Documents in the script known as ‘Minoan Linear B’ were unearthed at Knossos in Crete over fifty years ago. About the same time a few examples of the same script were found at Thebes and other places inmainland Greece. But it was not till 1939 that tablets like those from Knossos came to light in Mainland Greece, near the Messenian Pylos, and not till after the Second World War that they appeared at Mycenae itself.

Before the Pylian discoveries, European scholars had made several attempts to read the script; but their conclusions neither persuaded classical scholars nor wakened public interest. In this matter the discoverer of the Knossian documents, Sir Arthur Evans, seems to have imposed his own restraint on others. The acquisition of what may well be the household accounts of King Nestor created a new enthusiasm for the problem; as soon as the war ended, journals on both sides of the Atlantic began to print essays by various writers who hoped to decipher parts of the script. Mr. Michael Ventris was among these writers; and from the outset his methods were bolder and more resolute than those of the others. By 1951 his tentative decipherment of the Linear B script was being circulated privately; by 1952 he was explaining it in lectures addressed to learned societies; and a year later, in collaboration with Mr. John Chadwick, he published a full account of his solution in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (LXXIII (1953), pp. 84–103).

Mr. Ventris' claims are as follows: (1) The language of all the Linear B writings is Greek, and that of a pre-Dorian kind allied to classical Arcadian and Cyprian. (2) The script is in the main a syllabary, akin to the classical Cyprian syllabary. (3) By studying the way in which the syllabic signs are used (their frequency, position in the word, combination of one sign with another, etc.), and by inferring the content of the documents from certain signs which are not syllabic but ideographic, it is possible to discover the phonetic value of most of the syllabic signs. Mr. Ventris describes how he carried out the work of decipherment and produces phonetic values for most of the signs and also rules of orthography; and finally, he shows how his conclusions can be applied to various documents from Knossos and Pylos.

The only common factor shared by the fragments of vase and votive plaque discussed below is that all are Attic. The plaque fragments seemed to deserve individual treatment outside the general study of votive plaques from the Athenian Acropolis on which I am engaged. The vase fragment with the Marsyas scene which is published here with some comment on the possible literary treatment of the myth is in the possession of Mr. John Leatham. To him I am indebted for permission to study and publish the piece, and to Mme. S. Karouzou, Prof. O. Broneer, the Keeper of Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum, and the Director of the Thorvaldsen Museum for permission to publish pieces in Athens, Oxford, and Copenhagen.

I. Marsyas and Melanippides

The fragment which is here Illustrated on Plate I, 1, 3 is at present in the keeping of Mr. John Leatham. Unfortunately its provenience can be defined no more nearly than as ‘from Greece’. On the photograph reproduced on Plate I, 3 I have added in white the painted details on the sherd which the camera could not record. It is from the rim and wall of a calyx crater, part of whose lip decoration, a palmette scroll, is preserved. From the figure scene below we see the upper part of an Athena who holds her spear upright in the right hand while her arm hangs at her side, perhaps with the hand on the rim of a shield which rested on the ground beside her. She wears an aegis over her peplos, and an Attic helmet with raised cheek-pieces. She is looking to her left and slightly down towards a figure before a tree with white painted leaves. The figure is apparently seated, and his snub nose shows that he is a satyr or silen, and not a young one to judge by his shaggy white hair.

Alexander's battle against the Indian king, Porus, at the R. Hydaspes is in many respects the most interesting of all his set engagements. There he had to cope with a new weapon, the elephant, and few things show his military genius more clearly than the resource which he displayed in solving this difficult problem. The main outlines of the battle are clear, but, despite all that has been written, there is little agreement amongst historians regarding Alexander's tactics in the cavalry engagement which led up to the main action. The most recent treatment of the problem is that by Sir William Tarn, and it is this which has led me to examine the question more closely. Although, as will become clear, I find myself at variance with Tarn's interpretation on numerous points he has, I believe, shown that it is only by a detailed study of Arrian's text that we can arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the orders to Coenus—the hub of the matter. I intend, therefore, to re-examine Arrian's narrative and to attempt to substantiate a view of the overall strategy—particularly the part played by Coenus—radically different from that put forward by Tarn. Moreover, Tarn has subjected Arrian's account of the battle and its preliminaries to such severe criticism that it is not, I think, unfair to say that, if Tarn's interpretation of the operations is accepted, Arrian must be held to have misunderstood his source on several important points and to have failed to make Alexander's tactics intelligible. This article has, therefore, a second purpose—to demonstrate that the undoubted difficulties in Arrian's narrative, due in part to the complicated manoeuvres involved in part to the ambiguity of military terminology, do not indicate any fundamental misunderstanding of the situation by the historian.

This paper is prompted by a careful study of the ancient evidence and of the waters and coasts of the Salamis Channel, which has led me to a new conception of the battle. I proceed from the assumption that the ancient evidence is sound and that, if it is interpreted with respect, it provides a fairly close framework for the course of the battle. To this framework some additions can be made by means of local knowledge, whether gained at first or at second hand. The paper is divided into five sections: the topography of the Salamis Channel, the evidence for the battle, the manoeuvres of the day and the night before the battle, the day of battle, and an Epilogue with an Appendix on the new Scholia to the Persae.

After a hundred and thirty years of controversy, the interpretation of the Prometheus Bound is still the subject of debate. To the romantic poets of the revolutionary era, the Titan tortured by Zeus for his services to mankind appeared as a symbol of the human spirit in its struggle to throw off the chains which priests and kings had forged for it. But to the distinguished Hellenists who after the fall of Napoleon laid the foundations of the great century of German scholarship, no such naïve and one-sided view of the Prometheus seemed tolerable. It was partly, perhaps, that the political atmosphere discouraged an interpretation adverse to authority; but the other writings of Aeschylus himself seemed to offer strong evidence against this view. Elsewhere in Aeschylus, they could argue, Zeus was treated with profound respect. In the Supplices, he is continually appealed to by the chorus of Danaids, who miss no opportunity to extol the supremacy of his power. Zeus' omnipotence is the burden of a celebrated section of the first chorus of the Agamemnon; although scholars have differed widely in the details of their interpretation of this passage, most are agreed that it expresses theological doctrines that are at once subtle and sublime, and many have discovered profound significance in its puzzling allusions to ‘learning by suffering’ and to a χάρις that comes to men from the gods. Chiefly upon evidence derived from these two plays, many scholars have credited their author with the invention of a peculiar personal religion, tending to exalt Zeus at the expense of the other members of the Olympic pantheon, and crediting him with the purpose of perfecting men in goodness through the discipline of suffering. Some have gone so far as to detect tendencies to monotheism in Aeschylus. A fair specimen of the usual kind of view is that of Nilsson, who begins by hesitating to pronounce Aeschylus a monotheist; Aeschylus, he warns us, is not a religious innovator preaching a new form of religion, but a profoundly pious poet; but later, he comes dangerously near to this view. The power of Zeus, he argues, is so much magnified that at one point he seems more a principle than a personal god.

I think that we all know about the Colossus of Rhodes—one of the Seven Wonders of the World. We remember him from our childhood's days. Was there not some story of a great statue standing astride the harbour of that old-world port—Rhodes, somewhere among the Isles of Greece? And if we look up a Classical Dictionary we shall find him described as being a bronze figure of the sun god, Helios, and as standing 70 cubits, that is, more than 100 feet in height. We read that in the year three hundred and three before Christ, Demetrios Poliorketes, King of Macedon, becoming tired of his long-protracted Siege of Rhodes, returned to Greece, leaving his siege-train behind him. The citizens of Rhodes sold the weapons for 300 talents, and devoted the money to the erection of a statue of their god: a statue, moreover, which they hoped would compare favourably with those of their great ally, Egypt. The citizens of Rhodes called upon the sculptor Chares of Lindos: a town on the island of Rhodes not far from the capital. He was a pupil of the Greek sculptor, Lysippos, who had just constructed at Tarentium a bronze statue of Zeus, about 70 feet in height. Chares undertook the work. The colossus took twelve years to erect, from 292 to 280 B.C. It was thrown down by an earthquake some sixty years later, and remained on the ground, as one of the sights of Rhodes, for nearly 900 years. When the Saracens conquered the island in A.D. 653, their general broke up the figure and sold the bronze to a Jewish dealer. Not a fragment of the Colossus remains to-day, and no complete copy of the figure exists.

The general view of the relationship between Euripides and his fellow citizens which seems at present to hold the field received its most recent, most extreme, and most eloquent expression in the Introduction to Professor D. L. Page's edition of the Medea. Here we read: ‘Foreshadowed, too, already in Medea is that great burden of unpopularity which was to oppress the poet throughout his life. The sequel was the ridicule and hatred which Aristophanes reflects: the climax was his voluntary exile to Macedonia in sorrow and disillusion. Euripides was not the only teacher whom the Athenians persecuted, though they returned to him again and again, admiring while they hated, moved while they mocked and slandered.’ After quoting vv. 292 ff., where Medea speaks of the φθόνος incurred by those with a reputation for σοφία, Page continues, ‘History traces a single undeviating line from this passage of Medea through the bitter pages of Aristophanes to the final scene of an old man wandering out into the world friendless and embittered.’ A similar picture had already been presented by Wilamowitz and Murray; though Wilamowitz, in his critical account of the life of Euripides published in 1899, thinks that it was chiefly in the last period of his life in Athens, from the production of the Troades in 415, that the tension between Euripides and his countrymen became acute, and Murray similarly notes as a significant point the production of the Troades, which ‘set a flame of discord for ever between his people and himself’. Of his last years in Athens Murray writes, ‘Whatever the cause, shortly after the production of the Orestes in 408 the old poet's endurance snapped, and at the age apparently of seventy-six, he struck off into voluntary exile.’ The general picture, then, is of Euripides spending the last twenty-five years of his life in Athens, especially from 415 onwards, in an atmosphere of increasing isolation, unpopularity, and persecution, shot through with occasional gleams of approbation, until in 408 the tension became unendurable and he left Athens in voluntary exile.

The well-known fragment of a musical score of a chorus from Euripides' Orestes, published in 1892 by K. Wessely was dated by its first editor to the first century after Christ. Wessely, who had no dated palaeographical material for comparison, based his dating on external factors. ‘The scrap was taken (presumably when unpacked in Vienna, though this is not specifically mentioned) from a layer of papyri which belong to the first century A.D. (the Hadrianic period at the latest), a judgement that I can confirm by means of the dates on some of the pieces should the letter forms not be thought sufficient indication.’ Allowing for a certain period of years to elapse before a literary work was set aside, Wessely concluded that ‘the evidence permits a date in the time of Augustus’. This conclusion seemed to gain force from a suggestion that the papyrus was contemporary with Dionysius of Halicarnassus' musical score of the Orestes (de comp. verb. 11), and has been generally accepted. Nevertheless, the dating is at least two centuries too late. The character of the hand is to a large extent concealed by the photograph (and subsequently apparently it has always been this reproduction that has been reproduced) which accompanied the editio princeps. Seen in the original, however, as I was privileged to see it in the summer of 1955, its unmistakable Ptolemaic character thrusts itself on the attention. The mere size of the letters, especially their width, the coarse cut of the writer's pen which can only make thick strokes, the unnecessary horizontal link-strokes found at the top of a vertical hasta (seen clearly in the μ of μέγας, l. 2) are among such unmistakable stylistic features. Moreover, some of the letters have a characteristic Ptolemaic shape—α, κ, λ, χ, and above all τ, which begins with a bold initial upstroke on the left, υ which has a long, shallow bowl and a leftward curve at the foot of its vertical; to which one is tempted to add the archaic square ε of the musical notation. Among examples of Ptolemaic calligraphy this hand must take a high place. I know of no precisely similar dated handwriting, for dated literary hands of this period are still rare. But a number of similarities can be seen in any one of the following non-literary texts: P. Cairo Zeno 59532 (epitaph) and 59533 (music), and P.S.I. 379 (letter of 249/8 B.C.), all from the Zenon archive and to be dated about 250 B.C.; P. Teb. 811, a smaller and rougher hand of 165 B.C.; P. London 44, a good documentary hand of 161 B.C. which I should judge later than the Orestes. 260 B.C. and 150 B.C. are the extreme limits between which I would assign the date of this papyrus, with a preference for about 200 B.C. On this revised view of its dating, the Orestes fragment is even on external grounds to be reckoned among the oldest surviving pieces of Greek music, only the Zenon scrap (P. Cairo Zenon 59533) being perhaps older.

Among the many intrigues described by Thucydides in Book viii one of the strangest and most obscure is the episode in which Phrynichos, while serving as one of the commanders of the Athenian fleet at Samos, twice sent messages to Astyochos, the Spartan ναύαρχος. Because the intrigue was conducted with the utmost secrecy, detailed information about it cannot have been easily obtainable, and the motives of all the persons involved, who included Alkibiades and Tissaphernes, were perhaps fully known to nobody. The account given by Thucydides (50–1) leaves much unexplained: it gives the impression that he has recorded what he has ascertained from a single informant without adding much comment or interpretation of his own. Had he lived to revise Book viii, he would scarcely have left these chapters as they stand. The object of this paper is to examine these chapters and to suggest that the intrigues of Phrynichos described in them were less exclusively personal in aim, and had somewhat more important consequences, than is generally believed.

The picture of Phrynichos drawn by Thucydides presents him from the outset as a man of exceptional shrewdness who held strong views and did not hesitate to press vigorously for their acceptance even where they were not shared by others. The arguments whereby he dissuaded his colleagues, immediately after their victorious land operations at Miletos, from risking a sea-battle against the newly reinforced Peloponnesian fleet are recorded in some detail (27. 1–4) and with explicit approval (27. 5). Shortly before the episode of his communications with Astyochos he opposed in outspoken terms the plan of the Athenian trierarchs and others who were negotiating with Alkibiades with the intention of overthrowing the democracy and obtaining Persian support. Thucydides devotes a long passage of oratio obliqua to the objections of Phrynichos (48. 4–7). He maintained that Alkibiades was indifferent to the proposed change of constitution and was interested only in securing his own recall; that to Persia the existing alliance with the Peloponnesians was more advantageous than an alliance with Athens could be; that the establishment of an oligarchy would not improve, and might well damage, Athenian relations with the allies. Thucydides expressly concurs with the first of these arguments (48. 4, ὅπερ καὶ ἦν), and his approval of the other two may perhaps be inferred from his subsequent narrative, which confirms their validity.

In Vol. LXXV (1955) of the JHS I suggested that the determination of the angular diameters of the sun and the moon ascribed to Thales (Diog. Laertius I. 24) may have been obtained by angular measurement, not as is generally supposed by time-measurement. However, the question of the precise technical method that may have been employed was left open. To measure a very small angle with any degree of accuracy is obviously not easy; and a combination of actual measurement with calculation is probably necessary. In what follows I describe a method of measuring very small angles: whether this was the method employed in obtaining the result ascribed to Thales I do not know; all I can claim is that it presupposes neither mathematical knowledge nor mathematical techniques which could not have been at the disposal of an early Greek philosopher-mathematician.

In JHS LXXIV 36-43, under the above heading, M. White argues from Hdt. Ill 47-9 that the offences cited as provoking the Sparto-Korinthian expedition against Samos ought to have been committed either by Polykrates himself or by a predecessor of similar policy ‘whose sins could justly be visited upon his head’. These offences were: (1) the interception of the Kerkyraian boys sent by Periandros to Alyattes; (2) the seizure of the corslet sent by Amasis to Sparta; and (3) the seizure of the bowl sent by the Spartans to Kroisos. Of the boys, Miss White says (p. 37) that they must have been sent ‘at latest before the death of Alyattes ca. 560-555 B.C.’. The corslet was seized a year before the bowl, which ‘was a gift on the occasion of the alliance made between Sparta and Kroisos shortly before the latter's fall’. As to the date of this event, Miss White is not prepared to adjudicate as between the various years proposed, from 547 to 541/0: ‘even at the latest it is well before the time of Polykrates’ (n. 10). Eusebios' date for the accession of Polykrates is c. 532; and, even if this tradition is set aside, a date much earlier than 540 is impossible, because Peisistratos' establishment of Lygdamis as tyrant of Naxos, some time after his own final establishment at Athens (547/6), must come first. Therefore Polykrates himself cannot have been responsible for the seizure of either the corslet or the bowl —much less the interception of the boys. Miss White suggests that these and other considerations favour the view that the tyranny began in the sixties, and that Aiakes, Polykrates' father, was the first tyrant.