The discoveries and work of Parry and Lord have turned the old battleground of the Homeric Question and its many side issues into a scene of fruitful tillage if not of complete harmony. The exploration in Yugoslav epic songs of the nature of oral narrative, with its identification of the moment of reciting and the moment of composing, has met with wide approval in its application to the Homeric poems. Some scholars, however, feel that the difference in literary merit between the Homeric poems and the Yugoslav epic songs, fine as many of these are, is still too great to allow us to apply to Homer without reserve the conclusions which may be valid for the Yugoslav tradition.

In Ox. Pap. xxxii (1967) i ff., no. 2617, Mr. Lobel published fragments which he shows reason to believe are from Stesichorus’ Geryoneis. Further work has been done on them by Professor D. L. Page and Mr. W. S. Barrett, and the more substantial fragments are included in an Appendix to Page's Lyrica Graeca Selecta (Oxford, 1968). Fr. 4, the most considerable piece, describes how, in Lobel's words: ‘a person, who I do not think there is much room to doubt is Heracles, delivers a secret attack on somebody which consists in shooting him through the head. Though only one “forehead”, one “crown”, and one “neck” are mentioned and the Geryones of Stesichorus had six hands and six feet (Page, MG fr. 186; Stesichorus, fr. 9; LGS fr. 56) and therefore presumably three heads, as elsewhere (e.g. Hes. Theog. 287), the possibility that Geryones is here in question does not seem to be ruled out.’

This paper will discuss the behaviour of and in the Homeric poems. These words are allotted a variety of different ‘meanings’ by the lexicographers. For example, LSJ s.v. I. pray, II. vow, III. profess loudly, boast, vaunt; s.v. I. prayer, II. boast, vaunt, or object of boasting, glory; s.v. I. thing prayed for, object of prayer, II. boast, vaunt. I shall, of course, discuss the whole range of these words; but I begin with some observations on ‘prayer’.

It may appear at first sight that ‘prayer’ is a simple word, with only one conceivable ‘meaning’, which must have that ‘meaning’ in any language. We might suggest that ‘request addressed to a god’ is an adequate representation of that ‘meaning’, and that when we have rendered (say) by ‘pray’ in what appear to us to be appropriate contexts we have conveyed the full sense of the original.

Sophocles' Philoctetes is deservedly a much-studied play, and only sparse gleanings seem likely to remain for those who seek to propose total novelties in interpreting it. Much of the time, in these notes, I am attempting to restate or remarshal arguments for well-known positions; even the arguments are often old; I can only hope the redeployment of some of them will occasionally seem to sharpen them. It will be obvious how much I am indebted to the editions by Campbell and Jebb, and to recent interpretative studies by Linforth, Kitto, and Knox. Some old arguments I have probably recapitulated far too briefly, others I have perhaps reiterated at tedious length. My excuse for writing at all must perhaps be that the excellences of this play seem to be peculiarly in need of defence against critics who approach Greek tragedies with a conventional stereotype in mind, especially those who incline to think that Greek drama must in various ways have been undramatic.

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.

Arrian's enthusiasm for Ptolemy's account of Alexander has often been echoed in modern times. With much justification it is generally agreed that Arrian's account of Alexander, through its reliance on the works of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, is our best and, on the whole, most reliable account of Alexander. Recent work, however, has illuminated Ptolemy's weaknesses, and we can no longer regard Ptolemy as utterly reliable in every important respect. His version of the Alexander story is centred on Alexander, therefore Alexander is depicted out of the close context of the Macedonian court. It is only through the information preserved in other writers—traditionally, but undiscriminatingly, considered unreliable—that, for instance, the picture of Alexander's struggle with his Macedonian nobles has begun to emerge. And in matters of this kind Ptolemy's version is so much the court ‘official’ version that it cannot be regarded as trustworthy.

