The account of the reforms of Ephialtes given in the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. (25) is as follows:

For about seventeen years after the Persian Wars the constitution lasted unchanged with the members of the Areopagus pre-eminent, despite a gradual decline (καίπερ ύποφερομένη κατά μικρόν). With the increase of the mass of citizens [if that is the right way to understand the phrase αύξανομένου τοῦ πλήθους] on becoming leader of the People Ephialtes, the son of Sophonides, who was thought to be both uncorrupt and just in his attitude to the constitution, attacked the Council [sc. of the Areopagus]. First, he brought down many individual Areopagites, by bringing lawsuits against them for their acts of administration. Then in the year when Conon was archon (i.e. 462/1) he had removed from them all the additional functions (τὰ έπί'θετα) by means of which they guarded the constitution (δι’ ὧν ἧν ή τῆς πολιτείας φυλακή) and accorded some to the Council of the Five Hundred and some to the People and the Courts.

By comparison with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides makes remarkable use of young children in his tragedies. There are vocal parts, sung by individual children in Alcestis and Andromache, cries off for the two boys in Medea, and a song for a supplementary chorus of boys in Supplices. Important episodes concern silent children on stage in Heracles and Troades, lesser roles occur in Hecuba and Iphigeneia in Aulis, and suppliant children may be on stage throughout Heracleidae. No children figure in the extant plays of Aeschylus, and Sophocles gives them silent parts only in Ajax and Oedipus Tyrannus. It seems reasonable to suppose that children are proportionally more central to Euripides’ idea of tragedy, and that individual plays might be studied from this angle. Accordingly I propose to analyse the part of the children in Alcestis, not with questions of methods of performance in mind, but for what the presence, action, utterance or absence of children at any point can tell us about the issues and themes of the play.

Among the sepulchral epigrams comprising Book 7 of the Palatine Anthology, these two by Meleager occur in a sequence (189–216) having to do with animals, mainly birds or insects, that appears to derive from Meleager's Garland. The prose translation above will reveal that the interpretation to be proposed differs considerably from previous readings of either poem, specifically in that it runs counter to the following common beliefs or assumptions. 1. That the poems, while having many features in common, are to be read as two discrete works with no integral connection between them. 2. That the two epigrams, being non-sepulchral, are included in this part of the Anthology, perhaps erroneously and only by reason of their affinities with those insect poems that are sepulchral. 3. That the narrator of each epigram is a human being; the poet himself or some persona such as a ‘love-sick swain’. 4. That the addressee of each epigram is a pet, probably kept in a cage as such insects sometimes were, and so the vegetable mentioned in v. 7 of 195 is to be presented, along with the dew drops, by the human master. 5. That the phrase στóμασι σχιʒομένας in the final verse of 195 is difficult or impossible. (All attempts towards an explanation or emendation of the text are premised on points 2 and 3 above.) 6. That the word άντῳδόν in v. 5 of 196 indicates a response to a musical performance by Pan.

Aristophanes’ second play, Babylonians, included an attack on state offices and politicians and, probably, the city's treatment of its allies. According to the scholia of Acharnians, the play provoked Cleon to indict Aristophanes (or the play's producer Callistratus) for άδικία and ύβρις towards the δῆμος and the βοuλη on the grounds that he treasonably embarrassed the city before strangers at the City Dionysia. Cleon may also have questioned Aristophanes’ citizenship, suggesting that the poet (or Callistratus) was really a native Aiginetan, not a true Athenian. Aristophanes returned fire at the Lenaia of 425 with Acharnians, a play that renews Babylonians’ attack on Athens’ misguided politics and politicians. Even more important, by making a separate peace with Sparta and by offering in his speech of self-defense before the chorus to defend the enemy, the comic hero Dikaiopolis commits ‘crimes’ equivalent to those for which Aristophanes was indicted.

If today the archaeological investigation of Graeco-Roman sites no longer begins with the wholesale destruction of the late antique strata, much of the credit should go to the exemplary American excavations conducted from 1931 onwards in the Athenian agora. And yet, in part because the late antique city's heart shifted eastwards, away from the classical agora towards an area that has been only partially excavated, we still have no monograph on late Roman and early Byzantine Athens—and that despite the current fashion for historico-archaeological studies of the evolving urban tissue. As for the even newer fashion for archaeological survey, which has produced impressive results in neighbouring Boeotia, it will inevitably pass the immediate Athens region by, thanks to its extensive urbanization in the past thirty years. It is worth remembering, though, that if a quarter of the Athenian's horizon is the familiar and all-important sea, three quarters are mountain. On Parnes, Pentelicus and Hymettus, with their fortresses, watch-towers and sacred caves, one can still catch echoes of a lost rural world in constant interaction with the nearby city. As a contribution to the research on ‘city and countryside’ that is the natural synthesis of urban history and rural survey, it seems worthwhile to consider what can presently be known about the relation between late antique Athens and its neighbouring mountains.

