This decisive engagement in the Revolt of the Ionian Cities against Persia has its name from Lade Island, a dissected ridge of rock in the entrance to the roadstead of Miletus, where the naval contingents of the allied Ionian cities were concentrated to oppose a fresh Persian armada of Phoenician, Cypriote, Cilician, and Egyptian ships, 600 in all (vi. 9), of which 353 were war-vessels, probably the provincial levies; but their commanders collaborated (vi. 6). They had two immediate objects: to destroy the Greek squadrons, and to effect a landing in the home territory of Miletus, where a provincial land-force was to meet them for the siege of the city, advancing by the Maeander valley road from beyond Mount Grion and probably based also on the fertile valley of Mylasa about twenty miles south-east.

Although Telemachus is not the chief character of the Odyssey, his part in the plot is of considerable importance, and in one way he seems to be unique. For he is, perhaps, the only character in Greek literature who shows any development. All the other people who appear in Homer are already fully grown and, as characters, static. For in an epic it is the story which is of first importance, and the people can be adequately described by one major trait. In Greek tragedy, also, where no doubt character is of greater moment and occupies a larger proportion of the whole, we never see the characters growing as time passes. For there was a continual obstacle to the development of character on the tragic stage from a rather unexpected quarter—the Chorus. As H. C. Baldry says, ‘Because of the chorus, a fifth-century tragedy could not easily be a serial drama, leaping from incident to incident and place to place… such plays leave no scope for the development of character. The hero's nature may be revealed to the audience step by step, but in most of the extant tragedies it does not change.’

This article attempts to survey certain aspects of parody as it appears in ancient literature: it is concerned mainly with the nature and purpose of parody, the techniques which it employs, the relation of parody to certain other literary forms, and its origin. In any such discussion the principal difficulty is likely to be one of definition and classification, for the terms ‘parody’, пαρῳδή, &c., cover a range of divergent meanings, and a certain looseness can sometimes be detected in their use. What then is the basic meaning which пαρῳδή in itself conveys?

‘History and philosophy’, the problem I am dealing with, does not seem to be a Greek one. It seems much more to be a modern one. You may find this both in English books—e.g. Collingwood on the idea of history, which I read with great interest and profit—and in some German essays, especially by younger philosophers, who state the disastrous gap between the philosophical desire for sense and the absence of sense in history, particularly as epitomized by the most recent events of our own history. It is obvious that philosophers in this crisis feel more troubled than historians. Classical scholars do not seem to be moved at all.