As part of his recent study of ‘Narration and allusion in Archaic Greek Art’, Professor A. M. Snodgrass has cause to treat of the famous Attic black-figure vase which depicts Circe handing a cup containing her sinister brew to one of Odysseus’ sailors. She is stirring it with her wand the while, and yet this sailor, and three companions besides, have already been transformed into various animals (or at least his head, and their heads and arms have been). Professor Snodgrass has no difficulty in explaining the apparent simultaneity of separate events here and elsewhere on this vase-painting as relating to what he calls the ‘synoptic’ technique of early Greek Art, that familiar device whereby several successive episodes in a narrative are presented together within the same picture. And he is inclined towards a similar line of explanation as regards the partial transformation of Odysseus’ ἑταῖροι: the artist ‘wished to express the passage of time by indicating a half-way stage in the transformation’.

A. J. Holladay has effectively reasserted the traditional view of the hoplite phalanx—that it was a dense mass of men, relying on the weight and cohesion of the whole rather than on the prowess of individuals in order to break the enemy's line.

Further evidence in his support is provided by Plato's Laches, where Nicias is made to praise the art of fighting (that is, single combat) in hoplite armour, as a fitting part of a liberal education. But when it comes to its utility in warfare he is less enthusiastic. ‘This science will help somewhat even on the actual battlefield, whenever one has to fight ranged in order with many others. But its chief benefit will be when the ranks are broken, and one has to fight singlehanded against a single adversary, and either, in pursuit, attack someone who is defending himself, or else, in retreat, protect oneself from the attack of another.’ Nicias clearly has in mind a situation like that from which Socrates extracted himself so handsomely at the Battle of Delium, as the speakers in the dialogue have just recalled; though Socrates of course made his retreat without benefit of the newfangled art of fencing.

During the excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria several ancient sundials have come to light Most are only fragmentary, but one, standing as a pedestal in a paved area of the city (the post-scaenam piazza) is substantially in one piece and of considerable interest.

The dial (PLATE II) is in the form of a cylindrical pillar of marble, the upper surface of which is horizontal and stands approximately one metre above ground level. The top is slightly larger than the main body of the column because of a lip and was originally an oval of diameters 88·5 cm (east–west) and 78 cm (north–south) though the south side is broken away for perhaps one fifth of its original width. The base of the dial, 40–50 cm below pavement level, also has a similar lip, which betrays its earlier use, which was as an altar. The religious symbols have been erased—unless the crescent within a circle on its north side is one (but see below).

Seven inscriptions have been classified as recognition decrees for the Delphian Soteria. One of these is so fragmentary as to defy analysis. In a second, only the end of the decree survives, and relatively little can be learned from it. The other five decrees have been the subject of considerable disagreement since Pomtow's publication in 1914.

Plataea was an ancient city of ‘Boiotoi’ (Iliad ii 494 and 504; cf. Thuc. iii 61.2). Throughout its chequered history the citizens were always described as ‘Boiotoi’ (e.g. Thuc. iii 54.3; Isoc. Panath. 93; [D.] lix 95; Arr. An. i 8.8; Paus. i 15.3). The citizens were ‘the Plataeans’, whether they were in possession of their city or not. They figured as Πλαταιες on the serpent column of 479/8 (M-L 27, 7), as Πλαταιῆς in the list of Athens' allies in 431 (Thuc. ii 9.4), and as Πλαταιῆς ψιλοί fighting alongside Athenians in 424 BC when their city was in enemy hands (Thuc. iv 67.2 and 5). Although the majority of the Plataeans lived as refugees in Attica between 428 and 382, and again from 373 to 338, they continued to be ‘Plataeans’ and were never described in our sources as Athenians. The ability of the Plataeans to survive as a refugee community was paralleled, for example, by the ability of the Aeginetan refugees between 431 and 405 and the Samian refugees between 366 and 322 (Diod. xviii 18.9) to survive and ultimately to reoccupy their homeland. It was as such a community that ‘the Plataeans’ were brought back ‘from Athens’ to their ruined city in 382 (Paus. ix 1.4.).

It would seem that the plan of Thessaloniki (fig. 4) was laid out at the time of the city's foundation by Cassander in c. 316 b.c. and that it has close parallels in the plans of other early Hellenistic cities. There was possibly an agora in the upper city from the beginning, but the principal, commercial agora of the Hellenistic city was probably closer to the sea. A large open space to the west was possibly a ‘sacred area’ in Hellenistic times, but the only religious centre whose site is known with any degree of certainty is the Serapeum. A gymnasium is known to have existed to the north of the city from the late Hellenistic period at least, and a nearby stadium probably goes back to Hellenistic times as well.

