Achilleus′ speeches and action in Iliad 24 ‘complete a development of character-or better, enlargement of experience and comprehension-which stretches through the whole poem’. I largely agree with this statement, but since I also believe that an ‘enlargement of experience and comprehension’ necessarily entails ‘ a development of character’, I do not hesitate, as its author does, to assert that Achilleus′ character develops, i.e., changes for the better, in the course of the Iliad. It is my purpose here to discuss one of the ways in which his speeches in Book 24 are specifically designed to bring this out. I will also argue that it is precisely because his character changes for the better that the poem fits the Aristotelian concept of epic. Lastly, I will attempt to refute Redfield's arguments in support of his opinion that Achilleus does not change in the course of the story.

In 1957, Edgar Lobel published an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P. Oxy. 2390) containing anonymous commentaries to poems of Alcman which has not ceased to fascinate philologists and historians of ancient philosophy.

The consensus of modern opinion on the performance of this ode is that it was not a properly commissioned epinicion, but was sent spontaneously by Bacchylides in an attempt to introduce himself to Hieron. Gzella, for one, argues that many so-called epinicia were sent from poet to patron in order to impress and win commissions. Hence one finds, or so he claims, the terms , though, to be sure, commissioned epinicia were far more common.1 One could be misled here into believing that these were terms used by Pindar and Bacchylides themselves

Significant dreams, like omens and oracles, play a conspicuous part in Herodotus′ narrative; the prominence which he affords to them well illustrates the difference between his approach to historiography and that of Thucydides, in whose work we shall look in vain for nocturnal visions. From the point of view of the scientific historian reports of dreams are inadmissible evidence, resting as they must on the unverifiable testimony of a single witness whose recollection is very likely to have been influenced by subsequent events. Herodotus′ more hospitable attitude in part reflects his incalculable debt to the traditions of Levantine storytelling; but it is also connected with the central position occupied by kings and other powerful individuals in his narrative. Homer bears witness to the belief that the dreams of kings are more likely to be divinely inspired than those of others (II. 2.80–2.83), and throughout the Near East rulers recorded the achievements which resulted from monitions received in sleep; if royal dreams assumed a more lucid and orderly form than most people could well parallel from their own experience, this might be regarded as a natural corollary of the peculiar link between king and gods.

Whom did Telephus defend in Telephus? We know that he defended himself; fr. 710 proves that. It is widely, and I believe rightly, held that he defended the Trojans also; but this has been denied by some scholars, most recently by David Sansone in an article on the date of Herodotus' publication. In the first part of this paper I shall comment on Sansone' arguments and offer a defence of the conventional view; I shall then make some rather speculative suggestions concerning the reconstruction of the play.

It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this assumption can be shown to be shaky or actually false, the grounds for dividing the quotations of Empedocles into two poems by subject matter disappear; and without that division our interpretation of Empedocles stands in need of radical revision. This paper startswith the modest task of showing that Empedocles may have written only one philosophical poem and not two, and goes on to suggest some of the ways in which we have to rethink the whole story if he did. If all our material belongs to one poem we are bound to link the cycle of the daimones with that of the elements, and this has far-reaching consequences for our interpretation.

This passage, which appears without variation at the end of four of Euripides' tragedies and with slight variation in a fifth,1 is perhaps the most notorious of the brief sequences of lines, usually anapaestic and usually assigned to the chorus, with which nearly all the extant plays of Sophocles and Euripides conclude.2 Unlike the more varied final speeches of extant Aeschylean tragedy, which are closely integrated with the play's concluding action, these passages often seem almost detachable from such action, a comment upon or merely after finished business rather than a part of its finishing. In some instances there is general scholarly agreement that the concluding lines are relevant to the action of a play, but many of these passages have been variously dismissed by scholars - as interpolations, as mere dramatic conveniences, or as intentional throwaways.

These notes are intended as a critical supplement to my edition of the play, the scale and style of which are not such as to allow extended discussion of textual questions. In some cases I have been able to offer new solutions that did not seem to need more than a brief note by way of explanation, or none at all, and these I shall not discuss further here.

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.

Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries claimed with pride that their ancestors had always lived in Attica, a claim which they expressed by describing themselves as Related to this Athenian belief that they had always lived in Attica was a second, that, as a people, they were literally ‘sprung from the earth’. It is generally assumed that both beliefs developed at a very early date, but this is merely an assumption, and in the course of this paper we will see evidence suggesting, to the contrary, that both ideas were relatively late developments. This paper focuses on the development of the concept of autochthony, as far as our sources allow, in an effort to understand better what autochthony meant to the Athenians. In particular it considers how the Athenians came to think of themselves as ‘born from the earth’. It then suggests how, through the medium of the word the idea of being ‘born from the earth’ came to symbolize ‘living in a place from time immemorial’. Finally it examines how the concept of autochthony was used in contexts which relate it to the ideology of Athenian democracy.

In an earlier contribution to this journal I argued that many details in the experience of Pentheus in the Bacchae derive from the ritual of mystic initiation. One of these details was his vision of two suns, two cities of Thebes, and Dionysos as a bull. I would like to add here a further point of the same kind about this vision.

At the beginning of the fifth century there was a change in the style of clothing worn by Athenian men.1 When Thucydides speaks of it,2 he first describes how the Greeks of ancient times used to carry weapons in everyday life, just as the barbarians of his own day still did. The Athenians were the first to lay weapons aside and to take up a relaxed and more luxurious way of life.

‘Irony,’ says Quintilian, is that figure of speech or trope ‘in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood’ (contrarium ei quoddicitur intelligendum est). His formula has stood the test of time. It passes intact into Dr Johnson's dictionary (‘ mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words’ [1755]). It survives virtually intact in ours:Irony is the use of words to express something other than, and especially the opposite of, [their] literal meaning (Webster's).

In the course of his ethnography of Sicily, Thucydides gives this account of the settlement of Eryx and Egesta in the west of the island (6.2.3): Upon the fall of Troy, some of the Trojans, fleeing the Achaeans by ship, came to Sicily and settled as neighbours to the Sicans; as a group they were called Elymi, while their cities were called Eryx and Egesta. There joined with them in the settlement also some Phocians who were carried from Troy on the same occasion first to Africa by a storm, later from there to Sicily.

In Plato's Theaetetus Socrates is portrayed as a midwife of the intellect. The comparison of Socratic questioning to midwifery had until recently been commonly attributed to Socrates himself. In 1977 M. F. Burnyeat published Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration, which transformed the way in which the dialogue has since been perceived. The author maintains that the midwife comparison is in no sense to be attributed to the historical Socrates.

Diplomacy is the corpus of procedures and institutions used in foreign relations by an independent state. It is the method by which a state seeks to attain its objectives in foreign policy, namely to secure for its citizens prosperity and justice through negotiations with other states.

Editors and translators have found this paragraph troublesome. Though its general tenor is fairly clear it is not easy to interpret in detail, and the task is complicated by three points of uncertainty about the text, (i) Bury conjectured that in 5 is misplaced, and should stand in 3 after . (ii) After in 5, the second hand of Ven. 189 adds modern editors have often accepted this addition, (iii) In 6, has been thought incomprehensible: Badham offered instead, and this suggestion too has found some favour.

The belief in innate knowledge has a history almost as long as that of philosophy itself. In our own century it has been propounded in a linguistic context by Chomsky, who sees himself as the heir to a tradition including such philosophers as Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists and Leibniz. But the ancestor of all these is, of course, Plato's theory of recollection or anamnesis. This stands out as unique among all other innatist theses not simply because it was the first, but also because it is in some respects the strangest: Plato proposed not just a theory of innate knowledge, but of forgotten knowledge, and this, of course, goes hand in hand with his interest in the pre-existence of the soul. But my concern here is with another difference that makes Plato's theory unique, though it is not as clear as the previous one: in fact it has been for the most part over-looked by commentators and scholars. I wish to argue that while other theories of innate knowledge or ideas hold that much of what is innate in us is realized automatically and with ease, be it knowledge of moral principles, the idea of cause and effect or linguistic competence, anamnesis is concerned only with the attainment of hard philosophical knowledge, which most of us never reach.

For a number of years, in the not too distant past, there was a lively debate between Plato's defenders and critics over the question of whether his Republic contained slaves. However, since the appearance of an article by Gregory Vlastos1 some twenty years ago, it seems to have been generally felt that the issue has been resolved, and the controversy has died down. Vlastos argued that the evidence admits of no doubt - Plato included slaves in his ideal state. In this paper, I wish to have the case reopened, and to revive interest in what I believe should continue to be a matter of debate. In opposition to what has become the standard view, I am inclined to think, on balance, that his Republic could not contain slaves. Vlastos begins by reminding us that, on those occasions when Plato wants to propose a radical change from existing institutions, he argues for such a change. If he had intended to abolish slavery from his ideal society, this would have been a radical change, and we should have expected him to indicate clearly such an intention, and to justify it. Since no justification is forthcoming, we may presume that no change is envisaged. This line of argument I shall call the presumptive argument. One version of it is mentioned by R. B. Levinson,2 namely that the rough and dirty work, carried on behind the scene by slaves, will take place as usual, and the continuance of slavery is assumed without question.

In his biological works Aristotle frequently applies the language of abnormality to those individual members of natural kinds which fail through various defects to live up to the standard of their kind (e.g. GA iv.3 and 4). Aristotle extends this language of abnormality to natural kinds themselves, and will often speak of kinds as‘ deformed’ (TreTTripanevos or avd-rrrfpos) or ‘warped’ (Siearpafifxevos).1 In the vast majority of his references to abnormal kinds,2 Aristotle represents them as defective only because they do not measure up to some standard of excellence, and not because of any genuine distortion of their nature. In one category of cases the defective species belongs to a genus which demands a certain characteristic of its species, but which the defective species does not possess. The lobster, for example, belongs to a genus that possesses claws for prehension and for defence, and thus it too possesses claws. It is, however, ‘deformed’, because it does not use its claws in the natural way, but rather for locomotion (PA iv.8.684a32-bl). Such deformities as these may even conform to Aristotle′s teleology and promote the good of the defective species. The seal, for example, belongs to the genus, the viviparous terrestrial, which requires external ears of its members. The seal does not possess them, and consequently is ‘deformed’ (PA n.12.657a22–4). Yet Aristotle also argues that the seal′s lack of external ears is an advantage, because of its aquatic life, and Nature acts ‘reasonably’ in depriving it of them (GA v.l.781b22–8). In another category of cases the abnormal kind is defective with respect to a broader standard of excellence that lies outside its genus. Testaceans, such as the snail, are ‘deformed’ because they move ‘contrary to nature’. They do not move like a footed animal, but as if they were footed animals whose legs have been cut off (IA 19.714b8–19). This category of abnormality even takes in the whole of the animal kingdom, with the exception of man. For every animal is ‘dwarf-like’ in comparison with man, which is the best of animals, because the upper part of every animal′s body, in contrast with that of man′s, is larger than its lower part (PA iv.lO.686b2–21).