkler in their edition of the fragments of the novel. What I want to do, rather, is to draw attention to a single motif that might have made its way from Egyptian narrative fiction to the Greek novel; to explore the background of this motif in Egyptian literature; and to discuss the mode through which this motif was appropriated by the Greek novelists. This motif concerns the boukoloi, outlaw shepherds who inhabit the Egyptian Delta and oppose central Egyptian authority.

Editors and translators have long recognised the dramatic element in Plato's work. It might seem superfluous to take up this subject in detail; but the detail in some aspects does not, in fact, appear to have been closely studied or recorded.

The desire to honour the personality and to perpetuate the method of Socrates is an obvious motive for Plato's choice of the dialogue form as medium for his own published expositions of philosophic thought. Such thought takes naturally, for him, the form of Socratic inquiry and response. But much more than this, in interest, inspiration, and technique, goes to the making of the Platonic dialogue. It is this background and this execution that are now to be considered.

We have the familiar tradition, recorded by Diogenes Laertius (III. 6) as received from Dicaearchus, that Plato wrote dithyrambs, lyrics, and tragedies, and was about to compete with a tragedy in the theatre of Dionysus when, still at an early age, he ‘heard’ Socrates, burnt his poems, and took up philosophy.

A year ago I had the honour of speaking to you on the need of a History of Greek Commerce, and of proposing to you a way in which this Society might make an important contribution to that history, in the shape of a commentary on the three books of Strabo which deal with Asia Minor. That proposal, I am happy to think, has been warmly taken up by the Council; a Strabo Committee has been appointed, and has settled the main outlines of the work, which will consist of a Greek text, a translation, and a commentary laid out on broad lines. Large portions of the work have been assigned to the men who are best fitted to deal with them, and even under the shadow of the great preoccupation some progress has actually been made in putting on paper materials already in hand. The war must of necessity delay the completion of the task; in some cases it will be desirable that contributors should make special journeys to their districts, and Asia Minor is at the moment a sealed land to us. But there is much which can be dealt with already, and we can make progress not merely with spade-work, but with actual construction.

I Am availing myself of the kindness of several friends and especially of Professor Ramsay's to make the following additions or corrections in Part I. In the first inscription (p. 97), line 7, the Τ should have been marked doubtful; Professor Ramsay conjectures ἀθ]λοφό[ρ]ου Line 8 should read ΝΟ⊂ and not ΜΟ⊂. Line 10 should be deleted and the remaining lines renumbered. In line 13 (formerly 14), the A may be an Ν. In the second inscription, line 6, the first letter had the shape of a ∨ rather than a Υ. Professor Ramsay tells me also that, according to his drawing, the outside walls of the three shorter arms of the chapel (p. 96) were less square than I have represented them.

With reference to No. 10, it is worth while to note that the word βικάρις occurs in a Coptic ostracon recently published by Mr. W. E. Crum (Coptic Ostraca, No. 209, cf. p. 58 of the Commentary). From what we know of the title, we should be inclined to say that this ‘Eustathius of Hermonthis’ (cf. also op. cit. No. 366) there mentioned had invoked the aid of the civil power and that ‘Paul the vicarius’ was a civil officer (cf. Crum op. cit. p. xviii.).

That the physical description of a biographer's subject constitutes a natural and (one should think) necessary element of the genre seems an unremarkable premise on which to entertain a reading of Plutarch. In such chronicles of wasted time as we possess, after all, descriptions of the fair and the not-so-fair are hardly unusual, regardless of literary category. And, at least since the time of Leo, the prevailing scholarly assumption has been that Plutarch's Lives ordinarily include an account of the subject's appearance as a standard structural component of the biography—an idea still to be found in P. Stadter's magisterial commentary on the Pericles. One ought perhaps to hesitate in speaking of generic requirements for Plutarchan biography, if only because we are now more than ever quite uncertain in which exact literary tradition our author is most appropriately situated, though it is fair (I think) to observe how commonly physical descriptions are to be found in the extant biographies of Cornelius Nepos and in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars. The narrative conventions of biography, one instinctively supposes, require a personal description. Moreover, the eikonismos was by Plutarch's day a staple of rhetorical technique, useful to encomium and invective alike, and regularly discussed in handbooks. Literary and rhetorical expections, then tend to support Leo's proposition.

