Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique, category-defying formation that was somehow both ‘state’ and ‘society’ simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion of the two. The current paper offers an alternative perspective on this complex but fundamental issue. It questions prevailing views on theoretical grounds, suggesting that the consensus ‘fusionist’ position rests ultimately upon a misunderstanding of what Thomas Hobbes would call the ‘personality’ of polis political structures. Focusing on the case of Classical Athens, it then proceeds to present a new account of the Greek ‘state’, an account that aims to be both theoretically satisfying and heuristically useful. Even if all those who performed state functions were simultaneously constituents of polis ‘society’, the state was nevertheless perceived to function as an autonomous agency, possessing a corporate personality that was quite distinct from the individual personalities of the living, breathing citizens who happened to instantiate it at any particular time.

This article uses recent findings about the diversity of political organization in Archaic and Classical Greece beyond Athens, and methodological considerations about the role of civic Hestia in oligarchic communities, to add sharpness to current work on the political contextualization of Classical enkomiastic poetry. The two works considered here remind us of the epichoric political significance of such poetry, because of their attunement to two divergent oligarchic contexts. They thus help to get us back to specific fifth-century political as well as cultural Realien.

Alkaios refers to Pittakos as one who has ‘acquired an Atreid wife’ in fragment 70 Voigt. This paper looks at the connotations of that statement in the text of the Lesbian poet, and its significance for the history of the Greek idea of ancestral fault.

This article argues that several problems of character identification in the Batrakhomyomakhia should be considered not as matters of textual criticism, to be solved by emendation, excision or transposition, but as authentic features of the poem's parodic engagement with the text of Homer and its scholarship. This engagement comprises another reason for considering the Hellenistic period as the most likely terminus post quem for the poem.

The objections against the transmitted ending of OT (1424–1530) raised by scholars since the eighteenth century and most recently by R.D. Dawe deserve to be taken seriously, but only the last 63 lines (1468–1530, called B below) are open to truly serious objections, both verbal and dramaturgical. By contrast, objections against 1424–67 (called A below) are mostly slight, and in addition they are protected by an earlier passage in the play that seems to prepare the audience for Creon's demand that Oedipus re-enter the palace. A is genuine and gives us the end of the play as Sophocles wrote it: probably we have lost only a brief reply by Creon to Oedipus’ requests and some choral anapaests. A postscript discusses the meaning of 1451–57. I argue that these look to the future (infinitive πέρσαι plus ἄν standing for optative plus ἄν), and that έπί τωι δειν⋯ι κακ⋯ι means that Oedipus is being saved ‘for some dreadful mischief’, i.e. to cause such mischief to others, an allusion to the cursing of his sons and its result, the war of the Seven against Thebes.

A number of individual passages in Rhesus, a tragedy whose attribution to Euripides has repeatedly been questioned, evince extensive familiarity with institutions and mentalities prevalent in fourth-century Macedonia. The paper argues that Rhesus was composed and produced for a Macedonian performance context, probably between the late 350s and the late 330s BC, by an author who, while familiar with Athenian tragedy and conceivably of Athenian origin, may have lived in the court of Philip II or Alexander III.

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the (non)-reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’.

The aegis is Athena's most intimate and widely-discussed attribute, yet one of its vital aspects has so far been largely neglected: its colour. We shall argue that the nature and the role of the aegis and of its bearer are reflected not only in its shape and decoration, but also in its colour and luminosity. As with Athena's glaukos eyes, the key to chromatic characterization and meaning lies in brightness rather than hue. Most often in literature and art, Athena's aegis is characterized by a yellow or gold reminiscent of the gleam of the sun or of metal, which expresses a general divine gleaming brightness but also Athena's specific charis, namely the beauty, vitality and sparkling (or cunning) attractiveness that she can bestow on mortals under her protection. The dark or even black aegis (kyanaigis or melanaigis), by contrast, expresses the dark, wrathful and furious side of the goddess. Brightly shimmering or darkly obscuring, the aegis refers to Athena's protective, yet also potentially destructive, power. Its variable characterization in terms of ‘colour language’ constituted one tool among the many that were available to the Greeks for the construction of her divine personality.