One of the unsolved mysteries of Samaritan history is the problem of the Dosithean sect and its relationships with other Samaritan groups and with Christian and Gnostic sects. Of particular interest, in view of controversy over the history of Samaritan eschatology, is the question of whether the Dositheans believed in the resurrection of the dead and in a Messiah in the person of Joshua. It is more than fifty years since these questions were last examined in any detail and in the light of recent evidence accruing about the Samaritans the time would now seem to be opportune for a fresh evaluation of the evidence relating to Dositheanism.

A version of this commentary and bibliography was originally presented at the ‘Greek Drama II’ conference in Christchurch in February 1992. A subtitle could have been ‘What's been done since Sydney’ (site of ‘Greek Drama I’ in 1982), since my topic was to present a survey of the work of the past decade in Old Comedy. In a short period I cannot deal with all plays and topics, but will limit myself to six areas of discussion: (a) general studies, (b) Aristophanes’ early career, (c) Aristophanes and politics, (d) ritual as sub-text, (e) women in comedy, and (f) Eupolis and Kratinos.

Aristotle was evidently employing the vocabulary of fourth-century politics to express his contemporaries’ reconstruction of what had happened in early sixth-century Athens: it was as natural for him to explain in terms of oligarchs versus democrats what had been a situation of civic discord in archaic times, as it is for twentieth-century students to see it in terms of a power clash between organized political parties or of an industrial class struggle. But the liberation by statute of a demos from slavery was a concept strange to Aristotle’s world; and so he defined what he thought the tradition meant in this case:

I am sure I was not the only student who, when he first made his way stumblingly through the opening lines of the Persae, called to mind the raising of the curtain on the first act of The Mikado. But Aeschylus tells us a good deal more in his opening lines than the identity of the chorus of elders. They are the men left behind when the Persian host went to Greece, and they have been appointed by King Xerxes, son of Darius, to guard the wealth and splendour of the royal palace and oversee the land.

What I want to show in this paper is that what seems so natural in the Persae is achieved throughout tragedy and old comedy through a conscious adherence, as far as the identity of characters is concerned, to a convention. It is a convention which arises from the nature of Greek drama as a literary form primarily designed for performance.

This paper explores the use of utopian motifs in early Greek concepts of the afterlife. The notion of a paradisiacal existence for selected heroes after death is widespread in Greek thought, going back at least as far as Hesiod, and appearing in such diverse sources as Pindar, the Orphic gold leaves, Attic comedy, and Lucian. Such idyllic afterlives share various features common to Lewis Mumford’s ‘utopias of escape’ (The Story of Utopias, London, 1922, 15), such as the absence of pain and toil, plentiful and self-supplying food and drink, the company of one’s peers, and so forth. They also share the utopian ideals of selective and restricted citizenship – although the requirements for entry may vary. The popularity of eschatological utopias is associated with the theme of a lost ‘Golden Age’ and the consequent assumption of the inevitable decline of human societies. Although often regarded as escapist fantasies, eschatological utopias do react, often critically, to perceived issues in the societies that constructed them. Their unreal nature is regarded as problematic, and through their association with Kronos and the Golden Age they exemplify the dangers of anomia. But they also provide a means by which an individual can preserve his consciousness and identity in death.

In the Latin Settlement, which was supposedly initiated in 338 BC, Rome organised many of the incorporated communities into either the civitas or civitas sine suffragio. Livy, and those scholars who have accepted his explanation, claim that the use of these two types of citizenship was influenced by the political and military circumstances of each community’s incorporation. Such an argument posits that Rome judged each community on the basis of its past behaviour and ‘rewarded’ or ‘punished’ it accordingly, using these different forms of citizenship. However, Livy’s anachronistic and inconsistent approach to the Roman franchise undermines this explanation – at least in its simplest form. This paper highlights the inconsistencies in Livy’s account of the Latin Settlement and offers an alternative explanation for the differing grants of citizenship. It is argued that the pre-existing languages and cultures of the different communities need to be taken into account, as does the legal significance of the use of Latin at Rome. In sum, this paper argues that the decision to incorporate a community as a civitas or as a civitas sine suffragio was not straightforwardly based on the political or military circumstances of each community’s incorporation, but also (or rather) involved the recognition of cultural and linguistic differences in each community and the consequent practicalities of the inclusion of each in Rome’s legal and political apparatus.

This paper falls into two parts. The first explores the nature of the honour (if not unprecedented, outstanding) paid to Popilia circa 100 B.C.; the second speculates about the content of the panegyric pronounced on that occasion.

In 390 B.C., according to Livy, the Roman senate, in recognition of female generosity during the preceding Gallic siege, declared that women were to share with men the rights to funeral laudationes: matronis gratiae actae honosque additus ut earum sicut virorum post mortem sollemnis laudatio esset. The record is straightforward but the item is suspect because of the variant traditions which parallel it.

