The Works and Days is contained in far more manuscripts than the other Hesiodic poems. Altogether there are something over 260, as against seventyodd for the Theogony and sixty-odd for the Shield. Over a hundred of them are later than 1480, the approximate date of the earliest printed edition of the poem; but even when these are subtracted, a formidable number remains, many of which have never been investigated. The present century has seen more done in the way of cataloguing them than the nineteenth, but less in the way of collating them. Since N. A. Livadaras published his list of Hesiod manuscripts in 1963, the disparity between what has been done and what might be done has become more apparent than ever before.

The Hellenistic epigrammatist does not break off at this point, but proceeds to state that Pisistratus collected the corpus of the songs of Homer—an appropriate tribute, in his view, to a ‘golden scion of Athens if, as is claimed, we Athenians founded Smyrna’ (Smyrna was commonly thought to be the native town of Homer). The ‘Pisistratid recension’ of Homer is an extremely vexed and unfashionable question in Homeric criticism and does not concern us here. More to the present point is the elementary logical mistake which is made in the lines which are quoted above. Pisistratus had three periods of tyranny, and is said to have been driven out three times, and to have been restored (or perhaps to have come to power) three times. The error is a transparent one, common in juvenile puzzles. Pisistratus died naturally in old age at the end of his third spell of power (probably 528/7 B.C.) and so was exiled only twice. The final exile of his son Hippias (511/10) would be the third occasion completing the chain of coup and expulsion

The story of the votum made by the inhabitants of Locri Epizephyrii in 477/6 is well known: they vowed to prostitute their virgin daughters at the festival of Aphrodite, if they were granted victory over the tyrant Leophron of Rhegion who was directing an attack against their city. The threat, which was very serious, was overcome thanks to Hieron of Syracuse, but the Locrians did not fulfil the votum; they were reminded of it more than a century later, but that is another story.

During the entire period of the creative activity of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, tragic playwrights were required to enter the dramatic competition at the Dionysia with tetralogies consisting of three tragedies followed by a satyr play. This last was a comparatively short mythological travesty, a , 2 that received its name because its chorus is invariably composed of satyrs:3 comical half-men, half-beasts who regularly embody a wide range of shortcomings but nevertheless are possessed of a mysterious fund of knowledge and wisdom.

This paper will be concerned with Pindar's often-discussed innovations in the Pelops-Tantalos myth of the first Olympian, where Pindar explicitly rejects the traditional story of Tantalos' cooking his son Pelops and serving him up to the gods, one of whom inadvertently ate from the cannibalistic dish. Does Pindar really alter traditional features of a story from religious considerations only, as the communis opinio takes him to do? D. C. Young has recently drawn attention to the astonishing formal symmetry of the ode. As to the contents, however, the old charges against Pindar's poetry, inconsistency and irrelevance, still remain (‘His method and his conclusion are not easy to unravel’, Bowra says with regard to the central myth in O. I).

This passage has long embarrassed interpreters, and many, beginning with Kock, have condemned it as spurious (generally bracketing 1460–6). But this would mean that Aeschylus' only answer to Dionysus' question (1436) ‘what <way to> safety have you for the city?’ would be, in effect, ‘none’ (1458 ) : and this would hardly justify the general confidence expressed in the final scene (1501 f., 1530 ff.) that Aeschylus will in fact be able to save the city. The most recent editor, Stanford, rightly rejects the idea of interpolation here.

If we reject τις, which appears only in derivative manuscripts, then the sentence is notable in the following ways. First, the position of τι—not that it separates ἕκαστος from ὑμν, but because (a) we expect it, if present at all, to appear as πρός ὃ τι … and (b) ἓαστός τι in itself is a conspicuously discordant juxtaposition—hence presumably the corruption to ἓαστός τις. Second, the sense: the sentence must surely mean not that each juryman has a criterion, but that each has a different criterion, that he would like to see satisfied.

