Duris of Samos is significant enough, among lost Hellenistic historians, for a paragraph or two to be devoted to him in most works on the history or literature of the period. For the last two centuries such paragraphs have been saying among other things that Duris went to Athens and studied under Theophrastus. But Athenaeus 128a, the source cited for this statement, does not support it unless a doubtful conjecture is admitted to the text.

Few portions of Eduard Fraenkel's commentary on Aeschylus′ Agamemnon have been so influential as the three and a half ages On the Weapon with which, according to the Oresteia, Agamemnon was murdered.1 In contrast with the controversy and disagreement stirred by his remarks on The Footprints in the Choephoroe,2 his thesis concerning Clytemnestra's murder-weapon has met with almost universal approva and the matter is widely regarded as settled. It is symptomatic that within the past twelve months two important books should have appeared4 which independently assume the unquestionable Tightness of Fraenkel's conclusion: the weapon envisaged by Aeschylus was a sword, not an axe.

The story of Dion of Syracuse was told by ancient writers, and is still being told by modern historians, in the main as a story of ‘freedom versus tyranny’. The liberation of the greatest state in the Hellenic world from the rule of the most powerful tyrants' house in Greek experience fired the imagination and aroused the admiration of contemporary and later writers. There is, however, another side to the story of Dion.

The study of Plato's style as a writer has hardly kept pace with the study of his thought as a philosopher. Obviously he stands apart as the one original thinker in classical antiquity who also gives expression to his thought in a finished literary prose; and obviously his prose is worth studying for its own sake. What I would here suggest is that the close and continual relationship between the style and the content of his work may serve, in various aspects, to elucidate his argument; and, further, that at certain points his style itself has a direct connexion with his philosophic thought.

The essential purpose of the present article (which is quarried from my Cambridge doctoral dissertation, ‘A Study of the Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus’, 1975) is to put forward a new theory concerning the last scene of the Septem, 1005–78. The problem of the play's ending as a whole has been very thoroughly discussed by P. Nicolaus, Die Frage nach der Echtheit der Schlussszene von Aischylos' Sieben gegen Theben (Tübingen, 1967); since I have no wish to duplicate Nicolaus's work I shall deal only very briefly with those aspects of the problem on which I find myself in agreement with him and with other scholars.

Three contributions have been made recently to the understanding of the house of Odysseus. In 1949 Professor L. R. Palmer1 revived the theory that a door at the back of the megaron led into the womena's quarters, a two-storied building with storerooms on the ground floor and stairs leading up to Penelope's rooms. ‘If only we resist the temptation to use Mycenaean palaces as the mise-en-scène for Homer's story’ (p. III), we recognize a house type which was widely diffused over the Indo-European world from Neolithic to medieval times.

In 1871 it might well have been said that no Latin author was in worse need of a critical recension than Lucilius, and again in 1904 that none was in worse need of an exegetical commentary. The one want was supplied in 1872 by the edition of Lucian Mueller, and now Mr Friedrich Marx, by the publication of his second volume in 1905, has supplied the other. Both works deserve praise, both deserve thanks, and both deserve more thanks than praise ; for while gratitude is earned simply by the element of good which a book presents to us, admiration must depend on the greater or less predominance of the good element over the bad.

The object of this paper is to determine the relations between the two parts of Parmenides' poem: the Way of Truth, which deduces the necessary properties of a One Being, and the False Way, which contains a cosmogony based on ‘what seems to mortals, in which there is no true belief.’

Although the decision of Pericles to abandon Attica to devastation in 431 has often been severely criticized, the conviction of Thucydides that his defensive strategy was sound has been widely accepted during the last half-century. On the other hand, the offensive side of his strategic plan, consisting mainly of using his fleet to raid coastal districts of the Peloponnese, has tended to be dismissed as unimportant by modern writers, while a few have condemned it as pointless and wasteful. Because Thucydides devotes so little space to these raids, it is tempting to regard them as minor operations, but his careful record of the naval and military resources engaged, together with his statement that the force which Pericles commanded in 430 was approximately equal to that sent to Sicily in 415 (6. 31. 2–3), shows that they were on a substantial scale. Their influence upon the course of the war was slight, but if Periclean strategy is to be fully appreciated, it is clearly important to inquire why they were undertaken.

Hieron of Syracuse was the most powerful Greek of his day. He was also, and the two facts are not unrelated, the most frequent of Pindar's patrons. A singular feature of the four poems for this Sicilian prince is their obsession with sin and punishment: Tantalus in the First Olympian, Typhoeus, Ixion, and Coronis in the first three Pythians – all offend divinity and suffer terribly. But even in this company, where glory comes trailing clouds of pain, the Third Pythian stands out. The other three odes are manifestly epinician and celebrate success, both athletic and military. The Second Pythian, for instance, is a sombre canvas, and a motif of ingratitude dominates the myth. Yet it rings at the outset with praise of Syracuse and of Hieron's victory. The Third Pythian, by comparison, is not obviously a victory ode.

The lettering of this inscription begins at the very top of the block, just below the straight edge, and stops half-way down the block, the lower part being smoothed but uninscribed. As the inscription is not set centrally on the block, it is probably the continuation of an inscription which ran on a block once superimposed upon it. Doubtful letters are those which are marked by the dot underneath; and W. Peek reported in Ath. Mitt. lxvi (19,41), 200 n. 2, that he had seen the top of the v which Vollgraff suggested in the restorationThe inscription is dated to the seventh century B.C. by epigraphists. The stone itself was seen in 1729 by Fourmont and rediscovered in 1928 by Vollgraff; it was in the wall of a Venetian tower on the Larissa or acropolis of Argos. No one knows whence the Venetians had taken it. Therefore Vollgraff's suggestion that it had originally been set up in porta arcis regiae is no more than an attractive speculation.

