The true relation between these scenes and historic fact is more mysterious and less simple. The metamorphosis takes place on a higher plane. Historic events and the poet's inner experience are stripped of everything accidental and actual. They are removed from time and transported into the large and distant land of Myth. There, on a higher plane of life, they are developed in symbolic and poetic shapes having a right to an existence of their own. The fact, therefore, that the subjection of the storm is described in a simile for a moment highlighting a very important sphere of the poem (namely that of the historical world) is more decisive than a possible allusion to the younger Cato.

The first part of this paper argued that the traditional application of the Cave to the Line was not intended by Plato, and led to a misunderstanding of both similes. The Cave, it was said, is attached to the simile of the Sun and the Line by the visible region outside the cave, which is a reintegration of the symbolism of sun, originals and images in the sunlight, and the new system of objects inside the cave is compared and contrasted with the natural objects in the visible outside. As we know that the natural symbolism illustrates the Platonic education, our main task in this paper will be to find the meaning of the cave, untrammelled by the associations of the lower line.

The standard histories give notice of a polemical treatise entitled Letters on Empedocles, 'Eπιστολικὰ. περὶ 'Eμπεδοκλέους (Diog. Laer. Vitae 10.25) in twenty two books by Hermarchus, Epicurus' favourite pupil and successor. The work survives in some twenty fragments of more than probable ascription. The most important of these is an extensive extract preserved by Porphyry at De Abstinentia 1.7–12 on the origin in human history of justice, homicide law, and expiatory purifications, which has been the subject of much discussion. Porphyry himself never names the title of Hermarchus' treatise, though he makes it clear that it was in the form of a polemical attack on the views of Empedocles. A recent papyrus find gives the title not as Letters on Empedocles, but as φρὸς 'Eμπεδοκλέα (Against Empedocles). In what follows it will be convenient to show that this is no mere variant but in fact the original and correct form of the title, and to determine what can be known with certainty as a result about the make-up of the work.

That Hermias, the despot of Atarneus, was a barbarian as alleged by Theopompus, fr. 242, Oxf., Letter to Philip, in Didymus in Dem., col. 5, 24, has been denied by Jaeger, Aristoteles, p. 113 n., on the ground that in Aristotle's hymn and epigram he is put forward as a Hellene; cf. ibid., p. 119, on Callisthenes and Hermias. In confirmation may be added that, had he been a barbarian, he could hardly have induced the Eleans to declare the Olympic truce to him as Theopompus says they did, Did. 5, 29. Demetrius the Magnesian, Diog. L. V. 3, said he was a Bithynian; and possibly Theopompus said the same in the defective passage in fr. 210, Did. 4, 69. He may have been in fact a Bithynian by place of birth, yet not by blood: at such Greeks the taunt ‘barbarian’ was readily cast; cf. Birds 1700 on Gorgias, and Aeschines on Demosthenes. But we may go much further in scepticism.

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.

What follows is an experiment in reading practice. I propose that we read some key passages of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses in the active pursuit of acrostics and telestics, just as we have been accustomed to read them in the active pursuit of allusions and intertexts; and that we do so with the same willingness to make sense of what we find. The measure of success of this reading practice will be the extent to which our understanding of these familiar and well-studied texts can be usefully enriched by our interpretation of our discoveries (or rediscoveries). These will include an undiscovered authorial signature NASO in the ‘second proem’ of the Metamorphoses; an unnoticed self-referential response to Horace with NITIDO at the centre of Ovid's epic and a similarly self-referential AVSVM at the centre of Virgil's epic; in the Aeneid we will also find glances to Aratus with LEPTE and an Aratean anagram on Aeneas’ shield; and two new acrostics connecting Dido, Ajax and Lavinia.

The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras (the two being often confused), a number of anecdotes of varying degrees of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels in Der Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary (though not entirely comprehensive) as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat.

There have been two recent attempts to disentangle the evidence for the procedures in fourth-century Athens for the enactment and revision of nomoi, by D. M. MacDowell and by M. H. Hansen. I have learned from both, but think that further progress can be made.

MacDowell distinguishes five separate measures:

(b) The Old Legislation Law, requiring action at a specified time, advance publicity for the new proposal, concurrent repeal of any existing law with which the new proposal conflicts, and a decision by nomothetae who are omomokotes, men who have sworn the dicastic oath <for the current year and are on the register of potential jurors>: this is described as a παλαι⋯ς νόμος, and as the law καθ' ὃν ἦσαν οἱ πρότεροι νομοθέαι.

(c) Replacing that c. 370, the New Legislation Law, no longer requiring action at a specified time, advance publicity, concurrent repeal, or that the nomothetae should be omomokotes: as a result of the change conflicting laws have been enacted, and for some time continuing to the mid 350s commissioners have had to be elected to sort out the conflicts.

(d) Still valid in the 350s, the Review Law, requiring an annual epicheirotonia of the laws in four subject divisions in the assembly on 11 Hecatombaeon (i), advance publicity for new proposals, and at the third assembly after 11 Hecatombaeon the appointment of nomothetae who are omomokotes to decide between the existing laws and the new proposals.

History of religion, in its beginnings, had to struggle to emancipate itself from classical mythology as well as from theology and philosophy; when ritual was finally found to be the basic fact in religious tradition, the result was a divorce between classicists, treating mythology as a literary device, on the one hand, and specialists in festivals and rituals and their obscure affiliations and origins on the other.