Westphal wished to transpose lines 88–90 and 93–5 of the Supplices. This transposition has been supported recently by R. D. Dawe (The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus, 163), by Holger Friis Johansen in C. & M. xxvii (1966), 43–4 (also in his edition of the play), and by Sir Denys Page (in his new Oxford Text of Aeschylus). However, the transposition gains little support from a careful examination of the language and context of the passage, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate. I discussed the whole passage previously in my article ‘Aeschylus Supplices 86–95’, Classical Philology, 1 (1955), 21–5, and much of my argument can be found in that earlier article.

In the course of the military operations at Pylos three major actions were fought. The first was the series of attacks by land and sea launched by the Peloponnesians against the forces under Demosthenes occupying the peninsulaof Pylos (Thuc. 4. 9–12); the second was the naval battle in the harbour (13–14); the third was the Athenian assault on the Spartans cut off on Sphacteria(29–39). The second of these actions does not appear to have had less influenceon the development of the situation or to have been militarily less interestingand instructive than the other two. The account of it by Thucydides is, however, less detailed than his accounts of the first and third major actions andmay be thought to be lacking in the clarity which is normally a conspicuousfeature of his battle narratives.

Burnet's text (here printed) should be emended or repunctuated at three points. At d I we should follow Moreschini and with BT omit Proclus' γε: the unanimous voice of our best manuscripts must be allowed to drown the unreliable Neoplatonist. At e 2, as I shall argue, should be excised. And at e 2–3 the clause is to be attributed to Aristoteles, as Brumbaugh (tentatively supported by Stokes) advocates. This attribution gives a better and more typical question and answer sequence, although I can find no other example where Aristoteles ventures sua sponte (but he often enough—if less often than when prompted—volunteers e.g. 137 c 9, 138 c 6, 142 c 5, 145 a I).

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play.

Alexander's satrapal appointments in Syria have long been a focal point of scholarly dissension, for the relevant passages in the ancient sources are uniformly inconsistent and sometimes disconcertingly corrupt. A running debate continued until 1935, when Oscar Leuze presented a monumental survey of the ancient evidence together with exhaustive refutation of the hypotheses advanced by earlier scholars. Since then the problems of Syria under Alexander have been left virtually undisturbed, which is a pity. In the first place, Leuze's treatment is not impregnable. His massive discussion tends to convince through sheer accumulation of argument rather than by the cogency of its logic, which can often be faulted.

In the preface to the Anabasis Arrian explains his reliance on Aristobulus (as well as Ptolemy) because he took part in Alexander's campaigns and yet wrote after Alexander's death, when he was under no constraint or hope of gain that might lead him to distort the truth. It is in fact clear from 7. 18. 5 that Aristobulus was still writing his history after the battle of Ipsus in 301. According to Ps.-Lucian, Macrobioi 22, he stated at the beginning of his work that he was already in his eighty-fourth year; since numbers are easily subject to copying errors, it may be that the author of the Macrobioi was himself deceived by a manuscript corruption, and in any case, as the date of Aristobulus' birth is unknown, this testimony casts little light on the date of the history.

This paper completes a small but long desiderated act of restitution to the Euripidean scholarship of J. J. Scaliger (1540–1609).

In 1694 Joshua Barnes published at Cambridge a complete edition of Euripides; he included either in his text or notes a number of conjectures transcribed from marginalia in a copy of W. Canter's Euripides (Antwerp, 1571) owned successively by Scaliger, his pupil Daniel Heinsius (c. 1580–1655), to whom Scaliger bequeathed the book, and Jan Rutgers (1589–1625). The book passed to the Bodleian Library at Oxford (it has now the Catalogue no. Auct. S. 5. I); in the early nineteenth century P. Elmsley re-examined it for his editions of Medea and Bacchae, and complained that Barnes had not only failed to report all Scaliger's conjectures but frequently disguised the source of those he had noted or even silently appropriated them to himself.

