At Protagoras 316b8 Socrates introduces Hippocrates to Protagoras, and explains why Hippocrates wishes to be his pupil; and for the next twelve pages of the dialogue the sophist, encouraged by Socrates, expounds his views and methods, and explains what Hippocrates may expect to learn from him. The passage is a confused and confusing piece of Greek, and forms the philosophical introduction to one of Plato's more baffling dialogues. The confusions are, I believe, present in the Greek: we are not here concerned merely with problems created for the modern reader by his misunderstanding of Greek words. In translation, however, and in the light of the intervening centuries of philosophy, Protagoras' position may well appear much less plausible than it must have appeared to a Greek of Protagoras' (or Plato's) own day. My purpose in this article is to try to explain why a Greek might have found it more plausible; what type of Greek was most likely to be convinced; and the motive of Protagoras in presenting his case in the manner in which he does present it. (‘Protagoras’ throughout, of course, is to be understood as ‘the Protagoras of Plato's dialogue’. I should not myself distinguish sharply between Plato's Protagoras and the historical Protagoras; but the question is not relevant to the present discussion.)

Plotinus is, up to a point, a classical intellectualist in the manner of Aristotle, and, he would himself have certainly thought, of Plato. He professes, that is, to give an account of everything that is in any degree real in the universe (and even a kind of account of the unreal) which is certainly and unchangingly true and can be demonstrated to be so by rational processes. This account culminates in the description of an eternal realm of intelligible intellect which can be (and indeed really always is) our own, certainly and imperturbably possessed. This systematic account of reality, as is well known, breaks down, and we have to break out of it, in a very startling way at the top. Beyond the Platonic-Aristotelian Intellect-Intelligible, the world of real being which is Νοῦς and νοητά, lies the One or Good beyond being, which is neither intelligent nor intelligible. When we have completed our understanding of reality, we have to leave it all behind in order to find what turns out to be the only thing we want, the source of all values and the goal of all desire, which alone makes it worth the effort to attain to Νοῦς on the way, as it is the only reason why Νοῦς is there at all.

The ode celebrates a number of victories (all of them, as we shall see, in the δόλιχοϲ, the ‘long’ race) won by a certain Ergoteles, of Himera in Sicily. It is not in any proper sense an Olympian at all: the first victory mentioned was at Olympia, which is why the ode was classified by Aristophanes of Byzantium among the Olympians; but the most recent of the victories, the immediate occasion of the ode, was won not at Olympia but at Pytho.

The ode begins with an invocation of Fortune, and a prayer that she should protect the victor's city. From this it proceeds, in the regular fashion of the Greek hymn, to a statement of Fortune's power; and this statement then merges into a gnomic passage on the instability and unpredictability of human affairs, from which in turn we emerge to the victor and to his changing fortune and final success.

(1) Oidipous' self-blinding appears to be an act of madness, linked primarily with his incest, rather than with his parricide.

(2) Blinding for sexual trespasses is so common in tradition that its appropriateness cannot be discussed in the abstract.

(3) Greek data confirm the clinical finding that the eyes tend to symbolise the male organs, and blinding castration.

(4) This inference is further confirmed by the finding that blinding and castration are mutually exclusive punishments.

(5) Oidipous' total crime was a ritually patterned sequence of two crimes: the killing of the King (Father) makes incest with the Queen (Mother) possible—as it does also in infantile oedipal fantasies. In the Oidipous myth a patrilineal succession model is (temporarily) disguised as a matrilineal method of royal succession.

(6) Though the blinding of the criminal is not required by the Delphic oracle, and though Oidipous' final exile does execute the oracle's command, this does not imply that the self-blinding does not punish (in part) also the parricide, for it can be shown that death, castration and blinding can, and do, symbolise each other. This means that Oidipous' self-blinding is a heavily overdetermined (multiply motivated) deed of frenzy.

(7) The manner in which Oidipous blinds himself has a very exact clinical parallel which, together with other data, seems to suggest an unconscious nexus between sexual problems, self-blinding and a woman's breasts (or nipples, or brooches).

(8) The ‘dramatische Technik’ explanation does not exclude the possibility of justifying a seemingly illogical detail in tragedy also by means of depth psychological considerations.