In an earlier article I reported the text Ajax offered by the so-called ‘Roman’ family of Sophocles, the manuscripts G, R, and Q. My present purpose is to give collations of G, R, and Q for Philoctetes, with some introductory comments confined to this play; I hope I may be allowed to refer the reader to my previous article for a discussion of the general problems arising from a study of these manuscripts.

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’.

In 394 most editors of the Knights read , cited uniquely from this passage in the lexica, in the sense ‘dry up, parch’ (the simple is said to mean , Hdn. Gr. 2. 132, although it nowhere occurs in extant literature; but cf. avos, etc.), referring, for the condition and appearance of the prisoners after long captivity and privations, to Nub. 186, where the allusion is to the squalor and emaciation of the Socratics. Now Aristophanes' skill in maintaining allusively an image, once a keyword has been supplied, makes me wonder how line 394 was intended to complete the metaphor of the harvest and the crop in 392–3.

The average educated Greek, I am sure, knew the early history of Greece as well as the average educated European knows the history of modern Europe, and could no more separate Theopompos from the first Messenian War or put Pheidon after Kypselos than we can separate Wellington from Waterloo or make Frederick the Great follow Napoleon.

The professional historian, antiquarian, or chronographer would know much more, but could readily distort what he knew in trying to impose some theoretical pattern on the past. Where so many of our sources are theoretical (all the chronographers for example) and when they survive in fragments which are rarely substantial enough to show in detail the theory on which they worked, it is not easy to see through to the core of Greek belief on which they were based. But facts there were and in the main it was from them that the theorizing started.

To the modern student of fourth-century Greece nothing at first sight seems so surprising as the almost kaleidoscopic changes in relations between Greek cities, especially in the fourth century. Mortal enemies become allies suddenly, and alliances, though made for all time, are rapidly dissolved. In his old age Sophocles had summed up the harsh experience of a lifetime in words that might serve as an epigraph for the mutability of Greek ‘international’ politics.

Those who have studied the Athenian system of command in the fifth century have confined themselves almost entirely to the period after 440 B.C. They have raked over the evidence to discover signs of double representation of one tribe on the board of strategi, or of a supreme among the or of a chairman at least of the board of strategi. On the other hand little attention is paid to the progressive diminution of the military functions of the archon polemarchus within the state and to the great problems created in external affairs by the Persian Wars with the formation of the Greek League and then of the Athenian Alliance. Yet these matters are vital to the evolution of the system of command which can be seen in operation after 440 B.C. In particular the decisive steps were probably taken in 480–466 B.C., when Athens' national system of command had first to be integrated into a command-system of combined forces headed by Sparta in the Persian Wars and then adapted to take over the command of combined forces in continuous warfare against Persia. In this article I try to study the whole field and to avoid applying to the early part of the period the theories which have been evolved hitherto with special reference to Pericles in 440–428 B.C. The article consists of the following sections. A, Strategos and Hegemon in 501/0. B, C, current ideas on the modern term D, the historical origins of the so-called E, summary of conclusions.

To know the scale of an aulos it is necessary to have a complete instrument. None of the surviving auloi are complete. It is the purpose of this article to attempt to reconstruct the missing parts of several auloi and thus to determine their scales.

All musical sounds consist of regular vibrations. The interval between two notes may be expressed as the rate of vibration of the higher note divided by the rate of vibration of the lower note. This ratio is very roughly the same as the length of the air column for the lower note (i.e. the distance from the reed to the first open hole) divided by the length of the air column for the higher note. This gross over-simplification has been used for all calculations in this article. The width of the air column, the size of the holes, and the reed itself affect the pitch considerably. The player also has a large control over the precise note played. And so the notes obtained by the ancients might have been very different from the notes obtained by ignoring these factors; although the player's control over pitch might have been used to lessen the effects of the other factors.

