The definitive study of the Delphic Oracle by H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell published over thirty years ago assembled all the information then known about it and discussed the various theories both ancient and modern about its operation where reliable information was lacking. In the presentation and evaluation of these theories, however, Parke and Wormell take no account of the methods and practices of state oracles in other cultures, even though such oracles may still be functioning today at the end of the twentieth century and so be able to provide contemporary and authenticated evidence of their workings, power and credibility. In Tibet, for instance, the State Oracle has a history going back over 800 years. It was originally sited at the monastery of Nechung (‘Small Place’) some four miles west of Lhasa, operating there until the Chinese annexation of Tibet in the 1950's, when the monk who acted as the mouthpiece of the oracle followed the Dalai Lama in his flight to northern India. The Tibetan State Oracle now functions in exile at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh some 250 miles north of Delhi. Its operations show some striking similarities to those attested for Delphi, and although the distances in time and space (not to mention the differences in cultural and religious background) obviously preclude any links between Nechung and Delphi other than those of common human experience and psychology, the parallels may at times help to shed some illumination on a few darker or confused areas in our knowledge of Delphic practice. Analogy admittedly is not argument, and the individual reader must judge for himself the applicability of the evidence.

The music of the ancient Greeks, apart from a dozen or so fragments from the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman period, is lost to us. It is unlikely that we shall ever be in a position to appreciate it as we can appreciate their architecture, sculpture, and literature. We can only conjecture as to the extent of our loss from the high regard in which it was held by the Greeks themselves. From Homer onwards Greek authors give an honourable place to it. In lyric poetry, drama, and dithyramb it was a vital element, and Plato and Aristotle were deeply concerned about its use in education and its effect on character. The music teacher (κιθαριστ⋯ς) provided an important part of every boy's education. In some states musical education was compulsory (e.g. in Arcadia up to the age of thirty and in Crete). Without a knowledge of music the Greek was considered uneducated.

Though not the earliest excavator, Schliemann is surely one of the best known, and though he is perhaps most famous as the excavator of Troy his work at Mycenae was equally spectacular in its results and ultimately of greater importance for the study of Aegean prehistory. It seems appropriate, in the centenary year of his excavation of the Shaft Graves in 1876, to present an up-to-date assessment of their significance and of Schliemann himself. This study has developed from the chance discovery that in a letter to Max Müller at Oxford Schliemann reported a detail of the excavation that is not in the published account; in an ensuing hunt for other documents contemporary with the actual excavation, I learned much about Schliemann that seemed to me of considerable interest, as I hope it will be to others outside the small circle of Aegean specialists.

The past sleeps lightly at Olympia. Recall the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film, Olympia. In a misty landscape of ruined buildings, broken columns, and weeds run wild, a Greek temple stands amid the wreckage. Statues appear and then waken to life; a naked athlete throws a discus, another a javelin – this heads towards a bowl of fire. Another naked youth lights the Olympic torch and holds it high. It is carried from hand to hand in a relay and then reaches the stadium in Berlin, home of the 1936 Olympic Games, which the film is meant to celebrate. Adolf Hitler salutes the spectators, 100,000 strong.

Before Vespasian returned to Rome to take up the reins of imperial government, he reportedly had a vision in the Serapeum of Alexandria and, as the New Serapis, healed two men. These wonders came to define Vespasian's time in Egypt and yet, for modern readers, their prominence in the story of the emperor's rise to power creates an apparent inconsistency. The same man who on his deathbed joked about his impending divinization also apparently played the part of a god at the beginning of his reign. Such contradictions are to be expected in the colourful accounts of emperors' lives, but this particular one invites further investigation because of its significance to the historical development of the conception of the emperor's divinity. Through detailed consideration of the prospects for reception of these wonders both during and after the Flavian dynasty, this article seeks to demonstrate the predominance of Domitianic influence on the story of Vespasian's wonders. Domitian's reign saw a new emphasis on the living emperor's divinity, which diminished again under Trajan. Nevertheless, wonders were a means through which the charisma of the emperor was manifested in Flavian Rome and later.

The belief in a golden age is not confined to any one age or civilization. In every civilized community there tends to grow up a nostalgia for the simpler life of bygone days; and other races besides the Greeks (particularly the Chinese) have shown the same desire to exalt their origins and ancestry; But there are peculiar factors which for the Greeks make this belief more real. Their civilization was, they believed, a new one without a forerunner; immediately previous to it lay the period of barbarity in which the idealized naturalism of the age of Cronos was supposed to have flourished. At the same time the subconscious memory of the glories of the Aegean civilization and, perhaps, of the peaceful civilizations such as that of the Indus valley, furnished material to embellish the legend of the Golden Age.

The scope of this article is somewhat diffuse, and a brief mention of the points which are discussed in it will help to make the oudine more clear. First I shall recapitulate the main characteristics of the Golden Age as it is portrayed in classical literature; next I shall discuss the significant fact that it is only used by some writers, while others adhere to the competing theory of ascendant evolution. Then I shall attempt to settle the position, first of the writings of Lucretius, secondly of the Prometheus legend with reference to these competing theories of degeneracy and evolution. Finally, after a brief outline of the causes which lead to a belief in a cyclical theory, a comparison will be made between the views of Hesiod (in Works and Days, 109 ff.) and Plato (Politicus, 269 ff.).

Perhaps no Roman, except Julius Caesar, attracted the interest of ancient writers who specialized in religious affairs as much as Numa. His reign was considered to have been a period of unbroken peace, when the civilizing influences of religious laws tempered the savagery of the Romulean era. The Romans ascribed to Numa the organization of much of their state ritual, although they did admit that some of it was derived from the Etruscans and the Greeks. Numa's successor, Tullus Hostilius, failed to observe his instructions relating to the worship of Jupiter Elicius, a god usually associated by the ancients with lightning, to whom Numa had dedicated an altar on the Aventine. The result was that Tullus met his death when a thunderbolt struck his house. In contrast, Ancus Marcius, traditionally Numa's grandson, regarded Numa as his model and caused the instructions for state ritual contained in Numa's Commentarii to be transcribed on to tablets and displayed in the Forum. This king had a successful reign. Such is the spirit of those whose accounts of the Roman kings are still extant, all writers who lived during the late Republic and early Empire. It is clear from the way in which they make Numa the author of complete institutions which could not have received their final form until later times, that every change and every new practice in religious performance needed at least to conform in appearance to the doctrines of Numa. Fondness for apposite etymology led some to associate his very name with the Greek νόμος, a law.

Our sources present us with three different versions of Themistocles' death. The purpose of this article is to examine these different versions, explain how and why they developed in the form they did, and show which version is most likely to be correct.

In the Republic (519 E ff.), having finished his account of the education of the philosopher king, and having described the ideal life of pure contemplation in the Simile of the Cave, Plato makes Socrates say:

Then it will be our function as founders, I said, to compel the best natures to undertake the study which we previously declared to be the highest, to observe the good, and to make that ascent we mentioned, and when they have done so and looked their fill, then we must not allow them that freedom which they now possess.

In his sprightly volume The Homeric Odyssey (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955; originally the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), Professor Denys Page favoured the public with what he terms (p. 149) a few points of interest from his notes on the vocabularies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listing words and phrases found in the Iliad but rarely or never in the Odyssey, and vice versa, he concludes (p. 157) ‘that the two poems were composed and transmitted in separate regions of Hellas’.

On 19 December 2011, the death was announced of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. He was succeeded in power by his third son, Kim Jong-un. The BBC has called it a ‘choreographed Stalinist-style succession’ but, for students of the classical world, there is an uncanny resemblance to the death of Augustus in AD 14 and the accession of his adopted son and heir, Tiberius. A death is announced; there are allegations that it occurred earlier than is officially acknowledged, with announcement postponed so that all can be put in order for a smooth transfer of power. News of the death is received with public displays of grief, while the new autocrat is greeted with a pledge or oath of loyalty. The first necessity is to take control of the military, and military orders are issued by the successor before any formal power is conferred. There are omens. The state calls for its new leader to accept power. Money or food is distributed in the name of the head of state recently deceased. Much is made of coincidences (the date on which Augustus assumed the principate and died; the date on which Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un respectively became supreme commander). When it comes to the formal transfer of power, the written will of the dead leader is cited to legitimate his successor.

When Xerxes was marching through Asia to invade Greece, says Herodotus, he had to pass through the town of Kallatebos, not far from the crossing of the river Maeander. At this place (where, by the way, men make their living by preparing honey from tamarisk and wheatmeal) the king saw by the roadside a magnificent plane-tree, which on account of its beauty he presented with golden ornaments, and arranged that a man should stay there as its keeper or guardian for ever after. He then proceeded to Sardis.

The story became famous, and later centuries thought it rather silly. Aelian in particular declares that Xerxes, who ‘thought nothing of the works of God's hands, but must go and build himself newfangled roads and unusual ship-canals’—so he sneers at the eminent engineering feats of the Hellespont Bridge and the Athos Canal—made himself ridiculous (γɛλoīoς) by falling in love with a plane-tree, and decking it with golden necklets and bangles, and setting a guard over it, as he might set a slave to keep an eye on his harem. ‘What good did it all do the tree?’ Aelian rhetorically asks. ‘The apposititious ornament nothing suiting with it, hung there in vain… For to the beauty of a tree are requisite fair branches, leaves thick, a body strong, roots deep,… wideness of shadow, the successive seasons of the year, the nourishment of water by channels and rain.’ The criticism is rational. But Aelian, who though he wrote in Greek is recorded never to have left his native Italy, could hardly appreciate the feelings of admiration and delight, even of religious awe, shown by the dwellers on the arid plateaux of Asia for large and shady trees, feelings shared by the Greeks, and by any modern traveller in Greece who on a dusty summer's day has spied far-off a whitewashed chapel with trees at hand, and known that there he would also find a spring of cold dear water and rest from the road.

Saul bellow's book Mr. Sammler's Planet documents contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster of homo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.

‘M. Tvllivs … etiam in hoc opere [i.e. philosophia] Platonis aemulus exstitit.’ There is a fallacy underlying Quintilian's judgement here—he is not by any means at his best in this famous chapter—which is interesting in that, with very different consequences, it also underlies the almost total neglect of Cicero's philosophical works prevalent in this country in our own day. (That Cicero's philosophical works were once popular everyone knows; but many would, I fancy, be surprised to learn how much serious and scholarly attention they are still receiving in America, France, and Germany.) The fallacy which is the common basis of Quintilian's approbation and our neglect is the belief, explicit or implicit in much modern criticism, that Roman literature is to be assessed by comparison, man for man and genre for genre, with Greek. Some such comparisons can be made, and with profit for those who do not prejudge the issue of the investigation and, since the Roman writers often seem deliberately to invite such comparisons, for those who are equipped with the necessary understanding of what ‘imitation’ means in the context of ancient literature. But these comparisons are silly and fruitless when conducted with the kind of naïveté which can see in Cicero's philosophical writings only a ‘poor man's Plato’. To compare Cicero and Plato in this field is to compare incomparables. This becomes clear if we forget our presuppositions and ask, as I propose to do, (1) what was Cicero in his philosophical writings trying to do and was it worth doing, and (2) how did he set about his task, and were his methods the right ones ? Only then can we attempt, as I shall do briefly in concluding, an estimate of his achievement.

Modern scholarship has devoted much time and ingenuity to the problem of the sources from which the Greek tragic poets drew the plots of their plays. It has been commonly assumed that somewhere in that largely unknown area of literature which lies between Homer and the fifth century b.c. most legends had already crystallized into more or less the shape in which we know them from drama; and that the Attic playwrights (with the possible exception of Euripides) made little more than minor alterations in tales already familiar to their audience. But there is little evidence to support this assumption, either in the scanty remains of Cyclic epic and choral lyric, or in the occasional remarks on the subject by ancient commentators. In this article I attempt to illustrate by a single example a different point of view: the belief that in dealing with this aspect of tragedy we should put the same emphasis on the creative artistry of the dramatists themselves which it has received from Kitto and others in discussing other sides of their work; and that where (as in most cases) the source of their version is unknown, the very fact that it is moulded to suit a dramatic purpose should lead us to give the author, rather than a hypothetical and perhaps imaginary tradition, the benefit of the doubt.

On 14 December 1968 the following report from New York appeared on the front page of the Guardian: ‘An American-Italian team of archaeologists has found the long-lost site of Sybaris, known throughout the ancient world for its wealth and the luxurious life of its citizens. The discovery of the city was announced last night at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. F. G. Rainey, director of the University's museum, and Professor Giuseppe Foti, superintendent of antiquities at Calabria, said that the city, which disappeared around 510 B.c. after a civil war, had been found “beyond reasonable doubt”…’ When the excavation of Sybaris starts in earnest, it is expected to produce material of the first importance for the study of Greek colonial history in the archaic period. In view of the general interest that the excavation will arouse, it is worth summarizing what is known about Sybaris, to explain both the considerable efforts that have been made to find the site of the city, and the potential importance of its discovery.