Accounts of the campaign and the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC have in general two serious defects: they do not consider the problems of supply on both sides, and they make no attempt to match the topographical details of the ancient accounts with the presumed scene of the engagement. When I came to study the problem of supply, I reached the conclusion that the place of the engagement had to be farther west than had hitherto been believed, and in October 1985 I visited that place and matched the details with it. The result is this article, which is divided into four parts: the campaign, my reconnaissance of the ground, the battle, and some criticisms of earlier interpretations. There are three Appendices: the Battle of 364 BC, ‘Dog-heads’ and the Roman Encampment.

Achilles is the poetic paradigm of a hero, Alexander his real-life counterpart as well as his descendant. This idea is a commonplace of all our sources for Alexander's life. There arc numerous examples of it: Diodorus says at xvii 1.4:

έν ἔτεσι γάρ δώδεκα καταστρεψάμενος τῆς μέν Eύρώπης ούκ όλίγα, την δέ 'Aσίαν σχεδὸν ἄπασαν είκότως περιβόητον ἔσχε τὴν δόξαν καί τοῖς παλαιοῖς ἤρωσι καί ὴμιθέοις ℓσάʒουσαν … 'Aλέξανδρος οὖν γεγονώς κατά πατέρα μέν άφ’ 'Hρακλέους, κατά δέ μητέρα τῶν Aίακιδῶν οℓκείαν ἔσχε τὴν φύσιν καί τὴν άρετὴν τὴς τῶν προγόνων εύδοξίας.

Anything one says about the Letters of Phalaris must be, in some sense, provisional. We have no critical text, and it is clear from the work of Tudeer that exploration of the manuscript tradition might well cast light on the origins and development of this mysterious collection, the most ambitious example of fictitious epistolography that survives from antiquity. But the literary problems are so teasing that even a provisional exploration may serve at least a protreptic purpose.

About the mid-seventh century, polychrome styles of vase painting appeared in five different Greek wares, and in a sixth ware a short time after. By polychrome here is meant the use of a light brown or reddish brown paint for male flesh in human figure scenes, to go with the normal colours found on seventh-century Greek vases, black, red and white. The use of this light brown or reddish brown paint may have begun a little earlier, e.g. for parts of animals, but it would be confusing to call this partial polychrome and to regard this as a preliminary step towards the distinctive use of brown for male human flesh. The six wares in which polychrome vases appear are Protocorinthian, Protoattic, Argive, Naxian, ‘Melian’ (likely from Paros), and a ware found at Megara Hyblaea. Except for ‘Melian’ polychrome which continues to the end of the seventh or early sixth century, each of these polychrome styles flourishes for a brief time and then disappears.

The eleventh ode of Bacchylides begins and ends at Metapontum. But most of it is devoted to two myths about Tiryns. The first of these is the insult to Hera by the daughters of King Proitos and their consequent madness: they leave Tiryns to roam in the wild, until with the permission of Hera they are cured by Artemis, to whom they then build, with their father, an altar. The second is the earlier quarrel at Argos between the brothers Proitos and Akrisios which led to the foundation by Proitos of Tiryns. The latter myth is framed by the former, and the correspondences between the two are carefully implied: the story of the Proitids begins and ends with the foundation of the altar and cult of Artemis at Lousoi in the Arcadian mountains (41, 110), while the inner story begins and ends with the foundation of Tiryns (60-1, 80-1). Just as the girls’ departure from Tiryns led to the establishment of the altar, so the men left Argos and founded Tiryns. Both the joins between the stories are cemented by the idea of departure from a town (55-61, 80-4). Both stories move from a strange piece of folly to consequent suffering, prayers, divine ‘stopping’ of the suffering (76, 108), and finally the building of walls or altar. Similarly Alexidamos, deprived of an earlier Olympic victory by the ‘wandering wits’ of the judges, is now having his Pythian victory celebrated at Metapontum.

