Xenophon's Symposium lies at a confluence between two trends in modern scholarship. On the one hand, its author and his writings have recently attracted a resurgence in interest and credibility. No longer is Xenophon regarded as merely a ‘literary dilettante’, a dull, unimaginative and ultimately incompetent philosopher, or a conservative gentleman of the British old school. He is rather a political radical, an innovator in literary form, and the defender of a ‘trendy and shocking philosopher’. In this vein, his Symposium has been rescued from condemnation as a poor imitation of Plato's dialogue of the same name. No modern reader of Xenophon's work would go so far as Eunapius in declaring its writer to be ‘the only man out of all the philosophers to adorn philosophy in word and deed’. Yet, as Huss's comprehensive commentary has shown, the Symposium is much more than the product of an amateur philosopher and writer. It is a work of considerable complexity which draws on a variety of literary influences beyond Plato's Symposium, mixing seriousness with jest in order to explore, among other issues, beauty and desire.

Although the role of competition in Greek cultural and social practices has been well documented and studied, it is only in the last decades that the extent to which it permeates Athenian drama has been realised. The element of competition in Athenian dramatic performances is now widely used as an interpretative tool, especially in Old comedy, where the competitive conditions of performance are overtly articulated. As research on the fragmentary comic poets proliferates, Aristophanes' rivals have become a far more visible element in the scenery of Old Attic comedy and, as a result, the fiercely competitive dimension of comic performances is more easily traced. We are now able to ask questions from new perspectives, and understand better such issues as authorial collaboration, charges of plagiarism, claims of degeneration and decline in the quality of plays and their authors, as well as illustrate the enormous role of audience reception in the interpretation of Old comedy. Aristophanes' bombastic and self-righteous comments regarding himself and his poetry are now read in a more nuanced manner, as a competitive poetic strategy which constructs a fictionalised ‘Aristophanes’.

The ‘Black Hunter’ is an expression proposed by P. Vidal-Naquet, to understand certain phenomena within ancient Greek society: it designated a cunning, youthful figure haunting the borders, which was meaningful in implied opposition to a ‘normal’ adult male citizen living in the civilised world. He represents an attempt to interpret Greek culture through Levi-Straussian structural polarities.

As examples of Black Hunters, Vidal-Naquet pointed to the Spartan kruptos (young Spartiates sent out for a short time to roam the countryside and kill helots) and the Athenian ephebe (young men, about to become adult, sent into military service for two years, between eighteen and twenty). The kruptos and the ephebe belonged to Greek rites of passage, where youths become inverted ‘Black Hunters’ before integrating in the community. Another, very interesting case occurs in late Hellenistic Chaironeia, where a local youth, Damon, threatened with rape by a Roman officer stationed in the city, banded up with coaevals and ambushed the Roman: the youths smeared their faces with soot, drank pure wine and slaughtered their man at dawn during a sacrifice, before running away and plundering the territory (they returned to kill the city magistrates at their evening meal) – all marks of anomie, marginality and extremeness.

Going through the literature of late antiquity, of, say, the third and fourth centuries A.D., one is likely to discover very easily three different concepts of Indian geography.

(1) In literary—not in scientific—texts which belong to the classical tradition, India is usually thought of as the country of two big rivers, namely the Indus and the Ganges. This India does not include the region south of the Vindhya mountains, in spite of the fact that the commercial relations between South India and the Roman empire had been particularly close during the first and second centuries A.D. India, according to this literary tradition, was accessible by land, by following the course of Alexander's campaign, whereas Indian trade in the Roman period actually followed the passage provided by the monsoon, which had been discovered in the late Hellenistic period. Many details of that classical or rather classicistic conception of India can be gathered from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, written early in the third century A.D., as well as from the History of Alexander, falsely attributed to Callisthenes.

The purpose of this paper is to defend a sound old doctrine against a brilliant, amusing and superficially plausible attack by Professor Daube. The doctrine is that propounded – admittedly in an extreme form – by Sir Henry Maine, that Roman society had a ‘singular horror of intestacy’, a ‘passion for testacy’; in his Gray Lectures of 1966, summing up a rather fuller case made in Tulane Law Review, 1965, Professor Daube claimed to demonstrate that the evidence for this doctrine was ludicrously inadequate and the notion in any case a priori absurd. His judgement has been endorsed, with some corroborative arguments, by Professor Watson, and has achieved the approval of Professor Brunt.

