IF we are to believe all that Polybios tells us, then the world of Hellenistic Crete was a wretched place:

The Cretans are irresistible, both by land and by sea, when it comes to ambushes and piracy and the tricks of war, night attacks and all engagements undertaken with fraud; but when it comes to the face-to-face assault of phalanxes fighting on equal terms, they are base and craven-hearted….Money is honoured among them to such an extreme degree that the acquisition of it is thought to be not only necessary, but also most honourable. Generally speaking, the practice of disgraceful greed and acquisitiveness is so much the fashion there, that among the Cretans alone of all humankind no profit is considered shameful….Because of their congenital greed, they are engaged in constant upheavals, private and public, and murders and civil wars….Indeed, one would not find private customs more treacherous nor public enterprises more unjust (except in a few cases) than those of the Cretans….[In the year 181 BC] great troubles began in Crete, if indeed one can speak of a ‘beginning’ of troubles in Crete. For because of the unceasing nature of their civil wars and the excessive savagery of their treatment of one another, ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ are the same thing in Crete, and what seems to be a paradoxical saying of some individuals is there a consistently observable fact.

At the start of the section entitled ‘structure’ in his commentary on Callimachus' Hymn to Artemis, Fritz Bornmann notes that the third Hymn has enjoyed less success among critics than any other. ‘They lament’, he says, ‘the lack of unity'. And indeed, beginning with Wilamowitz, this has been not only the dominant, but the only view of the hymn. The latter part of the poem, said Wilamowitz, ‘macht trotz allen Künsten den Eindruck eines gelehrten Nachtrages' und es ist das auch’, he adds. Some forty years later K.J. McKay put it this way: ‘If there is a stronger unifying principle in this straggling composition than the idea of weaving together a number of disparate strands into a ‘historic day’ in the life of Artemis (with vv. 183–268 as a possibly unfortunate addition), it still eludes us'. And recently, Michael Hasiam has remarked on the poem's ‘disjointed tail section’. The hymn, to his mind, ‘progressively disintegrates, as the clear structural framework with which it started fades totally from view’. Even Herter, in his famous and influential essay on the hymn, ‘Kallimachos und Homer‘, echoes this opinion of the final third of the poem. The commentator Bornmann concludes: ‘this estimation is essentially correct’.

From the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE the Greeks settled an astounding number of new cities on foreign lands from the Black Sea to the coast of Spain, and these new civic foundations generated narratives designed to record and celebrate a city's origin. In general, the Greeks loved to speculate about beginnings; the births of heroes, the origins of cults, and the founding of cities all formed part of their aetiological repertoire. While tales of city foundations appear prominently in archaic literature, I will argue that foundation (or ktisis) poetry does not, as is commonly assumed, function as an autonomous literary genre in the archaic period. Genre is determined by type of occasion, not by content, at this time, and there is no evidence for any one specific occasion for which ktisis poetry was intentionally composed and performed. Instead, the foundation narrative always functions as part of a larger project; we find it embedded in many different poetic genres. For these reasons, the ktisis is better understood as a literary topos or theme which adds geographical detail and aetiological focus to a variety of poetic contexts and thus is performed on more than one occasion.

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.

Despite increasingly sophisticated theoretical debate, scholars concerned with ancient historiography effectively still divide into two camps: historians, who want to use the texts as sources and assess them by criteria of accuracy, reliability, completeness of record and presence or absence of prejudice according to their presumed relationship to the facts which they purport to represent; and literary scholars, who want to interpret the texts as texts, with their own internal logic.

This paper argues for a new interpretation of the rider to the Spartan rhetra. The rider's obscure terms should not be pressed for specific institutional correlates, for its language draws upon the imagery of the exposure of deformed children. The primitive nature of the thought behind the rider suggests that it may actually be an older document than the main text of the rhetra, and such a hypothesis helps to resolve some difficulties concerning the rhetra itself and early Spartan history.

This paper, concerning one element in the ancient biographical tradition of Philip II of Macedon, demonstrates the manner in which facts—that the Macedonian monarch was gravely wounded in the right eye, in the collar bone, and in the leg—become the basis of fictitious fabrications entered into the biographical tradition and accepted as elements of Philip's ‘life’. A diachronic analysis of the complete literary testimonia which convey information concerning these traumata attempts to determine when and how the biographical facts were altered and embellished over the centuries following Philip's death. Since the stunning discovery by Andronicos at Vergina in 1977 of the tomb designated Royal Tomb II, identified by the excavator as the tomb of Philip II, considerable interest has been focused on the wounds of Philip II in linking items recovered from the tomb and the physical remains of the male decedent with the great king of Macedon. A diachronic review of the literary traditions regarding Philip's injuries, useful to those arguing the identification of the occupant of Royal Tomb II, reveals a great deal about ancient biographical practices. Particularly in the case of the blinding wound to Philip's right eye, it is evident that the facts are very soon obscured by an overlay of fictitious embellishments, frequently amusing, which were created to heighten interest in an occurrence of lasting impact on Philip and became stock items in his βίος.

