Tell me, Muse, of that resourceful Man who travelled far,

After he had sacked the sacred walls of Troy in war,

And looked on many towns of men, and learnt their mind, while he

In his own heart suffered many sorrows on the sea,

To save himself from death and doom and bring his comrades safely home—

Eager though he was, he could not save them; they were fools and ate

The cattle of our Lord the Sun-God; their own folly proved their fate—

Something of that story, goddess, child of Zeus, to us relate.

That, so far as the Muse is concerned, is a complete epic paragraph, the form marked by the chime, ‘Tell, Muse … goddess, child of Zeus, relate!’ The Man, his character and his adventures, his comrades and their folly, are to be the Muse's theme. And yet the pattern still awaits completion, since the Man is not yet named. The second paragraph fulfils an expectation. We are in suspense until we hear ‘godlike Odysseus’ at the end.

There can be little doubt that, as Eduard Schwartz points out, the problem of the political sympathies of Thucydides can only be properly approached if it is remembered that his history in its present form was revised and possibly rewritten after the end of the Peloponnesian War. He was living in an atmosphere of défaitisme. Many of his contemporaries tended to glorify Sparta and her institutions, and to regard Athenian imperialism as a disastrous mistake. As a man of the older generation Thucydides felt it his duty to counteract this tendency by drawing attention to the real idealism which had inspired the Machtpolitik of the Periclean age, and by pointing to the benefits which the rule of Athens had conferred on the Greek world. The Preface to Book I may be regarded as a veiled apologia for the Athenian Empire, which had secured for Greece the freedom of intercourse which the writer holds to be essential alike for economic prosperity and for cultural development. Similarly the contrasts which Thucydides draws between the Athenian and the Spartan character, and the glorification of Athens which is the main subject of the Funeral Oration are inspired by the hope that the disillusioned Greeks of the early fourth century might come to realise that the ideals of Pericles and other Athenian imperialists had been not sordid but noble, and that Greece as a whole had derived benefits from the rule of Athens.

Cod. Florence Bibl. Nazion. Centr. Conv. Soppr. J.VI.34—formerly in Niccolò Niccoli's and St. Mark's libraries—written in a beautiful French hand of c. A.D. 1150–1200—contains the second edition of Boethius's translation of Pr. An. Many scholia, written on the margins and between the lines by the same calligraphic hand which wrote the Aristotelian text or by a hand very similar to and contemporary with it, accompany the translation in this MS. They are mainly concentrated in about one-half of the work, viz. in book i.23–30 (4ob–46a) and book ii (52a–70b); quite a few accompany i. 1, 5–6, 30–45 (24a, 27b–28a, 46a–50a); almost none is to be found in i. 10–14, 17–22 (30b7–33b25, 37a25–40b10). Arrangement and writing suggest that the scribe intended to give the reader Aristotle's text together with what was available to him of an authoritative commentary.

The scholia range, in nature and extent, from short glosses on single words or phrases and short summaries of sections of Aristotle's work to detailed explanations and doctrinal developments of important or difficult passages. Here and there carefully drawn diagrams illustrate logical rules and geometrical examples. The following scholia are mainly chosen from book i; others, from both books, will be given farther on.

In Laws 3.680b–c the Athenian Stranger's positive evaluation of the Cyclopean ‘way of life’ (Od. 9.112–15) is deeply indebted to Antisthenes’ interpretatio Homerica of the Cyclopes as ‘just’ insofar they do not have the need of written law. Antisthenes’ equation of ‘need of law’ with ‘need of written law’ is then contextualized within the unresolved tension, in the legislative project of the Laws, between oral dissemination (‘proems’ to the laws) and the potentially coercive power of the written text. Finally, Megillus’ inept reply to the Homeric quotation by the Athenian Stranger allows us to gain a more nuanced view of the ‘readerly’ dynamics enacted by the internal audience of the Laws.

Mr. Mahaffy in his preface to The Empire of the Ptolemies states among other problems raised by Ptolemaic history the following: ‘How far does the observation, that we only know of one crown-prince with a wife (Soter II.) account for the divorce of that wife after his accession, and for the other apparent heartlessnesses in Ptolemaic history? Is the hereditary title recognised in the princesses, which no doubt led to their marriages with their reigning brothers, a relic of Pharaonic ideas, or a mere imitation of the successful experiment of Philadelphus?’ This article is an attempt to show that the former hypothesis is the true one, and that the marriages of the Ptolemies were dictated by their policy of conciliation, and were based on deeply rooted native prejudices.

