Since being brought to light in 1853 by Adalbert Kuhn, the fact that the Homeric expression κλέος ἄφθιτον has an exact parallel in the Veda has played an extremely important role in formulating the hypothesis that Greek epic poetry is of Indo-European origin. Yet only with Milman Parry's analysis of the formulaic character of Homeric composition did it become possible to test the antiquity of κλέος ἄφθιτον on the internal grounds of Homeric diction.

It is generally agreed that the conservative character of oral composition entails a high degree of correlation between the antiquity of a Homeric expression and its formulaic character. In other words, although not all Homeric formulae are necessarily of ancient origin, it is nevertheless in the formulaic stock of the epic diction that archaic and backward-looking expressions should be sought. Consequently, demonstration that κλέος ἄφθιτον (as well as other Homeric expressions with Vedic cognates) is a Homeric formula would constitute valuable evidence for its origin in Indo-European heroic poetry. Strangely enough, however, as Parry's analysis won the recognition of scholars, κλέος ἄφθιτον was identified as a Homeric formula simply because of its agreement with the Vedic śráva(s) ákṣitam. Yet examination of κλέος ἄφθιτον from the internal standpoint of the Greek epic casts serious doubts on the formulaic and traditional character of this Homeric expression.

At a time when the Greek army is on the verge of annihilation, the Iliad tells us, two warriors have detached themselves from the fight. Idomeneus, having accompanied a wounded man back to the ships, and Mērionēs, on his way to fetch himself a new spear, meet at the former's hut. They stand and talk for a while, assuring one another that they are afraid of nothing and no-one, and finally decide to plunge into battle again, though only after discussing at some length whether to go to fight in the centre or at the left of the front line. At first sight their behaviour might not seem particularly strange, but when one realises that the poet has told us more than once that these two are the leaders of the Cretan contingent, some four thousand warriors strong, one may begin to wonder. How could a poet, if he had even the slightest notion of what armies and battles were like, let these men behave as if they were alone on the field, leaving the fight for trivial reasons, re-entering it when and where it suits them, not even bothering to return to their own leaderless countrymen? Such doubts have led scholars to argue that, in fact, the poet did not have the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

Some seek to show that epic society is vague and unreal — ‘Homeric kings are like the king and the prince in Cinderella — they reveal nothing about any social structure in the real world’ — and have suggested that the historian may dismiss it as literary fiction.

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise (Prot. 318e–319a):

What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in speech.

Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia (vicious disposition — he has just identified justice as ‘an altogether noble good nature (euetheia)’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says (Rep. 348d): ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia (Rep. 428b) — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ (428c–d). It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word.

According to the traditional interpretation of these celebrated lines, Pindar is saying here that while the wise can understand his poetry by themselves, the mass of his listeners need interpreters if they are to do so; he then goes on to contrast inferior poets, who can sing only ineffectually and only what they have learned, with the poet of natural genius, who surpasses them as the eagle surpasses the crows; and finally he returns to the subject at hand, the praise of the victorious Theron of Acragas. Sandys' Loeb translation may be taken as a representative example:

Full many a swift arrow have I beneath mine arm, within my quiver, many an arrow that is vocal to the wise; but for the crowd they need interpreters. The true poet is he who knoweth much by gift of nature, but they that have only learnt the lore of song, and are turbulent and intemperate of tongue, like a pair of crows, chatter in vain against the god—like bird of Zeus.

Now, bend thy bow toward the mark! tell me, my soul, whom are we essaying to hit, while we now shoot forth our shafts of fame from the quiver of a friendly heart?

Construed in this way, this passage has always been especially popular with scholars and with other readers — not surprisingly, for the former could find in it a justification for their activity as ⋯ρμηνεῖς, while the latter could pride themselves on belonging to the συνετοί.

In the Eighth Olympian, for Alcimedon of Aegina, Pindar recounts a story (31–46) that, according to a notice in the scholia, is not found in earlier Greek literature. Aeacus was summoned from Aegina to Troy by Apollo and Poseidon to help in the construction of the city's fortifications. Smoke, says the poet, would one day rise from the very battlements Aeacus built. The wall newly completed, a portent appeared: three snakes tried to scale the ramparts but two fell to earth while one succeeded in entering the city. Apollo immediately interpreted this sign: Troy would be taken ‘owing to the work of Aeacus’ hand' and would, moreover, be taken ‘by the first and the fourth generations’.

If there is literary invention here, it would seem that Pindar has drawn inspiration from three passages of our Iliad: (i) 7.452–3, Apollo and Poseidon toiled to build a wall for Laomedon; (ii) 6.433–4, there was one spot in the wall of Troy that was especially vulnerable; (iii) 2.308–29, the seer Calchas declares an omen involving a snake to signify the eventual destruction of Ilium.

The general import of the passage is clear enough — descendants of Aeacus play a prominent part in the Trojan war and in the capture of the city. But the details of the portent and of the prophecy have caused much perplexity, for they cannot easily be made to correspond to the history they prefigure. It is the numbers in Pindar's account that are the chief source of confusion.

On the model of the omen interpreted by Calchas (where a snake eating nine birds represents a lapse of nine years before the sack of the city) the three snakes in the Pindaric story might reasonably be expected to represent the lapse of three generations before Aeacus' great-grandson Neoptolemus played his conspicuous part in the final agony of Troy. But this interpretation of the portent forces us to explain away the fact that Troy was also destroyed by Aeacus' son, Telamon, as Pindar repeatedly insists in his Aeginetan odes (Nem. 3.37, 4.25; Isth. 6.26–31): if the snakes are taken to represent generations, one of the unsuccessful snakes in fact represents a successful conqueror. This is a disturbing inconcinnity.

The late Colin Macleod's commentary on Iliad 24 (Cambridge, 1982) has rightly received praise for its sensitivity to the nuances of Homeric language and its appreciation of the entire poem as a carefully constructed work of art. Although reluctant to accept the more radical solutions proposed by the ‘oral’ school, Macleod showed himself fully aware of the contribution made by the oral theory towards elucidating the history of the epic. Nevertheless, his commentary is concerned principally with the Iliad as we have it: a poem which is at one level a masterly re-telling of saga but at another a sublime tragedy, commiserating the sorrows inseparable from human existence and holding up for our admiration the heroes who nobly confront pain and death. I believe that much, and probably most, of the Iliad can and should be viewed in this light. The last book of all, as Macleod himself has shown, offers especially rich rewards to an interpreter who keeps in the front of his mind the overriding aims of the great poet. Yet Macleod's method, like any other single method, will never yield a fully satisfactory answer on all occasions. However the ‘definitive’ or ‘monumental’ composition of the Iliad was brought about, it formed only one stage (though from our point of view incomparably the most important stage) in the development of the Greek epic. Our Iliad cannot have been the first or the only treatment, on a large scale, of the matter of Troy.

Much has been written on the genesis of the pseudo-hesiodic Shield of Heracles — so much, that true progress is difficult to discern among the welter of theories. But some has been made, although the conclusions that have been reached must be regarded as likely hypotheses rather than proven facts. In this article I propose to proceed from some of these conclusions, ensuring that they are as firmly grounded as possible, to an assessment of how this poem's version of the combat of Heracles and Cycnus relates to the likely circumstances and occasion of its original performance. This will involve considering the legend's variants (including one from the Cycle that has not been discussed in relation to the Aspis), and a new look at the first half of the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo.

No ancient authority has left us a clear account of how the judges at the Athenian dramatic festivals operated. We can therefore never know for certain what happened. But it may be possible to improve the reconstruction normally given, which does not look as if it could ever have yielded acceptable results.

One thing that is very clear (from Isocrates 17.33–4) is that the choice of judges was taken seriously. Not only did it involve the Council, the Prytanies, and the Treasurers, but any tampering with the panel from which the judges were eventually selected seems to have been punishable with death. Even the physical arrangements were quite complicated. Names approved by the Council were deposited in ten jars, one jar for each tribe but each jar containing several names, sealed by the Prytanies, held in safe-keeping on the Acropolis, and eventually brought down to the theatre, where the archon publicly broke the seals and drew out one name from each jar.

