Since the decipherment of Linear B a number of scholars have argued, on the basis of supposed Mycenaean survivals in the Homeric poems, that the Greek legendary poetic tradition ran continuously from the Bronze Age through the Dark Age down to the singers of the Ionian towns in the ninth and eighth centuries. However, the directness of the connection between the narrative poetry of the Mycenaean Age, if indeed such existed, and the subsequent development of the Epic in Greece has been called into question. Thus Shipp, for example, has argued that most of the items listed by Chadwick in his article Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect in fact left their mark for a time at least on forms of Greek other than that of the Epic, and so could well have entered this tradition in post-Mycenaean times and in some other way than through a direct poetical current from the Bronze Age. A similar conclusion has been reached by Kirk, who has expressed his views forcefully in a series of publications. Consider the following:

The two objective criteria for dating elements within the Homeric poems, namely archaeology and language, require careful handling and reveal less than is generally claimed for them. They enable certain elements to be recognized as having existed as early as the late Bronze Age, but do not necessarily prove that these all passed into the Ionian Epic tradition by the medium of late Bronze Age poetry.

Vergil's parade of heroes, a panegyric that becomes a threnody, is an odd blend. It is framed by an elaborate quasi-philosophical eschatology, whose relation to the parade is problematical. Much of the passage puts itself forward as high panegyric, yet certain sections are at variance with that tendency. The lament for Marcellus (868-86) is most commonly remarked upon; other passages are equally, or more, anomalous. Still, the massive self-assurance of the picture of the underworld has its own imposing conviction, so that although the disparateness of the contributing elements has been documented often enough, few have felt the need to dispute the question of whether the blend coheres as a single statement. One noteworthy reader of Vergil was, however, compelled to give minute attention to the implications of the historical vision in Book 6. Incidentally throughout the Bellum Ciuile, but especially in his own sixth book, with the vision of hell called forth by the agency of the witch Erictho, Lucan provides a provocative reading of Aeneid 6. His insights will be exploited in the discussion as a valuable stimulus to reflection and re-assessment; an appendix will give a more systematic account of his re-interpretation of Vergil.

The twenty-two volumes of the last edition of the collected works of Galen occupy a smaller place in the affections of classical scholars than on the library shelf. The reputation of Galen as a great physician is sufficient to ensure a respectful neglect of his writings that is as undeserved as it is effective and that hampers a reassessment of his aims and abilities. Even though recent scholarship has done much to show him as a recognizable product of and participant in the Second Sophistic movement with strong claims to be regarded as a universal scholar, Wilamowitz's dismissal of him as a ‘Seichbeutel’ still remains a typical verdict. Not that the epithet was entirely unjust, for Galen's prolixity, his frequent polemics, his repetitions and recapitulations, and the inelegance of much of his prose style are all obstacles to his readers, few of whom have had the stamina and enthusiasm, to say nothing of the linguistic competence, to read all of his works preserved in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac. Thus it is not surprising that the finest contemporary account of society in Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, which lies buried deep in the fourteenth volume of Kuhn's edition, has only rarely been utilized in a discussion of that period. Πɛρὶ τΞῦ πρΞγινώσκɛιν, ‘On prognosis’, whose title, given by Galen himself, disguises the variety of its contents, has remained unread and its absence from the three volumes of the Scripta Minora Galeni and, as yet, from the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum has placed it beyond the ken of most historians. It is my intention in this paper to present a description of this treatise and a discussion of its position within literary genres as a contribution to the history of autobiography.

Homosexuality, it would appear, now claims the space in the public prints that was not long ago lavished on the ‘woman question’. Its prominence in contemporary life is reflected in art. Nearly sixty current journals dealing with the subject in all its multifarious manifestations are listed in the eighteenth edition of Ulrich's International Periodical Directory (1979). The experience of homosexuals in the concentration camps and the role of the homosexual as hero in contemporary fiction have lately provided matter for books. Recent biographies of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and W. H. Auden discuss their subjects' practice of or writings on homosexual behaviour. Masters and Johnson have now applied their quantitative approach to homoerotic physical response. Christian attitudes to homosexuality, notably in mediaeval Europe, have been extensively canvassed. In a less scholarly vein Edmund White has written of his travels in gay America; he, like Jeffrey Weeks and other members of the British Gay Left Collective, is much concerned with the politics and political vocabulary of homosexuality. Many other illustrations could be given. In short, ‘the love that dared not speak its name has become … insistently communicative’.

