The politicians of Athens in the 350s and the 340s are a shadowy lot save for Demosthenes and Aeschines, neither of whom was an influential figure before 346: the latter had only just begun his political career by that year, and the former was constantly in opposition and singularly unsuccessful. For the great names, Diophantus of Sphettus, Aristophon, Hegesippus and Eubulus, we have to rely almost entirely on scattered allusions in Demosthenes. No Hellenica survives to provide a framework of events: Diodorus xvi is principally Philippica and even omits entirely the most engaging political affair of the age, the making of the Peace of Philocrates. Except for the few fragments of Philochorus, without which we would be almost wholly without bearings, it is on what we can glean from his greatest opponent that we must rely for our understanding of Eubulus. Small wonder it is that the judgements of many modern historians have been strongly hostile to him. In this way great oratory may persuade posterity where it failed in its own age, and we must beware of judging Eubulus from the standpoint of Demosthenes.

Recently, archaeologists have been focusing on material relics as evidence of a historical consciousness. This article examines the Iliad and the Odyssey from the point of view of this ‘archaeology of the past’. Various material objects, ranging from tombs to everyday objects, evoke the past in the epic poems, thereby enriching the narrative and providing reflections on the act of memory. In turn, Homeric evidence sheds new light on the hermeneutics of relics in archaic oral society.

The Homeric description of the shield made for Achilles by Hephaestus (Il. xviii 478–608) is the type for all later ecphrases of works of art in ancient literature. It stands out as an extravagant example of the epic poet's powers of elaborate and vivid description, so extravagant that one notable ancient critic at least, Zenodotus, felt that it was more comfortable simply to athetize the greater bulk of the passage. More symphathetic commentators of modern times have sought ways of integrating the scenes displayed on the divine artefact with the primary subject-matter of the Iliad; the most common approach is to take the Shield as a summary of all human life, a mirror of society in all its aspects, against which to measure the significance of the narrow range of warfare and death that dominates the rest of the poem.

The requirements of internal coherence and external relevance also guided the interpretative strategy of ancient critics less austere than Zenodotus. This paper is an inquiry into the ways that antiquity perceived and exploited the Homeric Shield of Achilles. In the first section I examine early Greek responses to the question of the contextual function of a decorated shield such as that of Achilles.

Why did Athenian vase-painters choose the colours they did for the vases they decorated? Why did they choose black figures on red, or red figures on black; why were lekythoi often decorated on white ground? These are basic questions, but have rarely been asked. Many books and articles deal with the technical aspects of how these effects were achieved, but never seem to ask why. A few minutes' conversation with a modern potter will dispel any illusion that the colours so familiar from Attic pottery were the only ones compatible with the local clay. Even the orange of that clay was made more intense by the addition of a thin reddish slip, and white-ground can scarcely be accidental. It is legitimate to enquire why a particular range of colour schemes was adopted.

Somewhere in the first half of the eighth century B.C. the ‘graphic counterpart of speech’ (Diringer's nice expression) and a fully phonetic alphabetic script were respectively reintroduced and invented in Greek lands. Thus the Greeks achieved the feat, unique among European peoples, of rediscovering (after an interval of more than four centuries) the literacy they had lost. The alphabet of course marked an enormous advance on the clumsy ‘Linear B’ syllabic script, in the sense that it made it possible ‘to write easily and read unambiguously about anything which the society can talk about’. However, as Harvey's exhaustive study demonstrated, even in Classical Athens, where popular literacy attained the highest level hitherto known in the Greek world, there were still significant areas of illiteracy or at best semi-literacy. Widespread literacy cannot simply be deduced (as it was by Goody and Watt) from the mere availability of a phonetic alphabetic script of the Greek type. Further factors must be taken into account. One of these, Harvey suggested, is the political system. For although ‘democracy and literacy do not necessarily go hand in hand’ (p. 590), the high level of literacy at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries was perhaps ‘not entirely unconnected with the fact that she was a democracy’ (p. 623).