In the continuing discussion and debate over the development of letter-forms in fifth-century Athens, the official casualty lists from the public cemetery have played little part. One of them, however, the so-called ‘Koroneia’ epigram and related fragments (SEG x. 410; xxi. 123; and IG i2. 942), has been used in the argument by H. B. Mattingly, who has assigned it to Delion and claims its tailed rho for the 420s. But, the epigraphical argument aside, it seems to me that in so doing he has ignored two important characteristics of the lists—characteristics that are not apparent from these fragments by themselves but that can be seen from all the inscriptions of this class taken as a group. No summary of our knowledge of these lists has been written for almost 50 years, during which time the number known has almost doubled. In this paper I should like to outline the present state of our knowledge and to give some impressions of them gained from examining all known fragments and preparing them for publication. I wish to stress that these impressions were formed slowly, with no parti pris, no idea of their being used in any debate over letter-forms, but merely with the purpose of understanding as much as possible about the lists as a group.

Ardizzoni retains , but gives no reasons for doing so. Platt's correctionis technically easy, but the difficulty is, I feel, imaginary. I take . as asabsolute, = ‘joined the expedition’: so at 1. 90, 139—not, as LSJgive, ‘come next‘—and is dative of interest or advantage, as, for example, Od. 24. 400 , 21 209, 12.438, A.R. 2. 1092, Q,.S. 6. 119, 10. 24. here does not ‘govern‘ a dative any more than does, for examplel, at Od. 24. 400.And seems to me to be rather oddly placed.

Suidas tells us that Erinna wrote a poem of 300 lines, in Aeolic and Dorian dialect, called . There happens to be preserved on papyrus part ofa hexameter lament for Erinna's friend Baucis, the subject of two epigramsalso by Erinna, AP 7. 710 and 712. ‘Distaff’ is a strange title for a lament, it would seem, and there have been various attempts both to explain it and to explain it away.

Twice in this chapter, according to the commentators, Plutarch has confused a pair of military engagements, Spartolos with Poteidaia and Nikias' campaign in the Megarid during 427 with that of Demosthenes in 424. In both instances this view seems to me to be of doubtful validity. In one case I would propose that instead of confusing two campaigns Plutarch simply misunderstood a very difficult passage in Thucydides, while in the second there is only flimsy evidence for rejecting Plutarch's version.

His statement that the Athenians under the command of Kalliades and Xenophon were defeated in Thrace by the Chalkidians refers to the battle of Spartolos (Thuc. 2. 79), but it has become a critical dogma that Plutarch 'gives Kalliades as the commander, clearly by confusion with Kallias son of Kalliades',3 who led the Athenian forces at the battle of Poteidaia (Thuc. 1. 62–3). The only apparent reason for this view is the coincidence of the names Kallias and Kalliades, but the frequent occurrence of these names makes this coincidence of no significance.

emended in with the note ‘hanc formam doricam defendere studet G. Fraenkel Glotta ii. 33’.Fraenkel argues that this form is the product of a conscious effort to avoidconfusion and not ‘ein bloss‘

In the course of Demosthenes' lifetime, indeed within a mere decade, the whole balance of power in the Greek world was destroyed. By 338 the city states were completely overshadowed by the national state of Macedon, and it is the concern of all students of Demosthenes to analyse this dramatic change. The task is not easy. The evidence is most unsatisfactory. None of the great historians of the age has survived in other than a few precious fragments, and in the absence of Ephorus, Anaximenes, Theopompus, and the Atthidographers the pale reflections of some of them in Book XVI of Diodorus are poor consolation. It is on the Athenian orators that we have to rely, the very men most concerned in the politics of Athens, in the act of glossing over and denying their own share in the disaster and of misrepresenting that of their opponents. Memories were no longer then than they are today. In 343 both Demosthenes and Aeschines in discussing the events of a mere three years past denied all responsibility for the making of the Peace of Philocrates; one, at least, was lying, confidently. The formal documents were, generally speaking, merely heard, and only in part at that, and the orators were well practised in exploiting such material. If Aeschines and Demosthenes could lie so freely within three years of the events, what they had to say at a longer interval must be much more suspect.