As an example of Aristophanic literary criticism the portrayal of Agathon in the prologue of the Thesmophoriazusae has been rather overshadowed by the poetry contest of the Frogs. This is largely because more can be said about parody when something substantial of the author parodied has survived.1 Before many of the specific difficulties of the Agathon scenes we have no alternative but to confess our ⋯πορ⋯α.On the other hand, we need not despair of understanding the general point of these scenes, and in this the most helpful method is that of identifying those Aristophanic techniques which shaped them. This method has already taken us a good way forward, so that there is no need now to argue for the structural integrity of these scenes2 or their thematic relevance to the play.3 Accordingly, in this paper I will discuss the portrayal of Agathon in relation to typical Aristophanic techniques. My main concern, however, will be with the significance of the different conceptions of literature raised in the course of the parody, Agathon being satirized in turn as an inspired poet, a craftsman poet and an effeminate poet. I hope to show that, for Aristophanes, Agathon's effeminacy is as much a reflection of his art as of his personality.

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.

A Papyrus commentary on Alcman published in 19571 brings us news of a poem in which Alcman “physiologized”. The lemmata and commentary together witness to a semi-philosophical cosmogony unlike any other hitherto known from Greece. The evidence is meagre, but it seems worth while to see what can be made of it; for it is perhaps possible to go a little farther than has so far been done.

The excursus of Thucydides on the last years of Pausanias and Themistocles (1.128–38) is remarkable for its simple, rapid-flowing style, its storytelling tone, its wealth of personal ancedote, its marked deviation from his normally strict criteria of relevance. These characteristics, which give the excursus a Herodotean flavour, have often been noted by modern scholars, but until recently acceptance of its general credibility has been widespread, and indeed, with one important exception, which seems to have created very little impression almost unchallenged.

The degrees of formality into which speech can be graded are in no sphere more obvious than in expressions of address and third-person reference. Methods of naming vary according to many factors: the formality of the circumstances in which naming takes place, the nature of the subject under discussion, and the ages, sex, and relative status of the speaker and addressee. Conventions of naming sometimes reflect the rigidity or otherwise of social divisions. In some societies or circles address between superior and subordinate is non-reciprocal: the speaker with the greater prestige will adopt one form of address, the subordinate another. In other societies when unequals address each other both may use the same formal method of address: the difference of prestige is not explicitly acknowledged.

A Lasting tradition among the ancients marked Sicily as the birthplace and Tisias and Corax as inventors of the art of rhetoric: and in this tradition, legendary though it became, there is a stricter truth than in most of the stories related about the foundation of invented arts. We, with more elaborate historical views, shall still say of rhetoric that it was created at a certain epoch; and can still point to the Sicilians Tisias and Corax as its authors. Oratory, to be sure, has existed almost as long as speech. Its beginnings are prehistoric, and must in any case be imperceptible; and if by rhetorician we meant no more than one who uses speech with more than common effect, we might set the origin of rhetoric as far back as we chose, and could hardly bring it lower than the beginning of recorded literature. Indeed we are told that under the Antonine Emperors the eminent scholar Telephus of Pergamum wrote a book on Rhetoric in Homer, in which he illustrated from the Poet the whole contemporary system of the art down to the thirteen constitutions of Minucian; and in the same spirit the Venerable Bede, resenting the claim of the Greeks to have invented tropes and figures of speech, wrote a short work to show that they could all be found in Holy Scripture. But such inquiries, even when conducted less foolishly than by Telephus and less incompetently than by Bede, are irrelevant to the proper history of rhetoric. Let the practice of oratory have begun when it may, the first attempts known to us in Classical Antiquity to formulate a series of principles for the art of speech were made in the fifth century before Christ. These earliest systems were naturally very imperfect: they could not immediately be either comprehensive or well organized. But they were something that had not existed at all before: methodical principles for speaking. At the moment when these were first set out the art of rhetoric began.

In every generation the overwhelming majority of those who inhabited the imperium Romanum worked on the land and derived their sustenance directly from it. The notion is commonplace and scarcely admits of debate, but its implications for long have suffered unwarranted neglect. The well-being of any society ultimately rests upon the quantity and diversity of its food supplies, but the immediacy of their contact with the soil continually reminded the Roman people of this platitude with a force which few students of their history today can readily appreciate. The annual yield of wheat in particular, always a staple item in the Roman diet, and to a lesser extent of such cereals as panic and millet, acutely affected every segment of the Roman community. One example will serve to illustrate the point. The dependence of the plebs urbana upon imported surpluses is notorious, equally the intense suffering and violence which typically accompanied any disruption of their supply. Such outbreaks frequently punctuated the chaotic final decades of the Republic, but they also scarred more than one régime during the first two centuries of the Principate.

The paragraph in the first book of the Georgics, running from lines 118 to 159, which describes the loss of the golden age and man's subsequent history, has been very diversely interpreted. But one sentence, at 145f., has been especially controversial:

labor omnia vicit

improbus et duns urgens in rebus egestas.

In the Republic, Socrates undertakes to defend justice as being in itself a benefit to its possessor. Does he do this, or does he change the subject? In a well-known article, David Sachs pointed out that there seems to be a shift in what Plato is defending. The challenge to Socrates is put by Thrasymachus, who admires the successful unjust man, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who do not, but are worried that justice has no adequate defence against Thrasymachus. In all these passages justice is discussed in terms of the non-performance of actions which are regarded as unjust according to common morality; Sachs calls this common concept of ordinary justice ‘vulgar justice’.