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 purpose of this article is to consider how the symbolic associations which right and left had for the ancient Greeks influenced various theories and explanations in Greek philosophy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The fact that certain manifest natural oppositions (e.g. right and left, male and female, light and darkness, up and down) often acquire powerful symbolic associations, standing for religious categories such as pure and impure, blessed and accursed, is well attested by anthropologists for many present-day societies. Robert Hertz, in particular, has considered the significance of the widespread belief in the superiority of the right hand, in his essay ‘La prééminence de la main droite: étude sur la polarité religieuse’ [Revue Philosophique lxviii (1909), 553 ff., recently translated into English by R. and С. Needham in Death and the Right Hand (London, 1960) 89 ff.]. It is, of course, well known that the ancient Greeks shared some similar beliefs, associating right and left with lucky and unlucky, respectively, and light and darkness with safety, for example, and death. Yet the survival of certain such associations in Greek philosophy has not, I think, received the attention it deserves. I wish to document this aspect of the use of opposites in Greek philosophy in this paper, concentrating in the main upon the most interesting pair of opposites, right and left. Before I turn to the evidence in the philosophers themselves, two introductory notes are necessary. In the first, I shall consider briefly some of the evidence in anthropology which indicates how certain pairs of opposites are associated with, and symbolise, religious categories in many present-day societies. The second contains a general summary of the evidence for similar associations and beliefs in pre-philosophical Greek thought.

The return of Hephaistos to Olympos, as a myth, concerns the establishment of a balance of power among the Olympian gods. Many visual representations of the myth in Archaic and Classical Greek art give visible form to the same theme, but they do so in a manner entirely distinct from the manner in which it is expressed in literary narratives of the tale. In this paper, I argue that vase-painters incorporated elements of Dionysiac processional ritual into representations of the return of Hephaistos in order to articulate visually the principal theme of the myth. The vase-painters structured the myth along the lines of epiphanic processions in which Dionysos was escorted into the city of Athens. Like Dionysiac epiphanic processions, the procession of Hephaistos, Dionysos and the wine-god's followers is distinguished visually by drunkenness, ostentatious display of the phallus and obscene or insulting behaviour. To judge from the aetiological myths associated with them, the epiphanic processions symbolized the triumph of Dionysos over, and his belated acceptance by, those who denied his status as a god. By structuring the visual representations of the return of Hephaistos along the lines of such Dionysiac processions, artists conveyed visually the idea that the myth also concerned the triumph of a god over those who rejected him, and his acceptance among the Olympians. It is not necessary to assume that the vase-painters relied on a detailed poetic account of the myth to create their representations of it, because they employed elements of religious spectacle, an inherently visual phenomenon, to convey the essence of the story.

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.

With these robust words Müller sought to argue that the Furies were actually visible to the audience at the end of Choephori. More recent scholars, while generally agreed that this is not so, have still held a variety of views on the relation between the invisible Furies of Cho. and the visible ones of Eumenides, and the kind of existence that they should be conceived to possess. Thus Wilamowitz, who believed strongly in the subjectivity of Orestes' visions in Cho., was prepared on occasion to carry this over into Eum., and a similar thesis has been elaborated in detail by H. J. Dirksen. Conversely F. Solmsen uses the objective reality of the Furies in Eum. to argue against Wilamowitz's conception of the end of Cho. (‘it is after all impossible to regard the μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνες in one play as “Gewissensqualen” and in the other as real deities’), and others have taken up a similar position. Finally John Jones claims that the image of ‘a line extending from pure subjective fantasy to pure objective fact … provides a false frame of reference’, or else that we must ‘place the Furies at both ends of the line simultaneously’.

L. J. D. Richardson'S article ΥΠΗΡΕΤΗΣ, CQ xxxvii (1943) 55–61, asserted the manifest truth that the word hyperetes, for which ‘an unattested original meaning “under-rower” has been universally assumed, had ceased to be used literally by the time our records, literary and epigraphic, begin’. ‘When ὑπηρέτης and its derivative ὑπηρετέω first appear (in Herodotus saepe), both the particular transferred sense “servant” and the generally transferred sense “subordinate” were already well established to the exclusion of the original meaning (whatever it was), and, what is more, the metaphor from the seafaring usage seems to be already “dead”. The essential note, however, in the group of words (ὑπηρὲτης, ὑπηρετέω, ὑπηρεσία, ὑπηρετικός) is not hard to assess: it is implicit, unquestioning service in response to another's authoritative bidding.’ The truth of this assessment for the fourth as well as the fifth century is plain from an examination of the very frequent use of the word in, e.g., Plato. Richardson proceeded to point out ‘a source of confusion in the dictionaries’ (which still prevails), viz., that of the four chief members of the group of words mentioned, hyperesia alone, having become ‘figurative (as service) in all areas, was then reapplied in the naval domain’, as a name for part of the ship's company of the fifth- and fourth-century trireme. This pattern (of reapplication in a naval context) is in fact also true of hyperesion and hyperetikos. The former is the name given by Thucydides and Isocrates to the oarsman's cushion, called proskephalaion by Hermippus and Theophrastus, while the latter is used of a naval dispatch boat.

Euthymos was a real person, an Olympic victor from Locri Epizephyrii in the first half of the fifth century BC. Various sources attribute to him extraordinary achievements: he received cult in his own lifetime; he fought with and overcame the ‘Hero of Temesa’, a daimon who in ritual deflowered a virgin in the Italian city of Temesa every year; and he vanished into a local river instead of dying (extant iconography from Locri shows him as a river god receiving cult a century after his death). By taking an integrative approach to Euthymos' legend and cult iconography, this article proposes a new interpretation of the complex. It is argued that Euthymos received cult already in his lifetime in consequence of his victory over the Hero and that he took over, in a modified form, the Hero's cult. Various considerations, including the role of river gods as the recipients of brides' virginity in prenuptial rites, point to an identification of the Hero as a river deity. In this light it is suggested that the contest between Euthymos and the Hero was conceived as a deliberate emulation of Herakles' fight with Acheloos. The case of Euthymos at Locri, for all its peculiarities, draws our attention to some important aspects of the heroization of historical persons in the Classical period. First, the earliest attested cult of a living person in Greece is to be placed around the middle of the fifth century. Second, heroized persons in the Classical period were not always passive in the process of their heroization, but could actively promote it. And third, a common pattern in the heroization of contemporaries in the Classical period was to accommodate them into existing cults.

After a hundred and thirty years of controversy, the interpretation of the Prometheus Bound is still the subject of debate. To the romantic poets of the revolutionary era, the Titan tortured by Zeus for his services to mankind appeared as a symbol of the human spirit in its struggle to throw off the chains which priests and kings had forged for it. But to the distinguished Hellenists who after the fall of Napoleon laid the foundations of the great century of German scholarship, no such naïve and one-sided view of the Prometheus seemed tolerable. It was partly, perhaps, that the political atmosphere discouraged an interpretation adverse to authority; but the other writings of Aeschylus himself seemed to offer strong evidence against this view. Elsewhere in Aeschylus, they could argue, Zeus was treated with profound respect. In the Supplices, he is continually appealed to by the chorus of Danaids, who miss no opportunity to extol the supremacy of his power. Zeus' omnipotence is the burden of a celebrated section of the first chorus of the Agamemnon; although scholars have differed widely in the details of their interpretation of this passage, most are agreed that it expresses theological doctrines that are at once subtle and sublime, and many have discovered profound significance in its puzzling allusions to ‘learning by suffering’ and to a χάρις that comes to men from the gods. Chiefly upon evidence derived from these two plays, many scholars have credited their author with the invention of a peculiar personal religion, tending to exalt Zeus at the expense of the other members of the Olympic pantheon, and crediting him with the purpose of perfecting men in goodness through the discipline of suffering. Some have gone so far as to detect tendencies to monotheism in Aeschylus. A fair specimen of the usual kind of view is that of Nilsson, who begins by hesitating to pronounce Aeschylus a monotheist; Aeschylus, he warns us, is not a religious innovator preaching a new form of religion, but a profoundly pious poet; but later, he comes dangerously near to this view. The power of Zeus, he argues, is so much magnified that at one point he seems more a principle than a personal god.

