‘The problem of Spartan land tenure is one of the most vexed in the obscure field of Spartan institutions.’ Walbank's remark is as true today as when it was written nearly thirty years ago. Controversy surrounding this subject has a long tradition going back to the nineteenth century and the last thirty years have witnessed no diminution in the level of disagreement, as is demonstrated by a comparison of the differing approaches in the recent works by Cartledge, Cozzoli, David and Marasco. Although another study runs the risk of merely adding one more hypothesis to the general state of uncertainty, a fundamental reassessment of the question is required, not least because of its significance for the historian's interpretation of the overall character of Spartiate society. Through the introduction of a new perspective it may be possible to advance our understanding of the subject.

In Section I of this essay I shall attempt to review several influential scholarly theories and to examine their feasibility and the reliability of the evidence upon which they are based. Section II will begin to construct a more plausible alternative account which is based upon more trustworthy evidence. Finally, Section III will discuss a comparatively underemphasised aspect of the topic, the property rights of Spartiate women, which suggests a rather different interpretation of the character of land tenure and inheritance from those more usually adopted.

Pindar's Dithyramb 2opens with a reference to the historical development of the genre it exemplifies, the celebrated circular chorus of classical Greece. The first two lines were long known from various citations, notably in Athenaeus, whose sources included the fourth-century authors Heraclides of Pontus and Aristotle's pupil Clearchus of Soli. The third line appears, only partly legible, on a papyrus fragment published in 1919, which preserves some thirty lines of the dithyramb including most of the first antistrophe (thereby guaranteeing the metre for some reconstruction of the first strophe).

The average educated Greek, I am sure, knew the early history of Greece as well as the average educated European knows the history of modern Europe, and could no more separate Theopompos from the first Messenian War or put Pheidon after Kypselos than we can separate Wellington from Waterloo or make Frederick the Great follow Napoleon.

The professional historian, antiquarian, or chronographer would know much more, but could readily distort what he knew in trying to impose some theoretical pattern on the past. Where so many of our sources are theoretical (all the chronographers for example) and when they survive in fragments which are rarely substantial enough to show in detail the theory on which they worked, it is not easy to see through to the core of Greek belief on which they were based. But facts there were and in the main it was from them that the theorizing started.

Eunomia was early personified. Already in Hesiod she is one of the three Horai, the child of Themis and the sister of Dike and Eirene, and from her family we may learn something of her nature. Both mother and sisters are concerned with the individual as the member of a community rather than as persomn in himself. Themis is a complicated character, whose implications cannot here be discussed, but we may without offence call her the mother of the social order and of the organized life of the community; Dike and Eirene are certainly social virtues which cannot usefully be practised by the individual in isolation, but if widespread make possible the collective life of the city. Eunomia too is one of the guardians of the social order, keeping the city from violence and lawlessness.

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.

Developments in the Academy from the time of Arcesilaus to that of Carneades and his successors tend to be classified under two heads: scepticism and probabilism. Carneades was principally responsible for the Academy's view of the latter subject, and our sources credit him with an elaborate discussion of it. The evidence furnished by those sources is, however, frequently confusing and sometimes self-contradictory. My aim in this paper is to extract a coherent account of Carneades' theory of probability from the testimony with a further end in view, namely to understand better the uses to which that theory was put by the Academy in its debate with the Stoa. Though it is not its principal object, the investigation should also help make clear how the Academy's scepticism and its probabilism were related to each other as parts of a single consistent practice of philosophy.

Voltaire's Pangloss, the man who held among other things that noses were clearly created in order to support spectacles, is the very archetype of the lunatic teleologist; a caricature of sublimely confident faith in the general and undeniable goodness of the world's arrangement, a faith that managed astoundingly to survive the Lisbon earthquake and his own subsequent auto dafé. Voltaire, of course, is poking fun at such conceptions; and, no doubt, in their extreme sanguinity as well as in their apparent imperviousness to devastating empirical counter-evidence, they do seem to be eminently risible notions. In the face of them we might be tempted to abandon ‘métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie’, and to agree with Candide that ‘Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’.

According to Aristotle, Metaphysics (a) 2.3, 995a7–8, there are people who will take seriously the arguments of a speaker (including, it seems, those of a philosopher) only if a poet can be cited as a ‘witness’ in support of them. Aristotle's passing observation sharply reminds us that Greek philosophy had developed within, and was surrounded by, a culture which extensively valued the authority of the poetic word and the poet's ‘voice’ from which it emanated. The currency of ideas, values, and images disseminated through familiarity with poetry had always been a force with which philosophy, in its various manifestations, needed to reckon. As a mode of thought and discourse which proclaimed its aspiration to wisdom, philosophy could not easily eschew some degree of dialogue with an art whose practitioners had traditionally (and for much longer than anyone had been called a ‘philosopher') been ranked prominently among the sophoi. Even Aristotle, who keeps aloof from the assumption that philosophical contentions stand in need of poetic support, cites and quotes poetry regularly in his own writings in ways which indicate the influence on him of a prevailing mentality that regarded poets and philosophers as pursuers, up to a point at least, of a common wisdom.