Though published about 409 BC, IG i3 105 has long been thought to contain regulations originally enacted at an earlier date. In 1873 Kirchhoff suggested a date of 411/10 or 410/9 for the inscription itself, but noted that there were priscae dictionis vestigia. Hiller von Gaertringen went further in 1924 when he concluded that priscus dictionis color saeculi initium decet. Although modern scholars disagree about the exact date of the original provisions, some of which include the archaic expression ἄνευ τοῦ δήμου τοῦ Άθηναίων πληθύοντος there is general agreement that these older laws were passed between 501/0 and 462/1 BC. In this paper I shall argue that a Solonian date for the original enactment of the δῆμος πληθύων provisions makes the most historical sense.

Although the incidence of suicide in classical antiquity has been studied for over a century, a proper methodological basis for such a study has been established only recently. The scholars who have been most concerned with this issue are Hirzel, Katsouris, Aigner, Walcot, Seidensticker, and, recently, van Hooff, and they have approached the topic in various ways. Although their interpretations have contributed to our knowledge of suicide in ancient Greece, they have rarely done more than analyse and classify examples of suicide as these occur in classical literature: we have not used our knowledge of the topic to re-examine the literature. The task of investigating the ways in which poets made use of contemporary notions about—and attitudes towards—suicide for their own dramatic purposes still needs to be carried out.

At the start of the play Prometheus is brought on stage by two agents of Zeus, Kratos and Bia. He is to be fastened up against the side of a rock and exposed to the elements. Hephaestus, who enters with the others, is to provide the tackle and the skills to do the job. Hephaestus shows extreme reluctance to perform his duties, both in his initial utterances (17-21, 39-54) and during the actual process of fastening, particularly when dealing with the chest (66) and legs (78); Kratos, however, browbeats him brutally, at which Hephaestus acknowledges that he has no choice and obeys.

Describing the approach toward Sardis in the spring of 1699, the British antiquary Edmund Chishull wrote: ‘We continue our journey through a spatious and fertile plain, curiously beset on each side the road with [a] variety of round hillocks, which from their number, figure, and situation, in so level a campaign, appear plainly to be artificial’. The tumuli or burial mounds so described by Chishull still dominate the Hermus river plain opposite Sardis. Their modern name is Bin Tepe, or ‘Thousand Mounds’.

The obverse scene of the krater Oxford 526 by the Komaris Painter (Plate VI c) was the subject of J.D. Beazley's first contribution to this journal, an exemplary account from which the relevant passage deserves to be quoted:

The space on A is divided by a pillar. To the left of the pillar is the painter's room. A young man dressed in an exomis and seated on a stool is painting the background of a large bell-krater of the same shape as our vase. His left arm is inside the krater, the rim resting on his thigh, and he is applying a large brush to the lower part. At his side is a stand, supporting the skyphos-shaped vase which contains the black paint. In front of the painter a fellow-workman moves to the right carrying a second krater by both handles. He has lifted it from the ground beside the painter and is carrying it out to put it down beside a third krater which stands on the ground at the extreme right of the picture. Presently the batch will go to the furnace. Beyond the pillar is another workman who moves to the right in the same attitude as the last. In his raised right hand he holds a skyphos by the foot. Perhaps he is taking it to join a batch of vases of the same shape, but more probably he has been sent by the busy painter to fetch more paint … A pleasant rhythm is thus imparted to the scene; the first figure is occupied with both vase and paint; the second with vase; and the third with paint.

An Attic black-figure neck amphora in the British Museum (Plate VI d) depicts a winged warrior rushing to the right to overtake a ship that is sailing in the same direction. To the left a bird perches on a craggy rock. The winged warrior in this enigmatic scene should, I believe, be identified as the ghost of Palamedes, whose urgency in outracing the ship is dictated by his thirst for revenge.

The name of Palamedes never appears in the Homeric epics. Most people, like Strabo, assume that this is because the story of Palamedes (and of his father Nauplios) was a creation of the poets of the later epic cycle and so was invented only after the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey had been completed. Philostratos, however, suggested that Homer did know about Palamedes, but suppressed any mention of him because he wished to glorify Odysseus. For the story of Palamedes shed such discreditable light on Odysseus' character that the stain it left on the wily hero's reputation could never be effaced.