Parrhêsia has been understood as a right under the Athenian democracy, roughly equivalent to the right of free speech in modern democracies, including the privilege of speaking in the assembly. In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘rights’ is anachronistic in this connection; more particularly, parrhêsia was less a right than an expectation, the idea that one might freely express even unpopular opinions without fear of repression. But unpopular opinions might run athwart notions of public decency, and free expression might tilt over into license or shamelessness. Examples are given of how Athenian discourse, in tragedy (especially Euripides' Phoenician Women) and oratory, negotiated the delicate balance between forthrightness and insolence.

It was many years after the last premiere of a Terentian comedy that the first attempts to write the history of Latin poetry appeared. Scholars had available little documentary material regarding the poets of the late third and early second centuries except the texts of poems, dates of performance of so-called carmina in priestly archives and of so-called fabulae in magisterial archives, and inscriptions on tombstones. These poets were without exception slaves or non-Roman clients of the great aristocratic families and their persons were not well regarded in the community at large. Neither the attitude to poetry of Roman society nor the example of Greek historiography permitted the chroniclers of Roman public life to take account of them. The poets who wrote for the theatre of fifth-century Athens came for the most part from well-regarded citizen families and practised an honoured craft. Although those of them who wrote comedies had much to say about Athenian public life and although their prejudices tended to correspond with his own the great Thucydides had ignored them. Their first biographers found themselves as badly off for contemporary documentary material as Roman writers were to be and yet by the exercise of judgement and fancy in interpreting the extant texts succeeded in constructing extensive narratives. The Roman writers took over Greek methods here as in other areas.

Alexander’s administrative arrangements in India are an obscure and somewhat neglected subject. The obscurity is due to a crucial lacuna in the narrative sources, which take us to a crisis in government but say nothing of its resolution. Late in 325 the satrap of northern India, Philip son of Machatas, was assassinated by some of his native mercenaries. In his place Alexander appointed the native prince Taxiles to govern the territory along with Eudamus (the officer commanding the satrapal army of Thracians) until such time as he sent out a new satrap from court. Nothing more is heard of a replacement or of India. The sources foreshadow an administrative change but never report the outcome. Instead we have to wait for the reports of the satrapal distributions of Babylon and Triparadeisus, in which the division of the Indian provinces is sensibly different from what it had been in Alexander’s day. The change may be due to the king himself or to his successors. Both views have been stated, but the issue has never been fully argued and it is worth reopening. It has important implications for Alexander’s view of empire in his last years and for the status of India in his imperial plans.

Asconius believed he had access to two published editions of Cicero’s defence of Milo. The first purported to be a record of the speech as delivered at the trial, in which Cicero was not at his best. The second edition was regarded by Asconius as Cicero’s supreme achievement in oratory. This edition is that which we still have; the first has perished, and it has even been suggested that Asconius — and Quintilian — were duped by a forgery. Even so Asconius’ knowledge of Cicero’s line of defence in the trial cannot have depended on the text of this supposed verbatim record alone, but rather on an ample historiography on which he drew for the long and circumstantial argumentum to his Milonian commentary. (A forger, for that matter, who could impose on Asconius and Quintilian must also have been historically well informed about the case.) Any indication by Asconius, therefore, of a divergence between the original defence and the extant version is likely to rest on specific knowledge.

I have long been tempted by the vast haul of ostraka from the Kerameikos excavations of 1966-8 to review afresh the whole history of ostracism at Athens. Though they have still been only summarily published, enough is now known to make the enterprise worthwhile. I leave aside the question whether Kleisthenes introduced the institution as part of his legislative programme, possibly in a form that involved only his new Council and not the people as a whole. This intriguing topic does not affect the history of ostracism as we know it. Scholars agree that the first victim was Hipparchos Charmou in 487 B.C., but the Kerameikos ostraka tell us nothing of this occasion. Nor do they help with the ostracisms of Xanthippos and Aristeides and, since nothing can really be done with the Agora ostraka here, I shall omit these also from my survey. But the ostracism of Megakles has been brilliantly illuminated.

