One of the most striking features of the Iliad is that the gods are constantly present as an audience. Not only are they shown intervening and responding to human action, but repeatedly they are explicitly said to be watching. It will here be argued that this is much more than a ‘divine apparatus’, that it stands in a peculiar and identifiable relation to real religion, and that it is of the greatest importance both for the Iliad and for later Greek poetry.

The purpose of this article is to examine a neglected formulaic element in Homer, which we may call the doublet, and to establish its nature and function by comparison with—mainly—Irish narrative literature. By doublet is meant a combination of two terms which are to all intents synonymous. Without attempting to give a new definition of formula it may be useful to say that both the doublet and the noun-epithet formula—and perhaps only these two—are formulae of the style of heroic narrative.

In the history of Archaic Greece no event stands out so clearly as the First Sacred War. The War took place in the years round 590 B.C., and ended with the capture and destruction of the great city of Crisa at the hands of a coalition of powers which included Sicyon, Athens, and Thessaly. Our sources provide a wealth of detail–the causes of the War, the names of half-a-dozen commanders and champions, the stages of the fighting, the victory celebrations and dedications which ensued, certain Delphic oracles and Amphictyonic decrees.

The central question of Aeschylus' Supplices has usually been taken to be the reason for the flight of the Danaids. The most exhaustive guide to the many theories, of varying plausibility, which have been developed to account for this flight is provided by A. F. Garvie's book on the Supplices. For present purposes, therefore, it is unnecessary to examine any but the two most acceptable theories in detail. Nevertheless, a brief summary, prior to this examination, of two other, initially attractive, views might be helpful to students of this problem, the first simply because it is so attractive to so many eminent scholars, the second because, while it fails to provide an acceptable solution, it suggests a useful approach to the problem.

Bradeen and McGregor with exemplary skill and patience re-examined the almost desperately worn front face of ATL ii List 26. They were able to prove that the lines of its prescript were precisely forty-seven letters long. This excludes the possibility of dating this list 430/29 or 428/7 B.C., since only six spaces are available for the first numeral. They rightly maintained that the ATL Lists 25 and 26 must be kept together, but unlike them I would challenge the ATL numbering and order. I still think that this should be reversed.

A. R. W. Harrison in The Law of Athens, i (O.U.P., 1968), 63–5, argued that the exclusion of bastards from the phratries and the severe restriction of their right of inheritance does not entail their exclusion from Athenian citizenship; and that the form of Pericles' citizenship law, not stating that were to be , and Solon's law restricting the inheritance rights of , both point to the conclusion that bastards were not ipso facto debarred from citizenship. D. M. MacDowell in CQ N.S. 26 (1976), 88–91, rightly finds Harrison's positive arguments inconclusive, but suggests that three texts provide more definite support for this conclusion.

In REG 73 (1960) and 75 (1962) I discussed various points connected with the Peace of Philocrates, a number of which have been assailed by M. M. Markle in CQ N.S. 24 (1974) in an article entitled ‘The Strategy of Philip in 346 B.C.’. Time passes, and, although de Ste. Croix in his Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972), p.105, felt able to declare that ‘a book shortly to be published by M. M. Markle makes a valuable and original contribution to our understanding of the Peace of Philocrates’, and Markle himself confirms that a book is indeed forthcoming, some comment on his preliminary comments may be permitted.

In this paper I hope to show that a particular modern approach to Aristotle's philosophy of mind is untenable and, out of that negative discussion, develop some tentative suggestions concerning the interpretation of two famous and puzzling Aristotelian maxims. These maxims are, first, that the soul is the form of the body and, second, that perception is the reception of form without matter.

The fashionable interpretation of Aristotle which I wish to criticize is the attempt to assimilate him to certain modern philosophies of mind by making him into a functionalist. I shall therefore begin by explaining this modern term of art

As the editor of the new Budé edition of Diodorus Siculus 19 has said, R is ‘the more often correct’ of the two main manuscripts and the other, F, has a number of acceptable variants; and she reckons the division between R and F to have been ‘fairly ancient’. All other manuscripts are merely copies, more or less faithful, of R and F. For the passage which I wish to consider I quote the text as given in R:

Arrian was better qualified to understand the nature and significance of ‘the pursuit’ in Macedonian warfare than any modern scholar. He had himself fought and commanded in a very similar kind of warfare, and he was keenly interested in the study of military tactics. He was also better informed about the pursuits which Alexander had conducted, because he was able to use the accounts of Alexander's contemporaries, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Anyone today who wishes to question the veracity of Arrian's reports of these pursuits cannot do so of his own experience. He should therefore turn to comparable pursuits of recent times which have been reported accurately beyond any shadow of doubt.

We know of the Atinian plebiscite only from a tantalizing reference of Gellius, apparently citing Ateius Capito: ‘nam et tribunis, inquit plebis senatus habendi ius erat, quamquam senatores non essent ante Atinium plebiscitum.’ Willems was able to note two interpretations, one of which held that the plebiscite required that all tribunes be senators already, the other that it allowed tribunes the enjoyment of senatorial rights. The first was rightly rejected; since all we know disallows the notion that an aedileship would precede the tribunate, senatorial status could only come after the quaestorship and while there were only eight or less quaestors, clearly ten tribunes could hardly all be ex-quaestors. Consequently Willems adopted the second alternative: acquisition of the tribunate entailed the ius sententiae dicendae in the senate.

