There have been few issues in the contemporary analysis of Greek tragedy as hotly debated as what I shall call ‘civic ideology and the problem of difference’. By this I mean a nexus of interrelated questions concerning the political import of tragedy both for the fifth-century Athenians and for subsequent generations: how does the festival of the Great Dionysia—its rituals and dramatic performances—relate to the dominant ideological structures of democracy? How should critical or contestatory discourse be located within the dramatic festival and within the polis? How should the texts of tragedy be related to the society in which they were produced—and to the societies in which they are still being read and performed? The problem is not merely essential to our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but is also intimately connected to the history and theory of democracy and its discontents. To what degree can democracy respond to criticism and what space can it allow, in theory and in practice, for alternative viewpoints or opposition? In its most aggressive form, such questioning of the exclusions and repressions of democracy is sometimes articulated as a challenge as to whether the costs of (ancient) democracy outweigh its benefits.

For at least several decades of its official history of performance at state festivals—the period usually and, in part for this very reason, known as that of Old Comedy—Athenian comic drama was marked by an exceptional degree of indulgence in ridicule and vilification of named or recognizable individuals: ὀνομαστὶ κωμωιδεῖν, as it became termed by Hellenistic scholarship. In character and extent this practice belongs to a cluster of generic features (alongside, most notably, obscenity and outspoken comment on topical political issues) which give urgency to the question of the relation between the comic stage and the laws, mores, and values current in Athenian society of the time.

In recent years classicists and ancient historians have devoted renewed attention to the Archaic Age in Greece, the period from approximately the eighth century to the fifth century BC. Important articles, excavation reports and monographs, as well as books by Moses Finley, L. H. Jeffery, Oswyn Murray, Chester Starr and others, not to mention a recent volume of the Cambridge Ancient History, bear witness to the vigor of recent scholarship in this area. Among many of these treatments of the period, moreover, is evident an increasing recognition of the close connection between social and economic developments and the political life of the Greek cities of the period. At the same time that this renewed interest in the Archaic Age has become so prominent in classical studies, a group of scholars working in more modern periods has developed a fresh approach to the role of ritual and ceremonial in civic life, especially during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Deeply influenced by cultural anthropology, they have found in the often surprisingly rich documentation about festivals, processions, charivaris etc. important insights into the societies in which these activities took place. Classicists looking upon this movement may be inclined to undervalue its originality and perhaps its controversiality, pointing out that a serious interest in ancient festivals has long been prominent in classical scholarship and is well represented in recent books such as those by Mikalson, Parke and Simon and such older works as Martin Nilsson's frequently cited Cults, myths, oracles and politics in ancient Greece (Lund 1951). Yet there is a great difference both in method and in results between the traditional approaches to ceremonial represented in the study of ancient Greece and those being developed in more recent fields.

Although we have more references to the Politela of Zeno of Kition than to any of his other works, our evidence for its character and content is so slight, open to dispute on so many points, and at first sight so inconsistent, that there is a strong temptation to follow other guides: our conception of Stoic doctrine as a whole; a particular theory of the development of such an idea as the ‘brotherhood of man’; or even the general tendency to read modern ideas into ancient thought. It is hardly surprising that such material has led to a bewildering variety of interpretations. Thus while Zeller, followed by Barth and others, describes Zeno's ideal as a ‘polity of the wise’, Pöhlmann makes it include both wise and foolish. Pöhlmann, Dyroff and Karst place it in the future, Pohlenz in the past. Whereas Pearson, Hicks, Bidez and others see it as a world state embracing all humanity, for Tarn it is ‘a very limited State … a quite small community’. Recent discussions appear only to have increased the confusion, and it seems worth while to make a fresh attempt to gain clarity on the subject.