In the early months of 324 B.C., Harpalus, treasurer to Alexander the Great, fled Babylon westwards rather than run the risk of remaining to face his king, whose return from the Indian expedition was marked by a widespread purge of satraps and generals. With a sizeable complement of ships, mercenaries and money, Harpalus appeared off Cape Sunium in Attica in mid-summer, seeking entry into Athens, and despite an initial refusal, was subsequently admitted, only to be placed under arrest soon afterwards. His detention was brief, however, and having successfully escaped from custody, he fled the Greek mainland, presently to meet his death at the hands of his own men. At Athens investigations were instigated, and following a protracted preliminary inquiry by the Areopagus, a number of prominent Athenian statesmen were named as having accepted bribes from Harpalus. The most notable outcome of the subsequent cases argued before the appointed dicastery was the conviction of Demosthenes who, on being unable to pay the allotted fine, went into temporary exile in southern Greece in the first half of 323 B.C. Such, in barest detail, is the Harpalus Affair, about which much has been written by numerous scholars in an attempt to explain satisfactorily the roles of both Harpalus and Demosthenes in the above-outlined sequence of events.

Kolossai, an anciently-celebrated south-west Phrygian town, now lies dormant as a denuded mound three kilometres north of the modern Turkish town of Honaz. It is not over-endowed with published discoveries of material remains. In the last few years, two new inscriptions plus one recorded in an early epigrapher's notes and two new coins found in situ have been published. The total is now twenty-seven inscriptions and 157 or 158 coins. The most systematic material analysis of the site has focused on the surface pottery remains. The attempted compensation for this dearth by previous historians in over-reading the testimonia for the site is hardly satisfying, and one awaits with anticipation the fruit of those who are able to garner permission to survey the site completely and commence excavations. Meanwhile, each small discovery is valuable, and I am grateful to Professor Ender Varinlioğlu for permission to publish this inscription.

The first four Caesars formed a dynasty, and each successively was his predecessor’s chief and legitimate heir, inheriting the bulk of his private property, including his slaves, and taking his place as patron of his clientes, who included his freedmen. The conspirators who killed Gaius Caligula also ended the dynasty, and when the Senate met on the Capitol to consider the state of the Republic, it was proposed to obliterate the Julian name. The empire, it seemed, had ended, and though no one yet knew what would take its place, the Roman state would surely no longer be bequeathed like an heirloom in the family of the Caesars: ‘Liberty’ was restored.

The mimiamboi of Herodas reveal familiar hallmarks of the poetry of the third century: characters drawn from socially humble backgrounds; a literary re-casting of sub-literary ‘genres’; the revival of an archaic metre; the free reconstruction of an artificial literary dialect; the reaching back to claim authority for poetic practice in a great figure of the past. Obvious links between the mimiamboi and the roughly contemporary ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus (especially Idylls 2, 3, 14, and 15) have always attracted attention since the publication of the major papyrus in 1891. No subject has, however, so dominated discussion of the mimiambs as the question of how they were intended to be presented to the public, and how indeed they were so. Were they merely to be read (privately), or to be ‘performed’ either by a solo performer (with or without the assistance of mute extras), or by a ‘troupe’ of actors? We must not assume, of course, that the mode of reception of all the mimiambs was the same, or that one poem was not at different times ‘performed’ in different ways. Moreover, the history of the debate since 1891, a history of which Giuseppe Mastromarco has given a full account, suggests that it is hardly possible on internal grounds alone to prove to general satisfaction that the poems were presented in one way rather than another.

The following notes on two well-known passages of Hellenistic epic, part of Cleanthes’ so-called hymn to Zeus and Aratus’ proem, may be of some interest as affording a detailed comparison of how the poets use, adapt and add to the traditional epic vocabulary and phraseology to convey closely related subject-matter that both belongs to and goes beyond the normal range of epic.

