It seems uncertain whether the Macedonian infantrymen of Philip II had breast-plates or not. How much it matters, too, is also perhaps uncertain, though obviously it mattered not a little to the men themselves at the time, whether or not they carried on them that combination of strength and of weight, of moral comfort and physical encumbrance, that a breastplate meant to the man inside it. There may perhaps be something in this question, too, for the social historian as well as for the military specialist.

That Greek hoplites of the archaic period normally wore breastplates appears from vase-paintings, especially those proto-Corinthian examples which show combats not of individuals but of opposing phalanxes: it appears, too, from Tyrtaeus. Xenophon in the Anabasis, when he makes a passing remark about casualties on one occasion, gives the same impression about the Ten Thousand, who were predominantly a hoplite force. But breastplates were not uniform. Metal ones could vary greatly in weight, and there were variants (πĩλοι, σπολάδες) that were probably quite light in metal, on linen or leather. It has been suggested with some likelihood that in the fifth century the solid metal type virtually went out of use. If this were so, then the peltasts of the early fourth century would represent a logical development from a hoplite who had already become lighter than of old. It would seem logical for the pekast to have no breastplate at all, an arrangement incidentally that might suit well the mercenaries of the day who often were peltasts, and who were often poor men unlikely to own expensive equipment. But in spite of their occasional spectacular successes even against hoplites, the peltasts did not supersede them, so far as can be seen, in the citizen armies of the Greek cities. Indeed in the Hellenistic period still, in a treaty of about 270 B.C. between the Aetolians and the Acarnanians, the clause providing for reciprocal military aid distinguishes between three classes of infantry: (1) those who wore breastplates (πανοπλίαν), (2) those wore τὸ ἡμιθωράκιον, and (3) those who had no defensive armour (ψιλῲ). The first class is presumably, still, the hoplite.

Gregory Vlastos, in his interesting review of Cornford's Principium Sapientiae, in Gnomon, XXVII (1955), pp. 65ff., gives a particularly bald statement (p. 74 and n. 2) of a theory advanced in an article by Friedrich Solmsen, ‘Chaos and Apeiron’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, n.s. XXIV (1950), pp. 235ff., and by Hermann Fränkel in his Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (New York, 1951), pp. 148–9. The theory is that Theogony 736–45 has a profound cosmogonical significance, and that it was probably from there that Anaximander derived and developed his idea of an originative ἄπειρον. Now the Hesiodic passage is one of a group of variant descriptions of Tartaros that extend, as an appendix to the Titanomachy, from 726 to 819. Many of these descriptions are mutually inconsistent, and, although I would not go quite so far as Jacoby (Hesiodi Carmina: pars I, Theogonia (Berlin, 1930), pp. 22 ff.) in asserting that they are certainly all later additions, most of them by different authors, it seems manifest that they cannot all be by the author of the Theogony as a whole—even accepting that this poem is to some extent a synthesis, not always elegant or consistent, of previous accounts. At all events no other part of the poem, including the cosmogony and theogony of 116 ff., manifests the piecemeal, repetitive and contradictory qualities of this series of descriptions of Tartaros. For example, 726–45 describes the underworld, and it is there that the halls of Night are located; but at 746 ff. there is a sudden transition to the far west, the region where Atlas stands and where Night exchanges with Day. Solmsen (op. cit. p. 243, n. 2) tries to defend this unaccountable and irrelevant switch by showing that Night, earlier in the poem, is associated with the western parts of the earth, but is also a product of Chaos in the cosmogony of 116 ff. Yet this consideration, although it provides a sufficient motive for an irrelevant rhapsodic elaboration of the kind that Jacoby posited, really does nothing to support unity of authorship for the two adjacent passages. I agree with Jacoby, then, that what we are presented with in this part of the Theogony is a farrago of rhapsodic variants, juxtaposed inconsistently (for the most part) by the most mechanical principles, on the central theme of Tartaros.

I, 16, 3. [Of the tribunal set up to try Clodius in 61] pauci tamen boni inerant, quos reiectione fugare ille non potuerat, qui maesti inter sui dissimiles et maerentes sede-bant et contagione turpitudinis uehementer permouebantur.

maesti seems to refer rather to the sorrow shown by the looks and general aspect, maerentes to sorrow expressed in words’ (Tyrrell–Purser). But there is no real evidence for such a distinction. Madvig proposed mirantes in place of maerentes. uerentes, ‘ashamed’ to be in such company, may be worth considering.