At this stage of the process there emerged ten judges, one from each tribe. Their quality had been guaranteed by the Council's prior vetting of the panel, but their actual names were unpredictable because randomly selected from it. All had been done democratically and with equal representation of tribes, in perfect accord with normal Athenian practice.

But now comes the difficulty. The paroemiographers record a proverb (or rather perhaps a joke since it seems to be a kind of parody of a Homeric verse) about judgement being in the lap of five judges — ⋯ν π⋯ντε κριτ⋯ν γούνασι κεῖται; Lysias tells us of a judge whose vote was not counted; and Lucian, who likes to disguise a very careful antiquarianism behind an apparent casualness of style, says that at festival competitions the many know how to clap and hiss but that judgement is in the hands of seven or five or however many.

A persistent ancient tradition has it that a man named Lycambes promised his daughter Neoboule in marriage to the poet Archilochus of Paros, that he subsequently refused Archilochus, and that the poet attacked Lycambes and his daughters with such ferocity that they all committed suicide. When we reflect that the iambographer Hipponax drove his enemies Bupalus and Athenis and Old Comedy a man named Poliager to suicide, that the ancestress of iambos, Iambe, killed herself, and that all these suicides, like those of Lycambes and his daughters, took the form of hanging, we will not take too seriously the ending of the story of Archilochus' relations with Lycambes and his family.

However, it seems now to be generally accepted, at least among English-speaking scholars, that the whole Lycambes tradition is to be rejected. The present note seeks to demonstrate that this extreme scepticism is misguided. I shall begin with a survey of Archilochus' references to Lycambes and his family to ascertain how far the indirect tradition is consistent with the surviving fragments.

Lycambes appears to have played a consistent role in Archilochus, as far as the fragments allow us to see. In fr. 38 he appears as the father of two daughters (οἴην Λυκάμβεω παῖδα τ⋯ν ύπερτέρην), in fr. 33 (where the voice of ‘the daughter of Lycambes’ is mentioned) as the father of at least one daughter. In fr. 71 his role cannot be determined. But in fr. 54, if his name is correctly restored in v. 8, he may again figure as the father of a daughter, for a female is mentioned in the fragment, whether for good or ill. If his patronymic is correctly supplied in fr. 57.7, it may be significant that the letters πατρ occur in the same verse.

A leading character in a play, at any rate in a major speech, is normally doing several things: he is saying what the development of the plot requires, and sometimes also expressing the dramatist's own tragic vision; he is also expressing his own thoughts and emotions, or saying what from his point of view the rhetoric of the situation requires. There are thus at least two questions to ask about the Trugrede: What is its function in the economy of the plot? Why does Sophocles give this speech to Ajax, and what light does it throw on his character as presented by Sophocles? The first question is easy enough to answer. There can be no doubt that this is a deception speech in the sense that Tecmessa and the Chorus are misled about what is going to happen, and at any rate part of Sophocles' purpose was evidently to achieve an effect of relaxation of tension or ‘retardation’. At first all is gloom and despair; then when the suicide of Ajax seems to be imminent, this speech leads Tecmessa and the sailors to think that he means to live on after all, and they express their relief in a joyful hyporchema. Then follows a messenger speech with warnings that dispel their joy but still offer a gleam of hope, until that hope is extinguished when they find the dead body of Ajax. Sophocles has thus contrived an arresting dramatic sequence to fill the interval between the opening scene and the discovery of Ajax' death. The main effect could have been produced by direct, unambiguous falsehood in the speech we are considering, but (still looking at it from the dramaturgical point of view) Sophocles presumably wished the spectators to be aware that the joy and relief were illusory, so that they could at once appreciate the tragic irony of the sailors' rejoicing. There was probably no way of informing the audience directly that the speech was meant to be deceptive, and Sophocles therefore included in it numerous ambiguous expressions which the Chorus and Tecmessa, eager to believe good news, interpret as indicating a change of purpose, whereas for the spectators, who are more detached and probably aware of the traditional version of the story according to which Ajax killed himself, they have ominous overtones and arouse suspicion, in the last lines verging on certainty, that in this play too he still means to take his own life.