According to Daube the case in favour of the view that Romans usually made wills and had a dread of dying intestate consists of the following ‘chief’ arguments: that in the Twelve Tables a person who has not made a will is called intestatus, and the negative form of the word implies that it is the exception; secondly that, in Plutarch's famous story, the elder Cato said that one of the three things he regretted in life was to have spent a single day ἀδιάθετος, and finally that in Plautus' Curculio a man is cursed with the words intestatus vivito. With these three arguments Daube has – and gives – a good deal of fun, claiming, in the upshot, to have blown them all sky-high and thus to have demolished the entire positive case for the old view.

This study has a limited aim. It is to expand as fully as possible one aspect of Eclogue 1. The aspect concerned covers Virgil's description of the nature of his pastoral poetry, its inspiration both by poetic predecessors and a living dedicatee, and the claims which he makes implicitly for his own poetic achievement in the volume to which this poem serves as introduction. Some of the points which I make have been picked up by others, but not, in my opinion, welded into a coherent reading of this entire aspect of the poem. I shall attempt to show that we have here a carefully composed preface to the book of Eclogues; that it establishes a programme of specifically Roman pastoral, derived from Theocritus, but with important critical allegiance to Callimachus; that this is achieved by placing at the centre of the poem a symbolic encounter of the poet with his ‘divine’ source of inspiration firmly in the tradition of Hesiod, Callimachus and many other poets (and prophets); that such a reading of the poem begets new and alternative interpretations of individual passages which help to confirm its validity; and that it is further confirmed by subsequent passages in Virgil himself and in other writers. In so doing I shall touch hardly or not at all upon the historical, political, social and legal questions which the poem raises and which have always been in the forefront of discussion of it. This is not because I consider them irrelevant to the overall interpretation of the poem. They are, in fact, crucial. I have, however, little that is new to say on these matters and to have pursued them would have deflected me from my task of trying to set the work firmly within its literary tradition and to expound its central literary content.

Our understanding of ancient erotic poetry has, in my opinion, been greatly furthered in recent years by the shift from an approach which sees the poetic world of Roman love elegy as the creation of mimesis to one which reads it as semiosis. The elegiac poet portrays neither experienced reality nor conditions at least conceivable as such, but constructs a fictional situation using certain literary motifs provided by generic tradition, and thus challenges the reader to a game of semiotics. The latter, conversant with the ‘sign language’ of the motifs – for example of servitium amoris – will appreciate the poet's playful variations on a familiar theme and decipher the new meaning it has been given. Particularly significant here is, I find, the new perception of the two central characters in the elegiac world: the first-person poetalamator and his puella are both part of this fiction. The poet assumes the mask of an elegiac lover, playing the part as an actor would; he does not, then, re-enact his own experiences for an audience. In addition to this he designs the figure of the puella, who appears less as a character with its own personal profile and more as a typified representation, contrived in the main to reflect the poetic ego's thoughts. Women such as Cynthia, Delia, and Corinna are, to use Alison Sharrock's very apt definition, the product of ‘womanufacture’, and their names therefore cannot be read as pseudonyms for real-life women.

Two highly unusual vase paintings, which may be more or less direct representations of Aristophanes, have been first published recently. They have received little attention to date, and yet both bring with them intriguing problems, which are not, in my opinion, resolved in the original publications. This double accession is all the more remarkable since up till now there has been so little that might be claimed to illustrate pictorially the golden age of Old Comedy (say 435 to 390 B.C), however loosely or tightly the debatable term ‘illustration’ is used (see note 24). The best known has probably been the attic oenochoe with a squat, near-naked figure prancing on a low stage before an audience of two. He is usually taken to be burlesquing Perseus; but presumably his stage model, if indeed the genre is comedy at all, did not really perform naked and without mask. Closer to representation of actual performance may be the four unglazed oenochoai with polychrome decoration from towards the end of the fifth century, found in the Athenian Agora in 1954. For example the two porters, who are alleged to be carrying a large Dionysiac loaf, and who may be slaves or members of a chorus, have masks which are fairly grotesque, but their bodies are not particularly so (unless the one on the left is supposed to have a long but sketchy phallus pointing diagonally down?).

Adam Parry's article ‘Have We Homer's Iliad?’ (Yale Classical Studies xx (1966), 177–216) is one of the most readable of recent discussions of Homer. As it happens, I disagree with much of it—but that is not surprising, since much of it is taken up with disagreeing with me. In the pages that follow I shall be primarily concerned to question the validity of some of the author's detailed arguments and to probe some of his underlying assumptions.