Of the five Phrygian monuments now published from the drawings of Mr. A. C. Blunt, No. 4 on Pl. XXVIII, may be assigned to an early period of Phrygian history. It has been already published by Steuart, Anc. Monum.; but like all his drawings, this is very incorrect and gives an inaccurate idea of the original. The monument is at Yapuldak (see the map in last number of this Journal). There was at this place a town or fortification of some kind on the top of a hill, which rises about 200 feet above the plain. The western side of the hill is a precipice of rock, and on all other sides it is very steep. On the western side an underground staircase cut in the rock leads down to the plain: a similar one at Pishmish Kalessi has already been mentioned above, p. 6. Near this staircase there is a doorway leading into a small rock-chamber, from which another door in the opposite wall leads into a second chamber, larger than the first. At the back of the second chamber a door admits into a third chamber, and in the back of this third chamber there is a door or window which looks out over the precipice to the west. One can step out through this window and stand on a ledge about eighteen inches wide; and this is the only way to get a near view of the carved front which is now given according to Mr. Blunt's drawing and measurements. The architectural work round the door shows the love of ornament characteristic of both Phrygian and Mycenaean art. It does not consist of curved mouldings: the section shows only straight lines. There is a high pediment over the window, the centre of which is occupied by a peculiarly shaped obelisk. This pediment is very like one over the door of a tomb in the side of Pishmish Kalessi, engraved by Perrot, Voy. Archéol. p. 146; but is much more elaborate. On the two sides of the obelisk, arranged in the usual symmetrical fashion, are two animals, on the right side certainly a bull, on the left side probably a horse. The horse is frequently represented on the outside of Phrygian tombs, but I do not know any other case where the bull appears on them.

In AJA xcviii (1994) 609-16, F.B. Faklaris discussed the location of Aegeae, founded by the first Temenid king of the Macedonians and famous thereafter as the burial-place of the Macedonian kings (Pliny NH iv 33 ‘Aegeae in quo sepeliri mos reges’). He located it at Kopanos and not at Vergina, where I had put it in 1968. The geographical difference between the two sites is considerable. Kopanos is east of Mt. Bermion, and being some 19 km south of Edessa and 5 km east of Naoussa, it looks towards the plain of Pella. Vergina lies at the northern end of the Olympus massif, which consists of the Pierian mountains and Mt. Olympus; and it faces the Haliacmon and the western end of the plain. The choice between the two sites is to be determined by the interpretation of the literary evidence and by the ongoing flow of the archaeological discoveries.

Penelope's ‘stout hand’ (χειρί παχείηι) in Odyssey 21.6 has troubled readers with its implication that the 20 years Penelope has spent waiting, worrying and weaving have sapped her beauty. Attempts to redeem the verse have only been partially successful at best. By applying semiolinguistic models for jokes to both Odyssey 21.6 and Penelope's increase in stoutness at Odyssey 18.195, this paper pursues the possibility that both passages are humorous. Rather than deride Penelope, the humour celebrates her quintessentially human susceptibility to age and suffering, as well as the virtues she develops in parallel with her husband therefrom. The Odyssey regularly uses humour to similar effect by applying traditional epic formulaic structures to a broader range of subjects than they normally accommodate and thus redefining the heroic virtues that those structures encode so that they exalt mundane human experience.

Just after my paper on the Cretan Plays in the last number of this Journal had gone to press, a search for sources of the Erotokritos led me to the works of Luigi Groto, sometimes called Cieco di Hadria. The version of the Romeo and Juliet story which he embodied in his Hadriana (1578–1583) was not as close as I had hoped to the plot of Cornaro's Erotokritos, but there was sufficient evidence that the Hadriana was known to the Cretan poet. It was therefore with some excitement that I learned that Groto had also written a biblical play called Isach, published in 1586 just after his death. This play seems to be excessively rare, and neither of the specialists in Italian literature whom I have had the opportunity of consulting had ever seen it. It is therefore less surprising that it should never have been mentioned in connexion with the Cretan Thysia tou Avraam. It will no longer be necessary to drag in Feo Belcari or Theodore Beza. There is not the slightest doubt that the Thysia is directly modelled on the framework of Groto's Isach.

This fragmentary vase was discovered in 1895 in a tomb at Curium by the British Museum Expedition (Turner Bequest) and was first published in the Excavations in Cyprus. Since then references to it have been made by various scholars, chiefly because of its unusual decoration with female figures inside ladder-pattern frames; these frames have been commonly interpreted as windows', hence the name ‘window-crater’.

The same tomb in which the ‘window-crater’ had been discovered was re-excavated by the expedition of the University Museum, Philadelphia, in 1939, and thirty-five new fragments of the same vase were found. These have now been restored to the main body of the crater in the British Museum, and it has been suggested that in its more complete form it should be re-examined and published with better illustration.

A detailed description of its form and fabric is given in BMC Vases and the CVA It is probably the largest of its kind (height, 43·5 cm.; diameter, 43·2 cm.); the fabric represents Mycenaean ware at its best: buff pinkish clay, dark red lustrous paint. Each panel between the two handles is decorated with a chariot scene flanked with groups of female figures.

‘Critical work on the text of Plato, which in the second half of the nineteenth century had taken an all too easy but mistaken path, had to make a fresh start in the last years before the war (of 1914–18) and is still in its beginnings.’ Thus Pasquali in 1934; and as regards the text of the first seven tetralogies the subsequent twenty years have not produced any marked progress—certainly nothing comparable in precision and thoroughness to the work of Sir David Ross and other contemporary scholars on the text of Aristotle. This has been due in part, I suspect, to the prevalent impression that Burnet's text is, if not final, at any rate firmly based on trustworthy and sufficient foundations. And this impression has in turn been encouraged by the paucity of fresh collations: I think I am right in saying that to this day only two manuscripts of this part of Plato's work, B and T, have been accurately collated in their entirety. In this situation it seems worth while to publish the following notes, which are based on fresh collations made in preparation for an edition of the Gorgias. I am well aware of the danger of founding any general judgement of a manuscript upon a study of one part of it; but I hope that scholars interested in the text of other dialogues may be induced to check and revise my provisional conclusions.