The modern literature on divorce in Classical Athens is slight, the only detailed discussion that of W. Erdmann, Die Ehe im alten Griechenland (Munich 1934; repr. New York 1979) 384–403. A rare certainty in our knowledge is the ease with which a husband could terminate marriage. He had only to send his wife away, that is, back to her paternal family, and the marriage was at an end. From this it is tempting to infer that divorce in Athens was frequent, even casual. Not surprisingly that view has had a long tradition in works on marriage and family, law, society, and ancient Greece in general. It is a view almost surely incorrect, however, as the following examination of the evidence will show.

It has become habitual to approach Homeric man's mental functioning with the categories used today, only to show how different this man was from the later Greek and, moreover, from the modern individual. The studies in Homer's mental terminology begun by Bruno Snell and other German scholars before World War II illustrate this tendency. Although the scholarly value of these studies, which have led us to realize that the Homeric vocabulary lacks terms explicitly designating the person as a whole, is incontestable, in everything concerning the better understanding of Homeric man their effect has been, paradoxically enough, rather negative. Indeed, insofar as such ideas as ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘character’ are said to be irrelevant to Homer, and what is proposed instead is a loose conglomerate of the so-called ‘mental organs’, Homeric man is turned into an incognizable entity altogether estranged from everything understood as human today or in classical Greece. At the same time, the essential humanity of Homeric man is immediately felt by every reader of Homer, and the incompatibility of this experience with the image created by terminological speculations about Homeric man is strong enough to call in question the relevance of the results obtained through the terminological approach.

Largely because the processes of transmission have been unkind, the religious hymns sung by the Greeks during worship of a god on a public or private occasion have received less than their due attention from modern scholars. Our sources frequently mention in passing that hymns were sung on the way to Eleusis, for example, or at the well Kallichoron on arrival at Eleusis, or by the deputations to Delos for the Delia, but they usually fail to record the texts or contents of these hymns. Until the fourth century BC temple authorities did not normally have the texts of cult songs inscribed; and the works themselves were by a diversity of authors, some well-known, some obscure, making the collection of their ‘hymns’ a difficult task for the Alexandrian compilers. Some such hymns were traditional—Olen's at Delos, for example — handed down orally from generation to generation; others were taught to a chorus for a specific occasion and then forgotten. Nor do the surviving corpora of ‘hymns’ — I refer to the Homeric Hymns, Callimachus' six hymns, and the Orphic Hymns—go very far to satisfy our curiosity as to the nature of this ubiquitous hieratic poetry. The Homeric Hymns would seem to have been preludes (προοίμια) to the recitation of epic poetry; they are in the same metre and style as epic, and the singer usually announces that he is about to commence another poem on finishing the hymn. Their content may give us authentic material about a god and his attendant myths, but the context of their performance seems distinct from worship proper. The Homeric Hymns provided the basic model for Callimachus' hymns although it is clear that he adapted the model to permit innovations such as the mimetic mode of hymns 2, 5 and 6, which present an eye-witness account of religious ritual. Some find Callimachus' hymns lacking in true religious feeling; few seriously maintain that they were intended, or could have been used, for performance in cult.

How well known was Thucydides' history in the fourth century BC and the hellenistic period? Gomme, with an eye on Polybius, once wrote of the ‘nearly complete silence about Thucydides in what remains to us of ancient writers before the age of Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’. This is startling at first and has to my knowledge led to the misconception that Thucydides virtually disappeared after his own time. Gomme was however referring merely to specific mentions or discussions of Thucydides by name: he went on to speak of the ‘silent compliment paid him by Kratippos, Xenophon, Theopompos, and Philistos’. Even this is far from a complete list, and Gomme's possibly misleading paragraph can serve as my starting-point.

During a consultation at Delphi, one of Apollo's servants imagined, heard, intuited, or feigned Apollo's presence and then uttered Apollo's divine response to the human client who made inquiry of the god. Such inspired mimicry appears incomprehensible to the non-believing distant observer to whom Apollo no longer speaks. Scholars hear nothing at Delphi and, steadfast in their faith in positivism, claim Apollo said nothing. In a similar fashion, scholars have pronounced that the Pythia, like Apollo, did not speak at Delphi, or that her attendant prophets reformulated her utterances and converted them into comprehensible prose or verse. Such a reconstruction of the divinatory consultation at Delphi, however, finds no support in the ancient evidence. Not one ancient source suggests that anyone other than the Pythia issued oracular responses.

Ephialtes is a rather enigmatic figure in Athenian history. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as the third and final ‘author’ of Athenian democracy; the man who finished what Solon began and Kleisthenes pushed forward. On the other hand, our knowledge of what he actually did is remarkably fuzzy.

Considerable research on matters relevant to Ephialtes and his reforms has been published during the last decade, and it is my intention here to try to bring some of these results together to propose a new solution to the two principal problems concerning Ephialtes’ reforms: (i) what power(s) did he transfer from the Areiopagus to other bodies? and (ii) why did he propose these changes?