II, 2, 2. Πελληναίων in manibus tenebam et hercule magnum aceruum Dicaearchi mihi ante pedes exstruxeram. o magnum hominem, et unde multo plura didiceris quam de Procilio! Κορινθίων et Ἀθηναίων puto me Romae habere, mihi credes lege te haec doceo mirabilis uir est.

The last sentence is obelized by Wesenberg, Müller, Purser, and Sjögren. MS. variants worth mention are: in the first hand of M, credas of G (first hand) bs, and the absence of te in Ο and the Δ group.

Two of many conjectures appear in modern texts. Tyrrell–Purser and Winstedt follow Boot: mihi crede, si leges haec, dices ‘mirabilis uir est’. Constans and Constans' parrot, Moricca, have mihi credas, lege; te haec doceo: mirabilis uir est.

In 1900 Macé suggested that Suetonius may very well have been procurator of the Greek and Latin libraries before becoming ab epistulis; two of his successors in the latter office passed to it from the former. Macé went on: ‘Si on venait à découvrir une inscription concernant notre secrétaire ab epistulis, il ne serait pas surprenant que le texte en fût ici parallèle à ceux que nous avons conservés sur ses deux collègues.’ These were prophetic words, for in 1952 there was published an inscription concerning Suetonius, discovered in the Forum of Hippo Regius (Bône in Algeria), which reveals that he was indeed a studiis a bybliothecis ab epistulis imp. Caesaris Traiani Hadriani Aug.

1. In B354–6 Nestor, encouraging the Greeks to fight on, says

τῶ μή τις πρὶν έπειγέσθω οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι,

πρίν τινα πὰρ Τρώων ἀλόχω κατακοιμηθῆναι,

τίσασθαι δ' Ἑλένης ὁρμήματά τε στοναχάς τε.

‘So let no one be eager to return home, before he has slept with a Trojan's wife and avenged….’ Avenged what? Obviously the rape of Helen. The Greeks are to do to the wives of the Trojans what Paris did to the wife of Menelaus. So they will avenge the ὁρμήματα and στοναχάς of Helen.

It is difficult to believe, reading this passage, that in this country the normal, accepted interpretation of 1. 356 is that the Greeks are to avenge their own ‘cares’ (=μελεδήματα?) and groans for Helen's sake. In fact, that Ἑλένης is taken as an objective genitive. This strange interpretation has the authority of Aristarchus and is found, for example, in Leaf, Monro, and Liddell and Scott.

Aristarchus seems to have produced his explanation in a literary dispute with the Chorizontes. They put forward the view that this was a difference between the attitude of the Iliad and the Odyssey: that the poet of the Iliad makes Helen an unwilling victim, while in the Odyssey she went willingly with Paris. To counter this argument, Aristarchus produced his alternative interpretation of B 356. Most of us are Chorizontes now; why, then, should we repeat from generation to generation a forced interpretation which was conceived for the narrow purpose of literary polemics?

Since the publication in 1915 of the first of the papyrus fragments of Antiphon, the major problem of interpretation has been how to relate the Antiphon of the papyri to the Antiphon of the other fragments. The appeal to Physis as against Nomos in the papyri suggested that Antiphon was rejecting the claims of the community upon the individual while the fragments of the Περὶ Ὁμονοίας with their emphasis upon education and σωφροσύνη seemed to point in a different direction. Some, like Luria, may have felt that the difficulty could be dealt with by invoking the doctrine of the two Antiphons and attributing the papyrus fragments to one and the remaining fragments to the other. Others, like Sir Ernest Barker, have attempted a doctrinal reconciliation by appealing to more general principles from which both sets of doctrine might follow, or by so interpreting the doctrines of the papyrus tliat the conflict largely disappears. All have assumed that the papyrus fragments do give us either Antiphon's own views, or at least some of his views. This is true even of Bignone, Studi sul pensiero antico (Naples, 1938), who recognized that some of the time Antiphon is discussing the views of others. In what follows it will be argued that the papyrus fragments throughout are discussing the views of others and that Antiphon's own views only appear incidentally if at all.