There can be little doubt that, as Eduard Schwartz points out, the problem of the political sympathies of Thucydides can only be properly approached if it is remembered that his history in its present form was revised and possibly rewritten after the end of the Peloponnesian War. He was living in an atmosphere of défaitisme. Many of his contemporaries tended to glorify Sparta and her institutions, and to regard Athenian imperialism as a disastrous mistake. As a man of the older generation Thucydides felt it his duty to counteract this tendency by drawing attention to the real idealism which had inspired the Machtpolitik of the Periclean age, and by pointing to the benefits which the rule of Athens had conferred on the Greek world. The Preface to Book I may be regarded as a veiled apologia for the Athenian Empire, which had secured for Greece the freedom of intercourse which the writer holds to be essential alike for economic prosperity and for cultural development. Similarly the contrasts which Thucydides draws between the Athenian and the Spartan character, and the glorification of Athens which is the main subject of the Funeral Oration are inspired by the hope that the disillusioned Greeks of the early fourth century might come to realise that the ideals of Pericles and other Athenian imperialists had been not sordid but noble, and that Greece as a whole had derived benefits from the rule of Athens.

It was inevitable that somebody should suggest a Koine Eirene in the year 346 B.C. True, no ancient document or author records one. But these two words were much in the mouths of Greek statesmen in the 4th century, and much valuable work has been done on the subject in recent years. Indeed it is an interesting comment on the history of our own times that it has been reserved for the present generation of historical writers to reconstruct and understand the chapter in Greek experience which these words represent. It is probably true to say that few Greeks in the 5th century (or even earlier) regarded war as anything but a bad thing; but on the Greeks of the 4th century the greatest war of their history had left its mark without leaving an immunity from further visitations of the same disease, and as a result responsible statesmen (and not merely ordinary men and women) were now agreed that war was a very bad thing, to be preferred, in fact, only to a worse thing still, namely (for small states) to loss of autonomy, and (for the great states) to a fatal loss of prestige. The visible outcome of these feelings was a new kind of peace, Koine Eirene.

The Ashmolean Museum has recently acquired three. Attic vases with subjects of uncommon interest. The first (Pl. XXX.) is a b.-f. pelike with framed pictures. Each picture is bounded by a band of ordinary lotus-bud-pattern above, at the sides by net-pattern, and below by a clay line. A red band runs right round the vase immediately below the pictures, and a thinner red line, as is usual in panel-amphorae, surrounds the neck at the level of the handles. Red is also used for the beards and wreaths on side A, and on B for the beards, the front hair of 1 and 2, and patch on the goat's neck, the brim of 3's hat and the curved parts of his boots: white for the block and the joints of the folding-stool on A, and on B for the lines on the rock (which has also incised markings), and the chiton of 3 and the crown of his hat. The height of the vase is 40·6 cm., the width at the widest part 29·4 cm. and at the rim 18·4 cm.

There is a small group of reliefs from late Etruscan urns which are identified as representations of the Gaulish raid upon the sanctuary of Delphi in 279 B.C. The reliefs vary a good deal in detail and no general type for the subject can be traced, but but the narrow shape indicates Volterra; the material is tufa (Fig. 1).

Characters in the Greek novels comprise a dizzying array of identities, but one group of people who have received barely any attention are Spartans. They appear only in Chariton of Aphrodisias and Xenophon of Ephesus, where analysis of their presence sheds crucial light on the novels’ literary and sociocultural agendas. After an introduction (section I), section II discusses Chaereas’ self-characterization as the Spartan Leonidas in book 7 of Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe in the context of Imperial-period Sparta: its institutions (the Leonideia festival), prosopography (the Euryclid dynasty) and reputation for military greatness. I link these elements to the ‘kinsman of Brasidas’ in book 8, who can be directly connected to an Imperial-period descendant of Brasidas in Plutarch’s Sayings of Kings and Commanders, as well as to Thucydides’ Brasidas. Section III explores the Spartan identity of Aegialeus and Thelxinoe, the protagonists of an inset story told to Habrocomes in book 5 of Xenophon’s Ephesiaca. Details of their lives correspond closely to Spartan cultural phenomena familiar from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, especially in connection with marriage customs. This has consequences for the evaluation of Xenophon as a witty and sophisticated novelist, and for his compositional date. Section IV draws out the significant parallels between the depiction of Spartans in Chariton and Xenophon, which form the basis of proposals regarding their literary and chronological relationships.

Mr. Mahaffy in his preface to The Empire of the Ptolemies states among other problems raised by Ptolemaic history the following: ‘How far does the observation, that we only know of one crown-prince with a wife (Soter II.) account for the divorce of that wife after his accession, and for the other apparent heartlessnesses in Ptolemaic history? Is the hereditary title recognised in the princesses, which no doubt led to their marriages with their reigning brothers, a relic of Pharaonic ideas, or a mere imitation of the successful experiment of Philadelphus?’ This article is an attempt to show that the former hypothesis is the true one, and that the marriages of the Ptolemies were dictated by their policy of conciliation, and were based on deeply rooted native prejudices.

In this paper, I explore the literary aesthetics of Attalid Pergamon, one of the Ptolemies’ fiercest cultural rivals in the Hellenistic period. Traditionally, scholars have reconstructed Pergamene poetry from the city’s grand and monumental sculptural programme, hypothesizing an underlying aesthetic dichotomy between the two kingdoms: Alexandrian ‘refinement’ versus the Pergamene ‘baroque’. In this paper, I critically reassess this view by exploring surviving scraps of Pergamene poetry: an inscribed encomiastic epigram celebrating the Olympic victory of a certain Attalus (IvP I.10) and an inscribed dedicatory epigram featuring a speaking Satyr (SGO I.06/02/05). By examining these poems’ sophisticated engagements with the literary past and contemporary scholarship, I challenge the idea of a simple opposition between the two kingdoms. In reality, the art and literature of both political centres display a similar capacity to embrace both the refined and the baroque. In conclusion, I ask how this analysis affects our interpretation of the broader aesthetic landscape of the Hellenistic era and suggest that the literature of both capitals belongs to a larger system of elite poetry which stretched far and wide across the Hellenistic world.

My excuse for adding another item to the literature of the Hellenistic ruler-cult is that two new ideas have recently come into prominence. One is that the founder of the official ruler-cult was not Ptolemy II but Alexander; the other is that what was worshipped was not the ruler himself but his daemon. The former idea originated with Dr. P. Schnabel, and was derived by him from a new interpretation of the proskynesis scene at Bactra; he argued that Chares' account in Plutarch (Alexander 54) showed that the proskynesis was made to a statue of Alexander standing on an altar (ἑστία) among the hearth-gods: whether Macedonians in the fourth century had hearth-gods he did not consider, but quoted Roman analogies of a later time. This idea has been much criticised, and I know of no one but Professor L. R. Taylor who has accepted it; in particular, Professor Berve has made a strong case for preferring Arrian's version of the proskynesis scene. But, in fact, Schnabel's interpretation of Chares was killed dead at once by Dr. Th. Birt, though this has not been much noticed, perhaps because it only needed one sentence: Chares in the same passage makes Demetrius say to Alexander οὖτος γάρ σε μόνος οὐ προσεκύνησε where the word σε is conclusive that the proskynesis was made to Alexander (and not to a statue on an altar).

In 1967 Miss Olga Alexandri reported the discovery often trenches on the road from the Dipylon gate to the Academy. The area into which the trenches were dug measures c. five by seven meters; the individual trenches measure 1.10–1.35 m in length, 0.35–0.65 m in width, and 0.80–1.05 m in depth. They are arranged to form two pairs and two further groups each of three trenches set one behind another. In attempting to interpret the trenches, the excavator was reminded of beddings for stelai such as are attested for the archaic period. Apt as this observation is, it does not help to explain the number ten nor the togetherness of the trenches.

In the introductory chapter to the Funeral oration by Perikles, Thukydides (ii 34) describes in general terms what the patrios nomos, the ceremony for the public burial of Athenian soldiers consisted of.

During the last ten years no less than 4,361 coins of various parts of the Greek world have been added to the national collection. A certain number of these have been published year by year by Mr. Warwick Wroth in the Numismatic Chronicle, under the title ‘Greek Coins acquired by the British Museum.’ A still larger number are described by Mr. Barclay Head, the Keeper of Coins, in the annual Parliamentary Return of the Accounts &c. of the British Museum. As the former publication is not seen by all who are generally interested in classical studies, while the latter suffers the fate of most Blue Books, it has been suggested that a short paper on the subject of these additions might be interesting to readers of this journal. I need hardly say that the selection here given is not meant to be representative. Had I attempted to give a full report of the acquisitions during the last ten years, these notes would have reduced themselves to a mere catalogue. It has been necessary therefore to choose out a very few coins from among the more important acquisitions.

In his recent article ‘The Old Temple Terrace at the Argive Heraeum’, J. C. Wright discusses the date of the platform supporting the remains of the earliest Argive Heraeum—in other words, the uppermost terrace of the Hellenic (viz. Classical) Heraeum. Is it itself a Classical structure, or a late Bronze Age platform re-used to accommodate the first peripteral temple of the seventh century BC? Wright would connect both the platform and the temple upon it with the first stages of proper Hellenic culture, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. On pp. 191 ff, he denies that I can possibly be right in following the oldest investigators and assigning this platform to the Bronze Age. But I must confess that his arguments, however learned, have so far failed to shake my conviction.

In the fourth book of Achilles Tatius' romance the young and beautiful heroine Leucippe collapses suddenly. When she is approached by the hero Clitophon she leaps to her feet, strikes his face, kicks his friend, and has to be overpowered and tied up. Several chapters later we learn that this behaviour had in fact been caused by an overdose of an unnamed aphrodisiac. In the meantime, however, bystanders, consisting of members of an Egyptian military force, have decided that μανία τις is the trouble, and proceed to diagnose with all the confidence of laymen the cause of her madness.

Their diagnosis takes the form of an ostensibly straightforward physiological explanation in carefully ordered (if rhetorical) phrases and employing technical terms.