It is widely accepted that distinctive polities of an institutional complexity sufficient to consider as ‘states’ first appeared in the Aegean area shortly after c. 2000 B.C. Most scholars would also agree that the origins of these palace-centred societies of Minoan Crete cannot be understood without extensive reference to developments taking place within and beyond the Aegean during a long formative period spanning the late fourth and the whole of the third millennia B.C. Yet that is an era so remote that it lies well beyond the reach of even the most enthusiastic adherent of Homer as a source of information about the Bronze Age, beyond any demonstrable relevance of later Greek memory in myth and legend, well before the period to which the Mycenaean Linear B tablets refer – indeed, before the existence of written records of any sort in the region, at least in a form we can read at present. Such a dearth of documentary evidence, even of a very indirect or secondary character, might seem prima facie to damn the investigation of the emergence of the first states on Greek soil as inherently speculative and, to a degree, that is so; but in many respects the same or similar problems have to be faced in studying the later emergence of the Greek city-state. As Snodgrass has reminded us, the ancient Greek political analysts provide a wide range of ostensibly confident statements about the nature and aetiology of many early legal and religious institutions, yet they have scarcely anything to say about the appearance of the political entity of which they themselves claimed citizenship and they throw very little light on the origins of what they were analyzing. Indeed, he claims ‘it is doubtful how far, if at all, contemporary consciousness of the emergence of a “state” existed.’

It is a familiar fact that the religious tradition of Republican Rome did not depend on overt coercion of the citizen to maintain itself and its rituals. The censor did have powers to discipline those he found wanting in dutifulness towards the sacra; Cato once removed the public horse from one Veturius partly on religious grounds, though partly because he was too fat to ride it. In the courts, irreligion on the defendant's part was one of the most familiar themes of abuse; Cicero never underestimated the emotional impact of religious prejudice in his day. But the only formal charge of irreligion we hear of is that of incestum with a Vestal Virgin and, with that uncommon exception, there is nothing at Rome which corresponds even to the Greek asebeia proceedings, let alone to the persecutions or inquisitions of later Christian Europe. This does not prove that religious obligations were not felt or imposed through other forms of social pressure, but the apparatus of the State and the State's religious authorities seem not to have been directly concerned.

This paper argues that one of the functions of the Roman ritual calendar – the sequence of religious festivals as they occurred throughout the year – was to define and delineate Roman power, Roman history and Roman identity; and that it did this by evoking events from different chronological periods of the Roman past and arranging them in a meaningful sequence of time, but not a sequence defined by linear, narrative, history. I am concerned principally with the practice of Roman ritual during the late Republic and early Empire; and my argument depends on taking seriously the discussions of the various festivals preserved in the writings of contemporary Romans and Greeks – men who practised or observed the rituals. I want to stress that we should take the rituals and the preserved exegesis together – and I emphasize together – as an important part of a symbolic, religious discourse that continued to be meaningful in the complex urban society of Rome in the age of Cicero, Augustus, Seneca or Hadrian.

It has long been canonical to deny the Phoenicians a place in the ranks of the true colonisers of the Western Mediterranean. ‘The expansion of the Phoenicians’, says Moscati, ‘and later of the Carthaginians was predominantly commercial with no intent of conquest, requiring no stable settlements or mass emigration of the population.’ And although Moscati goes on to qualify this statement by admitting that, of course, some stable settlements did ensue, they were, he says, ‘in no way dependent on the phenomenon of expansion’. Thus by this thesis the Phoenicians may set up ‘comptoirs’, ‘relais’, ‘escales maritimes’, ‘établissements’, ‘Erkundungsfahrten’, ‘Factorei’, ‘teste di ponti’ and ‘emporia’, but never anything which might qualify as a colony in Maunier's terms, as emigration plus government.

Athenian tragedy is a ‘representation of élite practice …’, focusing primarily on the actions of ‘people superior to us’ in their moral and social station. Although it is debatable exactly what Aristotle means by σπουδαῖος in the context of a tragic plot, and to what degree his theory of tragedy is wedded to a belief in the social, as well as ethical, ‘superiority’ of the leading characters, there is no denying the obvious fact that the surviving plays draw a sharp line between the ‘serious’ (or ‘better kind of’) characters, whose decisions, actions, and sufferings form the core (or ‘soul’) of the plot, and the minor characters (‘us’) who form the socio-political context for those decisions and actions, and whose attitudes and desires tend to be affected by, but never to cause or determine, the key crises and reversals of that plot. The ‘serious’ characters are invariably royal or noble, while the minor characters are of markedly lower status. Thus, while it may be correct to describe Athenian tragedy as ‘polyphonic’ and ‘egalitarian’ in its form, in so far as it gives generous opportunities for female, servile, foreign, and lower-class voices to be heard, along with – and even in opposition to – the voices of the aristocratic main characters, the trajectory of the plots, along with the costumes and spatial arrangements of the theatre itself, nonetheless tend to reassert very strongly the differences between high and low, ‘superior’ and ordinary.