Aristophanes' last two surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, have long been regarded as something of an enigma. The changes in structure – the diminution in the role of the chorus, the disappearance of the parabasis, etc. –, as well as the shift of interest away from the immediacies of current politics towards broader social themes, can reasonably be interpreted as an early stage of the process that ultimately transformed Old Comedy into New, even if it is unlikely ever to be finally agreed whether Aristophanes was leading or following this trend. The decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness, which is perceptible in the earlier play and very marked in the later, may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration. Such an explanation squares with the evidence of a marked decline in Aristophanes' productivity towards the end of his life. Whereas in the first seven years of his career (427–421) he seems to have produced, or had produced for him, not less than ten plays, and in the years 420–405 approximately another eighteen, the twenty years or so that followed Frogs yielded a further eleven at the very most unless some titles have been completely lost; and since it is not likely that after the outstanding success of Frogs, and the public recognition that followed it, Aristophanes would have experienced any difficulty in securing a chorus, the explanation can only be that he was writing less. But the truly puzzling feature of the two late plays we possess is the apparent sea-change in the author's social orientation. In his fifth-century plays, from Acharnians toFrogs, as has been shown (in my view conclusively) by de Ste Croix, Aristophanes reveals himself as one who instinctively speaks the language and thinks the thoughts of the well-to-do, even if at the same time he can laugh with the common man at ostentatious and useless wealth in the shape of Pyrilampes' peacocks, Leogoras' pheasants or the sultan-like garments of an Athenian imperial official – as one who was happy for the Demos to be sovereign so long as it was willing to be guided by the advice of its' betters', the καλоί тε κáγоθоί of (e.g.) Knights 738 or Frogs 727–9, and to leave them in the quiet enjoyment of their property. At first sight in Assemblywomen and Wealth this seems to have changed almost diametrically.

Whether out of an understandable reluctance to neglect any of the scarce available sources or simply for want of more trustworthy evidence, classical scholars nolentes volentes tend to rely to a large extent on references to amounts of money in the ancient literary sources whenever they aim at quantifying, however roughly and shielded by appropriate disclaimers, some fundamental features of Roman economy and society. In view of this, the almost complete lack of systematic enquiries into the very nature of these particular data is almost as inexplicable as it seems inexcusable. While several studies have been devoted to the use of rounded numbers in Greek and Roman literature in general, none of these has specifically addressed the stylization of monetary valuations. The only notable exception is provided by the work of Richard Duncan-Jones who in a pioneering survey of prices in the Latin novel above all showed beyond reasonable doubt that in this genre, prices expressed in multiples of thirty (up to thirty million) should best be understood as purely conventional valuations. In his latest book, he has subjected the ancient numerical evidence for two areas of major concern—the public treasury and state expenditure during the Principate—to an analogous examination that has highlighted the stylized character of many relevant references and has thus largely confirmed his previous findings. Even so, owing to the limitation of these studies to a small number of authors and subject matters, a vast pool of similar data from ancient literature has hitherto been left virtually untapped. What is more, Duncan-Jones did not attempt to complement his re-evaluation of multiples of thirty with a systematic exposition of complementary patterns of stylization. In this paper, I hope to demonstrate the need for a more extensive and much more radical reassessment of much of the available evidence.

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of education versus training, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school.

One of the ironies of literary history is that the survival of Aristophanic comedy and indeed of all Greek drama is due to the more or less faithful transmission of a written text. Reading a play and watching one, after all, are very different sorts of activities. Unlike a book, in which the reader can leaf backward for reminders of what has already happened or forward for information about what is to come, a play onstage can be experienced in one direction only, from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’. Nor can a play be put down and picked up again at one's leisure or interrupted while the audience puzzles over a difficult or intriguing passage. Live theatre is an ephemeral and essentially independent thing, which must be experienced in its own time and on its own terms or not at all, and as a result we modern readers, dependent on the written page, are at a marked disadvantage in understanding ancient drama. Taplin's study of staging in Aeschylus has shed considerable light on the dramatic technique of Athenian tragedy. Stage-practice in Aristophanic comedy, and in particular the ways in which names and naming are used there, has received much less attention.