In 1931 F. Granier argued that treason trials and other matters of major political importance were heard by meetings of the Macedonian army assembly and this view received wide acceptance. However in the 1970s it was challenged by R. Lock and R.M. Errington, who concluded that there was no right of the army to be consulted in such cases, but that the king might seek to win the troops' approval before undertaking controversial actions, such as executing popular officers. More recently, N.G.L. Hammond has revived the view that the Macedonian army had the right to hold trials in cases of treason.

The Eleian manteis who practised at the altar of Zeus in Olympia appear to have belonged to two separate gene, the Iamids and the Klytiads. This paper first considers the identity and number of the Eleian mantic gene and then questions the long-held assumption that the Iamid genos was the first to become established at Olympia. It is argued that the foundation myths that appear in Pindar and Pausanias are probably the result of the embellishment of pre-existing tradition in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. While neither archaeology nor further textual evidence entitles us to assume that mantic activity at Olympia predated the late Archaic period, an early Classical inscription, certain of the sculptures on the temple of Zeus and a later series of inscriptions from Olympia do make it possible to infer that two mantic houses, of which the Iamids were one and the Klytiads likely the other, were practising at Olympia from that time or earlier. Some reflection upon the limitations of myth as historical evidence is offered before the conclusion is reached that we cannot be certain that the Iamids constituted the senior house.

Much is said in the text-books about Plato’s hankering after answers to moral questions which would offer scientific accuracy and absolute truth. It is to dialectic it seems that Plato turns in the hope of finding such accuracy. The Republic values Platonic dialectic rather higher than mathematical procedures, if only because the mathematician fails to explain the ultimate terms through which he conducts his inquiry. But the epistemologica! status of mathematics is at least as high as that of physical inquiry, whereas it is certainly higher than that of all this-worldly images. The images of the imitative artist were criticised for their distance from Platonic reality in Book X of the Republic, and it is not at all clear that they differ in this respect from the stories which Plato believes should be used at the commencement of his city’s education programme in Republic II (376e ff.). If myths are images, and images are low in epistemological status in the Republic and related middle period dialogues, then why does Plato use myths so prominently in precisely these dialogues?

Essential to a recent interpretation of Propertius iii 11 are the ideas that ‘the opening verses … establish clearly an erotic context for the rest of the poem’, and that ‘the statement that, with Augustus, Rome had nothing to fear from Cleopatra personally (55) can have nothing to do with her military resources … The victory celebrated here is that of Augustus over Cleopatra as over an enchantress, powerful in love.’ These assessments are based on the opinion, several times repeated, that Propertius' introduction of himself as the elegiac lover in vv. 1-8 necessitates our viewing everything in the poem thereafter as coloured by this fact.

Everyone knows that Caesar crossed the Rubicon because his political enemies at Rome had manoeuvred him into a position where he would soon be forced to leave his province, give up his imperium, and return to Rome as a private citizen, there to be put on trial, found guilty and have his political career ended. Yet over thirty years ago, Shackleton Bailey, in less than two pages of his introduction to Cicero's Letters to Atticus, destroyed the basis for this belief, and in the three decades since, no one has been able to rebuild it. Everyone also knows that Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon, was grossly outnumbered and conquered Italy only through his own rapidity and his enemies' sluggishness and incompetence; yet this belief was irreparably shattered by H.-M. Ottmer in 1979, in a book which professional scholars have practically ignored. The justification for this article is that it may bring to others' attention the real state of researches on the circumstances of Caesar's invasion of Italy, and perhaps even inhibit further restatements of exploded beliefs.

Much of the primary material for the social history of the early Roman empire is inscriptional and an uncomfortably high proportion of this material consists of just names. Names of persons are what we have in abundance and the study of nomenclature at all levels of society is bound to be a most important key to the interpretation of that society.

The sources which refer to Silvanus and his abortive usurpation are few and varied. They include a secular historian with a military background (Ammianus Marcellinus), a Roman emperor (Julian) and a lesser group composed of secular and ecclesiastical historians, orators and priests. Epigraphical evidence is slight. These sources are not of equal merit or value nor are they in absolute agreement. Indeed, the two major sources, Ammianus and Julian, differ substantially.

A curious scene (fig. 1) decorates the Attic lekythos BS 423 in the Antikenmuseum at Basel. It was drawn not long before 480 B.C. by the Diosphos Painter, a fairly prolific craftsman who rarely devoted to his pictures as much care and imagination as he did in this case. Specializing in the decoration of small vases such as lekythoi, alabastra and small neck-amphorae he is among those conservative painters in Athens’ Kerameikos of the earlier fifth century who continued to use the old black-figure technique which most workshops had by then abandoned in favour of the new red-figure technique invented around 530 B.C. But while the bulk of his work is in black-figure, most of his better pieces are in so-called Six’s technique. This technique is named after the Dutch scholar Jan Six who first studied it and involves drawing the figures on an all-black background by combining incised lines and added colours (mostly white, but for more elaborate scenes also pink and red). Of East Greek origin it came to Athens at the same time red-figure was invented, probably introduced by Nikosthenes whose workshop appears to have been instrumental in its promotion during the last decades of the sixth century. To take full advantage of the possibilities offered by it was, however, left to the Sappho and above all to his colleague, the Diosphos Painter, who improved its decorative appeal by achieving a more balanced distribution between added colours and incised lines. Substantial parts of his pictures are left in incised outline, without any colour added, and he is particularly fond of compositions in which an all-black figure drawn in pure outline contrasts with one that is painted in added white.

It seems that not just anyone, however qualified by age and distinction, could sue for plebeian office. I have interpreted the lex Atinia (perhaps about the time of the Hannibalic War or shortly thereafter) as removing the prohibition on members of the senate becoming tribunes. That regulation, I would conjecture, had been operative since the early days of plebeian consulates, reflecting perhaps a tension between the popular office and the aristocratic council. But at the same time that this restriction was probably becoming out-moded or dysfunctional, another, more peculiar one was still alive and well.

There is surely no one any more who requires convincing that the basis of the Augustan principate was the control of the legions. Augustus may have paraded his tribunician power and played down his potestas as a magistrate, but the Res Gestae is above all else the record of the generalissimo in control of the entire military resources of the empire. That control remained almost unchallenged for forty-four years.

William Harris brilliantly demonstrated that under the Republic military glory was the preeminent virtue of Roman politicians. The state was now in the control of one man, but nothing had changed, except that the stakes were higher. Edward Gibbon, of course, detected the truth. He had, after all, both political and military experience – however inglorious.

In the consideration of ancient Greek verbal syntax there are three main factors: the lexical meaning, or range of meanings, of each verb, the possible range of significance of its inflexion, including aspect, voice and mood (or mood-substitute), and the context. The interaction of these is such that the understanding of the complexities of each depends to some extent on its relationship to the others. Although we naturally describe the lexical meaning in terms of our own language, it is, of course, the ancient Greek meaning of the stem that is really relevant. For example, the dominant translation usually proposed for is ‘conquer’, yet in Greek terms it really means ‘am victorious’, for it appears to be a stative verb, one of ‘being’ or ‘having’, like , rather than an action verb, one of ‘doing’, like , . The context factor is not confined to the immediate context, the rest of the clause or sentence in which the words under consideration occur, but may involve the wider context embracing the paragraph, the chapter and the nature of the whole work, and also the assumed or external context of what the speaker or writer could assume to be commonly accepted in his society or might expect his audience to know or recognise. However one defines the various circles of context, it is important for modern readers to recognise that unexpressed assumptions, whether based on physical observation of gestures or on the shared habits of an ancient society, can sometimes lead to misunderstanding and to overconfident misjudgment.

The metrical technique of Catullus in his elegiac verse has not yet received the detailed examination that has been given to the usage of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid by Platnauer in his Latin Elegiac Verse (Cambridge, 1951). Robinson Ellis in the Prolegomena to his Commentary on Catullus (Oxford, 1876) introduced this part of his subject in these words: ‘If we examine the metrical peculiarities of these elegies, we shall find their defects to lie mainly in the too exclusive imitation of Greek models.’ He then goes on to speak of the Greek practice of allowing the thought to run on uninterruptedly without necessarily a pause at the end of the couplet, and of the Greek freedom in admitting words of any length in the last place in the pentameter: ‘in these respects the Catullian elegy is completely Greek.’ In the Introduction to the Select Elegies of Propertius (Macmillan, 1884) by J.P. Postgate there is a brief reference to what is described as the ‘carelessness’ of Catullus about the ending of the pentameter, and a further censure is implied in the mention of ‘his extraordinary number of elisions’; in short, Postgate describes the elegiac of Catullus as ‘still semi-barbarous’. Clearly, we have a problem here, since it is hard to reconcile the two descriptions of verse which in some respects is ‘completely Greek’ and in others ‘semi-barbarous’.

In an article published in this journal several years ago, Dr B. Rawson put forward the suggestion that the temple of Hercules associated with Pompeius' building activity should be assigned to an early period in his career, either 79 or (more likely) about 70 B.C. If the latter, she connects it with a competition between Pompeius and Crassus to secure the mantle of military prowess as the heir of Sulla, manifest in the lavish sacrificial feast given by Crassus in 70 B.C. which she says he made at the festival of Hercules Invictus on 12 August, in thanks for the military success which the god had secured for him in the recent slave war, and which was designed to steal Pompeius' thunder as the games celebrating his Spanish victories were due to begin a few days later on 15 August (Cic. Verr. i 31).