First we should note the general position that Adam Parry, by the end of his study, occupies. It is the apparently old-fashioned one that Homer wrote down, or had someone else write down, virtually every word of the Iliad (and presumably also the Odyssey) as we have it. Yet it differs from extreme Unitarianism, and takes account of Milman Parry, by accepting that Homer belonged to an oral tradition and composed his poetry, at least at the detailed level, by traditional means. He did not construct his verses like a fully literate poet, but used the new technique of alphabetic writing for the development of traditional, unlettered poetry into the extended form and complex texture of an Iliad.

This paper surveys a selection of texts from the fourth century B.C. to the ninth century A.D. and considers the continuing repercussions of Plato's famous attack on art for the present as well as the past. I propose to treat the subject in five sections:

1. A brief consideration of the iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries A.D., to highlight the theory behind the iconoclasts' rejection of pictorial art from the Church (and effectively from society).

2. A general discussion of Plato's apparently iconoclastic argument in Republic 10, to suggest that it too, like the later iconoclasm, was rejecting certain implicit claims made about the value of representation as such.

3. A closer analysis of the arguments in Republic 10 to clarify precisely what theories of art are vulnerable to them.

4. A survey of some subsequent defences of art on the basis that it imitates nature, to show that Plato was right to say that a defence on those lines would not make art sufficiently important to justify the place we accord it in society (or the Church).

Discussions of economic growth in antiquity have been primarily concerned with whether or not it occurred. Can we, from the array of unsystematic and often random information we have about individual and community wealth, and in the face of our very considerable ignorance about even such basic matters as population levels, find ways of measuring either aggregate or per capita growth? The second focus of scholarly energy has been on how growth might have been achieved, on levels of productivity and what limited them, on how institutions might have impeded or facilitated growth, and on the degree to which barriers may have been deliberately removed over time and growth consciously encouraged. This paper is not directly interested in either of those sets of questions. It is interested in who wanted growth in the first place.

The default assumption in discussions of growth often seems to be, at least implicitly, that it is brought about either by need or by greed. The desire of individuals to satisfy their needs more fully leads to an increase in, at the very least, aggregate productivity, and might be expected inevitably to drive growth from the supply side. The desire of individuals to increase their consumption drives growth from the demand side. The default assumptions tend to stop there, as if what counts as need is absolute, a matter of a certain minimum number of calories or ‘wheat equivalent’ a day, and as if greed is simply part of human nature.

Semonides 7 is a remarkable poem. At 118 lines it is by far the longest example of early Greek iambus. It is indeed by far the longest non-hexameter poem to survive from before the classical period. What is more this is a poem of whose seventh-century date we can be reasonably confident, and it is not a poem concerned with the mythical world but a poem directly related to everyday life. It has a strong a priori claim therefore to the attention of both literary scholars and historians. Yet it is a poem hardly discussed by either. In this paper I shall argue that if we take this poem seriously it can not merely shed light on one specific place and moment in Greek history, and on one particular writer, but should affect the whole way in which we think about relations between men and women in seventh-century Greece and about archaic Greek literature.

This paper looks at a relatively neglected character in Greek tragedy: the people. I cannot claim to produce a complete survey of this issue; however, I shall identify some different ways in which a tragic poet could portray a city's population, and discuss some examples.

This is an important and interesting topic for two reasons, which are linked throughout, for behind my argument is the contention that a consideration of the original staging of a tragedy can help us to understand its politics. In the first place, it is instructive to ask how a poet could meet the challenge of representing the population of a city on stage; in the second, this exercise is likely to shed light on the political function of Greek tragedy. More specifically, it will shed light on the relationship between tragedy and democracy - a vexed question in recent years - for no consideration of democracy in drama can neglect the role of democracy's central player.

Not so many years ago African adaptations of Greek tragedy would have been a most obscure subject for a classicist to write about. But since then, as a result of the everincreasing academic interest in post-colonialism on the one hand, and in the reception of Greek tragedy on the other, a number of discussions have been published, not only by experts in African, and more generally post-colonial literatures, but also by classicists. This article continues their work, focusing in more detail on a narrower, though still large and varied, geographical area: West Africa. Much more work, including work within Africa itself, will be necessary in the future to gain a more complete and nuanced picture. Moreover, I should state clearly that, as a classicist, I have only an incomplete knowledge of African literatures and cultures. Therefore, inevitably, much of what I say can itself only be a starting-point for more. However, I believe that such a start is well worth making, as the plays in question hold considerable interest for classicists.