The scene in Aristophanes' Frogs where Dionysus rows Charon's boat across the Styx to the accompaniment of the chorus of frogs is, of course, one of the most famous passages of Greek Comedy, and an essential element of the humour of the passage is the ineptitude of Dionysus as a rower. As a large part of the Athenian audience would have served in triremes as rowers, Dionysus' inability to perform this familiar task adequately will have been immediately ridiculous. Aristophanes was thus exploiting an easy source of humour in depicting Dionysus as an unaccomplished rower battling against the difficulties and discomforts of the task. Had so obvious a source of humour been neglected by the playwrights of Athenian Old Comedy till the time of Frogs? We should have been obliged to answer that we had no positive indications to the contrary till the publication in 1968 of Pap. Ox. 2740, but this now furnishes us with grounds to infer that some other Old Comedy, very probably the Taxiarchs of Eupolis, contained a scene where some person was represented as rowing ineptly.

The romance of Joseph and Asenatk (JA), a work almost entirely neglected by classicists, was extremely popular for many centuries and translated into many languages—Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, Roumanian, Latin (twice), Middle English, Coptic, and Ethiopian. Yet the first complete edition of the Greek text was not published until 1890, and Batiffol's editio pritnceps (‘Le Livre de la Priére d' Aséneth’, Studia Patristica i-ii (1889–90) does not inspire confidence.Batiffol treated JA as a product of the late fourth or fifth century A.D., though he soon conceded an earlier date, convinced by the arguments of various reviewers that it reflected the missionary outlook characteristic of Judaism of the late Hellenistic and early Imperial period.

It is perhaps unnecessary to defend the principle that mythical exempla in ancient poetry are not merely decorative, but serve in the expression of ‘significant emotion’ it would still be welcome to see it more frequently and more coherently applied. This paper tries to isolate one characteristic use of myth in four poems from Hellenistic and Roman authors; the last section summarizes its conclusions and briefly sets them in a context of literary history.

The relatively plentiful sources for the year 346 pose several questions which have never been satisfactorily answered. Why did Philip insist on an alliance with Athens as a precondition of the peace ? Did Demosthenes simply invent the promises of Philip which he claims Aeschines reported to the Athenian assembly in Skirophorion? Why were the Athenians frightened when Philip got control of Thermopylae? They had long expected him to settle the Sacred War, and such action surely required occupation of the pass. The correct answer to these questions indicates that Philip had two alternative plans in 346. ‘Plan A’ was with the aid of the Athenians to turn on Thebes. By this move, he would reduce the power of the second greatest city in Greece and thus eliminate the possibility of a combination of Athens and Thebes, which might be sufficiently powerful to block his ambitions.

1. 4. 9. Fugite delicias, fugite enervantem felicitatem, qua animi permadescunt et, nisi aliquid intervenit quod humanae sortis admoneat, †velut perpetua ebrietate sopitif†.

Although it is possible to produce a tolerable sentence by deleting et after permadescunt, it is generally agreed that a verb is missing in the last clause. Koch suggested <iacent> sopiti, Gertz sopiti <torpenty<, Feldmann sopiuntur, but the excellent clausula suggests that the end of the sentence should not be tampered with. Others rightly insert their supplement after admoneat: manent Hermes, vivunt Schultess, languent Viansino. One would hesitate to add to the growing clutter of suggestions, did not one of Seneca's favourite verbs seem to meet all requirements, namely marcent. Cf. ben. 4. 6. 3 ‘quies in qua putrescis ac marces’; 4. 13. 1 ‘vobis voluptas est… securitatem sopitis simillimam adpetere e t … animi marcentis oblectare torporem’; dial. 1. 3. 10 ‘hunc voluptatibus marcidumet felicitate nimia laborantem’; 9. 2. 6; 10. 2. 2; epist. 74. 1; 89. 18 et al.

Propertius' account of this myth contains two major difficulties of syntax and interpretation:

(a) modo (line 11). When the word modo means ⋯ννοτε μ⋯νand stands in the first of two co-ordinate clauses it requires an answering modo or its equivalent in the second clause. Et and etiam are not satisfactory equivalents. So the necessary second modo—or equivalent—is here absent.

(b) ibat uidere (line 12) is the sole account of Milanion's activities in connection with the hirsutae ferae. As such it appears obscure and abrupt.