In a previous article (JHS lxxxii (1962) 56 ff.) I examined some of the theories and explanations which appear in Greek philosophy and medicine in the period down to Aristotle, in which reference is made to right and left or certain other pairs of opposites (light and darkness, male and female, up and down, front and back), and I argued that several of these theories are influenced by the symbolic associations which these opposites possessed for the ancient Greeks. In the present paper I wish to consider the use of the two pairs of opposites which are most prominent of all in early Greek speculative thought, the hot and the cold, and the dry and the wet. My discussion is divided into two parts. In the first I shall examine the question of the origin of the use of these opposites in Greek philosophy. How far back can we trace their use in various fields of speculative thought, and what was the significance of their introduction into cosmology in particular? And then in the second part of my paper I shall consider to what extent theories based on these opposites may have been influenced by assumptions concerning the values of the opposed terms. Are these opposites, too, like right and left, or male and female, sometimes conceived as consisting of on the one hand a positive, or superior pole, and on the other a negative, or inferior one? How far do we find that arbitrary correlations were made between these and other pairs of terms, that is to say correlations that correspond to preconceived notions of value, rather than to any empirically verifiable data?

This paper is concerned with the eight Lives in which Plutarch describes the final years of the Roman Republic: Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, Caesar, Cato, Brutus, and Antony. It is not my main concern to identify particular sources, though some problems of provenance will inevitably arise; it is rather to investigate the methods which Plutarch adopted in gathering his information, whatever his sources may have been. Did he, for instance, compose each biography independently? Or did he prepare several Lives simultaneously, combining in one project his reading for a number of different works? Did he always have his source-material before him as he composed? Or can we detect an extensive use of memory? Can one conjecture what use, if any, he made of notes? And can we tell whether he usually drew his material from just one source, or wove together his narrative from his knowledge of several different versions?

I start from an important assumption: that, in one way or another, Plutarch needed to gather information before writing these Lives; that, whatever may be the case with some of the Greek Lives, he would not be able to write these Roman biographies simply from his general knowledge. The full basis for this assumption will only become clear as the discussion progresses: for example, we shall find traces of increasing knowledge within these Lives, with early biographies showing only a slight knowledge of some important events, and later ones gradually filling the gaps. It will become probable that Plutarch knew comparatively little of the detail of Roman history before he began work on the Lives, and that considerable ‘research’—directed and methodical reading—would be necessary for their composition.

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Herodotus' Samian narrative and to attempt to analyse the nature of its sources. In the light of this analysis I shall try to explain some of the peculiarities of the accounts of the reign of Polykrates, the career of Maiandrios and the part played by the Samians in the battles of Lade and Mykale. It will be argued that, in view of his sources, he could neither have over-emphasised the wealth and power of Polykrates nor transferred facts belonging to his predecessor to Polykrates himself, and that, consequently, we should adopt a longer chronology for Polykrates than some recent discussions have suggested and follow Herodotus' chronological implications rather than Thucydides' synchronism in book i 13.6 of the reign of Polykrates with that of Cambyses of Persia (530–522 B.C.). Herodotus' narratives of Lade and Mykale become more comprehensible if they are examined in relation to his sources.

There can be no doubt that Herodotus' Samian material was obtained at first hand on a visit or visits to Samos which lasted for a considerable time. His knowledge of Samian proper names, references to the work of Samian artists and offerings in the Heraion, his disproportionately long account in Book iii of Samian internal politics and his generally favourable attitude to the Samians all point to this conclusion.

At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 most Greeks believed that, if Sparta led her allies by land to ravage Attika, Athens would be unable to hold out for more than three years at the most (Thuc. vii 28.3; cf. iv 85.2; v 14.3). Admittedly the majority of Athenian citizens—and perhaps even the senior Spartan king and general Archidamos— did not share this belief. But since the Persian Wars of 480/79 it had been dogma, both inside and outside the Spartan alliance, that such an invasion was the most potent means of compelling Athens to fulfil her enemies' will. Yet the few concrete precedents—of the late sixth century and 446—were at best inexact, at worst frankly discouraging; and in the event Spartan strategy, in so far as it was determined by the dogma, was shown to have been null and void ab initio. The Spartan alliance was of course ultimately victorious, but victory was postponed for close on a generation and was achieved even then only through massive Persian subventions (Pritchett I 47 f.; II 119 n. 19). Above all, it was secured at sea, where the Athenians had been the undisputed masters (Pritchett II 225–7), while in Attika itself the new technique of epiteichismos proved far more devastating than the timehonoured esbolai.

Thus the Peloponnesian War with its heavily ironical outcome marks a watershed in the history of Greek military practice, truly the ‘end of a chapter’ (Snodgrass 1967, 107). It is therefore an appropriate moment to turn back to the beginning of the chapter and review one of the most portentous innovations of Greek antiquity, the hoplite ‘reform’.

My title is familiar as that of a book, and my subject may be thought to call for one. I hope in due course to explore the genesis of the Homeric poems in that format, and what I have to say here may take its place there in a maturer form (wiser, fatter). For the moment I offer merely a provisional attempt to trace out the stages by which the epic tradition developed, stopping short of any discussion of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves. Any such attempt necessarily involves a certain amount of rehearsal of familiar arguments, and, if it is to be plausible, a fair measure of concurrence in familiar conclusions. But conclusions that are familiar are sometimes also controversial, and can be strengthened against their assailants by a fresh discussion; and I have certain doctrines of my own that are best presented in the context of a broad synthesis.

After dismissing various possible approaches to the question of audience competence in fifth- and fourth-century Athens, this article proposes to tackle this important and notorious problem with a novel strategy that is not ‘top-down’ but ‘bottom-up’, starting with spectators rather than plays and focusing on the bottom-line of expertise which can be taken to be shared by the majority of audience members. An umbrella-notion of ‘theatrical competence’ is established before two central characteristics of drama performed in Athens are exploited: the participation of spectators in the citizen-chorus at the Great Dionysia, and the implications for the competence issue of frequent exposure to an art form which is as formally conservative as preserved Attic drama. What emerges is a model of stratified decoding by spectators (élite and non-élite) who share a considerable level of theatrical competence. In a final step, this model is applied to a number of case studies taken from fifth-century comedy.

Fustel de Coulanges' thesis that ancient society was founded upon the cult of ancestral tombs has had, for a thoroughly self-contradictory argument, a remarkably successful career. Neither Fustel himself nor the many subsequent scholars who have quoted his views with approval faced clearly the difficulty of deriving a social structure dominated by corporate descent groups from the veneration of tombs placed in individually owned landed property. On the whole, historians have tended to play down Fustel's insistence on the relation between ancestor-cult and property and to exaggerate the role of the corporate kin group. This tendency, which assimilates Fustel to Sir Henry Maine and other lawyers interested in the reconstruction of Indo-European institutions (e.g. Bonfante) has in my view considerably impeded understanding of the role of kinship in early Greek society; it also obscures one of the most individual aspects of Fustel's work which, thanks to the researches of Philippe Ariès (II) on the development of the modern tomb-cult in the nineteenth century, can now be placed in its historical context.

‘Much hero-cult was directly engendered by the powerful influence of Homeric and other epics.… We so often hear how saga reflects cult that we are in danger of ignoring the reverse truth that cult may reflect saga; for cult was often mimetic of past events, and the memory of these was preserved mainly by saga-poetry.’

Thus L. R. Farnell, in 1921. He was doing his best to create order out of chaos, writing at a time when it had been fashionable to explain away almost all heroes as faded deities. His method was to sort out the various categories of hero: the genuine faded deities, the vegetation spirits, the epic heroes, the ancestors, the eponymous figures, and finally the heroes who lived in historical times. Greek hero-worship has always been a rather untidy subject, where any general statement is apt to provoke suspicion; yet no one has since shown any good reason for rejecting Farnell's groundwork. This in itself is a tribute to the clarity and thoroughness with which he presented the literary evidence in the first place. Nevertheless, if a new edition of his book were contemplated today, it would need some substantial archaeological footnotes; indeed, during the last fifty years, every type of hero-cult has been illumined in some measure by the results of excavation—especially the cults of epic heroes, to which most of this paper is devoted; for the interval since 1921 includes most of the digging careers of Blegen, Wace, and Marinatos—to name the three archaeologists whose fieldwork has supplied in greatest measure the most abundant kind of evidence that we are looking for: that is, the evidence of veneration shown by later Greeks for the tombs of their Mycenaean predecessors.

It is generally agreed that the concept of inspiration is one of the most basic and persistent of Greek notions about poetry. Yet there appears to be a certain confusion on the significance of this observation. For instance, while most scholars consider that the idea is of very great antiquity in Greece, there is a recent tendency to regard the concept as a formulation of the fifth century B.C. E. A. Havelock, for example, describes the notion of poetic inspiration as an invention of fifth century philosophers, and G. S. Kirk states, without discussion, that poetic inspiration was ‘probably quite a new conception’ at the time Euripides was writing. This type of disagreement clearly relates to the more fundamental question of the meaning of the concept of inspiration itself. For although there is an apparent consensus that ancient notions of poetic inspiration correspond in some way to certain modern ideas about the nature of poetic creativity, little attention has been paid to these modern notions of inspiration. And unless such modern notions are investigated, the mere observation that there is a similarity is of little value.

For the lack of forty-nine drachmas Socrates was unable to attend the costly epideixis of Prodicus from which he would have learnt the truth about correct use of words (Plato, Cra. 384b). From Prodicus' ὥραι Socrates could also have learnt the concepts and characteristic words associated with arete and kakia: these compete in that work for the allegiance of Heracles, parading their respective characteristics. Thanks to Professor Arthur Adkins we have had for the past decade a book which not only confronts arete and kakia, but also analyses the meaning and usage of many Greek words for the evaluation of action from Homer to Aristotle. The importance of this book is generally acknowledged but it has not received the detailed discussion it deserves. Professor Adkins finds the social structure of ancient Greece inimical to the development of an adequate concept of moral responsibility. He shows, in a most interesting manner, how Greek values changed as the needs of society changed.

The evidence against the Aeschylean authorship of the Prometheus is now overwhelming; or so it appears to me, considering the question without preconception and in that hebdomad of life in which, according to Solon, περὶ πἀντα καταρτύεται νὀος ἀνδρὀς. Those who still maintain that the play is by Aeschylus may probably be divided into three categories: those who have not read Mark Griffith's recent book on the subject; those who are incapable of unlearning anything they grew up believing, at any rate concerning such an important matter; and those who, while not constitutionally incapable of conversion, nor unimpressed by the evidence, yet have a rooted feeling, which they are unwilling to discount, that the play is like Aeschylus. The first group is easy to prescribe for. The second is incurable. To the third I would say that although instinct may certainly on occasion be worth a hundred arguments, its reliability as a pointer to the truth depends on its sources. When it represents a rational calculation performed by the subconscious from considerations or observations of which the conscious mind has not yet taken stock, so that upon reflection it can be put on an objective basis, well and good. There is no doubt an element of such calculation in the present case, for of course the Prometheus does have some Aeschylean features.

As a drama and a poem the Eumenides is often regarded with unease. It brings the Oresteia to a conclusion; but its account of Athens and the Areopagus seems to many readers inspired more by patriotism (of whatever partisan tinge) than a sense of dramatic unity. Hence much attention has been devoted to Aeschylus' supposed political message in the play; as a result, the question of its fitness to crown the trilogy recedes into the background or even vanishes. On the other hand, those whose concern is with Aeschylus' poetry tend to ignore his ‘politics’. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to vindicate Aeschylus the artist: to show, that is, how the founding of the homicide court and the cult of the Semnai on the Areopagus in Athens properly marks the end of the troubles of the Argive Atridae, and how the sufferings and guilt of individual men and women are resolved in a city's institutions. In pursuing this aim, it also has to consider, and try to define, the relation of the tragedian to his audience and to contemporary society. My concern, then, is with the individual and the community, both within the play and behind it.

To defend the fatherland, to obey the laws and authorities, and to honour the State's cults are the principal points the Athenian citizen promised to fulfil in his oath of allegiance—called ephebic, because he took it as a recruit (ephebos)—at least since the second half of the fourth century B.C. (Lycurg. Leoc. 76). These duties are fundamental for the citizen's attachment to his polis, so one will hardly assume that the content of the oath depends upon the existence of the Athenian institution of cadet-training (ephebeia) which is attested by inscriptions not earlier than 334/3 B.C. Some ambiguous passages in fifth- and fourth-century authors give no reliable clue to determine the form or origin of the ephebeia. I shall consider sworn civic duties and the organisation of military training as different things, and shall treat the oath independently from the disputed question of when the ephebeia came into existence. My purpose is to draw attention to some fifth-century allusions to the oath which seem to have remained unnoticed so far.

This oath is transmitted by Pollux (viii 105 f.), Stobaeus (iv 1.8), and a fourth-century inscription from the Attic deme Acharnae. I give the epigraphic version, following G. Daux's text. I omit the first part of the whole inscription (lines 1–4: dedication of the stele by the priest of Ares and Athena Areia, Dion of Acharnae) and the last part (lines 20 ff.: oath before the battle against the Persians at Plataea).

The notion that texts are not read neutrally, but through perceptual filters shaped by culturally determined assumptions which determine perception and reaction would, I believe, be accepted—in some form—by most literary critics by now. But the extent and radical nature of the cultural determination of reading and their methodological implications are often not fully realized. For they entail that, if we wish to read a text such as the Antigone as closely as possible to the ways in which its contemporary audience did, we must reconstruct in detail their cultural assumptions, by means of which meaning was created, and try to read through perceptual filters created by those assumptions; otherwise we will inevitably read through our own assumptions by default, and as these are very different from those of the Athenians of the late 440s, they will inevitably produce very different meanings from theirs.

§ 1. Introduction.—A Herbal is a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medical purposes. Most herbal remedies are quite devoid of any rational basis. It may be taken for granted that the writer of a herbal is unable to treat evidence on a scientific basis. He makes a ‘direct attack’ on disease, without any ‘nonsense about theories.’ The herbal is thus to be distinguished from the scientific botanical treatise by the fact that its aims are exclusively ‘practical’—a vague and foolish word with which, from the days of Plato to our own, men have sought to conceal from themselves and from others their destitution of anything in the nature of general ideas.

A herbal is, moreover, to be distinguished from most other medical works not only in method but also in form. Its arrangement is under remedies rather than under diseases or conditions to be treated. A herbal is, in fact, primarily a descriptive drug-list or, as we now call it, a pharmacopoeia. Pharmacopoeias include a number of substances that cannot be classed as of vegetable origin. Nevertheless, in many ancient as in most modern medical systems, there has been a tendency for remedies to be of a herbal nature. The pharmacopoeias of the Greco-Roman world thus tended to approximate to the nature of herbals.

To designate collaborating with Persia, the Greeks employed the verb Μηδίζω ‘side with the Medes’ or the noun Μηδισμός ‘leaning toward the Medes, Medism’, both derived from Μῆδος. Since this seemingly inappropriate terminology has attracted only limited consideration, a thorough discussion of its usage in Greek literature may help to clarify Greek relations with the Achaemenid empire throughout the classical period. After a brief preliminary discussion I consider the more problematic aspects of this terminus technicus.

It may be observed initially that such terms characterized the political relationships within the Greek world, and were encouraged by the struggle of each polis to maintain its independence and preserve its distinctive cultural qualities. For example, such terms as ‘Atticizing’ (Thuc. iii 62.2, 64.5) and ‘Laconizing’ (X. Hell. iv 4.2) arise during the contention for leadership in the Greek world in the late fifth and early fourth centuries.