It has recently been argued by Gabriel Herman that fourth-century Athenian citizens, or at least the majority of them, believed that even under the impact of serious private aggression a man should not pursue revenge. The general ideal, so it is maintained, was to avoid not only violent revenge but also revenge through prosecution. Herman recognizes that other Athenian texts of the same period take the propriety of exacting revenge for granted, and he explains this in part by reference to a supposed ‘double standard’—a rather strange expression in this context, because it suggests that the propriety of revenge in classical Athens depended on the status of the victim of the revenge—which is not in fact the burden of Herman's doctrine.

In R. C. Flickinger's ‘Greek Theater and its Drama’ (3rd ed. second impression 1929) we read on pp. 171–2, ‘In the iambic trimeters written by Aeschylus a trisyllabic substitution (tribrach, anapaest or dactyl) for the pure disyllabic iambus occurs only once in about twenty-five verses.’ A similar statement is found in other earlier writers, e.g. Haigh (‘Tragic Drama of the Greeks’ 1896 p. 372). The authors of the error appear to have been Rossbach and Westphal, who are quoted with approval by J. Rumpel (Philologus XXIV (1866) p. 407), and subsequently repudiated by him (Phil. XXV (1867) p. 54). When Rumpel found that he had been misled, he counted for himself the trimeters and the trisyllabic feet in Aeschylus, but his results are of dubious value owing to the fact that he counts as ‘trimeters’ lines like;

δαίμονά τε τὰν ἂμαχον ἀπόλεμον ἀνίερον (Ag. 769) and

αὐτοϕόνα δίμορα τέλεα τάδε πάθη. τί ϕῶ; (Sept. 850).

Claudian's poem In Rufinum is a historical epic with at least two unusual features: the first book contains many of the standard elements of a formal invective, and the two books were composed and recited some eighteen months apart, since Book One celebrates the death of Rufinus on 27 November 395 as a very recent event (i, pr. 15 ff.), while the preface to Book Two refers explicitly to Stilicho's expedition to Greece in 397. The interval in composition is matched by a gap in content: Book One treats Rufinus' career down to 393, with some forward references to 395, explicitly marked as such (especially lines 321/2: Hunnorum laturus opem, quos adfore bello norat), while the narrative of Book Two begins from the death of Theodosius on 17 January 395 (ii. 1 ff.) and ends with the lynching of Rufinus on 27 November 395. Claudian thus omits any account of Rufinus' activities during the campaign of Theodosius against Eugenius in 394 and the emperor's last months in Italy. Claudian's careful chronological ordering of his material is deliberate, but since it has been obscured in recent discussions of the In Rufinum, it needs to be reinstated.

The short treatise On the Cosmos, which most scholars believe to be not by Aristotle, has confidently been attributed to Aristotle by G. Reale and A. P. Bos. I do not wish to enter into their arguments for this attribution, because I believe it can be proved to be untenable.

The extent to which Latin was familiar to the inhabitants of late sixth- and early seventh-century Constantinople is a topic of current discussion and interest. While there is little evidence to suggest a significant knowledge of Latin even among the educated in the seventh century, it is clear that in the late sixth century the language was still familiar to a section of the upper classes. Among native easterners, the degree of this familiarity would certainly have varied considerably, from those who could recognise a few words of Latin, through the lawyers, administrators and military men who had a specialised, professional knowledge, to the small proportion who could detect the Virgilian echoes in Corippus' panegyric of Justin II.

Whether Paul the Silentiary, epigrammatist and panegyrist of the Emperor Justinian's church of S. Sophia, should be included in the small category who were acquainted with Latin literature is indeed a more far-reaching issue than that of the survival of Latin in the eastern capital, since it is an element in the larger problem of the extent to which late Greek poets knew and imitated the work of their Latin predecessors. The broad generalisations of the past no longer satisfy modern scholarship, which rightly demands rigorous scrutiny of the evidence for each individual author.

When did Livy write his history? How many books had it, and what did the lost ones cover? Such answers as can be given to these questions come almost entirely from the one extant summary, the Periochae. The manuscripts of the Periochae disagree, however, on a matter of considerable interest: out of a hundred or so, only three, supported by a lost fourth, have been cited as adding to the title Ex libro CXXI the subtitle qui editus post excessum Augusti dicitur. When the latest editor, P. Jal in the Collection Budé (Paris, 1984), declares himself unconvinced of its authenticity (i. cxx–cxxi), he leaves the reader to decide whether authenticity means truth, authorial origin, or presence in the archetype; but whatever it means, seeds of suspicion have been sown.

Presumably it is common ground that this verb has in addition to the basic sense ‘recognize’ the derivative sense ‘oread’, and that one must judge from the context whether reading to one or more other people, or private reading, is meant. The reading of the text of a law to a jury at an orator's request is marked by the circumstances themselves as public reading; so is the reading of the Athenian decree to the Mitylenaeans in Thucydides. When Theaetetus answers in the affirmative the question whether he has read the book of Protagoras which contains the statement that man is the measure of all things (); or when it is asked ‘Why is it that some people, if they begin to read, are overcome by sleep even against their will, whereas others wishing to be overcome by sleep are kept awake by taking up a book?’ Evidently what is intended is reading in the privacy of one's own room. When Socrates in the Phaedo says that he heard a person reading from Anaxagoras and eagerly took the book home to read (97 B-98 B), both senses are found within a few pages.

This article does not attempt, except in a general way, to indicate Plutarch's sources for this Life, since any such attempt, in the absence of much of the relevant literature, is foredoomed to failure. It aims rather at showing the different types of biographical literature which grew up around this figure and which form the basis of Plutarch's Life, and to show what seems the most probable relationship of this Life to the biography of Nepos and to Cicero's Cato, both of which works have, in the present writer's opinion, been too readily assumed by some critics as Plutarch's sources. We may most conveniently deal with Plutarch's Life first, and then pass on to Cicero's and Nepos' presentations.

To justify certain steps of the computation developed in his Sand-Reckoner, Archimedes cites (without proof) the following inequalities relative to the sides of right triangles:

if of two right-angled triangles, (one each of) the sides about the right angle are equal (to each other), while the other sides are unequal, the greater angle of those toward [sc. next to] the unequal sides has to the lesser (angle) a greater ratio than the greater line of those subtending the right angle to the lesser, but a lesser (ratio) than the greater line of those about the right angle to the lesser.

That is, with reference to the two right triangles ABG, DEZ (Fig. 1), where AG equals DZ and the angle at B is greater than that at E, ZE:GB < angle B:angle E < DE:AB.

(Anth. Pal. 10.92)

So the Palatinus, our only source for this poem. No satisfactory explanation of has ever been propounded, and the words are surely corrupt. By deftly changing two letters and replacing by Jacobs restored a sense of sorts:

In Cratylus 385 b-c Plato argues that if statements () can be true or false, names (),2 as parts () of statements, are also capable of being true or false. From Aristotle onwards this view has often been challenged,3 and R. Robinson put the case against it trenchantly when he wrote:4

This argument is bad; for names have no truth-value, and the reason given for saying that they do is a fallacy of division. No one in the dialogue points out that it is bad. … Nevertheless it is fairly probable that Plato saw or at least felt that it is a bad argument, quite different in quality from those he later produces against the nature-theory.

J. M. C. Toynbee's study ‘Nero Artifex: the Apocolocyntosis Reconsidered’, C.Q. xxxvi, 1942, 83–93, has the double merit of questioning what had never been questioned—the dating of the Apocolocyntosis about A.D. 54–5—and of making many valuable observations on the importance of the Neronia of A.D. 60. But the attempt to transfer to these Neronia the Apocolocyntosis, the Carmina by Calpurnius, the second of the Carmina Einsiedlensia, and, to a certain extent also, Lucan's De Bello Civili, seems to me, if I may anticipate my conclusions, entirely misleading.

The problem suggested by this passage cannot be properly appreciated unless it is shown first of all that the treatment of poetry and art in the Laws fundamentally agrees with, though of course in some respects it provides a welcome supplement to, the attitude set forth in the Republic and elsewhere by Plato. The demand that music and poetry should ‘imitate’ the good; and that this ‘imitation’ should have meaning and accuracy, and be free from mere emotionalism (655–9, 667 sqq.) directly recalls the doctrine of the Republic (e.g. 395, 401) and other dialogues on the two kinds of imitation, which I have explained in the Classical Quarterly XXII p. 16, XXVI p. 161; the reason for the demand is the same—the imitation of evil has the same effect on character as the companionship of evil men. As for the effect of this ruling on comedy, the Republic (396e where παιδιᾶς χάριν leaves a loop-hole, 606c) is perhaps not over-clear. But the Laws explains that the comic art is to some extent valuable; its pictures of the ludicrous serve as a warning, and also help to make goodness more intelligible by setting it in relief; hence comedy may be performed for the edification of citizens by slaves or hired aliens (816) under certain restrictions such as that a piece shall not have too long a run (England on 8i6e 9) and that no ridicule of free men is to be permitted (935–6). On tragedy the two dialogues are in full agreement; it must become once more a hymn (Rep. 607a), using for a good purpose those forms of dramatic representation which are allowed to the poet in Rep. 396, and avoiding the mournful and complaining language (and music) of profane tragedy, which merely harrows the feelings and which cannot be used without blasphemy at a festival of the gods (Rep. 383bc, 605–6, Laws 800, 817).