The starting-point of this paper is one of the most disastrous pieces of advocacy in modern legal history. In October 1960, Penguin Books were prosecuted under Section 2 of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. On the first day of the trial, Mr. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Senior Treasury Counsel (i.e. Crown Prosecutor), did his best to wreck his case on the strength of one remark. He had previously tried to show that he was himself a man of the world: ‘Let me emphasize this on behalf of the prosecution: do not approach this matter in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct, mid-Victorian manner’. He now proceeded to work this out in practice: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?’

The London fragment of the Oxyrhynchus historian begins with a narrative of the voyage of Demaenetus to Conon and the reaction which it provoked. This is the last incident with which P deals under the winter of 396/5, and he describes it as approximately contemporaneous with some other incident, not improbably the mission of Timocrates. With one ship Demaenetus sailed off to join Conon, lacking the authorisation of the people, but not before secretly communicating his plan to the boule. The language of the following section gives the impression that the boule was taken aback by the extent and vigour of the outcry, which might indicate that prior anti-Spartan acts had not created such a disturbance. The action of Demaenetus was less trivial than it may at first seem; it was also more concrete, less easy to excuse or minimise than what had gone before. One of the twelve ships which Athens was allowed, and which could easily be counted, was gone, and Sparta would know perfectly well where it had gone. She had recently suffered a serious reverse in her struggle with Persia, the loss of Rhodes, whilst the apparently unconcealed object of Timocrates had been the incitement to war of the cities of Greece. In the circumstances Sparta would perhaps be more likely than before to treat the least unfriendly move by Athens as an act of war, especially if it took the form of assistance to Persia, whilst at Athens meditation on the possibility of war, inspired by Timocrates' appeal, would create an acuter awareness of the likely results of defeat and so promote greater caution and respect for Spartan sensibilities among prudent men.

The myth of Athens and Atlantis in Plato's Timaeus and Critias can be, and has been, interpreted on a number of different levels. On the most fundamental, philosophical level the myth sets into narrative motion the paradigm of the ideal state elaborated in the Republic. Gill, in a series of publications, has done much to throw light on the nature of this invention: its relationship with modern categories of fiction and with antecedent historiography. Yet the extent to which the myth of Atlantis is embedded in larger fourth-century political and historiographical concerns has been insufficiently appreciated. In what follows, I shall attempt to reconstruct some of these concerns. I shall argue, first, that the narrative set-up of the Atlantis myth corresponds to the conditions specified in the Republic for the successful creation of a charter myth (the ‘Noble Lie’) for the ideal city, and that this is a valuable indication of the truth status of the myth and of the function it is expected to perform. This function is not merely a matter of abstract philosophical interest, since there are close parallels between the Atlantis myth and contemporary panegyric versions of Athenian history; in Section III, therefore, I shall explore these parallels through an examination of some Isocratean orations. Sections IV and V will investigate how such panegyric history illuminates areas of ideological concern for Athenians in the first half of the fourth century, most notably worries about legitimating the constitution (politeia) under which they lived, and about the attitude that should be taken towards Athenian maritime interests in the Aegean. The Atlantis myth creates a vision of Athens that is true to Plato's political ideals, but which is animated by contemporary historical topoi. The result is a narrative for an audience of philosophical cognoscenti that both rejects and transforms such topoi, and sparks a second-order consideration of the forces at work in the construction of history.