Seneca devoted two of his letters to Lucilius to a problem which had been treated quite differently in previous philosophical doctrine. Letter 94 is written against philosophers who believe that there is no need for praecepta, for single precepts and moral sentences or proverbs concerning individual and specific situations in human life. Moral progress rests solely and entirely upon the knowledge of some basic decreta which belong in the context of a scientific theory and provide sufficient help for every occasion in human life. The second letter, 95, deals polemically with those who admit nothing but praecepta in their educational programme and who reject every kind of dogmatic knowledge. The first group is represented by Aristo the Stoic, whose contempt of praecepta is also attested by Sextus Empiricus. For the other group, Seneca does not quote an authority. He does not mention Cynics and Sceptics who rejected moral and general dogmatism alike, and it seems to be very likely that he was thinking of his own teacher Sotion and the Sextian school who had no interest in ethical theory, but were very famous for their use of moral and psychagogic sentences.

Seneca's own opinion is far from being original. He says that both—praecepta and decreta—are useful and even necessary, and this position was already held by Cleanthes, Panaetius and the majority of Stoics, by Aristotle and other philosophers.

Interpretation of the Agamemnon in general and of its first choral sequence in particular has tended to proceed on two assumptions: first, that Aeschylus could have given an answer (not necessarily a simple answer) to the question, ‘Was Agamemnon free to choose whether or not to sacrifice his daughter?’; and secondly, that he composed the play in such a way that if we try hard enough we can discover his answer. I submit in this paper an interpretation which replaces both these assumptions with an alternative trio of hypotheses for which, I think, a case can be made: first, that Aeschylus was well aware that in real life we cannot know the extent to which an agent was able to choose whether or not to commit a particular act; secondly, that in Ag. 104–257 he has portrayed realistically the manner in which people respond to the commission of an extraordinary and disagreeable act by a respected agent; and thirdly, that the aspect of Agamemnon's predicament which made the most powerful impression on Aeschylus and his audience is an aspect to which modern interpreters of the play have seldom alluded even by implication. I would not be so rash as to assert that Aeschylus never concerned himself with the question of responsibility, nor that his concepts of justice and retribution are of small interest, but I am not satisfied that ‘with all the powers of his mind’, as Professor Lesky puts it, ‘he wrestled with the problem arising from the conflict between human existence and divine rule’, nor do I take the view that a dramatist passionately involved in metaphysics and theology is a wiser and greater man than one who devotes the powers of his mind to concrete problems of poetic and theatrical technique. The scale of values adopted by interpreters of early Greek tragedy has certainly been affected, and has perhaps been somewhat distorted, by the dominant position of philosophy in European culture and education.

Les thèmes de folklore ont la vie dure. Chacun connaît les miracles d'Epidaure (v.gr. R. Herzog, Die Wunderbarheilungen von Epidauros, Leipzig, 1931). Or quelques uns de ces types de miracles se retrouvent dans la Vie, écrite quelque dix siècles plus tard, de Syméon Stylite le Jeune (521–592), éditée par Paul Van den Ven (Subsidia Hagiographica des Bollandistes, n° 32, 2 vol. Bruxelles, 1962 et 1970).

Ch. 41 (A). En tête de la première suite de miracles, accomplis par Syméon alors qu'il est encore sur sa colonne de 40 pieds dans le ‘monastère du bas’ (entre 533 et 541, Syméon ayant de 12 à 20 ans), vient une première liste du Trois anges, qui s'étaient mis à inscrire les noms des malades guéris par Syméon (40.16 ss.), lui annoncent qu' ils vont cesser de le faire: 41.7 ss. (parce que désormais toutes choses s'accompliront, grâce à toi, par la vertu de ta parole et de ta puissance)

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.

There is in the Ashmolean Museum (1968.777) a Hellenistic plaster relief with a festive scene of a most intriguing character (plate 1a). Its mood, I should like to think, is not alien to some of the lighter emotions which play round a celebratory volume; and perhaps this note, beginning from a re-interpretation of one detail of that scene, may end by adding a little to its claims on the manifold interests of the volume's distinguished recipient—not least if we find that it has some connection, of whatever kind, with the world of Greek drama.