In this paper I will discuss what Aristotle has to say on the relation between τὸ ἕν and τὸ ὄν. Stated briefly the relation is that τὸ ἕν and τὸ ὄν are (a) transcendental predicates: each applies in all the categories; (b) convertible predicates: each implies the other and adds nothing to the other. For Met. 1003b23–4 claims that being and unity are one and the same thing in that they are implied in each other, τὸ ὂν καὶ τὸ ἕν ταὐτὸν καὶ μία φύσις τῶι ἀκολουθεîν ἀλλήλοις. This is clearly meant to apply in every category, since the convertibility claim is functioning as a premiss in an argument whose conclusion is that there are exactly as many types of being as of unity. At Met. 1061a17–18 there is an equally explicit statement of convertibility, καὶ γὰρ εἰ μὴ ταὐτὸν ἄλλο δ' ἐστίν, ἀντιστρέφει γε· τό τε γὰρ ἓν καὶ ὄν πως, τό τε ὄν ἔν. I will try to say more precisely what these claims mean, and come to some view on their philosophical plausibility.

There are a number of reasons for discussing these topics. First, it is a prolegomenon to a comprehensive discussion of all those predicates which came to be thought of as convertible and transcendental.

P. Vidal-Naquet, en une série d'articles a construit, ou inventé, une figure composite, qui sous-tend les représentations mythiques des jeunes dans la Grèce ancienne, aussi bien que les pratiques réelles (rites d'initiation, éphébie, kryptie, “régiments” d'élite) gouvernant le statut des jeunes dans la cité: il s'agit du fameux “chasseur noir”. Cette représentation des tensions et des ambiguïtés qui entourent le moment du passage de l'enfance à la maturité permet d'éclairer bon nombre de faits de société et de textes; le dossier, bien connu, en a été pleinement assimilé au cours des années depuis le premier article publié en 1968. Cependant, il existe un cas très intéressant et dont on parle peu, bien qu'il mérite sa place au dossier.

Tacitus Annals 3.28.

It was decided that a marble arch (Ianus) should be erected in the Circus Flaminius at public expense, positioned by the spot where statues have already been dedicated to Divus Augustus and the Augustan household by G. Norbanus Flaccus, together with gilded images of peoples conquered, and an inscription on the face of that arch stating that the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this marble monument to the memory of Germanicus Caesar, since he … (account of achievements follows) … unsparing of his labours, until an ovation should be granted to him by decree of the senate, had died in the service of the republic; and above the arch there should be set a statue of Germanicus Caesar in a triumphal chariot, and at his sides, statues of his father Drusus Germanicus, natural brother of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, of his mother Antonia, his wife Agrippina, his sister Livia, his brother Tiberius Germanicus and of his sons and daughters.

This article is an exploration of two distinct but related aspects of political life in the early Greek world, ethnicity (the conscious expression of group identity), and the existence of ethne, a term used very loosely in antiquity and now applied to most forms of state structure other than the polis. It is a review of a problem, namely a tendency to focus on the polis when studying state formation and a consequent need to re-examine certain assumptions about the relationship between material culture and group identity in order to trace ethnos development in the archaeological record. It is also an examination of current and potential avenues of research, illustrated with reference to one particular region, Achaia.

The Ion is one of Euripides' most dazzling and puzzling plays. Poised on the boundary between the sacred and the sceptical, the mysterious and the mundane, the mythic and the realistic, and, as so many have noted, between the tragic and the comic, the drama dips and twists and turns and turns and turns again in a continuing series of theatrical tours de force. The birds who swoop down in the opening scene and intervene again in the most important moment of the plot at Ion's banquet might well exemplify these paradoxes of which I speak.

Defilers of the sacred temple dedications with unwanted offerings of their own (106–7, 176) and nesting in the eaves of the roof, crudely ‘making offspring’, no doubt, as Ion suspects them of doing (172–5), they are at the same time bearers of sacred messages (phēmas) to mortals from the gods (180–1), oracular portents (oiōnoi) both generic and particular (1191, 1333, 377) which will prove their worth when, later at the banquet, one of the birds drinks the poisoned wine meant for Ion and by its own lifeless form reveals the lethal plot to its interpreter (1196–211).

