Agamemnon's apology (Il. 19.95ff.), in particular that portion which relates the story of Zeus and Ate, contains a number of oddities and peculiarities. This was recognised in antiquity, as various remarks in the Homeric scholia testify. Further inconcinnities have been unearthed by more recent scholars, who by and large belonged to the school of Homeric analysts. Although the presuppositions of this school are now generally regarded as outmoded and inappropriate, we should not underestimate the services of the scholars who drew the relevant unique features to the world's attention. Ways of explaining the oddities may have changed, but the oddities themselves are still well worth considering.

The sea of love (a convenient heading under which to group the various marine and nautical metaphors, similes, parallels, allusions, and analogies applied to love and sex) was one of the more important amatory figures. It featured in both Greek and Latin from earliest until latest times, was employed in several genres of verse (dominating whole poems on occasion), appearing in prose as well, and reached an advanced stage of development in the hands of the Alexandrians and particularly the Augustans. The purpose of this article is to provide the first comprehensive and detailed study of the sea of love from the archaic period until late antiquity.

In fragment 38 Diels–Kranz, Empedocles turns to describe the creation of ‘everything that we now see’:

γαî τε κα πντος πςλυκμων ἠδ' ὐγρς ρ

ιτν ἠδ' αἰθρ σΦγγων περ κκλον ἂπαντα.

Here, as so often with Empedocles, the influence of Zeller and Diels has proved decisive in determining later interpretations of the text. They understood the words ιτν ἠδ' αἰθρ as meaning ‘and Titan aither’; ‘; the text has been mistranslated ever since. In fact the conjunction ἠδ is never postponed. This means that—as scholars earlier in the nineteenth century well understood—‘Titan” must be an item on its own, distinct from the aither:

earth and wavy sea and moist aer,

Titan and aither binding everything in its circular grip.

In his analysis of the social and economic conditions of intellectual activity in ancient Greece, Gentili argues that the value of poetry underwent a notable change in the late archaic period. Poetry came to be produced within a contractual relationship between patrons and poets, it became a commercial good available to the one who could pay for it and its value was expressed no longer by honouring the poet but by paying for his product. At the time of Solon and Theognis the producers of poetry had been aristocratic members of the polis giving political advice to their peers and gaining renown by the quality of their advice. Yet Simonides and Pindar wrote under different social conditions. Gentili writes:

Fully conscious by now of the dignity and importance of his role, the poet also becomes aware of its [i.e. poetry's] ‘commercial’ value. He puts his own sophia at the disposal of the highest bidder, thereby creating a basis for the tendency to regard wealth and poetic ‘wisdom’ as interchangeable moral equivalents.

The Menexenus is also known as Plato's Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The body of the work is a fictional funeral oration, composed as an example of what should be said at a public funeral for Athenians who have fallen in war. The oration is framed by an encounter between Socrates and a certain Menexenus, an eager young man who thinks he has reached the end of education and philosophy, but who is still rather young to take an active party in the city's affairs. Nevertheless, he is anxious to follow in the tradition of his family, which (Socrates tells us) has always provided someone to look after the Athenians (τινα μν πιμελητν). Menexenus' interest in public affairs has led him to attend a meeting of the Council at which a speaker was to be chosen to compose and deliver the funeral oration at the imminent public funeral. However, no final decision was reached at the meeting, and Menexenus remarks that by the time the choice is made, the speaker will have almost to improvise his speech. Socrates gently mocks Menexenus' respect for public orators, saying that speeches about a dead person follow a predictable pattern; a speaker exaggerates all a dead person's good points and minimizes all the bad, so that one who has died appears a paragon of virtue even if he was not really good for much. Socrates claims that listening to such public orations, when not only individuals but also the state is eulogized, always makes him feel that in living in Athens he is living in the Islands of the Blessed.

In a recent article, C. H. Kahn addresses an ‘old scholarly myth’, namely the idea that Book I of the Republic began life as an earlier, independent dialogue and was subsequently adapted to serve as a prelude to the much longer work that we know. The case for this hypothesis rests both on stylometric considerations and on the many ‘Socratic’ features that Book I, unlike the rest of the Republic, shares with Plato's earlier works. Having disposed of the positive arguments in favour of the ‘myth’, Kahn turns to the contrary—and in his view overwhelming—evidence that Book I was composed from the start as an integral part of the longer Republic. He catalogues 12 passages in Book I, accounting for roughly half its length, whose full significance will, he argues, only emerge if they are seen as instances of prolepsis, deliberate anticipations of what is to come in later books.