The Hellenistic fortifications probably followed the lines of those of the mid-fifth century a.d. In common with many other Hellenistic cities there is an acropolis incorporated in the city wall, but the fortifications of Thessaloniki are slightly anomalous in that the lower stretches of the east and west walls run parallel with some of the streets of the city plan.

Thus, even though the reconstruction of Hellenistic Thessaloniki may be an elusive and often a speculative business, the statement of an anonymous writer to the effect that ‘il ne reste à Thessaloniki aucun vestige de la ville hellénistique’ is certainly exaggerated.

Von Frisch has shown that hive bees communicate with one another by ‘dancing’, a discovery comparable with that of Ventris. Both the direction of food found and its distance are indicated with considerable precision. Aristotle (or perhaps pseudo-Aristotle) described this dance in Hist. Animal. IX, 624b. After noting that an individual bee visits a number of flowers of the same species in succession, which Darwin, von Frisch, and others have shown to be generally, but not universally, true, he continued:

ὅταν δ' εἰς τὸ σμῆνος ἀφίκωνται, ἀποσείονται, και παρακολουθοῦσιν ἑκάστῃ τρεῑς ἢ τέτταρες. τὸ δὲ λαμβανόμενον οὐ ῥᾴδιόν ἐστιν ἰδεῖν̇ οὐδὲ τὴν ἐργασίαν ὅντινα τρόπον ποιοῦνται, οὐκ ὦπται.

Bekker's translation, due to J. C. Sealiger, revised by J. C. Schneider, is as follows:

eo cum sunt ingressae, excutiunt et deponunt onus, semper etiam singulis ternae quaternaeque administrant, quid accipiunt non facile videre est; neque visum quo operantur modo.

This article re-evaluates the 22 so-called Tabulae Iliacae. Where most scholars (especially in the English-speaking world) have tended to dismiss these objects as ‘trivial' and ‘confused’, or as ‘rubbish’ intended for the Roman ‘nouveaux riches’, this article relates them to the literary poetics of the Hellenistic world, especially Greek ecphrastic epigram. Concentrating on the tablets' verbal inscriptions, the article draws attention to three epigraphic features in particular. First, it explores the various literary allusivenesses of the two epigrammatic invocations inscribed on tablets 1A and 2NY; second, it examines the Alexandrian diagrammatic word-games on the reverse of seven Tabulae (2NY, 3C, 4N, 5O, 7Ti, 15Ber, 20Par), relating these to the pictorial-poetic games of the Greek technopaegnia; third, it discusses the possible hermeneutic significance of associating six tablets with ‘Theodorean techne’ (1A, 2NY, 3C, 4N, 5O, 20Par), comparing a newly discovered epigram by Posidippus (67 A-B). All of these allusions point to a much more erudite purpose and clientele: the tablets toyed with Hellenistic visual-verbal relations at large.

A consensus has formed over the last 30 years that Diagoras was not really an atheist and that the famous Apopurgizontes Logoi were falsely attributed to him at a later stage. This note argues that the evidence is consistent with the view that Diagoras was indeed an atheist and did indeed compose the Apopurgizontes. Further hints in other sources allow us to reconstruct, albeit speculatively, aspects of Diagoras’ thought and self-presentation.

This article reviews a range of important recent work on Greek religion. It looks first at the critique (common to a number of the books under review) of the polis-religion model associated with Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood and then attempts to draw out a number of emerging themes: a comparative approach, a focus on the gods or on individual worshippers and a cognitive perspective. It then examines in more detail the application of the terms ‘belief’ or ‘theology’ to the field of Greek religion and the extent to which any picture of Greek religious experience may be said to be logically coherent, before looking forward to possible future directions of study.

This paper points out some of the weaknesses of the traditional account of the Homeric phrase ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην and suggests instead that the entire phrase is a relatively recent creation of the tradition on the model of an *ἀμ(β)ροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην. This phrase in turn has a clear Avestan cognate hauruuatātā amərətātā.

An Attic cup of Siana shape, said to come from excavations in Rhodes, was presented to the British Museum in 1906 by Sir Henry Howorth (Pl. II). The lip is decorated with a wreath—interrupted above the handles—of alternate purple and black ivy-leaves set in two rows, one point-upwards, the other point-downwards, on a central horizontal stem. The reserved band on which the figures and handles are set comes immediately below the lip, save for a narrow black stripe; the rest of the bowl is black, but divided by a horizontal band of tongue-pattern; the tongues, pointing upwards, are alternately black and purple, except in two places where two blacks accidentally come together. Black underlies the purple and the white everywhere, except under the purple tongues, but the white, used only for women's flesh, has almost entirely disappeared. The interior is plain black. The date will be before 560 B.C.

Let us look at the two scenes which appear one on each side of the cup: they are roughly drawn, but vigorous and interesting: begin with that which, as I hope to show, comes first in time (Pl IIIa). On the left, a woman is seated to right on a stool: she is dressed in purple; her hair is loose and she holds her left hand to her head in an attitude of grief, with which the gesture of the open right hand well consorts. On the right of the scene, another woman stands to left beside a naming altar (Pl IIIe). Her dress is a black peplos. She wears a broad belt, the upper band of which consists of a repeating Ѕ pattern; her hair is gathered into a small knot on the nape of the neck, and in her hands she holds out by its handles a liknoh, from the front end of which three corn-stalks project. Within are shown other objects; the scale is so small and the drawing so poor that it is not possible to identify them all: some are probably fruits, the central one almost certainly a phallus.

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.

It has occurred to me more than once that there was yet some work to be done on this topic, even after the meritorious and very accurate labours of Steele, the notes and indices of a series of editors, notably Ernesti, Orelli, and Tyrrell and Purser, and the dissertations of Bolzenthal, Font, and Laurand. Of these, the editors are concerned chiefly with establishing a correct text, and explaining the meanings of the words, which last task has for the most part been satisfactorily performed (see Tyrrell and Purser, passim, also Boot's excellent edition of the Letters to Atticus). Laurand mentions the matter only incidentally, and gives a list, not very reliable, of the words used in the rhetorical works; Font's chief interest is not lexicographical, but rather an attempt to answer the question why Cicero should ever use a Greek word at all when a Latin one was available. Bolzenthal I have not been able to consult, but gather from Font's synopsis of his work, pp. 3, 28 sqq., that it is largely superseded by Steele. Steele sets out to study the whole vocabulary of the letters, including quotations, but omitting the Greek words in the other works; and his chief interest, apart from tracing the quotations to their sources, is in a grammatical analysis of the words used by Cicero and his correspondents, with a list of those words which occur only or for the first time in the letters.

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.

While the great discoveries at Mycenae and Pylos have focused attention on the Peloponnse and the Mycenaean era, the record of excavations in all provinces of Greece and stages of antiquity in this past year is an unprecedented one; there have been some forty different excavations, and the activity of the Archaeological Society in the field has reached a peak. The clearing of the Athenian Agora has been greatly advanced, excavation has been resumed at Dodona and Olympia; the Temple of Poseidon at the Isthmia has at last been discovered, and the oldest known metal-working establishment in Europe has been uncovered on the east coast of Attica. Prof. Orlandos and his assistants have continued the restoration of Byzantine churches as far afield as Khanià, Siátista and the lake-island of Préspa. The advance in the reconstitution of the metropolitan collections this year is not immediately perceptible, but there has been welcome progress in the museums of Olympia, Delphi, and Herakleion.

For the writers of the imperial period, music theory presented a sharp dichotomy. One might be an Aristoxenus, or one might be a follower of the mathematikoi or Pythagoreans. The methods and doctrines of the two schools were thought of as radically incompatible with one another; and it is true that from the fourth century B.C., when their respective doctrines were first formally articulated, members of each tradition held views which their opposite numbers denied. But their disagreements are easily misunderstood. I have argued elsewhere that Aristoxenus' attitude to the Pythagoreans has sometimes been distorted. Here, in discussing the Sectio, which appears to be the earliest continuous treatise surviving from the other side of the fence, I shall try to show some of the ways in which its objectives differ from Aristoxenus', and thus the sense in which certain major disagreements between them reflect an oblique rather than a direct confrontation. I hope also to show that further study of this rather arid looking work for its own sake would repay both musicologists and philosophers.

It has been said that ‘the history of Pindaric criticism is the history of the cardinal problem, unity’; but this history has yet to be fully explored. Young's pioneering study passes dismissively over the centuries preceding the publication, in 1821, of Boeckh's commentary—a landmark, indeed, but Boeckh's approach to the poet did not spring into being from nothing; it was the product of a long tradition of careful study, in which Pindar had been widely admired and diversely understood. This paper attempts to document that claim; its primary purpose is therefore historical. But the study of the history of scholarship is of most value when it helps us to understand our own place in that history, disclosing and encouraging us to think critically about our tacit or ill-considered assumptions. I shall therefore conclude by pointing briefly to a possible implication of this history for some more recent work on the poet.

Through the kindness of D. M. Lewis I was recently able to study a photocopy of R. Loepcr, ‘The Thirty Tyrants ’, Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnago Prosveshcheniya (May 1896) 90–101―an examination, principally, of the list of the Thirty in Xen. Hell, ii 3.2.1 It seems worthwhile to publicise the outcome of this scrutiny, for four reasons: (a) Since its first appearance 80 years ago Loeper's main thesis―albeit in simplified form: see (c), and below―has exerted enormous influence upon students of prosopography, of the political organisation of post-Kleisthenic Attika, and of the regime of the Thirty.