Traditionally, discussion of Aristotle's metaphysics, including his theory of form and the ‘what it is to be’ any given substantial object, has dealt extensively with relevant texts in the Categories, Physics, De anima and, of course, the Metaphysics itself. But the biological works have been largely neglected as sources for knowledge about and insight into Aristotle's theory. This seems to me unfortunate. In his biological works Aristotle invokes the form of an animal constantly and in interesting physical and, one would have said, metaphysical detail, as the explanation for much, and that the crucial part, of what happens to it as it develops to maturity and maintains and reproduces itself. One would expect these explanations to reveal something about the character of Aristotelian forms and perhaps even to help resolve some of the many questions not clearly settled by him in his metaphysical writings. It might, I suppose, be argued, on the contrary, that Aristotle thought that the notion of form needed for metaphysical purposes is quite distinct from that needed in order to explain the biological phenomena addressed in the Parts and the Generation of Animals. Conceivably there is no, or only a very loose, systematic connection between what is said about forms in the two sets of works, so that one is not entitled to infer metaphysical consequences – consequences for the nature of forms as they appear and are argued about on metaphysical terrain – from what forms are taken to be like in the biological context. I will not attempt to argue against this line of interpretation here. In the belief that the philosophical interest of doing so will be sufficient justification, I will simply proceed on the natural assumption that Aristotle did intend his biological theory of forms to be a continuous development and extension of whatever theory of substantial forms he meant to be the upshot of his discussion in the central books of the Metaphysics.

When Aeschylus wrote, no distinction between morals and politics had yet been drawn. But in our day the moral and the political element in the Oresteia have usually been examined separately. Thus, for example, Professor Dover, in his thoughtful paper on ‘The Political Aspect of the Eumenides’, makes no attempt to connect this aspect with the moral issues raised in the earlier part of the trilogy. And Sir Richard Livingstone, in his paper on ‘The Problem of the Eumenides’, denied, if I understand him correctly, that any real link exists: ‘The last 350 lines of the Eumenides’, he says bluntly, ‘are not an integral part of the trilogy. They are a loosely connected episode, stitched on its outside.’ If he is right, we may properly ask what motive was so strong, what need so urgent, as to induce the poet thus to botch the conclusion of his masterpiece. And if he is wrong, we should try to prove him wrong by making clear the nature of the link. To explore these alternatives is the chief purpose of the present paper.

This article addresses a problem that is rapidly advancing to the status of a new Homeric question: the relationship between Greek epic and the narrative traditions of neighbouring Near Eastern cultures. The present situation recalls the debates that raged over the issue of oral poetry not so long ago. The formula used to be the central object of contention, now it is the ‘Near Eastern parallel’. Today there are so many parallels on record that it is hard to keep track. Yet, as with the formula, the number of known parallels seems to bear little relation to their usefulness. Now as then, problems of the most basic kind abound. What, for a start, is a Near Eastern parallel? And why should we care if someone pointed one out to us? Questions such as these are only just beginning to be asked in earnest.

As with the oral-traditional hypothesis, the Near Eastern hypothesis concerns the whole of Greek literature. But the problem has crystallised around epic, and so it is epic that concerns me here. In the first part of my paper, I sketch out briefly what I see as some of the parameters of the present impasse. In the second half, I suggest a framework for future study that enables us to see what we have come to call ‘Greek epic’ as one regional offshoot of the broader Near Eastern genre of cosmic history. In order to illustrate my claim, I look at one of the more notorious parallels between Greek and Near Eastern literatures: the problem of mortality as developed in the Iliad and the Poem of Gilgamesh. I argue that the full implications of the issue are better understood within the overall framework proposed in this article.

It is often observed that the familiar story of the origins of Rome appears to combine two distinct and incompatible legends: that of Aeneas, and that of Romulus and Remus. The first of these was in origin a development of a Greek story, with its roots in the epic tradition. Aeneas, the son of Venus and Anchises, escaped from Troy with his family and friends and after a series of adventures arrived in Italy where he founded Rome. The other story, that of Romulus and Remus, was localised in Latium. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the god Mars and Rea Silvia, daughter of a king of Alba Longa. On the orders of their grandfather they were cast into the Tiber. The river happened to be in flood, and when the waters receded the boat containing the infants was left high and dry at the foot of the Palatine, under a fig tree later known as the ficus Ruminalis. There they were suckled by a she-wolf, whose den was the near-by cave of the Lupercal. Rescued by shepherds, the boys grew up and after the death of Remus in suspicious circumstances Romulus founded a city on the Palatine, where his original dwelling, the casa Romuli, was preserved in later times.

The excavation of Aphrodisias in Caria has now uncovered so substantial an area of the city that the site must now feature in studies of both the Ancient and Byzantine city. Aphrodisias offers an example of a city whose history runs from the second half of the first century BC (when the settlement first prospered as a Free City in the fertile plain around the shrine of Aphrodite) until the late Middle Ages. But the chronological range of the surviving material also sets a familiar problem of urban history. How can such studies interpret buildings and settings which existed and functioned over many centuries, maintaining a presence in the city as its history passed from one historical ‘period’ to another? Can their permanence be recognised as a ‘continuity’; or should one look for clues of change and discontinuity? Is indeed the dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity an inevitable part of the vocabulary of urban history? The words have certainly dominated discussion of ‘capital’ cities like Rome and Constantinople in which much stress has been laid on identifying ‘continuities’, the strength of ‘tradition’, and significant ‘renewals’ of the past.