The relief is a cast, made in a mould taken from a metal cup. The class of artefacts to which it belongs has been illuminated by a discussion from Miss Gisela Richter; in 1964, while still in private hands, and not long after its acquisition by purchase in Egypt, this particular specimen achieved the distinction of publication in an extensive and very fine study by Mrs Dorothy Thompson; what I have to add here, it will be seen, is in the nature of a tentative excursus to that work.

Since I was taken, thirty-five years ago, to hear E. R. Dodds lecture on the Bacchae, his work has been one of my chief sources of inspiration. My Sather Lectures form a kind of commentary on his; and if I sometimes disagree with him, or see things from a different point of view, that will not prevent the understanding reader from seeing how greatly I admire him and how much my work owes to his. His inaugural lecture at Oxford was called ‘Humanism and Technique in Greek Studies’; and no great scholar of our time, except perhaps Rudolf Pfeiffer, has kept so perfect a balance between the two. In that lecture Dodds, as the circumstances of the time required, pleaded for more attention to the content, as against the form, of ancient writings; and throughout his career he has applied his masterly technique to just those problems of the ancient world which are of most interest and importance to the modern. But he has always borne in mind that a scholar who hopes to throw light upon such problems must do all he can to master the technique of his profession. Both in his humanism and in his technique, he offers an example from which all classical scholars of our time can profit.

To me Pindar seems one of the greatest Greek and also one of the greatest European poets. But some would dispute this proposition; and I believe that many even of those who would assent to it in reality admire him less than other great poets who seem to me to be his equals. There are two main reasons why Pindar has received less than justice. One is that he is believed to have a narrow and restricted outlook, which is often unfavourably compared with that of the great tragedians; the other is that he is difficult. The question of whether Pindar's outlook is narrow I shall treat comparatively briefly here; I shall not try here to describe that outlook at any length, though I may do so later. In comparing it with that of the tragedians, I shall be able to save space because of having already, in my book The Justice of Zeus, written about the Weltanschauung of the early Greek poets. Next, I shall pass to the difficulties which Pindar presents to modern readers. The difficulty with which I shall be most concerned will be that of eluding the dangers inherent in the romantic and historicist approach to Pindar which until eleven years ago was adopted in virtually all modern treatments and which still comes most naturally to most readers, including several distinguished scholars.

More light is thrown on the poetic art of Stesichorus by the papyrus-text of his Geryoneïs than by all his other fragments together. I published some thoughts about it in the Oxford Classical Text Lyrica Graeca Selecta in 1968, and I now give the detail of the work on which that publication was based, together with the results of work which I have done since. Some of the most important of these results are not mine but Mr Barrett's, and I have been careful to acknowledge my debt to him in detail throughout.

I. The Text

A. PMG 184

Gorgias, le sophiste, le raisonneur, ľincrédule Gorgias, lorsqu'il veut montrer la puissance irrésistible de la parole, se réfère à deux formes de paroles, qui sont les moins rationnelles de toutes. La première pourrait, à cet égard, laisser un doute, puisqu'il s'agit de la poésie; mais la seconde n'en laisse aucun, car le texte désigne bien clairement la parole magique et les sortilèges: «Les incantations sacrées qui se font par la parole apportent le plaisir, emportent le chagrin; en effet, le pouvoir de ľincantation, se mêlant à ľopinion de ľâme, ľensorcelle et la fait changer ďavis de façon magique. Car on a trouvé deux arts de magie et de sorcellerie, qui sont les fautes de ľâme et les erreurs de ľopinion trompée» (Hélène, 9). Ľaccumulation de mots comme ἐπῳδαί, θέλγείν, γοητεία, μαγεία, montre assez qu'il s'agit de magie au sens propre du terme; elle confirme aussi que la parole poétique, mentionnée en même temps, ľest, elle aussi, pour son effet puissant et mystérieux. La rencontre ďun tel thème dans un tel contexte et chez un tel auteur pourrait avoir de quoi surprendre et offre un sujet ďétude qui semble assez approprié pour un hommage adressé à ľillustre auteur de The Greeks and the Irrational. Il le paraît plus encore si, au lieu de considérer le texte lui-même, on regarde en arrière, du côté des poètes qui ont vécu avant Gorgias: un bref examen suffit alors à montrer que la tentative du sophiste pour utiliser rationnellement ces pouvoirs irrationnels de la parole est, en fait, ľaboutissement ďune longue évolution, qui a permis et facilité cette prise de position spectaculaire.