The true chronology of the Pentekontaetia is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish conclusively. The events between 477 and 432 were of the greatest possible importance: these years saw the creation of the Athenian empire and a precipitous decline in Spartiate manpower, drastic political realignments involving nearly every state in Hellas, and military activity often rising to a crescendo scarcely matched at the peak of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one might strongly argue that the fifty-odd years prior to 432 had a substantially greater historical significance than the three decades of war which followed, as well as a greater degree of political and military drama. But the Pentekontaetia lacks the unifying historical narrative of a Herodotus, let alone a Thucydides, and this one deficiency has caused events of the utmost significance to fade into near obscurity. There is scarcely a single political or military occurrence during the Fifty Years which can be dated to closer than a year or two, and in some cases, proposed dates have ranged over the better part of a decade. With no firm chronological framework, historical analysis degenerates into guesswork and speculation, especially if even the relative order of events is in dispute. In cognizance of this need, this paper seeks to present portions of a new chronology of the Pentekontaetia, one differing in several very significant features from those previously suggested. The severely limited nature of the available evidence precludes any hope of firmly establishing the validity of any one dating scheme over its rivals; the best we can hope for is plausibility.

Some years ago, Sir Kenneth Dover suggested a new interpretation of καρ⋯ξαι. Prima facie, the chorus ask the sun to proclaim where Heracles is, and this sense is supported by such passages as Il. 3.277 Ή⋯λιóς θ', ὃς π⋯ντ' ⋯ɸορᾷς, Od. 9.109 Ήελ⋯ου, ὅς π⋯ντ' ⋯ɸορᾷ (cf A. PV 91, S. OC 869), Od. 8.270–1 ἄɸαρ δ⋯ οἱ ἄγγελος ἧλθεν | Ή⋯λιος, and especially (‘a passage…which comes very close to Sophocles in spirit’) h. Cer. 69ff., where ‘Demeter visits the Sun and implores him, “you who look down on all earth and sea…tell me truly of my dear child, if you have seen her anywhere, who has gone off with her…”.’ This is the way καρ⋯ξαι in Trach. 97 has always been taken. Dover points out, however, that κηρ⋯ττειν also has a special, technical sense: to make proclamation inquiring about a missing person's whereabouts, as the town-crier used to do a century ago England and elsewhere, and the media do now. The model is not that of h. Cer. 69ff., but rather S. Aj. 845ff.: ‘Sun, when you see my native land, draw near and tell (ἄγγειλον) my aged father…of my fate.’

The examples he cites are enough to demonstrate the ‘interrogative’ use of κηρ⋯ττω, though his first example, Ar. Ach. 748 ⋯γὼν δ⋯ καρυξ⋯ Δικαιóπολιν ὅπᾳ, will not do: if sound, it means not ‘I will find out by κ⋯ρυξ where Dicaeopolis is’ (he is present in the next line), but ‘I will summon Dicaeopolis to where (the sale is)’. The normal ‘interrogative’ use is to enquire by herald (town-crier) the whereabouts of a Crminal (Andoc. 1.112, D. 25.56, Antiphon ii γ 2 with ib. δ 6) or a runaway slave (Lucian,Fug. 27).

Pythian 11 is usually reckoned to be a particularly problematic Pindaric ode. I hope to show that it is not, and in the process make some points which will have a bearing on interpretation of some of Pindar's other odes. Rather than go through the whole poem step by step, I shall concentrate on the main problems and on some particular passages.

The most disputed problem is the myth. What is the relevance of the story of Agamemnon's return from Troy, his murder by Clytemnestra, and her murder by Orestes, all of which takes up the central part of the poem? The myth appears even more irrelevant because after telling it Pindar seems to acknowledge that it was a mistake to have told it in the first place. What does he mean by saying (lines 38–40) that he went off course when he told it?

The second major problem comes after the myth and again concerns Pindar's apparently veering off suddenly into irrelevance. No sooner has he catalogued the victories of the winner's family than he launches into a denunciation of tyrannies and announces his support of moderation (lines 52–3). Why does he do that?

The poem ends, after the social and political comments, with an epode devoted to Castor and Polydeuces, Spartan heroes, and the Theban hero Iolaos. Are they a sign that Pindar puts his hope in an alliance of Thebes with Sparta to win freedom from Athens? And was Pindar in the myth ‘telling us not only what Thrasydaios of Thebes the victor is, but also what he is not: he is not exposed to the kinds of peril that plagued the great house of Atreus?’

In his new text of Euripides (Oxford, 1984) James Diggle shows that he has the courage of his convictions: he deletes the last twenty-five lines of Medea's great monologue. He is to be applauded for following ratio et res ipsa where it leads him and being undaunted by the sight of so much blood. No editor of Euripides before him, as far as I am aware, has ever been courageous enough to put these lines in square brackets, although their deletion had been a subject of discussion for exactly one hundred years at the time Diggle's edition appeared.

But though Diggle is to be praised for his courage in following reason, I believe he is mistaken. The arguments for excision are far from negligible, and defenders of the passage show a regrettable tendency to underestimate their force. But while I shall give these objections as much weight as any of those who urge deletion, I shall argue that there is a much more economical way of dealing with them than large-scale amputation. I shall accordingly pay close attention to the problems for which excision is the proposed solution, with inevitable repetition of earlier scholars' arguments. Since I have myself recommended athetesis of long passages on several occasions, I do not think I will be regarded as insufficiently alive to the possibility of interpolation or overly reluctant to wield the knife. In this instance, however, there are strong stylistic grounds for believing in the genuineness of most of the passage in question.

Modern interpretation tends to take E. Med. 639, ‘driving from the senses over a second bed’ (θυμ⋯ν ⋯κπλήξασ' ⋯τέροις ⋯π⋯ λέκτροις), found within the petition of the chorus that ‘dread Cypris never…inflict angry arguments and insatiate quarrels’ (637–40a), as referring to a second bed that might allure these women themselves rather than one that might allure their husbands. None the less, the latter interpretation seems to be recommended by both the contents and the context of the line; it is also consistent with Euripidean idiom. As to the context, v. 639 is found in the second stasimon. An examination of the attitude of the chorus toward Medea up to this point may guide us towards a fuller understanding of the phrase.

In her opening speech in the first episode (214ff.) Medea, who was betrayed by the husband for whom she left family and country (252ff.), persuades the already sympathetic chorus (136–8, 178f., 182) to side with her as underprivileged women in a world dominated by egocentric men (230ff.). In the first pair of strophes of the following stasimon (410–30) they accept Medea's division of human beings into ‘the female stock’ (419) and ‘the race of males’ (429) and sing of male perfidy and discrimination against women. They stress their own personal involvement by replacing ‘women’ with ‘I’ and ‘we’ in five of the seven references to the second sex (415 and 422 ‘my’, 423 and 430 ‘our’, 428 ‘I’).

Cobet, in his second discussion of ⋯γορεύω and its compounds, maintained that these verbs in Attic formed all tenses except present and imperfect from ⋯ρ⋯, εἶπον, εἴρηκα, εἴρηµαɩ, ⋯ρρήθην, save that forms with -αγορευ- were optionally used to distinguish certain alternative meanings. Thus ⋯πηγόρευσα etc. (Dem. 40.44, 55.4) could be used in the sense ‘forbid’, but not in that of ‘weary’ or ‘give up’; προηγορευµένα (Xen. Mem. 1.2.35) could be used in the sense ‘proclaimed’, but not in that of ‘foretold’ ‘or’ ‘said previously’; προσαγορε⋯σαι etc. (Pl. Phd. 104a, Polit. 288c; Xen. Mem. 3.2.1; Anaxilas fr. 21.4; Dem. 39.38, 40.1; Lyk. Leokr. 9, 18; and several other fourth-century instances, to which add one much earlier, [Aesch.] Prom. 834) could be used in the sense ‘call, name’ but not in that of ‘greet’. These distinctions, he believed, did not break down until about the time of Alexander. Hence his rejection of the aorist καταγορεύσῃ offered by the MS. tradition in Peace 107.

But καταγορεύειν too is a verb with two clearly distinct ranges of meaning: ‘tell, declare’ (as here, Clouds 518, Eur. Med. 1106) and ‘denounce, accuse’ (as Hdt. 3.71.5, Pl. Rep. 595b).

According to the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol. 43.4), the Assembly in Athens met four times every prytany. At each one of these meetings certain topics had to be discussed or voted on. For instance, a vote concerning the conduct of magistrates presently in office was to be taken at the κυρ⋯α ⋯κκλησ⋯α. At another meeting anyone who wished to could request a discussion of any matter, be it private or public. Nothing is said in this passage or anywhere else in the Constitution of the Athenians about the possibility of holding additional meetings of the Assembly in times of emergency, but in a few passages in the Attic orators we find the term ⋯κκλησία σύγκλητος used. The scholia to these passages and some entries in the ancient lexica indicate that this term refers to an extra meeting of the Assembly which could be convened at short notice in order to deal with emergencies.

On the basis of this information, scholars have in the past concluded that the Assembly normally met four times each prytany in the Classical period, but that extra meetings, called ⋯κκλησίαɩ σύγκλητοɩ, could also be held if the need arose. Recently, however, M. H. Hansen, whose work on many aspects of the Assembly has greatly increased our understanding of Athenian democracy, has challenged this communis opinio. Hansen argues that the evidence found in the scholia and lexica is unreliable and should be disregarded. In his view, several passages in the speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes and some fines in IG ii 212 indicate that the Assembly met a fixed number of times each prytany, no more, no less.

Our information about the Athenian politician Syrakosios is entirely derived from Ar. Birds 1297 and the scholia thereon. Syrakosios here figures among a long list of Athenians who are said to be nicknamed after various birds:

δοκεῖ δ⋯ κα⋯ ψήɸισμα τεθεικέναι μ⋯ κωμῳδεῖσθαι ⋯νομαστί τινα, ὡς Φρύνιχος ⋯ν Μονοτρόπῳ ɸησί [fr. 26 Kock]· “ψ⋯ρ' ἔχοι Συρακόσιον. ⋯πιɸαν⋯ς γ⋯ρ αὐτῷ κα⋯ μέγα τύχοι. ⋯ɸείλετο γ⋯ρ κωμῳδεῖν οὕς ⋯πεθύμουν.” δι⋯ πικρότερον αὐτῷ προσɸέρονται, ὡς λάλῳ δ⋯ τ⋯ν “ κίτταν” παρέθηκεν

‘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.

What we know of citizenship, marriage and political status in Athens in the fourth century suggests that they were matters of no little public concern governed by a body of law which left few, if any, significant loopholes or anomalies. The ‘descent group’ criterion for citizenship had triumphed over the possible alternatives. The fundament of the system was the Periklean law (or laws) of 451/0, re-enacted in 403/2, and prescribing double endogamy — that is, citizen birth through both parents — as the normal qualification for a citizen (astos). Whether this fifth-century legislation declared mixed marriages (astos with xene, xenos with aste) positively invalid or merely deterred them indirectly, through the disabilities falling upon the children, remains unclear. It is certain, however, that by the time [Demosthenes] 59 was delivered, in the 340s, both the parties to and the accessories in such marriages were breaking the law. ‘At that time an alien who joined the oikos of a citizen as husband or wife (the word synoikein implies a purported marriage, not mere concubinage) could be prosecuted by graphe and, if found guilty, was sold as a slave; the citizen man who thus received an alien woman into his oikos as his wife was fined 1000 drachmas. A man who, acting as her kyrios, gave an alien woman to a citizen for marriage could also be prosecuted by graphe, and if he was found guilty he was disfranchised and his property was confiscated’.