However much we may disagree about the meaning and function of the Iris-Lyssa scene in Euripides’ Heracles (815-73), we can be certain of one thing: it was meant to be startling. We can find, it is true, a handful of examples of the appearance of a deity in mid-action in tragedy, and no single feature of the scene to be discussed is without parallel, but viewed as a whole it is unique among the extant plays and the plays for which we have fragmentary evidence. For example, the appearance of Athena in Rhesus 595 ff. and the probable appearance of Artemis and Apollo during the course of Sophocles’ Niobe (cf. frs. 441a, 442, 445 Radt), must have been striking, but in each case the supernatural visitation advances the plot along not unexpected lines. In our scene the intervention of Iris and Lyssa drives the second part of the play in a completely surprising direction. Again, it is remarkable that two speaking characters appear and then not to agree but to quarrel heatedly about Lyssa’s assignment. The only even remote parallel is the discussion between Kratos and Hephaistos in Prometheus where the deities speak and act on ground-level and are found not at a crucial turning-point in the middle of the play, but at its beginning, when the disagreement of the speakers is a curtain-raiser to the more significant discord which pervades the drama.

The Capitoline Aphrodite (fig. 1) counts among the most copied statues of antiquity. In 1951, Bianca Felletti Maj collected 101 replicas of the type compared with 33 for the Medici Aphrodite (fig. 2) and a mere five for the so-called Aphrodite of the Troad; and many more examples have surfaced since.’ Yet despite the Capitoline type's popularity, the date, location and authorship of its original remain clouded, as does its relation to these other ‘pudica’-type Aphrodites, especially the Medici. Leaving aside the Aphrodite of the Troad, this article presents new evidence that may resolve one of these problems and sheds some new light upon some of the others.

The most vivid general impression which results from reading the inscriptions of the Greek cities within this part of the Seleucid dominions—of the Koina into which these cities still grouped themselves for half-religious, half-political purposes, and texts of the royal letters and decrees addressed to these recipients–is that all these cities were in a constant ferment of anxiety and activity concerning the retention of their much-prized ‘autonomy’. To seek fresh promises and guarantees on this score was perhaps the main purpose of their frequent and costly embassies to the king during the Seleucid period, and the embassies always seem to have involved the bestowal of ‘crowns’ (that is, gold wreaths) in addition to the numerous complimentary titles and honours–divine and otherwise, temples, monthly (sic) royal birthdays and the like–which they constantly begged him to accept.

Perhaps the most important military development of the Flavian period was the establishment of the vast provincial complex of Galatia/Cappadocia. As a result the entire aspect of Roman Asia Minor was changed. Instead of a weak agglutination of unarmed provinces with client kingdoms at the periphery there emerged a single huge province extending from the borders of Asia as far as the Euphrates, all of it under a consular legate with a subordinate of praetorian rank. Central Anatolia could at last be treated as a unity. Accordingly in the 70s and 80s A.D. a network of military roads sprang up, leading from Pisidia in the west and Lycaonia in the south to the Euphrates frontier and to the Pontic coast. Then as now the military area was to the east. Two legions had permanent camps at Satala in Lesser Armenia and at Melitene oh the Euphrates; and there was a chain of subsidiary fortresses manned by legionary vexillationes or auxiliary cohorts, which extended as far as Dioscurias, halfway up the eastern coast of the Black Sea.

Eduard Fraenkel’s celebrated remark, that ‘for Greek tragedy there exists also something like a grammar of dramatic technique,’ has recently been confirmed, explained and illustrated by a series of distinguished studies emanating from both sides of the Atlantic. These demonstrate clearly how recurrent incidents were habitually presented by the fifth-century Attic tragedians with similar structural patterns. The transmission and execution of orders, for example, became so conventionalized that a set of rules for what is permissible and not permissible in the dramatic treatment can readily be formulated. By the time that a playwright like Euripides began competing in the dramatic festivals towards the middle of the fifth century, there already existed a sufficient body of material in plays produced for the accepted and acceptable dramatic conventions to be equally familiar to dramatist, actor and spectator. Conventions, however, like other organisms, may develop; they are not necessarily static. An experimentalist such as Euripides could play on his audience’s expectations and experience by altering just one of the elements in the conventional model, and by a minimal shift in the pattern shock the audience and amend the convention. In this paper I should like first to exemplify the Euripidean method briefly with two instances from the Ion, where the chorus creates or sustains the challenge to the conventions, and then to examine at greater length Euripides’ use and exploitation of the dramatic conventions tied to off-stage cries.

