The Galatian invasion of Asia Minor, which shook the foundations of the ancient Ionian civilization, finds echoes in a considerable number of epigraphical documents, all of which have been analysed several times over in the course of the complicated discussions of the chronology of the First Syrian War. In this paper I shall concentrate on the sources which have been related to Antiochus I's decisive battle against the Galatians, weigh their relevance to that battle and their authenticity, and attempt to date the events reflected in them.

The battle was probably commemorated in a comprehensive epic by Simonides of Magnesia. The Suda s.v. Σιμωνίδης reports: Σιμωνίδης Μάγνης Σιπύλου, ἐποποιός. γέγονεν ἐπὶ Ἀντιόχου τοῦ Μεγάλου κληθέντος, καὶ γέγραφε τἁς Ἀντιόχου τοῦ Μεγάλου πράξεις καὶ τὴν πρὸς Γαλάτας μάχην, ὅτε μετὰ τῶν ἐλεφάντων τὴν ἵππον αὐτῶν ἔφθειρεν. The difficulty of calling Antiochus τοῦ Μεγάλου has led some to suggest that the Suda is referring to Antiochus III, but the reference to the victory of the elephants over the Galatian cavalry, known from Lucian to have decided the battle of Antiochus I against the Galatians, excludes any alternative. Lucian, however rhetorical and inaccurate, can be trusted when he attributes the victory to the elephants (see below). The conjecture that the latter reference was a gloss, inserted by the compiler or someone acquainted with Lucian, might have been given credit had we information about any campaign conducted against the Galatians by Antiochus III. But for the period of Antiochus III, which is covered in the most comprehensive way, we have no record, not even the slightest indication, of a military operation against the Galatians, and if there had been some confrontation which escaped notice, it could only have been on a small scale, and would not have been commemorated as the most prominent achievement of this king, as the phrasing of the Suda seems to suggest.

On re-reading Dio of Prusa's Euboicus, I formed the impression that his ideas on manual labour and on the respectability of occupations open to the poor are somewhat different from those conventionally adopted by Greeks and Romans of the upper class, to which Dio belonged. Part 1 of this paper discusses these ideas in the Euboicus and in some related works of Dio. It will inter alia afford some conjectural support to von Arnim's hypothesis that the Euboicus was delivered at Rome. Probably Dio's attitude was influenced by his experience in exile, when he had known what it was to be poor and had even propounded Cynic opinions. But the Euboicus is a work of his old age (VII. 1), and his conduct after his restoration to his home in A.D. 96 was conspicuously non-Cynic. If then we find some indication that he was also indebted to some previous theorizing on appropriate occupations for the free poor, we need not think of a Cynic model; indeed we should not, for the Cynics were little given to the kind of casuistry involved. In Part I some evidence will be found that Dio was also influenced by Stoic teaching, and in Part II it will be argued that his discussion of the way in which the poor could decently earn their living goes back to Stoic works on practical morality of the kind illustrated by Panaetius' treatise On Appropriate Action; however, Dio's ideas are not those of the Middle Stoa and more probably derive from Cleanthes or Chrysippus. In this connection I take Cicero, de officiis 1. 150 f., to represent the views of Panaetius, and as I have found that this interpretation can be contested, I have tried to justify it in the Appendix.

Private letters written on lead sheets in antiquity are rare, but not unknown; the publication of a new example found on the island of Berezan near Olbia in the Black Sea is remarkable as offering an early specimen of the Ionic dialect. Its Russian editor admitted that all its problems had not been solved, and the present article is an attempt to improve the readings and offer some suggestions for a better interpretation.

The document is completely preserved and legible without difficulty; it was found rolled up with the address written on the reverse. As Vinogradov suggests, it seems likely that it never reached its addressee. Vinogradov puts its date as the second half of the sixth century B.C. Dr L. H. Jeffery has kindly confirmed that on grounds of letter-forms the date would appear to be not far from 500 B.C.

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.

The attribution of lines to different speakers in Greek tragedy is a matter on which MSS have notoriously little authority. As for Electra itself, there are at least three places where the name of the heroine has been incorrectly added in some or all MSS. In my Studies in the Text of Sophocles, I, 198, I list these places and suggest that the same error has happened at a fourth place, viz. 1323. The purpose of the present note is to suggest that at El. 1205–10 the same mistake has happened yet again.

The situation is that Electra is holding the urn which she falsely believes to contain the ashes of her dead brother, Orestes. But Orestes is alive, and before her at this very moment. He is trying to persuade her to give up the urn. If the text before us had been preserved in a MS devoid of ascriptions to speakers, no one would have been so perverse as to do what all MSS and editors do in fact do, namely attribute the words οὔ φημ᾿ ἐάσειν to Orestes.

A. Frr. 1+47

col. i

The poem represented in P. Oxy. 2619 is self-evidently the work of Stesichorus, presumably his Iliou Persis. From the fragments as originally published not a single complete line or sentence could be reconstructed; the style and structure were, as Mr Lobel said, ‘quite unrecognisable’. There was really nothing to be done; it was a great disappointment.

To this gloomy picture Mr Barrett, with extraordinary ingenuity and skill, succeeded in restoring two quite substantial patches of bright and clear colour. He joined fr. 47 to the second column of fr. 1, and frr. 30 and 31 to fr. 15(b), in each place creating an intelligible context for seven consecutive lines. The texts of these two pieces as restored by Barrett read, with only slight modifications, as shown on pp. 47 and 50.

In his book Roman Law: Linguistic, Social and Philosophical Aspects (Edinburgh, 1969), Professor Daube proposes a heterodox interpretation of Aristotle's distinction in EN v 8 between two sorts of ἁμαρτήματα: ἁτυχήματα, mishaps, and ἁμαρτήματα proper, mistakes. Mr Crook, in his review of the book (CR n.s. xx (1970), 363), has already taken issue with the main point of this interpretation. In what follows I hope to clinch the verdict for orthodoxy, while ceding to Daube a point of broader significance.

Aristotle characterizes ἁμάρτημα as a sort of injury committed ‘in a transaction’ (as we might say, by one private person against another), involving ignorance on the agent's part about some particular circumstance of his action (1135 b 11–16). He calls this class of injury ἁμάρτημα because he holds that inasmuch as the agent did not know what he was doing, to that extent he did not mean to do what he did (cf. 1135 a 23–32).

Horace once described Tibullus, in a letter addressed to the elegiac poet, as ‘silently strolling through the healthy woods, pondering on the problems that matter most’ (Ep. 1. 4. 4–5 taciturn silvas inter reptare salubris ∣ curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est), and this is a view of Tibullus which underlies, in some form or another, most modern approaches to his poetry. After all, Tibullus is singularly dedicated to his concerns of love and the countryside, expressed with directness and simplicity in a style which is, as Quintilian says (x 1. 93), particularly ‘polished and elegant’ (elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus).

Of his own activity as a poet, and how he saw himself in relation to other writers, he says very little. At 2. 4. 13 ff., in one of love's despairs, he exclaims: