A short section of Aristotle's de generatione animalium embodies his final answer to the question how the faculties of soul are transmitted from parent to offspring. Aristotle here speaks in a tone which is dogmatic as well as enthusiastic; he is able to announce a new discovery. There is, he sets forth, in the sperma a peculiar substance (σῶμα) which has some connection with soul and differs in quality as the souls themselves differ in worth. This substance is identical with two of the entities mentioned in our title and ‘analogous’ to the third.

Πάσης μὲν οὖν ψυχῆς δύναμις ἑτέρου σώματος ἔοικε κεκοινωνηκέναι καὶ θειοτέρου τῶν καλουμένων στοιχείων ὡς δὲ διαφέρουσι τιμιότητι αἱ ψυχαὶ καὶ ἀλλήλων, οὕτω καὶ ἡ τοιαύτη διαφέρει φύσις. πάντων μὲν γὰρ ἐν τῷ σπέρματι ὑπάρχει ὅπερ ποιεῖ γόνιμα εἶναι τὰ σπέρματα, τό καλούμενον θερμόν. τοῦτο δ᾿ οὐ πῦρ πὐδὲ τοιαύτη δύναμίς ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἐμπεριλαμβανόμενον ἐν τῷ σπέρματι καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀφρώδει πνεῦμα καὶ ἡ ἐν τῷ πνεύματι φύσις, ἀνάλογον οὖσα τῶν ἄστρων στοιείῳ.

The sentences which follow state that fire has no generative or procreative power, yet such a power must be present in the Sun and in the θερμόν, the vital heat of living beings. Clearly, then, this θερμόν cannot be identical with the fire.

Nowhere else in the body of his preserved work does Aristotle establish this close connection between the vital heat, the pneuma, and the element of the stars, the so-called aether. These three concepts differ as much in their origin and past history as in their function and place within Aristotle's own physical or biological system. A brief sketch of them—skipping by necessity many significant episodes in the history of each—will suffice to make this clear.

What needs here to be said about the ‘element of the stars’ is indeed not much. It was Aristotle himself who added this element to the canonic four of the Empedoclean and Platonic tradition. The dialogue On Philosophy and the First Book On the Heaven secured it its place. It is divine, un-ageing, and unchanging, and yet a material element. Like the other elements it has its specific ‘natural motion’, to wit the circular, which makes it possible for Aristotle to explain by a physical ‘hypothesis’ the celestial motions for which Plato had resorted to the World-Soul. The place of this element is the entire heavenly region, extending from the First Heaven to the moon; below this, in the regions occupied by the four other elements, it is never to be found.

The importance of the Harpalus affair in Athenian history has always been recognised, and many scholars have laboured to clarify its obscure details and to evaluate its consequences. What has, on the whole, not been attempted has been to see it against the background of Alexander's Court—yet that alone can enable us to make historical sense of it. The reason for this apparent neglect is to be found in the nature of our sources: as is well known, Alexander, within a generation of his death, became a legendary figure—a superman or demon, a subject for nostalgic worship or philosophic animadversion. The injection of corrective doses of Court historiography, though in itself an improvement, yet did a great deal of harm with its illusion of restraint and objectivity, which captured a large part of subsequent scholarship from Arrian to Tarn. As a result, between legend and apologia, both (for us) fragmentary and adulterated, and in the absence of really important documentary evidence, we cannot at all easily write an account of Alexander's reign that will satisfy the reader accustomed to genuine political history and unimpressed by eulogy and denunciation. Yet there is more to be done than might at first sight appear: detailed study of individual incidents, approached through the relations and movements of men and (as far as this can be recovered) the chronological sequence of events, will often establish a pattern into which scattered items in the sources can then be fitted. Naturally, not all these results will be equally secure; but probability is often cumulative, and a pattern, once established, will give value to pieces that fit into it and that might otherwise have been ignored or rejected. This concrete approach, which has made other periods of history intelligible to us, may then provide some criteria that will enable the traditional argument about the sources and their relations to aid rather than retard the progress of scholarship. Above all, it may tear away the veil of unreality that still envelops the history of Alexander's reign, so that the modern student can see it in terms of human history, as he can, for instance, see the reigns of Augustus or of Napoleon.

The great popular insurrection which shook the throne of Justinian in the fifth year of his reign and laid in ashes the imperial quarter of Constantinople has been treated again and again by historians, but never in a completely satisfactory way. Its import has not been quite clearly grasped, owing to an imperfect apprehension of the meaning of the circus factions; the sources have not been systematically correlated; the chronology has not been finally fixed; and the topographical questions have caused much perplexity. It is not therefore superfluous to submit the material to a new investigation. I do not propose to enter upon the subject of the circus factions, as they have been well treated recently by the Russian scholar, Th. Uspenski; but shall confine myself to problems relating to the authorities, the chronology, and the topography.

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.

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.

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 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.

Discussion of the problems must begin with the allegations made in Lysias' speech XXX) Against Nicomachus:

When he became writer-up (anagrapheus) of the laws (nomoi), who does not know how he defiled the city? His instructions were to write up the laws of Solon in four months, but he set himself up as a lawgiver (nomothetes) in the place of Solon, instead of four months he made his office last six years, and every day he was taking money to insert some laws and wipe out others. (3) We were brought to this point, that the laws were doled out to us by his hand, and opposing litigants in the courts would produce conflicting laws, each claiming to have received them from Nicomachus. When the archons tried to impose fines on him and to bring him to court, he refused to hand over the laws: the city was brought to the direst disaster before he could be removed from his office and made to submit to examination (euthynai) for what he had done. (4) And yet, gentlemen, after failing to pay the penalty for those offences, he has done the same thing with his present office. First, he has been writing up for four years, when he could have had done with it in thirty days.

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.

Πολυπραγμοσύνη and its opposite ἀπραγμοσύνη are typical abstract nouns of the fifth century, indicating human qualities, comparable to words like δικαιοσύνη and σωφροσύνη. There is, however, one thing peculiar to our two words: they are opposite extremes, but there is nothing between them. There is no πραγμοσύνη. Simple action (πρᾶξις), we may assume, does not easily reveal a man's character. It is only when he acts ‘much’ or ‘not at all,’ that a conclusion can be drawn as to his own nature. The psychological aspect is paramount, more than in words like δικαιοσύνη or σωφροσύνη which also represent an idea. As so frequently happens in psychology, it is the contrast which illuminates either particular quality. We can perhaps go one step further and assume that conceptions like these are more likely than not to spring from a rational and conscious awareness of real phenomena, while for instance δικαιοσύνη, although it is the abstract noun belonging to δίκαιος, at the same time originates from the desire to give a name to the abstract idea which dominates the world of δίκη). There is no ‘idea,’ there are only psychological facts, in ‘busybodiness.’

This ugly and unwieldy English word makes it plain that—at least in English—the concrete rather than the abstract noun belongs to ordinary speech, the man rather than the quality. The ‘busybody’ is indeed a type which, though little loved, is deeply rooted in the English mind, and this is undoubtedly the legitimate translation of πολυπράγμων

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars (usually comfortable citizens of a colonial empire) who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’.

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.

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.