Today one expects a truth or the truth to be characterized by objectivity, communicability, and unity. It should be testable, precisely expressed, consistent, and logical. To be all this, the truth must conform to the world of observation, and it must be based on data that can verify or falsify it. A truth may be general or particular, and research in different disciplines, of course, will pursue information and truths by different methods.

Some thinkers express dissatisfaction with the narrowness of this concept of truth, which is largely based on the specific needs of the inductive model of the natural sciences. It makes us uncomfortable, however, to say that the poet has one kind of truth, the philosopher another, the doctor, the physicist, and the geographer still others, and the historian another, yet autonomous truth. History is among the fields of study most subject to misapprehension, for it lies between human sciences and human arts, also between cases and laws.

This is the text of Meritt, McGregor and H.T. Wade-Gery published in ATL as D 22, except that has replaced their in line 20.

In 1980 the restoration of line 22 was challenged by A.S. Henry: Vindex Humanitatis, Essays in Honour of John Huntly Bishop, edited by B.A. Marshall (University of New England Publishing Unit, Armidale), 17-33. He pointed out that is a reflexive pronoun, which must refer to the subject of the verb to which it is attached. The subject of on the other hand, is ; our restoration, he concluded, is therefore impossible.

On the editors’ suggestion, Professors Meritt and McGregor have generously afforded me the opportunity to conclude our scholarly exchange with a brief comment on their latest remarks (see above, pp.21-24).

First, a few points of detail.

(i) I still find unacceptable the label ‘indirect reflexive’ given to the phenomenon in dispute, and I see no reason to retract anything I wrote in Antichthon 17 (1983), 32-36 on the grammatical case,

(ii) The alternative restorations outlined by me (ibid. 31) were not proposals as such but merely exempli gratia suggestions. I entirely agree that it is undesirable ‘to restore errors and irregularities’ — though the doubled sigma is not demonstrably an error — but what I have suggested can at least be paralleled elsewhere on Attic stones. Likewise, although may well be unacceptable in i3 62.10-11, that does not mean that the heavily restored must therefore necessarily be right.

It has long been recognised that the word tyrannos and related forms are often used in Greek where the English derivative ‘tyrant’ is an inappropriate translation. This has led some modern writers to consider the word to be a synonym for basileus, and simply to mean ‘king’. Wilamowitz concluded that the pejorative use of the word, which has been carried over into the English ‘tyrant’, was a late development, stemming from Plato. Andrewes holds a similar view, that before the fourth century the word was neutral and that a ‘monarch’ could be addressed as ‘tyrant’ in compliment.

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 crucial point about this passage was well brought out by R. Hackforth: the immortality here envisaged ‘does not spring directly from the apprehension of , but from the begetting of true virtue (sc. in another’s soul).’ And Hackforth drew the conclusion that ‘consequently the philosopher can no more than the ordinary man become immortal (note ) save by vicarious self-perpetuation.’ The importance of this contention is that it offers us a Plato without a belief in personal immortality such as is prominent in other dialogues in which a similar version of the theory of Forms appears and that, because of this difference, the ‘ascent’ passage and the explanation of the creativity eros cannot be used directly in conjunction with dialogues in which a conflicting view of immortality appears, as part of a Platonic theory of eros.

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).

In her recent re-interpretation of the major frieze of the Altar of Zeus from Pergamon, Erika Simon made a relatively minor new identification whose ramifications beyond the immediate confines of the Altar are somewhat larger but appear to have gone unnoticed. The figure in question is a winged female, fighting on the Gods’ side, whom Simon suggested may be Hemera, a personification of Day. Within the context of the frieze alone, the identification seems reasonable, but it presents some difficulties in the interpretation of two other similarly endowed females elsewhere. These are the winged daimon in the Dionysiac frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, and the girl who occupies the top right corner of the painting of the Finding of Telephos from the ‘Basilica’ in Herculaneum (Fig. 1). Fourteen years earlier Simon herself had grouped all three together as representations of something completely different: as images of the constellation Parthenos, better known nowadays under its Latin name of Virgo. It is the aim of this paper to examine the identification of the winged girl in the Herculaneum painting: can she still be regarded as Parthenos, now that the Pergamene parallel has been removed and so long as the identification of the Pompeian daimon remains a contentious issue? If so, then on what grounds can the identification be maintained? And how does this affect the interpretation of the other figures in the fresco, and of the painting as a whole?