En effet, pour que le pouvoir miraculeux de la poésie et de la magie pût se trouver annexé à parole humaine en général, il fallait que celui-ci eût profondément changé de sens. Ľexemple de la magie peut servir à illustrer cette différence de valeur: c'est pourquoi il mérite ďêtre évoqué ici, dans la mesure où il éclaire ce qui concerne la poésie.

It is a common, and irritating, practice of Plutarch's to begin his prooemium with a comparison or a contrast. Perhaps the same move may be appropriate for an essay in the interpretation of an author to whom Professor Dodds, forty years ago, wrote one of the most charming and penetrating introductions. We might put it like this: to be in debt is indeed bad, dangerous and corrupting; but to acknowledge debts of learning and friendship in the manner this volume intends, is both καλόν and ἡδύ.

De vitando aere alieno is a vigorous and lively discourse. Style and subject mark it as somewhat out of Plutarch's usual line. It raises a swarm of problems. Is it genuine? Is it complete? Does it reflect a real crisis? The preliminary to any answer to these, and similar, questions seems to me to be an analysis of the speech as it stands, an attempt to show its connections of thought. This is all I shall try to do here.

The thesis ὅτι οὐ δεῖ δανείζεσθαι involves two distinct propositions: that borrowing is a bad thing (A); and that there are ways of avoiding it (B). To look at it in this way brings it into line with the moral failings that Plutarch discusses in treatises like πϵρὶ φιλοπλουτίας or πϵρὶ δυσωπίας where the principal heads of the subject are naturally the attack on the vice and the suggestions for cure. Now both these basic propositions readily admit amplification. Proposition A can be enlarged by any means that paints the picture in darker colours, for example by representing the debtor as a damned soul (828F, 830F) or as a drowning man (831D). Proposition B leads at once to the hackneyed topics of the renunciation of luxury and the true freedom of the self-sufficient life. Plutarch did, I think, conceive of his subject under these heads. Given his moral preoccupation, this was almost inevitable. And in fact he treats the two themes turn and turn about, and we can detect the passage from one to the other, even where it is masked by the syntactical structure

Mein Lieber Dodds,

in dem ersten Kapitel Ihres grundlegenden Buches ‘The Greeks and the Irrational’ machen Sie einige Bemerkungen über psyche, noos, thymos bei Homer (S. 15 f.), über den Gebrauch von είδέναι = ‘wissen’ und ‘gesehen haben’ und schließlich über das ‘Sich-Erinnern’ oder ‘Vergessen’ bei der Besinnung auf moralisches Verhalten wie etwa der Tapferkeit (S. 16 f.). Sie schließen diese allgemeinen Erörterungen mit den Worten: ‘Such a habit of thought must have encouraged the belief in psychic intervention. If character is knowledge, what is not knowledge is not part of the character, but comes to a man from outside. When he acts in a manner contrary to the system of conscious dispositions which he is said to ‘know’, his action is not properly his own, but has been dictated to him. In other words, unsystematised, nonrational impulses, and the acts resulting from them, tend to be excluded from the self and ascribed to an alien origin.'

Wenn das für Homer richtig ist (und mir scheint es evident) und wenn die späteren Griechen ein ausgeprägtes Bewußtsein dafür hatten, daß der freie und überlegene Mensch durch eigene geistige Kraft Klarheit gewinnen muß über das, was wahr, gut und schön ist, kann man diesen Weg dahin vielleicht verfolgen an der Art, wie jeweils die Griechen das Erkennen aufgefaßt haben.

Two related passages in the discussion of mimesis in this part of The Republic are in question here:

Commentators and translators generally agree that Socrates is referring to the effect of imitations of such sounds in performances of drama or dithyramb, and that the mimesis in question is the result of ‘identification’ on the part of spectators. As Adam puts it: ‘In good acting the spectator identifies himself with the actor through sympathy; and as the actor “imitates” so does he.’ Since several of the sounds mentioned would be difficult to imitate effectively by the human voice, Adam and others suggest that the imitative sounds were produced by musical effects and stage-machines (such as the βροντϵȋον). They note that the later ‘degenerate’ dithyrambic performances aimed at mimetic effects of this kind; and so too, of course, did Old Comedy. The three main points in this generally accepted interpretation are:

(a) the mimesis mentioned here is largely a matter of musical reproduction of the sounds listed;

(b) the mimesis consists of direct mimicry of these sounds;

(c) Socrates is referring to dramatic and dithyrambic performances.

