In February of 401 B.C., Xenophon, the Athenian, set out in a contingent often thousand Greek mercenaries in the army of Cyrus, the Pretender to the throne of Persia. Cyrus, in fact, was leading the army against his brother Artaxerxes, the Great King of Persia, though the real object of the expedition was not revealed officially until the army reached Thapsacus on the Euphrates in July and crossed the river from Syria into Mesopotamia. Xenophon joined the expedition more or less as a diplomatic attaché, not a soldier. But he became an observer and critic, and, since he was a man of talents, he was driven by self-preservation and by disasters which befell them in the end, virtually to take command. His account of these events was not published or written till many years had elapsed: but it is clear that it must have been based on a regularly kept log or diary.

The geographical problems which Xenophon's report of their itinerary raises have occupied scholars and travellers for nearly two hundred years, the earliest attempt to identify the sites mentioned by him being that of d'Anville in 1779. For this long history of an unsettled problem, the reasons are that, firstly, we still know little from cuneiform sources about the ancient geography of Central Mesopotamia, and as yet no monograph exists which studies Babylonia in this period; secondly, that the record of Xenophon, though invaluable, is bedevilled occasionally by false reports or inadequate or misunderstood data, or possibly by errors in transmission of the text; and in our own time, progress has been held up by insufficient study of the ground, in particular of the ancient courses of the Euphrates and Tigris and the canals that fed them—and finally, by the inadequate use of aerial photography.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

This paper examines Plutarch's treatment of education in the Parallel Lives. Beginning with a close reading of Them. 2, it identifies two distinct ways in which Plutarch exploits the education of his subjects: in the first, a subject's attitude to education is used to illustrate a character presented as basically static (a ‘static/illustrative’ model); in the second, a subject's education is looked at in order to explain his adult character, and education is assumed to affect character (a ‘developmental’ model). These two models are often associated with two different forms of discourse: anecdotal for the static/illustrative model and analytical for the developmental. The developmental model, furthermore, is closer to Plutarch's thinking in theoretical discussions of character in the Moralia; the static/illustrative model to Plutarch's treatment of character in the Lives more generally, where anecdotal treatments predominate. The coexistence of these two models is probably to be seen as the result of a tension between Plutarch's philosophical thinking and his biographical practice: those few passages in the Lives which assume a developmental model occur in contexts where either Platonic texts or the activity of philosophers are being discussed.

Plato's Menexenus opens with a scene of typical Socratic interest in the young, as Socrates questions Menexenus about his activities and intentions. This scene, however, I would suggest, is not simply an illustration of Socrates' characteristic behaviour, forming a suitable introduction to this or any other dialogue. Its relation to the work as a whole is closer than this: it raises a question with which the Menexenus may best be understood as being essentially concerned.

In JHS cvii (1987), I argued that the Festival of the Great Dionysia needed to be seen in the context of fifth-century Athenian culture and that the plays which make up a major part of this festival could be seen as offering a profoundly questioning attitude towards what might be called fifth-century Athenian democratic polisi ideology. One play which seems to fit uneasily into that description of Athenian tragedy—as indeed it fits uneasily into many general arguments about Athenian theatre—is Aeschylus' Persae. In this brief paper I want to suggest some ways in which the social and political context I outlined in my earlier paper may help us to understand certain elements of the Persae which have worried critics.

