If the Iliadic Aeneas has a fault, it is that he fails to die: 20.302 . In Homer, he is not memorable, but closer inspection reveals a warrior of authentic distinction.

There are two main types of question which arise from Aristotle's treatment of democracy, as from all other major topics which we find in that part of the Politics which is related to empirical data about political behaviour (Books 2–6 in O.C.T.). One type is primarily philosophical: ‘Is Aristotle's analysis logically coherent, is it consistent with his data, is it convincing?’ The other is more historical, though it has philosophical importance too: ‘From where does he derive his data, from where his views (or prejudices)? Has he done justice to the historical events that he adduces and to the opinions of men that he cites as evidence for political and ethical norms?’ Although in this paper I have a special interest in questions of the second type regarding the nature of the data, they cannot be tackled satisfactorily without considering the nature and validity of the analysis of democracy.

This essay has two aims: to affirm the significance of private banking in fourthcentury B.C. Athens, and to propose a model of its role in the economy. Such a project is desirable because there has been a tendency since the publication of Finley's The Ancient Economy to minimalize the significance of banking in ancient Greece. Banking is seen as a ‘fringe activity’ largely carried out by such ‘outsiders’ as metics and ex-slaves.Consequently historians have frequently overlooked the value of banking as a tool for understanding the Greek economy.

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse.

In an article on ‘The Name of the Euxine Pontus’ in C.Q.xxxiv (1940), pp. 123 ff., A. C. Moorhouse rejects the suggestion made by M. Vasmer and supported by Boisacq that the original Greek title ἃξε(ι)νος was a popular rendering of the Avestan adjective αχṦαệνα, ‘of dark colour’. Moorhouse raises the following objections to this theory:

i. There is no direct evidence of the Avestan adjective ever being applied to the Black Sea.

ii. In historical times ‘Avestan is a long way from Greek’ and in prehistorical times it is doubtful whether the speakers of Avestan had any close connexion with the Black Sea.

iii. Assuming πόντος to denote ‘way’, ‘the dark way’ would be a fantastic name for any sea.

iv. The early Greek form is ἃξενος, and only metri gratia ἃξεινος, whereas if the word is a loan from αχṧαēνα we should expect the phonetically closer form ἃξενος

Plato's views on tragedy depend in large part on his views about the ethical consequences of emotional arousal. In the Republic, Plato treats the desires we feel in everyday life to weep and feel pity as appetites exactly like those for food or sex, whose satisfactions are ‘replenishments’. Physical desire is not reprehensible in itself, but is simply non-rational, not identical with reason but capable of being brought into agreement with it. Some desires, like that for simple and wholesome food, are in fact ‘necessary’ and approved by reason. Other appetites, like lust and gluttony, are ‘unnecessary’ and anti-rational in that they are actively opposed to reason. According to the Republic, the satisfaction of these ‘unnecessary’ desires inevitably strengthens the elements in the soul that oppose reason. The desire to weep at the theatre is treated in this dialogue as just such an anti-rational desire. Even a temporary indulgence in tragic pity and fear has a permanent deleterious effect on the soul, although it does not lead directly to any action.

This paper argues that a radically different psychological theory, with important aesthetic implications, appears in the discussion of wine-drinking in Books 1 and 2 of Plato's Laws. Though this long passage has been much scorned and neglected, it is of considerable philosophical importance. While in the Republic Plato condemns drunkenness and other anti-rational states, in the Laws he extols the benefits of a hypothetical ‘fear drug’ that could induce a temporary state of anti-rational terror and of wine to produce other anti-rational emotions and desires.

In 404 Sparta stood supreme, militarily and politically master of Greece, in concord with Persia. By 362, the year at which Xenophon terminated his history on the sad note of ‘even greater confusion and uncertainty’, she was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again; and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local wrangler. The reasons for all this which are to seek are of absorbing interest and prime importance for the history of Greece, but it is hard to resist the temptation to connect the change with the policies of Agesilaus whose reign virtually coincided with the period in question. He was king for forty-one years and over thirty of them well before the battle of Leuctra (Plut. Ages. 40) and he had influence in the state unequalled as far as we can tell by any other king.

J. Wackernagel and E. Löfstedt have both drawn attention to Pindar's ‘Neigung, das Futurum zu setzen bei Verben, die eine jetzt vorhandene, aber auf zukünftiges Tun abzielende Willensrichtung ausdrücken’. But they regarded this as a purely grammatical phenomenon, and did not note that the Pindaric use is practically limited to statements of the type, ‘I shall sing, glorify, testify, etc.’. It was E. Bundy who first drew attention to the conventional nature of these futures and so ended years of misunderstanding. So, for example, Wilamowitz considered that P. 1.75 represented an optative with while Slotty, following Breyer, thought that N. 9. 10 was an aorist subjunctive ‘auf Grund des pindarischen Sprachgebrauches’! Postgate, following Gildersleeve, thought that 0. 8. 57 represented though the contrary would appear to be more true, cf. 0. 13. 11: and also Hoekstra sees in the future ‘den Nebenbegriff des Konnens’.

With the dawn of the day of the Battle of Salamis in ch. 83 of Book 8, Herodotus heightens the tone of his language. An unfortunate result of his more elaborately worked writing has been failure to understand his words, and hence much misplaced editorial intervention. In particular, the words at 8.83.1, προηγρενε εῢ ἒΧοντα μν κ πντων Θεμιστοκλης, have regularly been mistranslated. Powell even wanted to rewrite the Greek here to read: ἠγρευε μν πρó πντων Θεμιστοκλης (‘And Themistocles was chosen to pronounce the exhortation’). Few would wish to follow such a drastic and arbitrary alteration of the transmitted text, but the conjectural emendation highlights the difficulty of understanding Herodotus' words at this point.

The scene at the end of the Phaedo, in which Plato describes how Socrates dies by poisoning from hemlock, is moving and impressive. It gives us the sense of witnessing directly an actual event, accurately and vividly described, the death of the historical Socrates. There are, however, certain curious features in the scene, and in the effects of the hemlock on Socrates, as Plato presents them. In the Phaedo hemlock has only one primary effect: it produces first heaviness and then numbness in the body.

So much has been written on this vexed issue, that one hesitates to reopen it. Yet one has no other choice when one finds scholars accepting as generally agreed a view which rests on altogether insufficient evidence. I propose, therefore, to examine the main grounds on which recent authorities interpret the disorderly motion of Tm 30a, 52d–53b, and 69b as a mythical symbol. They are four:

I. That the Timaios is a myth;

II. The testimony of the Academy;

III. That motion could not antecede the creation of time;

IV. That motion could not antecede the creation of soul.

Two firm points in the chronology of Antiphon's speeches are VI περ⋯ τοὖ χορευτοὖ in 419/81 and the Defence (περ⋯ τ⋯σ μεταστ⋯σεωσ) in 411/02. Speech V περ⋯ τ⋯σ 'Hρῷδου is now generally dated between these two; only the vaguest attempts have been made to date I κατ⋯ τ⋯σ μητρυ⋯ασ; there is no general agreement on either the date or the authorship of the Tetralogies. The main purpose of this paper is to adduce linguistic as well as external evidence for the dating of V in the neighbourhood of 414 and to show grounds for dating I between VI and V. Its secondary purpose is to apply some of the results gained in this inquiry to the fragments and the Tetralogies.

So far, interpreters have not made the import of this last clause clear. F. J. Church (followed later by R. E. Allen) translates the last phrase ‘they act at random’. Burnet says of Adam (who understands ( after this phrase and translates ‘They treat a man just as it occurs to them’) that he seems to have been the first to point out that the meaning cannot be ‘they act at random’. Instead, ‘the phrase expresses indifference’. Adam′s idea, which Burnet here commends, is that the many are thoughtless in their treatment of the individual; and Adam compares 48C below: the many would lightly put someone to death and just as lightly bring him back to life again. The Burnet-Adam point is evidently that the many have a policy of acting indifferently, or just as it occurs to them—by contrast with the ‘at random’ in Church′s translation, which suggests that they act without policy at all.

The most important historical work in Latin that was actually written in the first half of the first century B C. was L. Cornelius Sisenna's history of the War of the Allies and the Civil Wars which followed it, up to Sulla's dictatorship or conceivably death-the most important one that was not written being of course Cicero's. Sallust praised Sisenna's work highly in the Jugurtba, though complaining that it was not sufficiently frank about Sulla, and his own lost histories began, very probably, where Sisenna's left off. Varro's logistoricus on the writing of history, of which, alas, only a brief and unenlightening fragment remains, bore Sisenna's name.

Theurgy, the religious magic practised by the later Neoplatonists, has been commonly regarded as the point at which Neoplatonism degenerates into magic, superstition and irrationalism.1 A superficial glance at the ancient lives of the Neoplatonists, and in particular at Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists, reveals a group of people interested in animating statues, favoured with visions of gods and demons, and skilled in rain-making. But when we look more closely at the works of the Neoplatonists themselves, rather than the stories biographers tell about them, we find a considerable diversity of attitudes towards theurgy and a number of attempts to fit theurgy into their philosophical system.

The Hiero is an account in Socratic conversational form of a meeting between Simonides the poet and Hiero the tyrant of Syracuse; it was written by Xenophon of Athens in the fourth century b.c., but is set in the fifth, when the historical Simonides and Hiero lived and met. The subject they are portrayed discussing is the relative happiness of the tyrant and private individual. Plato also makes this a topic of discussion in his Republic. However, whereas Plato writes a regular Socratic dialogue, Xenophon does not, for though he represents his characters using Socratic conversation, Socrates himself does not appear; the characteros of the Hiero are Simonides and Hiero, poet and tyrant. This is the problem of the Hiero. It requires explanation.

The action of the Hiero is initiated by Simonides and begins in the following way:

Simonides the poet once came to the court of Hiero the tyrant. When they were both at leisure, Simonides said, ‘Would you be willing to tell me, Hiero, something you are likely to know better than I?’ And Hiero said, ‘What is it that I should know better than you, who are such a wise man?’ He replied, ‘I know that you were once a private individual and are now a tyrant. Since you have experienced both conditions, you are likely to know better than I how tyrannical life differs from private life in respect of men's pleasures and griefs’ (1.1–2).

The identification of Simonides as a wise man who nevertheless seeks wisdom from others establishes his Socratic nature from the start.

In any competition for monuments of wasted labour the collection of accidental acrostics in Latin poets published by I. Hilberg would stand a good chance of a prize. But amongst his examples of ‘neckische Spiele des Zufalls’ (269) is one I am gullible enough to believe may be more significant. In Aeneid 7. 601–15 Vergil describes the custom of opening the gates of war in a long anacoluthic sentence, the first four lines of which run:

Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quern protinus urbes

Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum

Roma colit, cum prima movent in proelia Mortem,

Sive Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum…

To the extent that one subscribes to the proposition, by now a virtual principle of criticism (at least in some circles), that literary texts constitute sites for the negotiation, often vigorous, of power relations within a society, the reader of Catullus can hardly avoid some consideration of the poet's attitude toward contemporary political matters. It is a subject on which two principal lines of thought can be traced. Mommsen argued that Catullus responded to the enormities that followed the reinvigoration of the First Triumvirate at the conference of Luca in 56 by occupying a thoroughly optimate position. Wilamowitz, on the other hand, insisted that Catullus' lyrics reflect only moments of the author's individual experience, amongst which expressions of personal distaste for certain public figures naturally appear but nothing which can appropriately be taken as indications of a political stance. The approach of Wilamowitz has proved more influential, followed in spirit if not in specifics by numerous commentators. To the degree that Catullus has been assimilated to the Augustan elegists, whose poems have been deemed by a scholar of the stature of Veyne to be anti-political in nature, it has been all the easier to reject the idea that Catullus adopts a political position, an assessment strongly maintained in a recent study by Paul Allen Miller, for whom the rejection of all political engagement is the sine qua non of true lyric poetry. Mommsen's optimate Catullus has lately found his champion, however, in a careful article by H. P. Syndikus. Although Miller and Syndikus, like Wilamowitz and Mommsen, draw diametrically opposed conclusions concerning politics in Catullus' poetry, they are agreed nevertheless that politics can be regarded as a relatively straightforward term: it refers to statecraft, matters of government, and party strife. Other readers, however, have been more self-conscious in their theoretical concerns, a salutary consequence of which has been a shift by some to a less narrow conception of the field of reference appropriate to discussions of ‘the political’ in Latin literature.