In the famous opening chapter of the Metaphysics Aristotle, in his analysis of σοϕία, introduces the important concept μπειρία, ‘experience’. In the course of the discussion he cites the sophist Polus, 981a 1–5:

κα δοκεῖ σχεδν πιστήμῃ κα τέχνῃ μοιον εἶναι μπειρία, ποβαίνει δ’ πιστήμη κα τέχνη δι τς μπειρίας τοῖς νθρώποις μν γρ μπειρία τέχνην ποίησεν, ς ϕησι Πλος, ρθς λέγων, δ’ πειρία τύχην.

Over sixty years ago, it was written of early Greek tyranny that it ‘had arisen only in towns where an industrial and commercial regime tended to prevail over rural economy, but where an iron hand was needed to mobilize the masses and to launch them in assault on the privileged classes… But tyranny nowhere endured. After it had performed the services which the popular classes expected of it, after it had powerfully contributed to material prosperity and to the development of democracy, it disappeared with an astonishing rapidity… The people regarded tyranny only as an expedient. They used it as a battering ram with which to demolish the citadel of the oligarchs, and when their end had been achieved they hastily abandoned the weapon which wounded their hands.’ Thus Gustav Glotz, whose view found favour with de Ste Croix. He too concluded with appeal to Aristotle, who in a famous passage declared that unlike monarchy, which arises to help ‘the great and good’ (οί πιεικεȋς) against the People, and the monarch who is appointed as one of ‘the great and good’, ‘the tyrant comes from the People and the multitude to confront the men of note(οί γνώριμοι) and prevent the People being unjustly treated by them. This is clear from what actually happened, for, generally speaking, the majority of the tyrants became tyrants from being demagogues so to speak, having got themselves trusted by their abusive attacks on the men of note.’ Against this view of Aristotle and all his latter-day satellites, this paper is directed.

In discussions of the complex and controversial problem of Spartan land-tenure,1 the mysterious ‘ρχαῖα μοῖρα’ (archaia moira) has assumed an importance out of all proportion to its prominence in the sources, for the actual phrase only occurs once in extant literature. It owes its importance to the fact that the reference to it has been used to support the theory that there were two categories of land in Sparta, a theory which in turn is held to explain how, when all Spartans supposedly owned equal estates, there could nevertheless be rich ones and poor ones, as authors such as Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle make clear. The answer, it is claimed, is that although all Spartans possessed an equal share of one category of land, they could own more or less of the other category.2

The Periegesis of Pausanias has finally entered the world of serious literature. Long after the way was first shown, the Magnesian has arrived and duly taken his place in the intellectual world of the second century: a pilgrim to the past. Yet he was no bookish, library-bound bore. Recent studies have transformed our opinion of him as a recorder of the sites and treasures of what was, even to him, antiquity, ‘His faithfulness in reporting what he saw has, time and time again, been proven at a large number of sites and could easily be demonstrated at a good many others.’ ‘The very fact that the second-century A.D. traveller Pausanias wrote at such length about the sites and monuments of Greece is itself indicative of his most important attitude towards antiquities. That is, he thought them of sufficient value to be worth recording and thought it worth travelling extensively in mainland Greece over a period of many years to see them for himself.’ And so inevitably, as respect for the author has grown, the desire to lay bare his soul has followed. Critics are unanimous in their view of a man sensitive to the resonance of the ancient and power of the past. On occasion a Herodotean fascination with the mutability of man's lot bubbles to the surface, indeed we may surmise Herodotus to have been an important influence on the Periegesis in several fundamental respects. Above all he was a man of deep learning and keen interest in the past and a faithful recorder of its remains. Archaeologists and art-historians concur.

My purpose in this note is to examine the evidence for the witness's oath of disclaimer in the Athenian lawcourts. This is an issue on which modern discussions tend to be brief for want of ancient evidence. However, although our ignorance on matters of detail relating to the exomosia remains, and is likely to remain, profound, I believe that we can, by a careful reading of the limited evidence which is available, draw a number of more or less confident conclusions about the form and content of the oath and the degree of restriction it imposed on witness and litigant. The lexicographers have the following to say on pressures applied to recalcitrant witnesses:

Polydeukes 8.37: τóν δ' ο βονλóμενον μαρτρεῖν κλἠτενον το μαρτνρεῖν πρρστιθντεσ ἔδɛι δ αῖτóν ἠ μαρτνρεῖν ζομóσασθαι ὡσ οῖκ εíδεíη ἦ μἤ χιλíασ ποστíνειν. κλητεσθαι μν οῖν στí καλεíσθαι εíσ μαρτνρíαν, κκλητεεῖεσθαι δ τó δíκην óφεíλειν πí τπí τι τσ χιλíασ καταβαλεíν.