When the Erinyes catch up with Orestes in Athens they find him clutching the archaic wooden statue of Athena and invoking her aid along with that of Apollo (Eum. 235 ff.). The Erinyes scorn his prayers and bid him hear their ‘binding song’: ὕμνον δ’ ἀκούσῃ τόνδε δέσμιον (306). Wecklein in his 1888 edition of the play remarked ‘erinnert an magische Künste’ and quoted Laws 933a, where Plato, discussing murder by poison, makes brief mention of the popular belief in sorcerers, incantations and binding spells (καταδέσεις). Subsequent commentators repeat Wecklein's brief note nearly verbatim and then elaborate it along two different lines, either claiming some vague Orphic source (Thomson 1938) or citing Wuensch's Defixionum Tabellae Atticae (Blass 1907; Groeneboom 1952). More recently, Lebeck argued that the ostensible title (‘binding song’) is incompatible with the actual content of the stasimon (Apollo's encroachment on the Erinyes’ power); she concluded that the title is irrelevant or at best only of secondary importance.’ Thus on the whole, this ὕμνος δέσμιος has been treated as a remnant of magical or chthonic lore too obscure to have any real bearing on our understanding of the immediate dramatic situation in Eumenides. I shall argue to the contrary that the song is closely related to a specific kind of curse tablet used to affect the outcome of law cases in Athens as early as the 5th century bc, and as such it is important to the dramatic context of a tragedy which depicts the mythical foundation of Athens’ first homicide court.

Conventional portrayals of Athenian imperialism, heavily influenced by Thucydides, tend to assume that the Athenians thought of, and described, their imperialistic actions in frank, even brutal, terms. This article seeks to challenge that assumption by exploring two sets of fifth-century Athenian epigraphical material: documents which contain the phrase ‘the cities which the Athenians rule’, and inscriptions imposing regulations on allied states which are erected at the ally's expense. In both cases, it is argued that if these apparently overtly aggressive documents are considered in an epigraphic rather than a Thucydidean context, they reveal the existence of a more subtle, nuanced and diplomatic approach to imperial politics.

The names given to plants in ancient and modern Greek are not only of interest in themselves but have some bearing upon a general point in the history of the meaning of words. Many of the names of plants in ancient authors can only be interpreted with a certain vagueness: of νάρκισσος we can only say that it is some sort of daffodil; κρίνον is pretty certain to be a lily of some kind; we can hardly go further. In these straits it is natural enough to enquire into the meaning of these words in Modern Greek, and here we certainly find no lack of information, but unless we scrutinise this modern evidence with some care we are apt, I think, to let it lead us too far, or even in some wrong direction. How this modern evidence ought, in my opinion, to be used is the subject of this present paper.

Tragedy was a product of the classical polis, but took its themes (with very few exceptions) from an imagined earlier age, the heroic age that is also the subject of the Homeric poems. The result, it has been argued, is a creative tension, notably between the spirit of heroic autonomy and the rule of law characteristic of the polis. The institutions of the polis make themselves felt, anachronistically, in the tragic representation of heroic myth.

The article is an enquiry into the identity of two groups who called themselves Messenians: the Helots and perioikoi who revolted against Sparta after the earthquake in the 460s; and the citizens of the independent polity founded by Epameinondas in 370/69 bc in the Spartan territory west of the Taygetos. Based on the history of the Messenians in Pausanias Book 4, some scholars have thought that those two groups were simply the descendants of the free inhabitants of the region, subdued by the Spartans in the Archaic period and reduced to the condition of Helots. According to these scholars, the Helotized Messenians preserved a sense of their identity and a religious tradition of their own, which re-emerged when they regained freedom. One objection to this thesis is that there is no clear archaeological evidence of regional cohesiveness in the area in the late Dark Ages, while the very concept of Messenia as a unified region extending from the river Neda to the Taygetos does not seem to exist prior to the Spartan conquest. Furthermore, evidence from sanctuaries dating to the Archaic and Early Classical periods shows that Messenia was to a significant extent populated by perioikoi whose material culture, cults and language were thoroughly indistinguishable from those documented in Lakonia. Even the site where Epameinondas later founded the central settlement of the new Messenian polity was apparently occupied since the late seventh century at the latest by a perioikic settlement. Some of these perioikoi participated with the Helots in the revolt after the earthquake, and the suggestion is advanced, based on research on processes of ethnogenesis, that they played a key role in the emergence of the Messenian identity of the rebels. For them, identifying themselves as Messenians was an implicit claim to the land west of the Taygetos; therefore the Spartans consistently refused to consider the rebels Messenians, just as they refused to consider Messenians – that is, descendants of the ‘old Messenians’ – the citizens of Epameinondas' polity. Interestingly, the Spartan and the Theban-Messenian views on the identity of these people agreed in denying that the ‘old Messenians’ had remained in Messenia as Helots. Messenian ethnicity is explained as the manifestation of the will of perioikoi and Helots living west of the Taygetos to be independent from Sparta. The fact that most Messenian cults attested from the fourth century onwards were typical Spartan cults does not encourage the assumption that there was any continuity in a Messenian tradition going back to the period before the Spartan westward expansion.