Modern historians of Rome have expended much care and ingenuity in discussing the constitutional basis for the Augustan principate. Ancient historians had a much simpler view — it was a monarchy. And they were right, even if it was a monarchy within a constitution so that as monarch Augustus contrived to govern with the consent (and support in many cases) of the traditional governing classes without constantly having to invoke the reserve powers of a monarch whose will is ultimately sovereign.

In order to appreciate the originality of Alexander in his policy in Asia, we may note that the actions of Philip in the Balkan area were described in terms of traditional Greek imperialism. ‘Philip made Macedonia mistress of many great tribes and city-states’, wrote Diodorus in a Proem which was probably an abbreviated form of the Proem of Ephorus XXVIII (Diod. 16.1.3 ). In 349 B.C. Demosthenes remarked that ‘the Paeonian, the Illyrian and in a word all those folk, it should be realised, would gladly be self-governing and free rather than be slaves ; for they are unaccustomed to being anyone’s subject’ (1.23). In addressing the Macedonians at Opis, Alexander pointed out that thanks to Philip the Macedonians had become masters and not slaves and subjects of those very barbarians who used to plunder their possessions and carry off their persons; and that Philip ‘added to Macedonia the greater part of Thrace’ (Arr. An. 7.9.3).

The sovereignty of the people, its libertas, is the key concept in the civic and political vocabulary of republican Rome. One of the periods in which it was particularly emphasised was the last thirty or forty years of the second century B.C., to judge from the later comments made on the series of leges tabellariae passed in this period, and from the types and themes which appeared on coins issued by the relatives and descendants of those responsible for proposing the laws.

The imagery of black and red figure pottery continues to be a valuable source of information for the social and ideological history of ancient Athens. These images have traditionally provided historians with insights into material culture, religion and daily life activities, and increasingly, in large part due to francophone archaeologists like François Lissarrague, they are also being employed as detailed evidence of the conceptual world of archaic and classical Athenians. It is striking though that in spite of the clear evidentiary value of finely painted Attic pottery, almost no sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the critical issue of whose lifestyle and ideological point of view were replicated in images by Athenian pottery painters. In light of this lacuna the recent research project of David Gill and Michael Vickers to isolate more exactly the status of red and black figure pots in Attic society would appear to be most promising. Their findings end up challenging two widely held but never fully substantiated articles of faith of classical archaeology, namely that this type of pottery was used extensively and valued highly by the Athenian elite, and that these ‘vases’ were an important and privileged medium for the development of Greek art. Gill and Vickers seek to demonstrate that the homes of upper class Athenians were crammed full of precious metal vessels and had no place for mere painted pots. They maintain instead that such fictile pieces were inexpensive, and slavishly imitated the shapes, colours and even imagery of the vastly more valuable vessels made of gold and silver. Consequently, Gill and Vickers argue that Attic finely painted pottery was entirely dependent on the artistry and inventiveness of the designers and smiths of precious metallic pieces.

This short document from the fourth century gave guidance to students who were getting an education in the tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman schools. Basil came out more strongly than any other early Church theologian in favour of the view that pagan literature, while not being authoritative, could be studied by Christians at school to their advantage. This view held good for many Christians in the Greek-speaking Byzantine world for the next thousand years and was endorsed in the West at the Renaissance when the Address was published in many editions throughout Europe. Leonardo Bruni first translated it into Latin in 1405, and it paved the way for his translation of classical texts, of Demosthenes, Aeschines, Plutarch and Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle.