From Draco onwards, if not before, the laws of Athens were preserved in writing, and some of them were also displayed to public view: notably the laws of Solon, written up on objects called axones and kyrbeis. No other publication of Athenian laws had such renown as this, or these, of Solon's. In fact it is hard to find any publication at all on the same scale, or any publication but of single documents in scattered places. In the later fifth and the fourth centuries, the period best known to us, each new document is published, if at all, on a separate stele. Moreover, there is no thought of aligning this stele with any existing publication, either of similar laws or of laws in general; instead the stele is set up at whatever spot seems indicated by the business at hand; if the business is urgent, more than one stele is set up at more than one spot. Such episodic publication is the rule for laws as well as other public documents. Or to put it differently, for a long while the Athenians did not distinguish laws from other binding decisions, mainly decrees of the Assembly; if they did not so distinguish when publishing on stone, they did not either in their filing system of papyrus and whitened boards. By the early fourth century a distinction was made, and afterwards insisted on, between ‘laws’ and ‘decrees’; but even then professed laws were published as before, on separate stelae in various places. From these facts we might be tempted to conclude that any general or comprehensive publication of laws, as of Solon's, was so to speak an accident, occurring only when many so-called laws needed to be published all at once, as will happen at an early stage of society.

Avroman is a town in Persian Kurdistan lying close to the Turkish frontier between the sources of the Lesser Zab and the course of the Diala River some distance to the north of the highway from Bagdad (say Ctesiphon) to Hamadán (Ecbatana). Near it in a cave in the mountain called Kuh-i-Sálán, a peasant found about the year 1909 a stone jar hermetically sealed; in it were decayed millet seeds and several documents. These passed from hand to hand and some were lost, only three have survived; two, which being Greek most nearly concern us, are almost perfect, they have only suffered a certain amount from wear and from the gnawing of mice; the third written in an Aramaic script which has not yet been deciphered is said to have been much larger when found; what is left has been a good deal torn and is patched with modern leather.

Factoids—a word coined by Norman Mailer in his introduction to Marilyn—are mere speculations or guesses which have been repeated so often that they are eventually taken for hard facts. There is something decidedly unbiological about such factoids: the tendency to get stronger the longer they live is one of their most insidious qualities. Factoids occur in all branches of scholarship and many are of course still well disguised—their complete discovery would create havoc in the subjects concerned. Archaeology, converted from treasure hunting into an historical discipline, is for obvious reasons prone to create a number of factoids.

The process by which mere hypotheses attain the apparent rank of established fact, without ever having been proved, presents a linguistic and a psychological aspect. Linguistically, words or particles indicating the hypothetical character of a statement are dropped one by one in a process of constant repetition. The subjunctive is exchanged for the indicative, and in the end the factoid is formulated as a straightforward factual sentence. Psychologically, the repetition of unproved hypotheses is facilitated by an attitude which is as indispensable in research as it is ambivalent: a certain amount of implicit trust in the results of other scholars' research.

The present year, 1916 A.D., is the centenary of the acquisition by the public of the Elgin Collection of ancient sculptures, inscriptions, casts and drawings. It has therefore seemed a suitable moment to print a fuller account than has hitherto been attempted of the formation and purchase of that collection.

I should state that I have been engaged on this subject for some time past, by desire of the Earl of Elgin, who has put all his papers bearing on the subject into my hands. It was the wish of Lord Elgin that the episode of the marbles should appear in its due proportion in a full biography of his distinguished grandfather. The other aspects of that career are being studied by Sir Harry Wilson, K.C.M.G. But the call of other duties and the distractions of the time have made it doubtful whether the biography can be completed at an early date. The present narrative is therefore offered now, by way of a centennial commemoration.

Aristophanes' encomium on Eros (Smp. 189c 2–193d 5) is a story with a moral. Once upon a time, all human beings were double creatures, each with two heads, two bodies and eight limbs. Then, by the command of Zeus, each double creature was cut in half, and so humans as we know them came into being. Every one of us ‘seeks his other half’, and this search is Eros. If we are pious, we may hope to be rewarded by success in the search; if we are impious, Zeus may cut us in two again, and each of us will be like a flat-fish or a figure in relief.

The story is amusingly told, and the comedies of the real Aristophanes are also amusing; but when Sykutris says that the story ‘reminds us of the plot of a comedy’ and when Robin constructs a hypothetical comedy out of it, they are confounding essence and accident. The affinities of Aristophanes' story do not lie with his own comedies or with those of his contemporaries, but elsewhere.

The extant plays of Aristophanes are firmly rooted in the present, and each of them explores the possibilities of a fantasy constructed out of the present. Mythology was exploited by the comic poets—rarely by Aristophanes himself, more extensively by some others—in order to present humorously distorted versions of the myths which were the traditional material of serious poetry. Some comic titles point to theogonic myths (e.g. Polyzelos, Birth of the Muses and Birth of Dionysos) or to myths about the era before the rule of Zeus (e.g. Phrynichos, Kronos, and the younger Kratinos, Giants and Titans).

Two important studies have recently appeared of the career and philosophy of the celebrated first-century Cynic Demetrius—an article by J. F. Kindstrand and a monograph by M. Billerbeck. Both scholars discuss Demetrius' defence of P. Egnatius Celer in AD 70. The purpose of the present paper is threefold: (i) to argue that Kindstrand's and Billerbeck's interpretations of this incident, different as they are, must, like all previous interpretations, be rejected; (ii) to offer a new perspective, in the hope of showing that Demetrius' action can be understood as thoroughly honourable; (iii) to demonstrate that Demetrius' action can be understood as not only thoroughly honourable, but also profoundly Cynic. It may be objected that investigation of motive in such a case is intrinsically misguided. The only evidence is a short notice in Tacitus, and it is of course true that we shall never be able to say for certain what Demetrius' motives were. Some modern historians, moreover, deprecate on principle analysis of motive, in the ancient world especially. It seems, nevertheless, both legitimate and worthwhile to attempt to understand the reasons why Demetrius, a Cynic philosopher of (on the normal view) high moral character, should have defended Celer, a Stoic philosopher who (again on the normal view) had revealed himself to be a complete scoundrel. The exercise may also serve to bring out some fundamental points about the Cynics' conception of man and their interpretation of human weakness. For reasons which will become clear below Cynicism was vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Demetrius' defence of Celer, I shall argue, provides an instructive paradigm for the correct interpretation of Cynicism.

Modern historians of Greek slavery seem to agree, despite other differences, on an understanding of slavery as a relationship of property. This understanding of slavery essentially goes back to Aristotle's theory of natural slavery. An examination of the Greek vocabulary of slavery though shows that the vast majority of Greeks had a very different understanding of slavery as a relationship of domination. This article argues that this alternative Greek understanding of slavery can account for some serious conundrums in Greek attitudes and thought, and explains the reasons behind Aristotle's reformulation of slavery as a relationship of property. Finally, it is argued that seeing slavery as a relationship of domination has enormous potential for the modern study of slavery from a dynamic historical perspective.

My purpose is not to give a full interpretation of this difficult and important passage, but to discuss one particular problem, taking up some remarks made by F. M. Cornford (in Plato's Theory of Knowledge) and by Mr. R. Robinson (in his paper on Plato's Parmenides, Classical Philology, 1942). First it may be useful to give a very brief and unargued outline of the passage. Plato seeks to prove that concepts are related in certain definite ways, that there is a συμπλοκὴ εἰδῶν (251d–252e). Next (253) he assigns to philosophy the task of discovering what these relations are: the philosopher must try to get a clear view of the whole range of concepts and of how they are interconnected, whether in genus-species pyramids or in other ways. Plato now gives a sample of such philosophising. Choosing some concepts highly relevant to problems already broached in the Sophist he first (254–5) establishes that they are all different one from the other, and then (255e–258) elicits the relationships in which they stand to one another. The attempt to discover and state these relationships throws light on the puzzling notions ὄν and μὴ ὄν and enables Plato to set aside with contempt certain puzzles and paradoxes propounded by superficial thinkers (259). He refers finally (259e) to the absolute necessity there is for concepts to be in definite relations to one another if there is to be discourse at all: διὰ γὰρ τήν ἀλλήλων τῶν εἰδῶν συμπλοκὴν ὁ λόγος γέγονεν ἡμῖν So the section ends with a reassertion of the point with which it began (251d–252e): that there is and must be a συμπλοκὴ εἰδῶν.

The question I wish to discuss is this. Is it true to say that one of Plato's achievements in this passage is ‘the discovery of the copula’ or ‘the recognition of the ambiguity of ἔστιν’ as used on the one hand in statements of identity and on the other hand in attributive statements? The question is whether Plato made a philosophical advance which we might describe in such phrases as those just quoted, but no great stress is to be laid on these particular phrases. Thus it is no doubt odd to say that Plato (or anyone else) discovered the copula. But did he draw attention to it? Did he expound or expose the various roles of the verb ἔστιν? Many of his predecessors and contemporaries reached bizarre conclusions by confusing different usesof the word; did Plato respond by elucidating these different uses? These are the real questions.

Eunoia, in Greek, is something more than good will: it means approval, sympathy and readiness to help. Having such meanings, it soon came to be applied to politics in a number of ways, as describing one's feeling towards a person, or a party, or the city—or even another city. And this last instance which is connected with foreign politics, is what we shall here be dealing with. It is what Isocrates himself is most interested in, for out of sixty examples of the word about twenty-five refer specifically to the relations between one city and another city. And it is the meaning that deserves to be studied, particularly among people who like Thucydides. Whether it is φόβος or δέος, fear, in Thucydides, seems to dominate all relations between the cities of Hellas—and, to begin with, between Athens and other cities: well, eunoia, or good will, is the contrary of fear. That is to say, when Isocrates wants eunoia to rule political life, he wants things to be just the opposite of what they were in the world that Thucydides had described. Indeed, the position he adopts when discussing good will is part of an important controversy that was then being conducted about force and justice, might and right. And so, even if he is not himself a very thrilling writer nor a very intelligent man, it seemed worth while trying to find out how the idea arose both from recent experiments in Greece and from personal tendencies of Isocrates, and how he hoped the notion of eunoia could work in contemporary politics.

The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of what archaic verse epitaphs meant to contemporary readers. Section I suggests their fundamental message was praise of the deceased, expressed in forms characteristic of poetic encomium in its broad, rhetorical sense, i.e., praise poetry. In section II, the conventions of encomium in the epitaphs are compared to the iconographic conventions of funerary art. I conclude that verse inscriptions and grave markers, not only communicate the same message of praise, but do so in a formally parallel manner. Section III, drawing on Pindar as a preserver of archaic thinking, attributes the parallelism between verse epitaph and grave marker to their common debt to funerary ritual. The epigrams will be seen to share with their monuments the goal of memorializing this ritual.

Dr Long's interest in my work (JHS xc [1970] 121–39; hereafter referred to as ‘Long’) is naturally very welcome; but it seems to me to require further comment in its turn. In order to advance the discussion, I shall be compelled to refer on a number of occasions to what I have written elsewhere in articles, and indeed on other pages of Merit and Responsibility. I shall begin with some very general points, some concerned with philosophy, some with interpretation.

First, can ‘an historical reference for Homeric society’ be found ‘in the individual oikos, such that Homeric values can be seen to derive consistently from its needs’? The ‘facts of Homeric life’ to which I endeavour to relate my analysis of Homeric values are those contained in Professor M. I. Finley's admirable The World of Odysseus. My very occasional disagreements are concerned with interpretations within an agreed framework: Professor Finley's framework. I shall turn to the historicity of the society in a moment; but there seems in any case to be no prima facie absurdity in employing the tools of the social anthropologist on an overtly fictional society, say More's Utopia, with the intention, perhaps, of displaying incongruities and discrepancies: however fictional it might be, there would still be a society and values to discuss.

The Athenian Archon list can be divided into three periods: (1) from the institution of the annual archonship down to 481/0—a period for which the evidence available for restoration of the list is slight; the names of some sixty-five archons out of the total for the period of about 200 are known to us, and the dates of many of them are uncertain; (2) from 480/79 to 302/1, a period for which a complete list has been preserved for us in the extant portions of Diodoros, apart from abundant confirmatory evidence; and (3) the Hellenistic period, for which as far as 101/0 the list has been reconstructed as fully as possible by the labours of Dinsmoor, Pritchett and Meritt. The present paper lists the archons of period (1) whose names have survived, and assembles in the case of each name all the available evidence for the date. In this it resembles Beloch's excursus ‘Die attische Archonten’ but differs from it in arguing the chronological problems more fully, and in writing out the greater part of the evidence in extenso. Moreover, since Beloch not only have numerous articles on points of early Athenian chronology appeared, but what is probably a fragment of an early inscribed Athenian archon-list has been discovered; and it seemed worth while to discuss the significance of this, as well as to assemble, within the limits of a single article, all the evidence and as many as possible of the opinions expressed relevant to the restoration of the list.

The encounter of Alexander the Great with the Indian Brahmans or Oxydorkai/Oxydracae forms an important episode of the Alexander Romance as well as featuring in all the extant Alexander historians. The purpose of this paper is to consider how far the various accounts reflect genuine knowledge of India in the sources in which they are based, and to what extent the episode in the Alexander Romance diverges or adds to them and to what purpose. A future paper will consider the development of the episode in later works, Geneva Papyrus inv. 271 and Palladius De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus, as well as the Collatio Alexandri et Dindimi.

FGrH 328 F 35a (Phot., Suid. S.V. ὀργεῶνες): … περὶ τὶν ὀργεώνων γέγραφεν καὶ Φιλόχορος̇ ‘τοὺς δὲ φράτορας ἐπάναγκες δέχεσθαι καὶ τοὺς ὀργεῶνας καὶ τοὺς όμογάλακτας, οὓς γεννήτας καλοῦμεν.’

F 35b (Harp., Suid. S.v. γεννῆται, etc.): … Φιλόχορος δ̓ ἐν τῇ δ̄ ̓Ατθίδος φησὶ πρότερον ὁμογάλακτας ὀνομάζεσθαι οὓς νῦν γεννήτας καλοῦσιν.