To convince the Spartans of his suggested reform of the kingship, Lysander tried to get the sanction of the oracle of Zeus Ammon at the oasis of Siwa in Libya, and even attempted to bribe the priests there. The priests reported him to the Spartans. Only after his death, upon the discovery of a speech he had ordered concerning the reform, was the full scale of his plans revealed.

The Euthydemus presents a brilliantly comic contrast between Socratic and sophistic argument. Socrates' encounter with the sophistic brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus exposes the hollowness of their claim to teach virtue, unmasking it as a predilection for verbal pugilism and the peddling of paradox. The dialogue's humour is pointed, for the brothers' fallacies are often reminiscent of substantial dilemmas explored seriously elsewhere in Plato, and the farce of their manipulation is in sharp contrast to the sobriety with which Socrates pursues his own protreptic questioning. But the strategies of this text are complex: the Euthydemus may be a playful satire of the desire to confound, yet beneath its knockabout humour a serious purpose is also visible.

No recent scholar has ever seriously maintained the genuineness of [Andokides] Oration IV, Against Alkibiades. Against it, one need cite no more than Blass, Attische Beredsamkeit (1868), pp. 325–31; Jebb, Attic Orators (1876), vol. i, pp. 133–9; an(i now more recently Raubitschek's learned and interesting article in T.A.P.A., vol. lxxix (1948), pp. 191–210. The speech is quite ‘out of character’ for Andokides, who was certainly far too young ever to have been in danger of ostrakism as an alternative victim to Nikias or Alkibiades; and there is no reasonable doubt that its ‘dramatic date’ is early in 415, and its ostensible speaker Phaiax, the clever young orator of Aristophanes' Knights (1377 ff.), ambassador to Sicily in 422 (Thk. 5. 4–5; cf. our speech § 42, which adds Macedonia and Epeiros) and butt of Eupolis on divers occasions (Plut. Alk. 13, Athenaios 3. 106b). These conclusions, however, leave open certain other material questions, especially that of the real date of the composition, on which in turn depends the question how far it can be legitimately used as an historical or biographical source.

In his reply to my previous article Professor Tatum has added some interesting material to the discussion and has made some points which invite further examination.

He rightly stresses that the statement in the added first line, that the dead man had been flamen Dialis, would have conflicted with the hopes expressed in the original epitaph if we think these hopes referred to success in war and politics. This objection would be equally relevant if the Publius of the epitaph were the grandson proposed by Sumner or any other young Scipio who, though robust enough for a public career, died prematurely.

It seems clear that Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus knew, if not the third Sibylline Oracle itself, prophecies like it. An unnoticed parallel between that work and Horace may confirm this conclusion and afford a small insight into the Latin poet's art.

The Athenian expedition led against Macedonia by Archestratos, son of Lykomedes, early in 432 was not diverted from its destination by the revolt of Poteidaia. Archestratos had received additional instructions to enforce the Poteidaia ultimatum if he could, but, this being already impossible, he continued with the real object of his mission, the attack on Perdikkas II of Macedon. The widespread revolt among the Chalkidians had deprived the Athenians of the bases for this attack on which they might have reckoned, and Archestratos had at the outset to make good this loss by recapturing Therme, at the head of the gulf to which it gave its name. Therme, or Serme, had been a tributary member of the Delian League since 450/449:2 it need not necessarily be said that it lay within Macedonia, as Poppo and Bergk inferred from Thucydides 1. 61. 2, but it is at least likely that it lay on the boundary, as it was handed over to Perdikkas under the agreement of 431 (Thuc. 2.29.6).3 However, that the Athenians could include in their Empire a city within Macedonian territory is shown from the position of Berge (tributary since 452/451), and is likely in other cases, e.g. Haison. From Therme, Archestratos moved on to Pydna, presumably by sea, and laid siege to it. Here he was joined by substantial reinforcements, while at the same time the situation in Chalkidike became increasingly embarrassing, so that a peace and a reinsurance alliance were seen by both sides to be ‘imperative’ (Thuc. 1. 61. 3). When these had been concluded, the Athenians moved against Poteidaia.