It is hardly controversial to assert that recent work on Greek mythology is methodologically diverse. However, there is one body of writing which seems to have become a reference point against which scholars of many persuasions–not excluding orthodox positivist philologists and adherents of psychoanalysis–feel the need to define their own position. I mean structuralism. G.S. Kirk and, later, W. Burkert have conducted their dialogues with it; C. Segal and more unreconstructedly R. Caldwell have tried to accommodate Lévi-Strauss and Freud under the same blanket; a glance at bibliographical citations in studies of tragedy over the last twenty years will show how J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet have moved from the periphery to the centre (much as Finley did some time ago in ancient history). The polemical attitudes being struck by M. Detienne (from within the movement) and C. Calame are directly generated by over-confident structuralist attempts to map out the mental territory they claimed as their own.

An interest in the Greek idea of the hero, and in the cults established in Greek states to historical or legendary figures endowed with this status, has for long been one of the chief concerns of research into Greek philology and religion. But it is only through the gradual accumulation of archaeological evidence of Geometric and Archaic date that the origins of ‘hero cults’ have begun to be seen as an historical problem requiring an historical explanation. The most recent general works on Geometric and Archaic Greece, by J. N. Coldstream, Anthony Snodgrass and François de Polignac, have long sections devoted to discussing the significance of hero cults, and general ‘pan-hellenic’ explanations have been offered for their occurrence. Whilst there may be much truth in their suggestions, such ‘pan-Hellenic’ explanations ignore important local differences in the archaeological and material manifestations of hero cults. These differences, I would argue, relate in part to the different paths that were taken in the formation and development of early states in Greece. I shall use as examples the two regions of Attica and the Argolid, two areas of Greece where differences both in the manifestations of hero cults and in the paths of social evolution can most easily be traced. Before embarking on a detailed comparison of the two areas however, some discussion of the other general explanations that have been put forward is in order.

Following the example of Meleager and Philip of Thessalonica, Agathias of Myrina, poet, lawyer and continuator of the Wars of Procopius, compiled in the sixth century A.D. an anthology of epigrams, generally known as the Cycle (κύκλος) which, together with those of Meleager and Philip, was incorporated into the later anthology of Constantine Cephalas and partially survives in the Palatine and Planudean anthologies. But unlike Meleager and Philip, Agathias included only the work of contemporaries, representatives of that Indian summer of Greek poetry which illuminates the age of Justinian. And it has always been assumed that the Cycle was published during Justinian's reign, and that the (unnamed) Emperor to whom Agathias' (surviving) preface is addressed is Justinian himself.

But the arguments on which this dating is based are as flimsy as could well be imagined, and neglect moreover a number of material pieces of evidence which point decisively to a later date. P. Waltz, editor of the (alas unfinished) Budé Anthology, observes that the allusions to Italy and Rome in Agathias' preface (AP iv 3) ‘permettent d'en dater la publication des années qui suivent la reprise de Rome par Narsès’ in 553. Not a very helpful terminus post quem. In 553 Agathias was hardly more than 20. No one, surely, would wish to suggest that he published the Cycle before he was out of his teens.

Philosophy, in general, moves in a sphere of abstraction, and its statements claim to be necessary and of universal validity. The reader therefore expects them to appeal directly to his reason, and he does not normally reflect much on the time and historical conditions that determined what the philosopher took for granted. It is only in this age of historical consciousness that we have come to appreciate these factors more readily, and the great thinkers of the past appear to us more or less closely related to the culture of their age. The writings of Plato and Aristotle in particular are for us an inexhaustible source of information about Greek society and civilisation. This is true also in regard to the relation of Greek philosophy to the science of its time, and this is of special importance for our understanding. That relation can be traced throughout Aristotle's logical, physical, and metaphysical works; but the influence of other sciences and arts is no less evident in his ethics. In this paper I propose to examine the numerous references to medicine that occur in the Nicomachean Ethics. They are mostly concerned with the question of the best method of treating this subject. The problem of the right method is always of the utmost importance for Aristotle. The discussion of it begins on the first page of the Ethics, where he tries to give a definition of the subject of this course of lectures and attributes it to a philosophical discipline that he calls ‘politics’. He does so in agreement with the Platonic tradition. We can trace it back to one of the dialogues of Plato's first period, the Gorgias, in which the Platonic Socrates for the first time pronounces his postulate of a new kind of philosophy, the object of which ought to be the care of the human soul (φυχῆς θεραπεία). He assigns this supreme task to ‘political art’, even though it does not fulfil this function at present.