This article re-evaluates the significance attributed to Hecataeus' encounter with the Theban priests described by Herodotus (2.143) by setting it against the evidence of Late Period Egyptian representations of the past. In the first part a critique is offered of various approaches Classicists have taken to this episode and its impact on Greek historiography. Classicists have generally imagined this as an encounter in which the young, dynamic and creative Greeks construct an image of the static, ossified and incredibly old culture of the Egyptians, a move which reveals deeper assumptions in the scholarly discourse on Greeks and ‘other’ cultures in the Mediterranean world. But the civilization that Herodotus confronted in his long excursus on Egypt was not an abstract, eternal Egypt. Rather, it was the Egypt of his own day, at a specific historical moment – a culture with a particular understanding of its own long history. The second part presents evidence of lengthy Late Period priestly genealogies, and more general archaizing tendencies. Remarkable examples survive of the sort of visual genealogy which would have impressed upon the travelling Greek historians the long continuum of the Egyptian past. These include statues with genealogical inscriptions and relief sculptures representing generations of priests succeeding to their fathers' office. These priestly evocations of a present firmly anchored in the Egyptian past are part of a wider pattern of cultivating links with the historical past in the Late Period of Egyptian history. Thus, it is not simply the marvel of a massive expanse of time which Herodotus encountered in Egypt, but a mediated cultural awareness of that time. The third part of the essay argues that Herodotus used this long human past presented by the Egyptian priests in order to criticize genealogical and mythical representations of the past and develop the notion of an historical past. On the basis of this example, the article concludes by urging a reconsideration of the scholarly paradigm for imagining the encounter between Greeks and ‘others’ in ethnographic discourse in order to recognize the agency of the Egyptian priests, and other non-Greek ‘informants’.

Largely because the processes of transmission have been unkind, the religious hymns sung by the Greeks during worship of a god on a public or private occasion have received less than their due attention from modern scholars. Our sources frequently mention in passing that hymns were sung on the way to Eleusis, for example, or at the well Kallichoron on arrival at Eleusis, or by the deputations to Delos for the Delia, but they usually fail to record the texts or contents of these hymns. Until the fourth century BC temple authorities did not normally have the texts of cult songs inscribed; and the works themselves were by a diversity of authors, some well-known, some obscure, making the collection of their ‘hymns’ a difficult task for the Alexandrian compilers. Some such hymns were traditional—Olen's at Delos, for example — handed down orally from generation to generation; others were taught to a chorus for a specific occasion and then forgotten. Nor do the surviving corpora of ‘hymns’ — I refer to the Homeric Hymns, Callimachus' six hymns, and the Orphic Hymns—go very far to satisfy our curiosity as to the nature of this ubiquitous hieratic poetry. The Homeric Hymns would seem to have been preludes (προοίμια) to the recitation of epic poetry; they are in the same metre and style as epic, and the singer usually announces that he is about to commence another poem on finishing the hymn. Their content may give us authentic material about a god and his attendant myths, but the context of their performance seems distinct from worship proper. The Homeric Hymns provided the basic model for Callimachus' hymns although it is clear that he adapted the model to permit innovations such as the mimetic mode of hymns 2, 5 and 6, which present an eye-witness account of religious ritual. Some find Callimachus' hymns lacking in true religious feeling; few seriously maintain that they were intended, or could have been used, for performance in cult.