It was a characteristic of Macedonian custom that a name was used in a special and in a general sense. For example, ‘Foot-Companions’ was the name of a Bodyguard of Philip and also of the men of the Phalanx-Brigades from Lower Macedonia, and ‘Hypaspists’ was the name of Infantry-Guardsmen of Alexander and also of the men of three Hypaspist Phalanx-Brigades. Geographical names were repeated: there were at least two regions and two cities called ‘Emathia’, two or three regions called ‘Doberus’, four cites called Philippi or Philippopolis, and Alexandrias galore. To a modern mind this makes for confusion. That is certainly the case with the names ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedones’, which I shall treat separately in this article.

The most striking example of Roman intervention in the affairs of mainland Greece between the Achaean and Mithridatic Wars is provided by an inscription now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This stone bears the text of a letter to the city of Dyme in Achaea from a Roman proconsul named Q. Fabius Maximus, which describes his trial and sentencing of certain men of Dyme whom he had judged responsible for a recent disturbance in that city. One crux to be resolved is chronological: A date of c. 115 b.c. has long been generally accepted, but recently evidence from another, still unpublished inscription has been thought to point to the year 144. Further, the letter of Fabius Maximus has long been held to exemplify the close supervision that most scholars, regardless of their position on the vexed question of Greece's formal status after 146, assume was exercised over Greece by Roman commanders in Macedonia from the time of the Achaean War. The document has also often been cited to bolster the claim that Rome pursued in second-century Greece a conscious policy of suppressing democracy or the political aspirations of the lower class. This is not, of course, the place for reassessment of these old, complex controversies. My purpose here is rather to show that interpretation of the letter of Fabius Maximus has not always been sufficiently mindful of the many obscurities of the text and, consequently, of the events that lie behind it; too often the great lacunae in our knowledge have been filled with assumptions that beg the questions that are under debate.

At Phaedo 59b Echecrates asks Phaedo who was present on the day when Socrates drank the hemlock in prison. Various Athenians are named (59b 6–10), then various foreigners (59c 1–2), but when Echecrates subsequently asks if two other foreigners, Aristippus and Cleombrotus, were present, Phaedo replies that they were said to be in Aegina (59c 4). After this fleeting reference to Cleombrotus, Plato does not mention him again in the Phaedo or any other dialogue; and yet in later antiquity a certain Cleombrotus of Ambracia rose to fame in connection with the Phaedo. Callimachus is our earliest source for the anecdote which immortalized the Ambracian (A.P. 7.471):

Εἴπας ‘Ἥλιε ϰαῖρε’ Κλεμβρτος ὡμβρακιώτης

ἅλατ' φ' ὑΨηλο τεϰεος εἰς Ἀδην,

ἴζιον οὐδν ἰδὼν θαντου κακν, λλ Πλτωνος

ἕν τ περ Ψυϰς γρμμ' ναλεζμενος.

The fabula praetexta is a category of Roman drama about which we are poorly informed. Ancient testimonia are scanty and widely scattered, while surviving fragments comprise fewer than fifty lines. Only five or six titles are firmly attested. Scholarly debate, however, has been extensive, and has especially focused on reconstructing the plots of the plays.1 The main approach has been to amplify extant fragments by fitting them into a plot taken from treatments of the same episode in later historical sources such as Livy, Dionysius, or Plutarch.2 This method was extended by Mommsen and others in their efforts to identify new titles and plots by isolating passages in the historians which seem written in a dramatic style, and could therefore be interpreted as derivations from historical plays.3 Such a line of approach is both risky and subjective. It is based on the desire to recover a lost genre, which modern scholars feel must or should have existed. It is tempting to imagine that the Romans would have encouraged a thriving national theatre on historical themes. Such a genre, it is argued, would have been influential in shaping the average Roman's view of past events and the treatment of famous episodes by later historians.4 The conclusions reached have virtually no basis in the ancient sources we actually have. The result is largely a fiction created by the scholarly imagination.

Horace addresses Torquatus again in Carm. 4.7. There the poet distinguishes three cardinal qualities: Torquatus's genus, his facundia, and hispietas. Since Horace distinguishes them they were no doubt qualities on which Torquatus prided himself, but they are, in any case, the key by which Torquatus slips into Horace's lyric. I suggest that we can use the same key to open up the Epistle, and that by taking up these qualities we have ready access to the wit of the poem, carefully predicated upon its addressee.