The last two decades have seen a welcome erosion of traditional dogmas of Alexander scholarship, and a number of hallowed theories, raised on a cushion of metaphysical speculation above the mundane historical evidence, have succumbed to attacks based on rigorous logic and source analysis. The brotherhood of man as a vision of Alexander is dead, as is (one hopes) the idea that all Alexander sources can be divided into sheep and goats, the one based on extracts from the archives and the other mere rhetorical fantasy. One notable theory, however, still flourishes and has indeed been described as one of the few certainties among Alexander's aims. This is the so-called policy of fusion. As so often, the idea and terminology go back to J. G. Droysen, who hailed Alexander's marriage to Rhoxane as a symbol of the fusion (Verschmelzung) of Europe and Asia, which (he claimed) the king recognised as the consequence of his victory. At Susa the fusion of east and west was complete and Alexander, as interpreted by Droysen, saw in that fusion the guarantee of the strength and stability of his empire. Once enunciated, Droysen's formulation passed down the mainstream of German historiography, to Kaerst, Wilcken, Berve and Schachermeyr, and has penetrated to almost all arteries of Alexander scholarship. Like the figure of Alexander himself the theory is flexible and capable of strange metamorphoses. In the hands of Tarn it developed into the idea of all subjects, Greek and barbarian, living together in unity and concord in a universal empire of peace. The polar opposite is an essay of Helmut Berve, written in the heady days before the Second World War, in which he claimed that Alexander, with commendable respect for Aryan supremacy, planned a blending of the Macedonian and Persian peoples, so that the two racially related (!) Herrenvölker would lord it over the rest of the world empire. On Berve's interpretation the policy had two stages. Alexander first recognised the merits of the Iranian peoples and placed them alongside the Macedonians in his court and army hierarchy. Next came the ‘Blutvermischung’, the integration of the two peoples by marriage.

Aristophanes’ second play, Babylonians, included an attack on state offices and politicians and, probably, the city's treatment of its allies. According to the scholia of Acharnians, the play provoked Cleon to indict Aristophanes (or the play's producer Callistratus) for άδικία and ύβρις towards the δῆμος and the βοuλη on the grounds that he treasonably embarrassed the city before strangers at the City Dionysia. Cleon may also have questioned Aristophanes’ citizenship, suggesting that the poet (or Callistratus) was really a native Aiginetan, not a true Athenian. Aristophanes returned fire at the Lenaia of 425 with Acharnians, a play that renews Babylonians’ attack on Athens’ misguided politics and politicians. Even more important, by making a separate peace with Sparta and by offering in his speech of self-defense before the chorus to defend the enemy, the comic hero Dikaiopolis commits ‘crimes’ equivalent to those for which Aristophanes was indicted.

Our main pieces of evidence about the bastards who exercised in the gymnasium of Kynosarges not far outside the walls of Athens are the following:

(1) Plutarch, Themistocles 1: Themistocles' mother was a Thracian (or Carian) and he therefore exercised at the gymnasium of Kynosarges where the nothoi were enrolled (syntelein), the gymnasium being sacred to Heracles because he, too, being the son of a divine father but a mortal mother, was a nothos among the gods. Themistocles persuaded aristocratic friends to exercise with him at Kynosarges and thus abolished social discrimination between pure-born Athenians and nothoi.