Opramoas of Rhodiapolis in Eastern Lycia is one of the best known benefactors in the Greek half of the Roman Empire because the decrees and other documents inscribed on his tomb allow us to trace the extent and sequence of his benefactions and the honours he received. Two inscriptions from the Letoon near Xanthos, recently published by A. Balland, seem to extend this picture of generosity, one of them virtually doubling the previous total of Opramoas' benefactions. The first, Balland no. 66, is a statue base recording that Opramoas gave to the Lycian League land to finance a distribution to the koinobouloi of the league; the second, Balland no. 67, is a stele listing a much longer series of benefactions, to the league, to Xanthos and to other Lycian cities, but it does not, and never did, include the benefactor's name. Balland argues that the second inscription also refers to Opramoas, and this has been generally accepted; but it is argued here that its subject is not Opramoas but an anonymous contemporary, so that Opramoas loses his unique position among Lycian benefactors, and we can compare the nature, extent and distribution of his gifts with those of the Anonymous Benefactor and others.

In the sixth book of the Iliad Glaukos relates the story of his grandfather, Bellerophon, who had been sent from Ephyre on the Greek mainland to Lycia carrying with him a folded tablet bearing on it baneful signs.

The single reference to this type of tablet in the early preserved literature suggests that such tablets were rare although they must have been recognizable to the audience at the time they were originally incorporated into the epic tradition.

Existing accounts of this war only know what now appears to have been its second phase; but the material now available should enable us partially to reconstruct the first phase, and recover for the history of Asia something of two lost years, 276 and 275. The starting point is Mr. Sidney Smith's new readings and translation of the fragment of the Babylonian chronicle concerning Antiochus I, with which the decree of Ilium, O.G.I. 219, works in and out; overlapping them come the letter of Ptolemy II to Miletus and the Milesian decree in reply.

The Babylonian chronicle shews that in spring 276 the army of Ptolemy II invaded Seleucid Syria, and some time later in 276 Antiochus defeated it and drove it out; while heretofore it has been supposed that it was Ptolemy who defeated Antiochus some time in 274–3. On the face of it, then, Ptolemy was the original aggressor in the long series of wars between the two kingdoms. But can the war be traced back before spring 276? There had been bond enough between Ptolemy I and Seleucus I to prevent actual war so long as either lived; but once Seleucus was dead (280), Ptolemy II immediately threw down the gauntlet by recognising Keraunos as king of Macedonia, which Antiochus I claimed; while next year he damaged Antiochus considerably, for Miletus, Seleucid in 280/79, became Egyptian some time in 279/8. It does not follow there was fighting; but Ptolemy restored to Miletus a long-lost piece of territory, which must have become King's Land; and if he took King's Land from Antiochus it was an act of war.

In JHS cv (1985) 162–8, J. L. Moles has given an excellent treatment of the literary influences at work in the ‘second preface– of Arrian's Anabasis (i 12.1–5). I am in agreement with the main points of his work, and the purpose of the present note is to offer some additional evidence and suggestions.

1. Literary influences. Moles sees five major influences at work in the second preface: Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and the prose encomium. Of this last he writes (164), ‘Arrian's work will be biographical in orientation and fundamentally encomiastic’. There is no doubt, of course, that Arrian's work is encomiastic; Arrian does not hesitate to express admiration for Alexander at the outset of the work or in comments throughout the work or in the επιμετρῶν λόγος at the work's conclusion. But Arrian's history is not an encomium, though it may incorporate elements from that genre.

For the uprising of 323 and 322 BC by the Greek states against the Macedonian domination, the name ‘The Lamian War’ has universal currency, identifying the overall conflict through reference to the siege of Lamia in the winter of 323/2. Given the relative insignificance of that particular event in determining the outcome of the war, the name does not seem to be particularly appropriate. Yet there is ample ancient evidence to indicate that the term ὁ Λαμιακὸς πόλεμος was used also in antiquity to signify this struggle.

Of all the states in ancient Greece, Attica seems to have had the most interesting and complete system of land defences. A chain of important fortresses, of most of which there are still considerable remains, follows the line of the Kithairon–Parnes range: Eleutherai, Oinoe, Panakton, Phyle, Dekeleia, Aphidna and Rhamnous. It may appear at first that this series of strongholds was designed expressly to mark off Athenian territory, but whilst incidentally and in large measure they served this end, in origin they were intended rather to defend the various roads from Attica into Boeotia. A fresh examination of these forts and their relation to the Attic frontier may be of some service and interest.

The natural boundary of Attica on the N.W. is the mountain ridge which begins on the Halkyonian sea-coast behind Aigosthena and continues almost due eastward to the Straits of Euboea, reaching the sea at Cape Kalamos. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that the early tradition made the Megarid and Attica into a single kingdom. Plato, describing an idealised primitive Attica, gives as the boundaries the Isthmus and the heights of Kithairon and Parnes extending down to the sea, with Oropos on the right and the Asopos on the left.