The material published here is the Greek pottery from levels 5 to 9. This falls into two groups: that from levels 5 to 7 and that from levels 8 and 9. Within these groups there was evidently much disturbance, and bits of the same vase are frequently found in several levels. Even between the two main groups such overlaps occur, and there are pieces which, though they do not join fragments in the other group, seem out of context; but in the main the division between levels 7 and 8 seems significant, and I have treated the two groups separately while merely recording differences of level within them. Pl. I, m and n come from level 4 with Attic red-figure pottery, which is plainly an accident. I am only able to publish a small proportion of the pottery, and have tried to combine a general conspectus of the material with the reproduction of most of the outstanding pieces. For some classes—e.g., black Ionian cups and jugs, and to a great extent bird-bowls and the like—I have relied on references to identical material published elsewhere.

Less than a decade ago Robin Seager wrote that further discussion of the Peace of Callias would be inexcusable. Needless to say, discussion has continued. Wherever one stands, on the problem as such, it ought to be admitted that new ideas have been put forward, or (since it seems unlikely, on a topic so much discussed, that anything new can now be said) at least old and forgotten ones have been revived and put in new perspectives. Meiggs's estimate of a special treatment to be expected every two years has stood up well enough: Klaus Meister's bibliography lists twenty special treatments between 1945 and 1982, and one (by S. Accame) appeared in the same year (1982) as Meister's own.

Achilles is the poetic paradigm of a hero, Alexander his real-life counterpart as well as his descendant. This idea is a commonplace of all our sources for Alexander's life. There arc numerous examples of it: Diodorus says at xvii 1.4:

έν ἔτεσι γάρ δώδεκα καταστρεψάμενος τῆς μέν Eύρώπης ούκ όλίγα, την δέ 'Aσίαν σχεδὸν ἄπασαν είκότως περιβόητον ἔσχε τὴν δόξαν καί τοῖς παλαιοῖς ἤρωσι καί ὴμιθέοις ℓσάʒουσαν … 'Aλέξανδρος οὖν γεγονώς κατά πατέρα μέν άφ’ 'Hρακλέους, κατά δέ μητέρα τῶν Aίακιδῶν οℓκείαν ἔσχε τὴν φύσιν καί τὴν άρετὴν τὴς τῶν προγόνων εύδοξίας.

‘The historical value of an object depends not so much on the nature of the object as on its associations, which only scientific excavation can detect.’ The full significance of an inscription may equally rely on knowledge of its archaeological context. In practice, however, users of inscriptions often neglect this aspect. The standard commentaries, new and old, on Alexander's famous ‘edict to Priene’ (hereafter ‘AE’) tend to ignore the physical context of the inscription (I.Priene I) and to treat the text as an isolated or one-off document. Consequently no-one reading Dittenberger, Tod or now Heisserer would learn that it is one of a series of public inscriptions with a consistent theme belonging to an ‘archive’ of connected texts. The inscription is not discussed as one of a group of documents, its monumental setting is largely ignored and the rich corpus of Prienian inscriptions is not exploited fully as a control and source for the historical background of the AE. It is the purpose of this article to try to show that the AE cannot be properly studied in this archaeological limbo. ‘The associations’ of the AE are vital. They provide a new perspective from which to study the text.

It is now rather over a century since the marble statue of a youth in Naples was recognised as a copy of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, and the first attempt made to extract from it the mathematical principles of the Polykleitan canon. Periodic warnings uttered on the subject by such scholars as Gardner and Furtwängler failed to deter further speculation, which culminated in Anti's monumental publication of 1921. Understandably enough, this seems effectively to have checked research in the field, with only one or two exceptions, for a number of years. In the past decade or so, however, the pendulum, apparently never stable for long, has swung back again: a spate of books and articles on Polykleitos and his school has appeared, including no fewer than four major attempts to recover the principles of the canon from the surviving copies of his works. Again, murmurings to the contrary have passed unheeded, the gulf between believers and unbelievers now, it seems, having become virtually unbridgeable. With this in mind, and considering that Polykleitan studies have undergone a quiet revolution in the last year or two through the identification of fragments of casts of the Doryphoros and an Amazon among those recently discovered at Baiae, it seems an opportune moment to try to restate a few principles, basic but all too often ignored, and to indicate a number of directions that further research might take.