In the paper that I read to the Third International Congress of Classical Studies in London in 1959 I tried to delimit the sphere of human reflexion and freedom of decision, as opposed to the sphere of divine intervention, in Homeric poetry. The conclusion I reached was that there was a mutual and often indissoluble fusion of these two spheres. In trying here to say something about the significance of personal decision in the dramas of Aeschylus, I am in fact continuing my inquiry in a different literary genre. But the problems are basically the same: in both cases the question is what significance the poet ascribes to the personal decisions of the human agent within the frame-work of a basically God-governed ‘Welt-bild’, how the limitations upon his freedom are defined, and what degree of responsibility is thus entailed.

I began the previous paper with my thanks to Bruno Snell, who was the first to clarify these problems of free human action with which we are faced in epic poetry, and I must now begin by thanking him again. Professor Snell, in his book Aischjlos und das Handeln im Drama, which appeared in 1928, emphatically placed the personal decision of the human agent in the centre of his interpretation of Aeschylus; he even went so far as to regard a decision based on free choice as the most important element in the development of a genuinely tragic conflict. I cannot enter upon the history of these problems; however, I should like to emphasise the importance of the question and the interest it has recently aroused in scholarly discussion.

It was once a commonplace of early Greek history that a major factor involved in the demise of the aristocratic regimes of the dark ages was the adoption of the hoplite form of warfare: that the rise of the early tyrants and other contemporary political developments were brought about at least in part by the inability of aristocrats to maintain their monopoly of privilege in the face of demands from non-aristocratic hoplites for political power commensurate with their new military importance. But in an important article in this Journal (lxxxv [1965] 110–22) Snodgrass challenged this view. He first argued that the hoplite phalanx was unknown in Greece before c. 650, and that its adoption can therefore not have affected the rise to power of the earliest tyrants. Similarly, if the Spartan rhetra is to be dated to the early seventh century, it cannot have been the result of demands made by a hoplite class. His case was not, however, merely chronological, for he suggested that it is in any event difficult to believe that the hoplite reform had immediate political consequences. The reaction to his case has been mixed, but his arguments have not been subjected to the careful examination they deserve.

The following miscellany consists mainly of comments on various archaic inscriptions already published, but also includes four unpublished stones from Crete, observed during a six months' stay in Greece in 1947. Two of these are archaic, the other two considerably later, and therefore added separately at the end. All are listed geographically, under the headings of the relevant volumes of Inscriptiones Graecae or Inscriptiones Creticae; where the inscription discussed is not included in that volume, the heading is bracketed.

Grateful acknowledgment is here made to N. Platon, Ephor of Crete and Director of the Candia Museum, for permission to photograph and publish nos. 8–11, and to G. Kotzias, Ephor of Attica, for permission to photograph nos. 1–2.

Too often in the study of Greek divine personalities assumptions about deities' nature and development have been reflected in the methodology adopted and have thus introduced distortions, forcing the evidence into inflexible interpretative frameworks which may be logical without being correct. I believe we must aim at a ‘neutral’, bias-free approach which does not allow the operator's convictions to distort the evidence by casting it into a preconceived mould. I shall first set out the factors which, in my opinion, determine the definition and development of Greek divine personalities; these can be established by considering detectable historical developments in these personalities. I then propose an open-ended and flexible methodological framework which will take account of this model but will not depend on its validity.

The first determining factor is clearly the worshipping group and its specific realities and needs as they develop in the course of time. Deities are shaped by the societies that constitute the worshipping group and develop with them. A second factor to be taken into account is the pantheon to which they belong and the spheres of activity of its members. For a pantheon is an articulated religious system within which divine beings catering for the needs of the worshipping group are associated and differentiated; and this nexus of relationships contributes to the definition of each divine personality.

The theme of this paper is intolerance: its manifestation in late antiquity towards the pagans of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the immediate reactions and long-term attitudes that it provoked in them. The reasons why, in spite of copious evidence, the persecution of the traditional cults and of their adepts in the Roman empire has never been viewed as such are obvious: on the one hand no pagan church emerged out of the turmoil to canonise its dead and expound a theology of martyrdom, and on the other, whatever their conscious religious beliefs, late antique scholars in their overwhelming majority were formed in societies whose ethical foundations and logic are irreversibly Christian. Admittedly a few facets of this complex subject, such as the closing of the Athenian Academy and the demolition of temples or their conversion into churches, have occasionally been touched upon; but pagan persecution in itself, in all its physical, artistic, social, political, intellectual and psychological dimensions, has not as yet formed the object of scholarly research.

‘Without exaggeration and oversimplification little progress is made in most fields of humanistic investigation.’ With this disarming quotation from A. D. Nock, Albert Henrichs begins his book-length interpretation of P. Colon, inv. 3328. In the same spirit of humanistic progress, I would like to reconsider some aspects of the text and to offer a different assessment of its place in the history of religion and literature.

The fragments are from three pages of a hitherto unknown Greek novel, Lollianos' Phoinikika. Frags A and B luckily include book-ends, from whose subscriptions we know the author and title of the work. Frag. C is just scraps which yield no continuous sense. Frag. A brokenly and confusedly mentions youths, women dancing, (furniture?) being thrown off the roof, sobriety, kissing, and then, in a slightly more intelligible scene, the male narrator's loss of virginity with a woman named Persis, her gift to him of a gold necklace which he refuses, the assistance of one Glauketes in taking the necklace elsewhere, and finally what seems to be a confrontation between Persis' mother and the two lovers. This last is similar to Achilles Tatius ii 23–5. Achilles Tatius also offers the closest parallel to frag. B, a ghastly description of human sacrifice and cannibalism. This scene is the focus of most of Henrichs' interpretation and I will limit myself to it in the present article.

The central question raised by this new novel fragment is how to assess the relative importance of religious and literary parallels. Is the Phoinikika to be regarded as a document in religious or in literary history, or perhaps somewhere on the borderland of both? There has been a lively discussion in the last half century of the thesis that the ancient novels were written and read as religious documents, deriving their basic structure and many details from the myths and cults of particular religions. Henrichs devotes most of his book to arguing that the sacrifice scene in Lollianos is inspired by an actual rite, probably of a Dionysian character, and that the Phoinikika serves to illuminate a little-known corner of religious history. His views are based on an extensive collection of liturgical, mythical and ethnological parallels concerning oath rituals, the sacrifice of children, cannibalism, and face-painting. Of all the parallels cited, the two which are closest in every way to Lollianos are Achilles Tatius iii 15 and Cassius Dio lxxi 4. On the strength of these Henrichs asserts that Lollianos' description of a ritual murder represents, more or less directly, the cultic practice of the Egyptian Boukoloi. Without postulating a religious message for the Phoinikika as a whole, Henrichs does claim that this scene yields valuable information about the structure of ancient mystery rituals (78 n. 6) and that these new fragments support the methodological correctness of Kerenyi's and Merkelbach's approach to the ancient novels.

It has long been recognised that money is both a reality and an ideology. Yet the interaction between the two, the extent to which all-purpose money, in ancient Greece first realised in the use of coinage, brings about particular ideologies of value and exchange, while at the same time being framed by them, rarely comes into focus. Like literacy, money has frequently been taken as a culturally independent cause for particular effects both at the social and economic as well as the ideological level. In this paper I wish to complicate the story of monetization by relating its ideological superstructure in the Greek polis to the particular institutions in which it circulated.

Plutarch of Chaeroneia stands almost alone among Greeks of the Roman Empire in displaying in his works an extensive knowledge of, and interest in, Rome and Romans. The knowledge of Roman history and the many notes on Roman institutions and usages seen in the Lives together with the work specifically devoted to Roman customs, the quaest. Rom., and the celebration of Rome's good fortune, the de fort. Rom., testify to his great sympathy with the Roman way of life. For us Plutarch is a unique bridge between Greece and Rome. But what sort of bridge does he himself envisage between Rome and his own world? In particular, how far does Plutarch believe that Romans share his own Hellenic culture? In answering this question I shall argue that in his presentation of Romans Plutarch often shows himself to be conscious that Hellenic culture had been imported to Rome and could never be fully taken for granted among Romans as it could among Greeks, and that as a consequence it is worthwhile for him as a student of character to consider how well and with what benefit Romans absorb it.