There are objections to all of these points. First, against the notion that musical mimesis is primarily or mainly intended: up to this point in the discussion Socrates has confined his remarks to literature. He concludes his literary discussion quite specifically in 398b: ‘Now it looks as if we have completed our survey of the words and myths of μουσική.’ Then he explicitly goes on to consider ‘after this’ the remaining matter, namely, the right kind of ᾠδή and μέλος for the education of the Guardians.

These notes are offered to E. R. Dodds in gratitude for much kindness and for much instruction on Greek drama and religion.

I. Heros

The main lines of the story are clear from the summary, the list of characters, the two papyrus passages and the fragments. But the second papyrus passage can, I think, be made a little clearer and something can be said about the Heros. For understanding these the beginning and the end of the summary are useful: ‘An unmarried girl (Myrrhine) bore twins (Plangon and Gorgias) and gave them to a guardian (Tibeios) to bring up. Then later she married her raper (Laches)…. When things became clear, the Old man (Laches) discovered his children (Plangon and Gorgias), and the violator (Pheidias) took the girl (Plangon) willingly.’

The second of the two papyrus pages begins with the last two lines of an Act; then the new Act (the fourth because it has the main recognition scene) starts with a short agitated soliloquy of Laches (55–63). He has returned home and found that the girl Plangon whom he had promised to his slave Daos has borne a child to an unknown father (I assume that Daos' claim has been rejected): this, I think, is what he comments on in his fragmentary soliloquy. Then Myrrhine comes out.

I am happy to offer this paper in tribute to the deep range of a dedicated Hellenist's life-work, not least for personal reasons. Professor Dodds first introduced me to the Ion towards the end of those happy twelve years of his career spent in the University of Birmingham. With his respect for Forsterian buckets let down into the subconscious, he may not be surprised that the introduction has had enduring effects. An early consequence was my verse translation of the play, eventually published in 1958 and, more recently (1968), produced on the stage by our Department of Drama and Theatre Arts. Translations of Greek and Latin authors play an increasingly important part in our contemporary cultural life, especially translations of Greek plays for the stage and for broadcasting. This is an area of activity which scholars should not ignore. What Gilbert Murray so successfully practised in his time, Milman Parry emphasized in another context: ‘…scholars must see that they must impose their truths before others impose their fictions’. Over the years I have followed the discussions in books and journals which have added to our understanding of the power and complex meaning of the play. Only some of these can be mentioned in what follows, to enable me to express agreement or a difference of opinion or emphasis.

The simply rationalistic interpretation of the Ion associated with the translation, preface, etc., by H.B.L. in 1889 and with the work of A. W. Verrall in 1890 and subsequently, was temporarily fashionable in certain quarters at the time. This interpretation no doubt stimulated further study of the play in this country, but there has been continuous corrective criticism of its aberrations.

Aeschylus was a dramatist of ideas—of religious ideas. His ideas may have been old or new, clear or confused, crude or profound, but it was in terms of religious ideas that he interpreted the story of the house of Argos; and it was in terms of religious ideas that he interpreted a great event in the history of his own time. It is, therefore, of considerable interest and importance to discover, if we can, a relationship between the way he thought in 472 and the way he thought in 458. In 458 he made a Chorus reject an old doctrine: that prosperity and good fortune in themselves give rise to disaster—the doctrine, that is to say (though the word is not used), of the jealousy of the gods (φθόνος τῶν θϵῶν). No, sings this Chorus, it is the impious deed that begets after its kind, the old hubris that gives birth to new and to a train of evil consequences. In 472, in the Persae, we seem to find both doctrines. We find the Chorus singing of the crafty deceit of a god from which no mortal can escape, and we find the Messenger speaking of the jealousy of the gods. But we also find Darius speaking of the stern punishments of Zeus and attributing the disasters of the Persians to their own acts of hubris. As though such seeming contradictions were sent to test our ingenuity, eminent scholars—I mention no names—have tied themselves in knots to demonstrate that the contradiction does not exist. I would suggest that the contradiction not only exists but is essential to the thought of the play, and that it has, to some extent, imposed upon the play its form.