The degrees of formality into which speech can be graded are in no sphere more obvious than in expressions of address and third-person reference. Methods of naming vary according to many factors: the formality of the circumstances in which naming takes place, the nature of the subject under discussion, and the ages, sex, and relative status of the speaker and addressee. Conventions of naming sometimes reflect the rigidity or otherwise of social divisions. In some societies or circles address between superior and subordinate is non-reciprocal: the speaker with the greater prestige will adopt one form of address, the subordinate another. In other societies when unequals address each other both may use the same formal method of address: the difference of prestige is not explicitly acknowledged.

In 50 B.C. Cicero writes to Atticus as follows (Att. 7.2.1): ‘Brundisium uenimus VII Kalend. Decembr. usi tua felicitate nauigandi; ita belle nobis flauit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites. hunc si cui boles pro tuo uendito.’ The antonomasia, the euphonic sibilance, and the mannered rhythm (the five-word line with fourth foot homodyne; the spondaic fifth foot) are all prominent in Cicero's hexameter. The line is a humorously concocted example of affected and Grecizing narrative. But it is also a line which, Atticus is to suppose, would value; presumably therefore it is meant to hit off characteristics of their style. Cicero must in fact be parodying what he regards as a typical ‘neoteric’ line, and the significance of this simple fact has perhaps been underestimated.

The problems connected with the Cornificii of the late Republic are various, and all concerned with identification. I have no major discoveries to present, but various minor rectifications and suggestions to make, which should give the younger Q. Cornificius at least more substance. Where he is concerned, one basic identification has been, rightly, generally accepted: that made by Jerome between the poet of the name and the Cornificius who fell in Africa in the wars of the Triumvirate, abandoned by the soldiers whom he had castigated as ‘hares in helmets’. I do not wish to discuss here in any detail the military career of Cornificius; son of the man, like him Quintus, who stood in vain for the consulship of 63, he fought with success for Caesar as quaestor pro praetore in Illyricum in 48; he was rewarded, probably in 47 when Caesar doled out many priesthoods, with the augurate, and went out to govern Cilicia, only to find himself called on to help in suppressing Caecilius Bassus' revolt in Syria.

‘Saving the appearances’, , is a slogan that, in its time, stood or was made to stand for many different methodological positions in many different branches of ancient natural science. It is not my aim, in this paper, to attempt to tackle the subject as a whole. I shall concentrate on just one inquiry, astronomy. Nor, with astronomy, can I do justice to all the complexities of what was certainly one of the central methodological issues, if not the central issue, in the history of ancient theoretical astronomy. I have a quite limited aim, to examine the foundations, and test the applicability, of a widespread and influential line of interpretation of ancient Greek astronomy according to which it was essentially, or at least predominantly, what we may call ‘instrumentalist’ in character—that is, broadly speaking, that Greek astronomical theories were devices or fictions put forward purely for the sake of calculations with no claims to correspond with physical reality.

Recent months have brought forth a new edition of Nemesianus and a 294-page study of the textual tradition that he shares with Calpurnius. The edition, prepared by P. Volpilhac for Budé (Paris, 1975), offers nothing new on the tradition beyond reports of a few manuscripts known to previous editors; but Luigi Castagna's book I bucolici latini minori: una ricerca di critica testuale (Florence, 1976) makes an earnest attempt at solving once and for all the problems that survived the last contribution of any weight, Giarratano's edition (Naples, 1910). Though most of what Castagna says is true, however, his readers may be cushioned against the sharper points by an undue amount of padding, which also fails to hide gaps. Before he proceeds to his own edition of Nemesianus, therefore, a few things can usefully be said.

The awkwardness of the word in 997 has called forth various transpositions and excisions, but none so far suggested seems to put the passage right. Thus Fraenkel excised 991—6 and 1005 f. Professor H. Lloyd-Jones very rightly defends the passage against this, advocating the placing of 991—6 between 1005 and 1006. But although the verses do indeed fit here, is still slightly odd, since a few lines come between Orestes' first talking of the robe (980 ff.) and his next mention of it (997), and in these lines both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are mentioned.

For E. Badian the story of Pompeius Strabo's desire for a second consulship in 88, though implausible, was too well documented to require citation of sources. In fact it is not well documented and seems to depend solely on one disputed passage: Veil. Pat. 2.21.2. Others, far less cautious than Badian, have not scrupled, however, to accept it as uncontested fact and on it to build unlikely hypotheses, despite the long scholarly controversy as to whether it refers to 88 or 86. It is my belief that it can be shown that the passage almost unquestionably refers to the ambitions Pompeius Strabo entertained in 87 with regard to the consulship of 86.

Altum gurgitem Tigris premens: what is Tigris doing? Gronovius has no remark to the point. The context however points the way to interpretation. For in the list of four rivers, two others are given some word or phrase to characterize them: Hydaspes is gemmifer and Baetis is said to give his name to nearby lands. Thus altum gurgitem premens should refer to some characteristic act or condition of Tigris, not to a unique or casual occurrence. H. M. Kingery (1908, reprinted 1966) cannot be right in saying that ‘the Tigris, noted for its swift current, is pictured here as checking its deep torrent, so as to water the plants that grow in or near its bed’;