The excavations at al Mina, Sueidia, were undertaken as part of a programme of research covering a wide field in time and space. The object with which we set out was the tracing of connexions, if such existed, between the early civilisations of the Aegean, in particular that of Minoan Crete, and the more ancient cultural centres of hither Asia. Oriental influences working upon the art of Knossos have sometimes been suspected, but little evidence has been adduced to prove them; in some of the later periods of history, as for example in the ‘Orientalising’ phase of Rhodian pottery or in the Corinthian fabrics, the influence has always been obvious but the point of contact has remained obscure; intercourse may have been indirect, through the principalities of Asia Minor and the Ionian coastal towns, as has generally been assumed, or there may have been a more direct channel perpetuating perhaps an older tradition. I was myself strongly prejudiced in favour of direct contact, but only excavation could prove or disprove the theory; and the first step was to select a site which could give definite evidence.

Philostratus relates that Apollonius of Tyana, a sophist of the early Empire, was once at Peiraeus trying to find a passage on a ship sailing for Ionia. The skipper refused to take him, saying that she was a cargo-ship and did not carry passengers. Apollonius then asked of what the cargo consisted, and was told it consisted of statues of the gods, in gold and stone, or gold and ivory. Then there was some bantering, in which Apollonius chaffed the skipper for refusing to take him on board. ‘Are you so ignorant,’ he asked ‘as to drive away like this from your ship philosophers, men for whom the gods have a special fondness, and above all at a time when you are making a business out of the gods? This was not the way they made statues in olden times. They did not canvass the cities selling them the gods. They used to carry nothing but their own hands, their masons' and ivory-workers' tools; provided the raw material and fashioned the works of art in the temples themselves.’

From this, then, it appears that in olden times the craftsmen travelled freely about, carrying with them nothing but the secrets of their craft, a few tools and their materials. Apollonius does not say to what period he refers; but what he describes exactly fits the facts in the early history of the ivory craft from the Mycenaean period to the seventh or sixth century B.C., as far as we can make out the facts. In the Mycenaean period, the sites where ivories have been discovered are numerous.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evidence for early Greek enterprise in the Adriatic, and to ascertain, within such limits as the scanty material imposes, its nature and extent. The Greek cities of Illyria and the eastern coast of Italy were always unimportant, though not, perhaps, quite so unimportant as has often been supposed. But it may be worth while to try to discover why no literary tradition has survived and why these cities remained without influence on, though not uninfluenced by, he main current of Greek history.

I. The sources and the credibility of Greek enterprise in the Adriatic.

Alcman is the only seventh-century author whose fragments betray an interest, albeit an incidental interest, in the Adriatic. He wrote for a Spartan audience, and would write what they could understand, and his poetry was sung at festivals in which many must have joined. Spartans of the late seventh century had heard something of the tribe in the northern corner of the Adriatic and of the Illyrians on the eastern shore or farther inland. In the sixth century Greek knowledge of Adriatic geography, human and physical, began to take shape. Not only the allusions in the poems of Mimnermus of Colophon and Ibycus of Rhegion, which shew that Greek legends were thus early being attached to the coasts of the Adriatic, but the systematic works of Scylax of Caryanda and Hecataeus of Miletus are as old as the sixth century.

I must begin with an explanation of my reasons for writing this paper. I have for some years been interested in modern attempts to reconstruct ancient campaigns and battles—especially those between Greece and Persia—in fact, most of the arguments I am using tonight were first written down in a rather different form in 1913. But I should not have thought it worth while to read them to this Society had not Admiral Custance's book, his lectures, his address to this Society and the discussion which followed it made me feel that this subject is still one of fairly general interest, that we are still far from arriving at certainty with regard to the history of ancient fights, and that it may be worth while to raise some general questions such as, ‘How far it really is possible to reconstruct ancient battles with any finality’ and ‘how far the methods of attempting to do so usually followed by modern writers really are the soundest methods to employ’.