In this article, an introduction to a proposed more comprehensive treatment of the subject, I wish to discuss the contribution that the parabasis makes to the understanding and interpretation of Aristophanes’ comedies. The study of this part of the plays has in the past concentrated upon two main areas: firstly, its role in the development of comedy, including questions about its original position in the dramatic structure and its relationship to other elements such as the parodos and agon; and secondly, its role as the repository of Aristophanes’ personal views.1 I shall touch but incidentally on the first of these, though my argument will have some bearing on it; to the second I shall return at the end. My aim is to consider an aspect of the parabasis that has not so much been neglected as dismissed as non-existent: the relation between the contents of the parabasis and those of the rest of the play. It is generally agreed that the parabasis deals with matters that are irrelevant to the dramatic action, but I wish to argue that it has a significant role as the focus of the most important themes in the play: far from breaking up the unity of the play, the parabasis provides indications as to where that unity is to be found, besides giving hints about the meaning of the play and the nature of Aristophanic comedy generally.2

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so.

The relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States seems to embody most fully the type of the ‘special relationship’ today. It is a relationship founded ultimately (and now of course remotely) on biological kinship, structured by mutual economic and strategic interests and cemented by a sense of political and ‘spiritual’ affinity. At least the broad contours of such contemporary ‘special relationships’ are sufficiently clear. This is far from being the case with those of the Archaic and Classical Greek world, for two main reasons. First, and more decisively, our sources for the history of that world – literary, epigraphical, archaeological – are normally scrappy, discontinuous and variously slanted. Second, and only in part because of the nature of the evidence, the workings of all ancient Greek interstate relationships, whether ‘special’ or not, are in principle controversial. For in the absence of governments and parties in the modern sense it is frequently impossible to explain confidently a particular foreign policy decision taken by a Greek state. A fortiori it is in principle even more difficult to describe and account for ‘special’ relationships between states that apparently transcended purely immediate, local and narrowly self-interested considerations.

Aeneas' speech of defence before Dido (A. 4. 333–61) is the longest and most controversial he delivers. Although by no means typical, it can open up some revealing perspectives over the rest of the poem.

The exchange between the two, having as its kernel a dispute over obligations and responsibilities, requires some words of context. The early part of the book describes the establishment of a liaison between the refugee leaders, while revealing amongst the poem's characters a wide discrepancy of opinion over the nature of that liaison. Juno announces that she will arrange the marriage of the couple (125–7); after the ensuing marriage-parody of the cave-scene (165–8), Dido also calls what now exists a ‘marriage’: coniugium uocat, hocpraetexit nomine culpam (172). Fama too, moving around Libya, speaks as if Dido has taken Aeneas for husband (192). But the local King Iarbas regards Aeneas as a pirate who has carried off a successful job of plunder (217), while Jupiter looks down from heaven and sees ‘lovers’, amantis (221). Mercury is able to address Aeneas as uxorius (266).

A reiteration of the main details of the case may be helpful. Euphiletus killed Eratosthenes and was prosecuted for premeditated homicide by Eratosthenes' relatives. The present speech, our sole source of information concerning the case, was written for the defendant, partially or totally, by a professional speechwriter, presumably Lysias. In this speech Euphiletus admits killing Eratosthenes. He pleads, however, that, since he killed Eratosthenes after catching him in the act of adultery with his own wife, this was a case of justified homicide. At the same time, he denies a charge of the prosecution that he had killed Eratosthenes for reasons unrelated to the adultery. The speech was delivered before a court of fifty-one judges especially set up to judge such cases, as is attested elsewhere:

T1

Arist. Ath. Pol. 57.3: ‘If…a person admits that he has killed someone but claims that he had a right to do so, as, for instance, when he has surprised an adulterer in the act,… then the trial takes place in the Delphinion’ (cf. Dem. 23.74).

That Sallust owed a considerable debt to the writings of Cato the Censor was observed in antiquity, and the observation has often been discussed and expanded on by modern scholars. The ancient references to Sallust's employment of Cato are mainly in the context of his adoption of an archaic style, and specifically Catonian vocabulary. But the choice of Cato as a model had an obvious significance that went beyond the purely stylistic. Sallust's works articulate extreme pessimism at the moral state of late-Republican Rome, and do so partly by contrasting the modern age with a prelapsarian time of near-untrammelled virtue, brought to an end only by the fall of Carthage and the consequent dominance of Roman power, which in turn led to moral corruption. Similarly, Cato famously stood in his own day for moral rectitude—and specifically appealed to past virtue as the standard to which he wished to hold his contemporaries. Sallust, by writing in a Catonian style, aligns himself with that tradition.