The study of recent ‘traditional’ Mediterranean rural economy has long been a predilection of ancient historians and archaeologists working in that area. Traditional practices and production norms have been used by ancient historians in the interpretation of the often enigmatic testimony of the ancient agronomic writers, while archaeologists have used the same information to fill in the many gaps in the material record supplied by the spade. Much of the relevant data on traditional rural economy are gleaned from the accounts of early travellers or of modern geographers, ethnographers and agronomists. But comparanda acquired at first-hand enhance the credibility of archaeologists and ancient historians as fieldworkers, and chance summer encounters with Cretan shepherds or Cycladic fishermen are valuable currency in competitive displays at academic conferences.

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides' Bacchae and again in The Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.

The working out of the anger of Achilles in the Iliad begins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of the Odyssey hinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simply Suppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.

A botanical study of crop processing was undertaken on the semi-arid, southern Aegean islands of Karpathos and Amorgos. The present article provides details of the crop processing activities, and some contextual information concerning the wider agricultural economy. Attention is drawn to three aspects of this wider economy (time stress, scale and risk) which are of particular significance for understanding both recent ‘traditional’ and ancient farming practice in the region. Amorgos is discussed in greater detail as the period of fieldwork was longer.

This paper is chiefly concerned with the circumstances in which early Greek elegy was performed. Section II argues that for our extant shorter poems only performance at symposia is securely attested. Section III examines the related questions of the meaning of elegos and the performance of elegies at funerals. Finally (IV) I try to establish the existence of longer elegiac poems intended for performance at public festivals.

Among early Greek historians, Herodotos and Thukydides, owing to their survival, inevitably dominate our attention. But of course they were not alone. We have some substantial citations and numerous shorter fragments of many contemporaries. Difficulties of interpretation and the authority of their greatest modern interpreter, Felix Jacoby, have for many years prevented a thorough re-evaluation of early historiography and the position of Herodotos within it. The present paper is a contribution to this effort. In the first section, the list of Herodotos' contemporaries is drawn up as a necessary starting-point. We shall find that Jacoby's assessment of the evidence, and in particular his late date for some historians, is to be rejected, and that his conclusions about Herodotos' position in the development of historiography, which still dominate the field, lack at least part of their foundation. In section II an alternative method, in the absence of certain chronology, is developed for identifying the salient characteristics of the individual historian; the method owes something to narratology. It is illustrated from the fragments of the authors listed in section I, together with those of other historians down to the beginning of the fourth century. Section III then focuses on Herodotos; it will emerge that the most distinctive thing about him is his constant talk about sources and how to assess them. Other historians (and, indeed, poets) knew that sources contradict each other, but Herodotos first realised that this situation exists as a theoretical problem requiring the development of new methods. His is a second-order, or meta-cognitive awareness. Section IV goes on to deal, as seems necessary, with Detlev Fehling's theory about Herodotos' sources, since if he is right Herodotos is not really serious about them. An epilogue draws attention to a fifth-century passage in the Theognidean corpus with striking parallels to a passage in Plato's Protagoras; the two together throw light on Herodotos' proem, and confirm the picture drawn in this paper of his historical activity.

At the very end of Plato's Symposium our narrator awakes to find Socrates still hard at it, and making Agathon and Aristophanes agree that the composition of tragedy and comedy is really one and the same thing:… προсαναγκάӡειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺс τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸс εἷναι κωμωιδίαν καὶ τραγωιδίαν ἐπἰсταϲθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνηι τραγωιδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κωμωιδοποιὸν εἷναι. ταῦτα δὴ ἀναγκαӡομένουϲ αὐτοὺϲ … the two playwrights succumb to sleep, leaving Socrates triumphant. Socrates had to ‘force’ his case; and it is a fact that, though we know of well over 100 fifth-century playwrights, we do not know of a single one who produced both tragedy and comedy. In a famous fragment the comedian Antiphanes (fr. 191K) complains that the tragedians have an easy time—familiar stories, the deus ex machina etc.—ἡμῖν δὲ ταῦτ' οὐκ ἔсτιν … It is a matter of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Furthermore, there was an entire separate genre besides tragedy and comedy. As Demetrius put it (de eloc. 169), τραγωιδία χάριταϲ μὲν παραλαμβάνει ἐν πολλοῖϲ, ὁ δὲ γέλωϲ ἐχθρὸϲ τραγωιδίαϲ· οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐπινοήϲειεν ἄν τιϲ τραγωιδίαν παίӡουϲαν, ἐπεὶ ϲάτυρον γράψει ἀντὶ τραγωιδίαϲ.

The fine modern scholarship on Athenian law has concentrated on (a) the scope of particular laws, and (b) the technical aspects of the legal process. This paper attempts to examine how the legal system worked in practice.

The Athenians classified legal cases in various ways. On the one hand there was a division by subject matter between private cases (dikai idiai) and public cases (dikai dēmosiai), and on the other there was a division according to the procedure involved. There were a number of specialised procedures, but the most important procedural division was between those cases which anyone was free to bring (graphai) and those which only an interested party could bring (dikai in the narrow sense). These divisions on grounds of subject matter and on grounds of procedure overlap, but they are distinct and neither corresponds to the modern European legal division between civil and criminal cases.

The Homeric poems are the subject of such a flood of print that a definite justification is needed by one who adds to it. Especially perhaps is this so if the Epic Cycle is to be involved; ‘enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle’, said T. W. Allen in 1908. My argument will be that the Cycle has still not been fully exploited as a source to show, by comparison and contrast, the particular character and style of the two great epics, particularly the Iliad. With the domination of Homeric scholarship in English by formulaic studies on the one hand and archaeology on the other, the poems themselves have perhaps been less discussed than might have been expected, and the uniqueness of the Homeric style and picture of the world has not been fully brought out. Most treatments of the Cycle have been concerned to assert or to deny that it contained poems or incidents earlier than the surviving epics, a question which will not be raised here. Most recent writers on Homer have more or less ignored the Cycle; even Hermann Fränkel, the first part of whose book Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (2nd edition 1962; now available in English, Poetry and Philosophy in Early Greece [1975]), is perhaps the most illuminating single work to have appeared on Homer in this century, does not discuss it, although it could have been made to support many of his arguments. No inferences are based on it, for example, in Wace and Stubbings, Companion to Homer, nor by Sir Maurice Bowra in his posthumous Homer. ‘My remarks are restricted to the two epics’, says J. B. Hainsworth in his short account; and G. S. Kirk, who does refer to the style of the fragments, does so summarily and without quotation. Yet after all the Cycle was a large body of early Greek heroic poetry, composed at a time not too far removed from that of the great epics, and at least passing as being in the same manner. We have some 120 lines quoted in the original, and a good deal of information about the content of the poems. If it proves possible to draw from this material any clear contrast with the Iliad, it may be felt that this will bring out the individuality of the latter even more strikingly than does the epic poetry, currently more often invoked, of the ancient Hittites or the modern Yugoslavs.

I begin with two modern texts, both as it happens printed on the first page of earlier issues of this journal, and each, I think, expressive of a strong body of opinion in Homeric scholarship, at least in the English-speaking countries, at the time of their writing. First, Miss Dorothea Gray in 1954: ‘Belief in an historical Homeric society dies hard’. Secondly, Professor Adkins in 1971: ‘I find it impossible to believe … that the bards of the oral tradition invented out of their own imaginations a society with institutions, values, beliefs and attitudes all so coherent and mutually appropriate as I believe myself to discern in the Homeric poems. This aspect of the poems is based upon some society's experience’. Miss Gray's prophecy, whether or not one shares the misgivings that it embodied, was thus soundly-based: the seventeen years between these two quotations have indeed witnessed a powerful revival of the belief that the social system portrayed in the Homeric poems, and with it such attendant features as the ethical code and the political structure, are in large measure both unitary and historical. One good reason for the vitality of this belief is the simple fact that it has been alive since Classical times. Another is that it has received support from several influential recent works: if pride of place should be given to M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus, on whose conclusions Professor Adkins expressely says that he takes his stand, a number of others should be acknowledged also. Whereas Finley located the social system of the Odyssey most probably in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., A. Andrewes in his book The Greeks extends this type of inference when he argues for an historical origin in the ‘migration period’ of the twelfth and eleventh centuries for the Homeric political system. As influences on the other side, one may mention T. B. L. Webster's work in isolating Mycenaean practices and features, whose divisive effect on the social pattern is apparent; while G. S. Kirk has a significantly entitled chapter in his The Songs of Homer, ‘The cultural and linguistic amalgam’ (my italics). Most recently, the early chapters in the German Archaeologia Homerica have shown a certain tendency to discern a consistent and historical pattern in the allied area of the material and technological practices of the poems. It is true that in one chapter the author is led to conclude that the metallurgical picture of the Iliad is substantially earlier than that of the Odyssey, and that the date of composition of the former poem must accordingly be very much earlier. But this is only because he is pressing the arguments for the ‘historical’ case one step further: the historical consistency of the metallurgical pictures in each of the two poems is, for him, so apparent and so precise that each can and must be given an historical setting, even if the two are separated by a long period.

A fashionable approach to the interpretation of Athenian drama concentrates on its context in performance at Athenian festivals, and sees both the festivals and the plays as products of the Athenian democracy. In this paper it is argued that, whereas the institutional setting inevitably took a particular form in democratic Athens, that was an Athenian version of institutions found more generally in the Greek world, and even in the Athenian version many features do not seem distinctively democratic. Similarly in the interpretation of particular plays themes have often been said to be democratic which are better seen as concerns of polis-dwelling Greeks in general, and the notion that plays questioned Athens' democratic values because the democratic ethos of Athens consciously encouraged the questioning of Athens' democratic values is far from certain.

A Love and desire, to sequester a Mans Selfe, for a Higher Conversation … is found, to have been falsely and fainedly, in some of the Heathen; As Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; And truly and really, in divers of the Ancient Hermits, and Holy Fathers of the Church.

F. Bacon, Of friendship

The holy men of Greco-Roman paganism will never inspire either the reverence or the fascinated horror that the ascetics and monks of early Christianity have commanded ever since they first impinged on the common mind in the time of Antony and Athanasios. Writing for a Christian audience, Francis Bacon could dismiss the semi-mythical Epimenides and Numa, and notorious exhibitionists like Empedokles and Apollonios, as self-evident imposters; while in our own less devout times the abundance of the hagiographical literature ensures that the Christian saint will preoccupy scholars for the indefinite future, if only as the unwitting patron of a mass of historical and sociological data that is only just beginning to be analysed. Yet this is poor excuse for neglecting the pagan holy man, who came in the later Roman empire to play a conspicuous part in his own religious tradition, and also affords instructive points of comparison with his Christian competitors. This paper offers a first orientation towards such wider perspectives, by investigating the social and historical consequences entailed by the distinctive pagan concept of personal holiness. It will be suggested that a tendency to associate holiness with philosophical learning (Section I) determined the essentially urban (II) and privileged (III) background of the pagan holy man, and also encouraged his gradual drift to the periphery of society (IV).

There have been numerous attempts to understand the role and importance of the Great Dionysia in Athens, and it is a festival that has been made crucial to varied and important characterizations of Greek culture as well as the history of drama or literature. Recent scholarship, however, has greatly extended our understanding of the formation of fifth-century Athenian ideology—in the sense of the structure of attitudes and norms of behaviour—and this developing interest in what might be called a ‘civic discourse’ requires a reconsideration of the Great Dionysia as a city festival. For while there have been several fascinating readings of particular plays with regard to the polis and its ideology, there is still a considerable need to place the festival itself in terms of the ideology of the polis. Indeed, recent critics in a justifiable reaction away from writers such as Gilbert Murray have tended rather to emphasize on the one hand that the festival is a place of entertainment rather than religious ritual, and on the other hand that the plays should be approached primarily as dramatic performances.

Wedding ritual in tragedy tends to be subverted. In explaining and arguing for this generalisation I hope also to shed new light on some of the passages deployed.

My starting point is the actual wedding ceremony. How did the Athenians of the classical period imagine that it was celebrated? Our evidence derives largely from contemporary drama and vase-painting. The picture presented by this evidence coheres very well in certain respects with that derived from other periods and places: Sappho, Catullus' imitation of the Greek, the lexicographers, and so on. For example, one important element that is found in the Attic and the non-Attic evidence alike is the ambiguity, for the bride, of the transition. The abrupt passage to her new life contains both negative and positive elements. On the one hand it is like the yoking of an animal or the plucking of a flower. It means isolation, separation from her friends and parents. It is an occasion of resentment and anxiety, comparable to death.

I have tried to analyse elsewhere the archaeological evidence for Greek armour and weapons, and their possible effects on tactics, in the critical period of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. There, I was of necessity concerned with the monumental evidence, and did not look far beyond it. But there are historical implications which should be faced and also, I think, some further historical support for the conclusions there reached.

The conclusions were briefly these. The equipment of arms and armour, which modern writers tend to group together as the ‘hoplite panoply’, was originally a motley assemblage. Certain of its components—the long iron sword and spear—were part of the equipment of most warriors of the era, and of many periods before and since. Other items resemble those used by Mycenaean warriors some five centuries earlier: these include the bronze plate-corslet, the greave and (an optional accessory) the ankle-guard. I cannot believe, with some scholars, that such advanced and costly products of the bronze-smith had been produced continuously throughout the Dark Age that followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilisation; and indeed for at least 400 years there is no evidence of any kind that they were. Rather, they were revived or readopted: the corslet apparently under the influence of the metal-working cultures of Central Europe and Italy, the greave and ankle-guard spontaneously, although the Epic tradition had never forgotten their earlier use. Other items again, the closed helmet of the type that the Greeks called Corinthian, and the large round shield with arm-band and hand-grip, were Greek variants devised as an improvement on foreign models, principally the metal open-faced helmets and round single-grip shields used by the Assyrians, Urartians and other Eastern peoples. The combination of all these elements together was an original Greek notion; as was their later association with a novel form of massed infantry tactics, the phalanx.

It is some years now since the Oxford anthropologist Edwin Ardener in his article ‘Belief and the problem of women’ drew attention to the striking lack of progress that had been made in understanding traditional societies as they are seen from the point of view of women: ‘the models of a society made by most ethnographers tend to be models derived from the male portion of that society’. The result, as he pointed out, is that, in considering social structure, ‘we are, for practical purposes, in a male world. The study of women is on a level little higher than the study of the ducks and fowl they commonly own.’ He went on to put forward an explanation of the fact, by suggesting that, since the dominant structure of society is articulated and communicated in terms of a male world-position, women constitute a ‘muted group’, made inarticulate by the lack of a language in which to communicate their particular sense of society and its relationship to the totality of experience.

The focal point of this article is the detailed study of the concept of hybris recently published by N.R.E. Fisher, and the differences of interpretation which exist between that study and other recent work on the concept. Though I dispute much of what Fisher has to say about hybris, I also defend many of his most important insights, and readily admit that my own task has been made immeasurably lighter by his industry and integrity in the presentation of a wealth of valuable data. That I take issue with his thesis is no token of disesteem, rather a recognition that he has made a strong case for his interpretation and that disagreement with a study as well documented as his must rest on detailed discussion of individual passages.

In 355/4 Demosthenes asserted that there were ‘perhaps sixty or slightly more’ recurrent liturgies performed every year in Athens. Böckh doubted this figure, thinking it a serious underestimate, but neither he nor any later scholar has pressed this doubt to the point of tabulating the relevant evidence in detail. It may therefore be found useful if I do so here, for it will emerge with some clarity that Böckh's doubts were well-founded.

Demosthenes' word ‘recurrent’ (ἐγκύκλιοι) achieved some currency in the last century as a quasi-technical term. By it he meant the civilian liturgies—choregia, gymnasiarchy, etc.—in contrast to the military liturgies the imposition of which was irregular and unpredictable; but since every known civilian liturgy in Athens formed part of the celebration of a festival, it may perhaps be clearer to think of them as festival liturgies and to arrange the evidence not according to the category of liturgy but by festival. I begin with the certain cases.

Numismatists necessarily deal in minute detail, often so minute that it passes unnoticed by those used to a larger scale; yet as much historical knowledge may depend on such minutiae as on the far larger details of sculpture or architecture. This difference of scale, however, is dangerous because it tends to increase the gulf between numismatists, who seem to be pursuing ever smaller details, and historians, who want to be told how coinage may affect the larger picture with which they are concerned. The following pages are an attempt to assemble and evaluate some of the very incomplete, but annually increasing, evidence, which bears on the function and use of coinage in the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The treatment will be divided into three sections:

1. Evidence for the movement of coins from their various areas of origin.

2. Evidence for the incidence of fractional coinage.

3. The implications of 1 and 2 for an understanding of the function of early Greek coinage.

Dio of Prusa (Dio Chrysostom) is nowadays mostly read only as a historical source for the Graeco-Roman world of the late first and early second centuries A.D. But he is of course one of the relatively few Greek writers of the early Imperial era who are worth reading at all and his career raises important questions of a more general kind: how valid is it to analyse a writer's or philosopher's life in terms of conversion and how firm a line can be drawn between the activities of the philosopher and those of the sophist?

In this paper I shall argue that the theory of Dio's conversion is not borne out by the facts of his career, and that the originator of the theory was not Synesius of Cyrene but Dio himself, who found it a convenient way both of suppressing the memory of his early time-serving attacks on philosophy under Vespasian and of gratifying his personal taste for self-dramatization. The discussion falls into five parts. Part 1 consists of some general remarks on the methodology of conversion-analysis intended to emphasize some of the dangers of me approach. In Part 2 I consider the evidence of Synesius and of the facts, as far as they can be established, of Dio's early career.