One of the most familiar traits of the part-horse, part-man creatures known as silens is their keen interest in women. In Athenian vase-painting, the female companions of the silens are characterized by a variety of attributes and items of dress, and exhibit mixed feelings toward the attentions of silens. The complexities of the imagery have resulted in disagreement in modern scholarship on several points, including the identity of these females, the significance of their attributes, and the explanation of a change in their receptivity to the advances of the silens. One of the reasons for the lack of consensus in the scholarship is the fact that the imagery raises not one question but many: questions concerning iconographical method, mythology, ritual, and poetry. In what follows I have attempted to separate some of these entangled issues. I hope to show that the companions of the silens are nymphs and not maenads, and that a major change in the iconography of silens and nymphs, occurring in late sixth-century red-figure Attic vase-painting, reflects in some way developments in the Athenian dramatic genre of satyr-play.

The mansion known as the West House or House of the Admiral at Akrotiri, Thera, was excavated by Spyridon Marinatos in the 1971 and 1972 seasons. The miniature fresco, one of the most important monuments of Aegean art yet found, decorated room 5, which was the north-west corner room on the upper, first floor of the building. This room, approximately 4×4 m internally, had wide windows of three and four frames respectively in the north and west walls, an exit eastwards into the central part of the house and a door in the south-east corner into room 4 and the adjacent bathroom, 4a (Fig. i). Although its function cannot now be demonstrated room 5 was probably a living room, with its wide windows and reasonable size. But a curious vessel, which may have been a ritual sprinkler (Thera VI 31—2 and pl. 70), was found in the south-west corner among the fresco fragments and carries a hint of other functions.

Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique, category-defying formation that was somehow both ‘state’ and ‘society’ simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion of the two. The current paper offers an alternative perspective on this complex but fundamental issue. It questions prevailing views on theoretical grounds, suggesting that the consensus ‘fusionist’ position rests ultimately upon a misunderstanding of what Thomas Hobbes would call the ‘personality’ of polis political structures. Focusing on the case of Classical Athens, it then proceeds to present a new account of the Greek ‘state’, an account that aims to be both theoretically satisfying and heuristically useful. Even if all those who performed state functions were simultaneously constituents of polis ‘society’, the state was nevertheless perceived to function as an autonomous agency, possessing a corporate personality that was quite distinct from the individual personalities of the living, breathing citizens who happened to instantiate it at any particular time.

Athens in the fourth century was undergoing a process of social and economic change of which a major component was the development of elements of market economy. The question to be addressed here is: what response does that historical process meet with in the work of Aristotle? I shall contend that Aristotle has a substantial body of thought, analytical in nature and intent, which is directed specifically to the analysis of that process. M. I. Finley has drawn quite the contrary conclusion, and in addition to developing my own account of Aristotle's thought 1 shall have to examine the shortcomings of Finley's. Finley takes the view that although Aristotle was aware of the process of change he simply ignored it, and that there is no trace of any analytical concern with it to be found in those sections of the Aristotelian corpus which it has been usual to regard as containing Aristotle's ‘economic’ thought, namely, NE v 5, and Pol i 8–10. Finley sees in Aristotle nothing more than moral condemnation of certain practices such as kapelike which he regarded as damaging to the koinonia of the polis.

It sometimes happens that what one finds in an author depends on one's possession or lack of the equipment necessary to recognise what is there and to identify it for what it is. Finley is looking at Aristotle in order to determine the presence or absence of what he terms ‘economic analysis’.

§1. A saying attributed to the Cynic Diogenes by Diogenes Laertius, VI. 63, ψηφισαμένων ᾿Αθηναίων ᾿Αλέξανδρον Διόνυσον, κἀμέ, ἔφη, Σάραπιν ποιήσατε though condemned as unhistorical by some scholars, has recently been quoted as evidence for the divine honours paid to Alexander during his life. It cannot, however, be genuine; Diogenes was not a contemporary of Alexander as world-conqueror, and Sarapis as a god who would be known in the Greek world at large is subsequent to king and Cynic alike. Apart from this we frequently find in modern authorities the statement that, when Alexander sent his demand in 324 to the cities of Greece to be recognised as a god, Athens on the proposal of Demades voted that he should be honoured as Dionysus. This is not the case.