Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described.

No sooner had Pompey and the Senate fled in terror from Rome before Caesar's approach than the fears of those who remained in the city were heightened by new portents. The Etruscan soothsayer, Arruns, who was called in by the frightened townspeople to discover the will of the gods, proceeded to give such instructions as might be expected from one of his profession, and then, on sacrificing a bull, found that the omens were unfavourable. As if this were not enough, at v. 639 the famous Neopythagorean scholar and friend of Cicero, P. Nigidius Figulus, appeared in order to consult the skies, for, as Lucan observes, he was in advance of even the Egyptians in his knowledge of astrology. He began by remarking that, if this science meant anything at all, considerable trouble was in store for the Romans; and then went on in vv. 651–65 to reveal what he saw when he looked at the heavens, expressing his meaning in words which, apart from a couple of technical expressions, may be immediately translated with some incidental interpretations as follows:

‘If the cold baneful planet Saturn were kindling his black fires summo caelo’ (the inference, of course, is that he was not doing so), ‘a flood like that of Deucalion would have been pouring from Aquarius’ (or, because Aquarius is sometimes identified with Deucalion, the meaning may be ‘Aquarius would have been pouring out such a flood as could be expected from him’) ‘and the entire land would have been hidden in the spreading expanse of water.

The principle that a moving body must continue to move unless something stops it was not known to Aristotle nor even unconsciously assumed by him. The effect of this ignorance upon his philosophy was discussed in C.Q. 1939, p. 129 f. It forbade him to conceive of a mechanist theory in the nineteenth-century sense. It enabled him to hold, what must seem self-contradictory to us, that all events have definable causes without there being a universal nexus of causes and effects (future events, therefore, he thought of as not yet determined in the nature of things). And it compelled him to believe that nature could not be orderly unless guided by a purposive force. Therefore he attacked those scientists who had thought that the world could be explained in terms of the compulsions and interactions of natural stuffs—a principle which they vaguely called Necessity, Ananke. In attacking their doctrine A. cannot have thought he was attacking the mechanistic determinism which modern critics have detected in their words: for he could not even conceive of such an idea. There is an a fortiori case for arguing that his predecessors cannot have conceived of it either. But it is always possible that A. misunderstood them. And there is still Epicurus to consider.

Whether any apology is possible for the form of this paper is doubtful; but perhaps a few words are allowable. The miscellaneous notes, of which it consists, are fairly well described by the title: at all events, the proposals contained in them—with, I fear, many others—have been pencilled at one time or another in one margin or another. Their age varies widely: two or three must go back to days when my only complete Euripides was Kirchhoff's editio minor and my only Sophocles a copy of Tournier; the most date from middle age or ‘quidquid est illud inter iuvenem et senem medium in utriusque confinio positum’; but, whenever they were made, they were not made by a student of the Greek dramatists commanding the equipment that such a student ought to have. The equipment, in any case, was out of my reach; but, though I have read the plays often, I have read them only because the ancients have a way of enabling one to forget the moderns—as I was informed in my youth by an excellent scholar who has now forgotten both. I hope, therefore, that anyone who may happen to read the paper will overlook some errors and ignorances of the amateur; and, above all, if I may borrow a sentence from Markland's preface to his emendations on Lysias, ‘si quando dictatoria ista, Lege, vel Scribe, occurrent, scito me nihil aliud velle quam Forte legendum vel scribendum’.

The informal character of political parties at Athens and the consequent absence of clearly defined party programmes often obscures the principles and aims of Athenian politicians. This obscurity is naturally greatest in the case of ‘moderates’, whose activities consisted largely of opposition to extremist elements of the Left or Right. Hence modern attempts to reconstruct their policies and assess their merits are liable to reach widely differing conclusions. A figure about whom there have been fluctuations of opinion, as well as some misconceptions, is Nicias. A passage in Aristotle used to be accepted as evidence that he was an oligarch, and he was believed by many to have been a pacifist and a friend of Sparta. In an article which has had a deep influence upon subsequent accounts Allen B. West showed that he could be considered neither an oligarch nor a philo-Laconian pacifist. On one point, however, West echoes a commonly accepted view, though he expresses it in very moderate terms: he believes that Thucydides treats Nicias too sympathetically and is inclined to be blind to his faults. This view has been reaffirmed with much greater emphasis by other scholars who have strenuously challenged the impartiality of Thucydides in this respect. Such charges appear to me to have little foundation, and I shall attempt to substantiate my opinion by examining Thucydides’ account of Nicias. First, however, it is pertinent to ask whether the historian can have had any cogent reason for partisanship, and also to seek the source from which the commonly accepted view may have originated.

The regular increase in the proportion of resolved feet in the iambic trimeters of Euripides' later plays was first commented upon in 1807 by J. Gottfried Hermann, who therefrom deduced the principle that the date of any play of Euripides could be directly determined from the frequency of its resolutions. This criterion he restated in several of his works in the following years, and when Elmsley objected that it was of uncertain value on account of the small number of plays of certain date by which it might be verified, he replied with a strong defence of his case: he did not, however, develop his principle in detail or give figures in its support. The first scholar to publish the totals of trisyllabic feet in each play was Zirndorfer: relying largely on these, he produced a chronology of Euripides' dramatic composition in several respects superior to any predecessor's. His conclusions were questioned by C. F. W. Müller, who, while accepting Hermann's thesis as being in general correct, doubted its reliability for determining the exact period of a tragedy's composition. Consequently, although he gave the totals of trisyllabic feet en passant, Müller made no attempt to suggest dates. At almost the same time as Müller's treatise appeared, J. Rumpel published an article giving a full and detailed list of references to all trisyllabic feet in Euripides: from this evidence he divided the dramas into four age-groups, but did not go so far as to assign specific dates.

The root *pent-1 has achieved wide distribution in the IE. languages. In the course of its long history considerable modification of meaning has affected it, both as a primary verb and as it appears in derivative nouns, and here I refer particularly to Go. finpan ‘find’ (with the other verbs of like meaning) and to Gk. πάτη ‘deceit’. With little ingenuity—against mere ingenuity, of course, the etymologist is bound to be on his guard—it is possible to trace the train of thought that connects the various forms. But though the explanations here offered may well seem obvious, they have not, so far as I am aware, been previously published. The familiar dictionaries of Boisacq, Walde-Hofmann, and Walde-Pokorny do provide attempts at explanation, but these have little power of convincing.