Here Ovid treats the demiurge's disposition of weightless aether over the other elements. This section of the cosmogony follows one that is devoted to the sphere of aer (52–66) where the creator settles the turbulent winds and other threatening meteorological phenomena. Recently Denis Feeney has suggested that Ovid's demiurge ‘does not act in a very epic manner’ by placing weightless aether on top of the winds. He argues: ‘The oddness of the control is caught in a moment of comparison with Vergil's universe: Vergil's Jupiter controls the winds by putting on top of them a mass of mountains(Aen. 1.61), while Ovid's mundi fabricator places above them the aether, explicitly “liquid and lacking weight, containing nothing of earthly sediment” (liquidum et gravitate carentem / aethera nee quicquam terrenae faecis habentem, 1.67–8)’. Feeney's observation has much to recommend it. To begin with, Ovid's excursus on the cardinal winds (57–66) evokes Vergil's set piece on the cave of Aeolus in Aeneid l. And the demiurge's subsequent placement of aether (‘haec super inposuit liquidum et gravitate carentem / aethera’) seems to echo the action of the Vergilian Jupiter(‘hoc metuens molemque et montis insuper altos / imposuit,’ Aen. 1.61–2). However, Feeney's conclusion that the demiurge's action is ‘redolent of anti-epic allegiances’ needs some adjustment.4 For his reading neglects an important verbal and structural allusion to the cosmogony of Lucretius (D.R.N. 5.495–501). Accordingly, the conclusion to be drawn from lines 67–8 may be, not that Ovid momentarily reveals his Callimachean colours in an epic context, but that he plays Lucretius off against Vergil and so establishes his own position in the epic tradition of cosmological poetry.

Ovidians continue to be puzzled by the 404-line speech put into the mouth of Pythagoras in book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Questions of literary decorum and quality are insistently raised: how does the philosopher's popular science consort with the predominantly mythological matter of the preceding fourteen books? Do Pythagoras' revelations provide some kind of unifying ground, a ‘key’, for the endless variety of the poem? Can one take the Speech as a serious essay in philosophical didactic, or is it all a mighty spoof, as intentionally laughable, perhaps, as the imperial panegyric with which the narrative of book 15 concludes? Or should we beware of imposing modern tastes on Ovid's original audience, and respect the Hellenistic and Roman predilection for scientific poetry? This article seeks to establish further contexts for the evaluation of the Speech of Pythagoras through a study of Ovid's allusive practice within the Greco-Roman tradition of hexameter epos. The figure who provides a foundation for Ovid's construction of his own poetic genealogy turns out to be the Greek philosophical poet Empedocles. The resulting reflections on Ovid's manipulation of generic conventions may be timely in the light of the recent appearance of sophisticated and fresh approaches to the question of whether the Metamorphoses is, or is not, an epic.

Students of later Platonism know well the significant role Porphyry played in the development of what we now call Neoplatonism. His own biography of Plotinus makes clear that we probably owe the very existence of the majority of Plotinus' written works to Porphyry's nagging. Having cajoled the master into penning a large number of works during his latter years, Porphyry then edited and published them, giving them the title Enneads which they have since borne. We must, of course, take Porphyry's claims regarding the importance of his own influence with a grain of salt. Still, with the sole exception of Plato himself, no figure in the Platonic tradition had ever enjoyed Plotinus' good fortune in the transmission of his complete works, and none would again, for which we clearly have Porphyry to thank.

This note argues that two passages are worthier of the dramatist if the audience has seen the furies than if it has not. Orestes sees the furies (Choe. 1048–50, 1053–4, 1057–8); the chorus (1051–2, 1055–6,1059–60) does not see them. Does the audience see them? K. O. Müller, on philosophical and antiquarian grounds, thought so. Nearly all scholars today believe not. I agree with Miiller from what Orestes now says to the chorus: ὑμεῖς μν οὐφ ρτε τσδ', γὼ δ' ρ (1061). If the chorus does not see the furies and the audience does not see them either, the ὑμεῖς μν οὐχ ρτε τά7sigma;δ' lacks moment; the chorus cannot find those words of any use and the audience (from what it has heard in the ten lines preceding) cannot find them of interest. There is value in the words only if the audience, seeing what Orestes sees, is being reassured that the chorus does not. Line 1058, κξ μμτων στζουσιν αἷμα δυσφιλς, may be regarded as saying something the audience did not know from its own senses, and the same is true for ὑμεῖ μν οὐχ ρτε τσδ' in 1061 if it says once more that the furies, though real to Orestes, and to the audience as well, are not real to everyone. The opposite reasoning—that if the audience has seen the furies the γὼ δ' ρ (at the close of the line) is unneeded after Orestes has already said three times that he sees them—is not countervailing. For those words are in the less emphatic position, are fewer, and are of less doubtful usefulness, since they lead to λαὑνομαι δ κοὐκτ' ἄν μεναιμ' γώ.