This paper argues for the existence of the topos of oroskopia in Greek and Latin literature. Gods and mortals are positioned on mountains to watch events or landscapes below. The view from above symbolises power (in the case of the gods) or an attempt at control or desire for power (in the case of mortals). It may also suggest an agreeable and relaxed spectatorship with no active involvement in the events watched, which may metaphorically morph into a historian's objectivity or a philosopher's emotional tranquillity. The elevated position may also have a temporal aspect, gods looking into the future or mortals looking back on their life.

It is widely held as uncontroversial that throughout the classical period male inhabitants of Attica were divided between three distinct categories – Athenian citizens, metics (regularly translated as ‘resident aliens’) and slaves – and that Athenian society had, therefore, a tripartite structure. The opportunities available to and requirements demanded of a man depended on his category. Those foreigners permanently resident in Attica – those with the legal status of ‘metic’ – were, unlike slaves, free, but, unlike citizens, they could not own land, vote in the Assembly, or serve as a dikastes or as a magistrate; in addition, metics were required to pay a poll tax (the metoikion) and to have a citizen sponsor (prostates). In this paper I seek to challenge not the nature of the distinction between citizens and metics but instead the assumption that the distinction was made throughout the classical period. I suggest that the growth of the Athenian citizen population after the Persian invasion of 480–479 demands that the origin of metic status be situated around the middle of the fifth century, and that the occasion on which the Athenian polis first defined metic status is likely to have been the occasion on which it first took an interest in restricting who might become a citizen: in 451/0, with the passing of Perikles' citizenship law.

Anyone that attempts to tackle the question of the role of experiment in Greek science must first come to terms with the extensive modern literature on the subject, and what strikes one first about this literature is that ever since the Novum Organum of Bacon (1620) much of it has been highly polemical in tone. Bacon's judgement is well known: ‘Atque ex philosophiis istis Graecorum, et derivationibus earum per particulares scientias, jam per tot annorum spatia vix unum experimentum adduci potest, quod ad hominum statum levandum et juvandum spectet, et philosophiae speculationibus ac dogmatibus vere acceptum referri possit.’ Against Aristotle in particular Bacon adopts a different line of attack, for he concedes that in some of Aristotle's works references to experiments are to be found, but accuses Aristotle of twisting the data of experience to fit his preconceived opinions.

The Pandora myth as told in Hesiod's Works and Days (59–105) has been criticised since antiquity as internally inconsistent. In the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century this led editors to propose radical atheteses and emendations to resolve the inconsistencies. Although in recent decades the impetus has swung more towards conservative editing, and seemingly endless work has been done on the myth, the passage still has not been fully understood in terms of its purpose within the Hesiodic corpus. In this paper I argue that the ‘suspect’ lines are perfectly consistent when understood in terms of the intertextual relationship between Hesiod's Works and Days and his Theogony, a relationship which has been established by scholars such as Jean-Pierre Vernant (1980), Glenn Most (1993) and Jenny Strauss Clay (2003). I argue that, in representing Pandora in Works and Days, Hesiod is engaged in a project of expansion which had its roots in his Theogony. Pandora is of more importance to the Iron Age Works and Days than to the divine Theogony; so she is described in greater detail and becomes more of a prominent figure in her own right. Furthermore, I argue that Hesiod does not stop there, but enacts an expansion of the expansion within Works and Days itself, from Zeus' commands to the gods for Pandora's creation at Op. 60–68, to the execution of those commands at 70–80.

Beckett's verbal duel is reminiscent of Aristophanic routines between two characters in which the name of the game seems to be to cap the boast, threat or insult hurled by the opposing character. Several recent studies have pointed to the importance of capping to the character and meaning of Aristophanic comedy. Ian Ruffell shows that verbal routines in which a joke is elaborated and capped by another are integral to Aristophanes' comic mode. He has also argued that Old Comedy is partly constituted through a generic requirement that each play deploy an intertextual rhetoric of innovation in which the playwright parades the way in which he has ingeniously capped the plots, routines and conceits of a rival's previous offering. Derek Collins has demonstrated that some of the social and stylistic dynamics of Aristophanic stichomythic and antilabic capping routines have been misunderstood due to a lack of awareness that such routines are part-and-parcel of a wider, cross-generic tradition of performed verse capping. He also shows that this central mode of poetic competition in archaic, classical, Hellenistic and Roman imperial Greece can be usefully illuminated by ethnographic and anthropological comparisons.