Lands and peoples on the northern edge of an empire never fail to arouse curiosity; and their first entry into history exhibits sharp contrasts. The Hyrcani made a notable impact when Alexander in the year 330 invaded their country.

Hyrcania permits a fairly close definition. It occupied the southeastern corner of the Caspian (a sea which frequently took that name). To the north was the wide steppe, inhabited by the Dahae, on the east the region Margiana. To the south Hyrcania extended into the Elburz mountains; and under the last Achaemenid it formed one satrapy with Parthyene, its neighbour on the southeast. Belonging to the narrow neck between the Caspian and the Salt Desert, Hyrcania lay beside the highroad from Ecbatana to Bactra. Hence a vital link for successive imperial powers.

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.

An interest in the Greek idea of the hero, and in the cults established in Greek states to historical or legendary figures endowed with this status, has for long been one of the chief concerns of research into Greek philology and religion. But it is only through the gradual accumulation of archaeological evidence of Geometric and Archaic date that the origins of ‘hero cults’ have begun to be seen as an historical problem requiring an historical explanation. The most recent general works on Geometric and Archaic Greece, by J. N. Coldstream, Anthony Snodgrass and François de Polignac, have long sections devoted to discussing the significance of hero cults, and general ‘pan-hellenic’ explanations have been offered for their occurrence. Whilst there may be much truth in their suggestions, such ‘pan-Hellenic’ explanations ignore important local differences in the archaeological and material manifestations of hero cults. These differences, I would argue, relate in part to the different paths that were taken in the formation and development of early states in Greece. I shall use as examples the two regions of Attica and the Argolid, two areas of Greece where differences both in the manifestations of hero cults and in the paths of social evolution can most easily be traced. Before embarking on a detailed comparison of the two areas however, some discussion of the other general explanations that have been put forward is in order.

The name given by Aristophanes to the leading character in his Acharnians has given rise to much discussion, and I take the opportunity of the appearance in this Journal of another well-documented assessment to put forward briefly, and without a full and independent armoury of footnotes, a solution that contests the communis opinio that Dicaeopolis in some sense speaks for and as Aristophanes.

With the publication recently of two valuable studies on Attic demes, we are now more fully aware of what we know, and do not know, of the deme. With Osborne's work, we now have some idea of the tendency of Athenians to own and maintain property in the deme of origin, but the role of marriage in consolidating property in that deme is more difficult to assess. In contrast to Osborne's focus on the ancestral deme, this brief study will concentrate on the deme into which the woman married; such a deme will be termed the deme of marriage or the marital deme. The study will focus particularly on the families who contracted more than one alliance for their kinswomen into the same outside deme and will emphasize the importance of siblings in securing and maintaining these alliances in the marital deme.

This note is written in reaction to Jasper Griffin's article in JHS cvi (1986) 36–57. He argues two points: (1) that there is a significant difference in vocabulary between the narrated portions of Iliad and Odyssey and the speeches, the former containing almost no emotional, critical, or evaluative words; (2) that Achilles and Agamemnon each have their own characteristic vocabulary.

In JHS cvii (1987), I argued that the Festival of the Great Dionysia needed to be seen in the context of fifth-century Athenian culture and that the plays which make up a major part of this festival could be seen as offering a profoundly questioning attitude towards what might be called fifth-century Athenian democratic polisi ideology. One play which seems to fit uneasily into that description of Athenian tragedy—as indeed it fits uneasily into many general arguments about Athenian theatre—is Aeschylus' Persae. In this brief paper I want to suggest some ways in which the social and political context I outlined in my earlier paper may help us to understand certain elements of the Persae which have worried critics.

In the course of investigating the Pontic region under Byzantium, Anthony Bryer and David Winfield have rescued from oblivion a monument from Sinope of much earlier date. 'Excavations for a gas pump not far west of the walls. . . brought to light an altar made of a stumpy fluted Doric column. A clean-cut inscription carved on two successive flutings reads:

ΔΕΛΦΙΝΙοΣ

ΟΡΓΙΑΛΕΟΣ

Homer's description of the harnessing of a wheeled vehicle has puzzled commentators since antiquity because of the unusual technical terms used.

The remarks below on UET 4 193 aim to correct the published accounts of that text in response to inquiries about its chronological implications. The long epigraphic comments are necessary to explain what might otherwise seem to readers unfamiliar with cuneiform script to be a suspiciously sharp discrepancy in interpretation. I take the occasion to append comments on two other ‘ghost facts’, a term meant as an analogy to ‘ghost words’.