Authorities on Apollo and Apollo cults are still divided into two camps. Some believe the god to have been Anatolian—Homeric god of the Troad, god of Branchidae and Lycia, a hawk-god, Smintheus, Lykios, with a western outpost at Carian-Ionian Delos, worshipped too in Crete, whence he passed to Pytho. In the other camp Apollo is, at least in part, believed to be a northerner, fair-haired, descending on Greece from the land of the Hyperboreans, the people ‘Behind the Beyond.’ And the mainstay of those who claim a partially northern origin for Apollo is in tales which both at Delos and at Delphi link him with the Hyperboreans.

A long-lasting and sometimes acrimonious debate over the correct vocative form of second-declension Latin words in -ius began more than 800 years ago. For the past century most classicists have considered the matter to be settled, and little discussion on the subject has taken place. Yet the century-old conclusions we now so unthinkingly accept are based on very little evidence and are internally inconsistent in some of their details. The past hundred years have provided us not only with more Latin to work with, better tools for search and analysis, and a more complete knowledge of the history of the Latin language, but also with a new understanding and respect for the ancient grammarians and their views on the structure of their language. It is time to re-examine the ancient and modern views on the vocative of -ius words, to see whether any viable conclusions can be drawn and whether the ancient grammarians may have more to contribute than our predecessors believed.

Alkman's Partheneion contains so many obscure details that even the elucidation of a single point seems worth while. It is proposed to show that the Kolaxaian horse, (59), hitherto identified as the typical Skythian horse,1 is an altogether different breed, specifically associated with Skythian royalty.

Context. The Partheneion mentions four breeds: The winged dream horse, the Enetic courser, and, together, the Ibenian and Kolaxaian (49, 51, 59). Not one of these breeds has, as yet, been definitely identified. All of them are, however, exotic breeds, and this regardless of whether the Enetic is a Venetic or a Paphlagonian steed, the Ibenian a horse of Keltic or of Ionian origin, and the Kolaxaian a Skythian steppe pony or some other Skythian breed. Other exotic elements are Lydian coifs and the Xanthos river (67–68, 100).

Did the Romans in their dealings with other nations outside Italy know of any international laws, and did such laws ever crystallise from scattered observances into a general system? This is an interesting question, but one not easy to answer.

Two minuscule codices carrying collections of grammatical and rhetorical treatises and extracts from such treatises, one written at Monte Cassino between A.D. 779 and 796 (Paris, Bibl. Nat. Lat. 7530 (CLA V 569)), the other at Benevento towards the middle of the following century (Rome, Bibl. Casanatense 1086), contain among their uncial tituli the three words INCIPIT THVESTES VARII. There follows in both codices a twenty-four-word sentence stating the full name of Varius, the literary character of the Thyestes, an aesthetic judgement on the work, the date of a public performance in a Roman theatre, and the price paid: Lucius Varius cognomento Rufus Thyesten tragoediam magna cura absolutam (Quicherat: absolute codd.) post Actiacam uictoriam Augusti (Mommsen: aug … Par.: augusto Par., Cas.) ludis eius in scaena edidit pro qua fabula sestertium deciens accepit.

It is important to ascertain whether in the Actium campaign Antony really had only the small proportion of Italian legionaries sometimes assigned to him, and this can only be done by analyzing his legionary figures from Philippi onwards. Unfortunately, though Appian is usually quite clear, he omits one figure at the very start, which prevents one treating the matter synthetically; so one must analyze backwards from Antony's legionary coins.

This article argues that Aristophanes' Clouds treats Socrates as distinctly interested in promoting self-knowledge of the sort related to self-improvement. Section I shows that Aristophanes links the precept γνῶθι σαυτόν (‘know yourself’) with Socrates. Section II outlines the meaning of that precept for Socrates. Section III describes Socrates' conversational method in the Clouds as aimed at therapeutic self-revelation. Section IV identifies the patron Cloud deities of Socrates' school as also concerned to bring people to a therapeutic self-understanding, albeit in a different register from that of Socrates. Section V discusses a sequence of jokes connected to ‘stripping’ that give a concrete image to the search for self-knowledge. Both the action of the Clouds and the tales of cloak-stripping provide models for understanding self-knowledge in a Socratic key. Section VI argues that Socrates' other interest in the phrontistērion, myth-rationalization, is consistent with the promotion of self-knowledge. Section VII supports the claim that Plato's Phaedrus alludes constantly to the Clouds, and because the Phaedrus pays careful attention to self-knowledge, Plato must think that the Clouds does too. It notes in particular that we can explain the Platonic Socrates' famous self-knowledge-related curiosity about his similarity to Typhon (230a) as Plato's allusion to Aristophanes, an allusion made apt by Aristophanes' coordination of Socrates with self-knowledge. Section VIII concludes the paper.

Dr. Jameson's editio princeps of his major discovery at Troizen (Hesperia, xxix [1960], 198–223) will long remain essential for the study of this document. The following jottings are largely footnotes to the rich material which he has collected. Their main preoccupation is linguistic, and I abstain from any attempt to fit the decree into its historical setting. The gap between 480 B.C. and our copy is so long that it is hardly to be expected that the authenticity of the decree will go unchallenged, and this exploration of some points in the language may help towards a decision.