Modern interpretations of this fragment differ widely, but they agree in assuming that the two classes orgeones and gennetai between them made up the whole membership of the phratry, gennetai being the aristocratic minority, orgeones the great mass of commoners; and that the purpose of the clause here quoted was to safeguard the admission of orgeones to the phratry. Drakon's law of homicide (IG i2 115 = Tod 87, 18–19) takes it for granted that a murdered man, if he has no near relatives, will at least have phrateres, and that social distinctions can be made among them. Already by his time, then, all Athenians belonged to phratries, nobles and commoners alike, and if commoners were ever outside the phratries their first admission belongs to a period before written law. Our fragment has thus had to be taken as referring to the repulse of a later attempt to exclude the orgeones, and it has generally been dated to the time either of Solon or of Kleisthenes.

In this paper I shall explore the motif of travel in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, composed by Philostratus in the first half of the third century AD and published after 217. This text, apart from its novelistic, hagiographic and apologetic features, is an exemplary portrait of an ideal life. One aspect of its appeal (rather ignored in modern scholars' keenness to assess its veracity and the extent of Philostratus' elaboration) is the metaphorical nature of much of the work's content—designed to create an ideal literary image of the Greek philosopher in the Roman empire. I examine the theme of travel (with its deep debts to ancient ethnography, pilgrimage writing and the novel) as a masterly rhetorical device on the part of Philostratus by which to establish and demonstrate the superiority of Apollonius.

The uprising which took place in Constantinople in January 532 has long attracted the attention of scholars, the first significant contribution being J.B. Bury's magisterial article of 1897. My present aim is to re-examine the Nika riot, and to set it in its wider context: it will be argued that the significant place assigned to it in accounts of the reign of Justinian distorts the reality of late fifth-sixth century Constantinople. The riot was by no means an isolated outbreak of popular discontent, but just one in a whole series of bloody confrontations in the capital. It has engaged the interest of historians more than other disturbances for the same reason that Justinian's reign attracts such frequent biographies, while Anastasius' remains neglected: the wealth of sources available for the riot of 532 is much greater than for any other such event.

With the fuller publication of the material found by Blegen at Ano Englianos in 1939 (The Pylos Tablets, Dr. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Princeton, 1951) and by Evans at Knossos in 1899–1904 (Scripta Minoa, Vol. II, ed. Sir John Myres, Oxford, 1952), it has at last been possible to undertake a systematic study of the Minoan–Mycenaean texts written in Linear Script B. Their decipherment is now the central problem in Aegean archaeology, accentuated by the discovery, in the summer of 1952, of many new tablets by Blegen at Pylos and by Wace at Mycenae.

Evans believed that Linear B (first found in the L.M. II palace of Knossos, c. 1400 B.C., and thereafter the exclusive script of the Mainland down to the ‘Dorian invasion’) was an administrative revision of Linear A, designed to express the same ‘Aegean’ language; and that Minoan colonisation of the Mainland was responsible for its occurrence at Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis.

The focus of this paper is a series of representations depicting a youth, with or without spears, pursuing a girl who is fleeing before him (PLATES IIb—c and IIIa—d). I call the pursuits in which the youth is carrying spears ‘type 1’ and those in which he is not ‘type 2’. I also discuss various matters pertaining to girls, marriage and the relations between the sexes, and to myths such as Peleus' capture of Thetis.

In his tract A Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham repeatedly refers to the courtroom as the ‘theatre of justice’. Bentham's description has been borne out by recent scholarship on Athenian law. As a form of civic space, the Athenian lawcourts were similar to the Theatre of Dionysos in many respects: litigants faced each other in a competitive agon, delivering lines written for them by logographers to a mass audience which would range, ordinarily, from 200 to 1500 jurors. Moreover, modern scholars have drawn on the notion of ‘social drama’ introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the Athenian lawcourts as an arena for socially constructive feuding behaviour, as a public stage for the social élite to compete for prestige, or as a forum for ongoing communication between élite litigants and mass jurors ‘in a context which made explicit the power of the masses to judge the actions and behavior of élite individuals’.

In 1904–5 the British Museum excavations at Ephesos were resumed under D. G. Hogarth, and resulted in the discovery of what he held to be the foundations of earlier buildings beneath the great Artemision of the Croesus period unearthed by Wood. In these earlier buildings Hogarth distinguished three successive stages:

A. A Central Basis, faced with green schist, standing on virgin sand, and joined in the middle of its west side by a narrow jetty to a second rectangular platform, both of limestone; the whole built, in his view, about 700 B.C., and lasting until it was destroyed by the Kimmerians about 660.

B. A rebuilding and enlargement of the same about 650, the resulting temple lasting till about 600.

C. A further building and enlargement finally superseded by the Croesus temple about 550.

Hogarth's chronology has met with strong criticism, notably from Löwy, who regarded all remains as belonging to the foundations of the Croesus temple.