The encounter of Alexander the Great with the Indian Brahmans or Oxydorkai/Oxydracae forms an important episode of the Alexander Romance as well as featuring in all the extant Alexander historians. The purpose of this paper is to consider how far the various accounts reflect genuine knowledge of India in the sources in which they are based, and to what extent the episode in the Alexander Romance diverges or adds to them and to what purpose. A future paper will consider the development of the episode in later works, Geneva Papyrus inv. 271 and Palladius De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus, as well as the Collatio Alexandri et Dindimi.

In a recent article which does much to enhance understanding of an important but neglected work, David M. Olster has drawn attention to the historical and political background against which George of Pisidia, panegyrist of the Emperor Heraclius (AD 610–641), composed his major surviving poem, the Hexaemeron. Olster rightly casts doubt on the validity of the distinct categories of ‘panegyrical’ and ‘theological’ into which George's poetry has traditionally been classified, and illuminates the significance of the Creation theme as a metaphor for political renewal at a time when the Byzantines achieved great victories against Persia after a prolonged period of disaster in the first decades of the seventh century. These observations lead him to the view that all of George's poetry should be interpreted in political and panegyrical rather than theological or religious terms.

The Ilioupersis cup of Onesimos in the J. Paul Getty Museum offers a unique opportunity for the study of Ilioupersis iconography (PLATES la and lb). The tondo in the cup's interior features the murder of Priam, and the surrounding circular zone contains eight further scenes of the sack in all, nine scenes decorating a single surface. In his recent article on the cup, Dyfri Williams has discussed the iconography of each of these scenes individually. In this paper I hope to complement Williams' acute observations by drawing attention to the visual and thematic interaction among the nine scenes when viewed in combination.

Like his predecessor Herodotus, Ctesias has a great deal to report of marvellous springs, lakes and other bodies of water. Indeed, in one of the most noteworthy tales in his book on India, he describes a remarkable well which produces not water but gold. The story has never been discussed in full. A recent scholar, in fact, in one of the few allusions to it, reproduces the account, but only in part, namely the lines which concern the gold. The original narrative, however, includes much more, for it deals, in addition, with the iron found at the bottom of the well and with its remarkable properties, as well as with the two swords of this metal which Ctesias allegedly received, one from the queen-mother, the other from the king.

Toward the midpoint of the OT Jocasta, in a bid to convince Oedipus of the unreliability of oracles, recalls the old prophecy that Laius was destined to die at the hands of his son. Jocasta points out that this prediction proved doubly mistaken, since Laius was killed by foreign robbers at a crossroads and his newborn child was exposed on the desolate mountainside (707–25). To Jocasta's surprise, Oedipus responds with agitation. He questions her closely about the circumstances of Laius' death and then embarks on an autobiographical narrative that touches on his early life in Corinth and his journey to Delphi, reaching its rhetorical climax with the description of his own fateful encounter at the very crossroads mentioned by Jocasta.

In JGS xxxii (1990), a volume devoted to the Portland vase, the sections on the discovery of the vase (85-102) and on the interpretation of its frieze (130-6) are jointly contributed by Kenneth Painter and David Whitehouse (hereafter P. and W.), who refer at some length to my own published views on these problems, but only to dismiss them as untenable. The purpose of this note is to show why they have not persuaded me to change my mind on either.

The number of interpretations of the scenes (or scene, if it is regarded as one continuous one) on the two sides of the Portland Vase had by the end of 1992 reached the impressive total of forty-six. All of these, while involving valuable observations about the figures, their poses and setting, fall a long way short of proof. Most are over-complicated, introducing implausible identifications of figures and scenes. This is true of the most recent attempts by Painter and Whitehouse in the Journal of Glass Studies, repeated in the volume on Roman glass jointly edited by one of the same writers, and of a note in JHS cxii (1992) by Harrison.

There is no denying that Theophrastus ranks among the most prolific Peripatetic philosophers. Diogenes Laertius lists 225 items in his bibliography, some of them perhaps twice—first as an independent treatise, then as part of a larger work. As time went on, this vast oeuvre suffered the usual vicissitudes: the overwhelming majority of it has been partly or entirely lost. In sharp contrast to the Frankish West, where, despite great losses, more texts were in circulation under Theophrastus' name than was justified, in the ever shrinking Byzantine world we find comparatively few references to him. But this surely does not mean that the small number of references are unreliable.

The hymn to the Greatest Kouros from Palaikastro, Crete, has occasioned considerable debate among students of choral lyric and ancient Greek religion since its discovery in 1904. The god invoked as the greatest kouros has been identified with Zeus Diktaios in whose sanctuary at Palaikastro the hymn was discovered. The hymn as we have it is a second or third century AD copy of a late fourth or third century BC composition. As is so often the case in Cretan studies, Minoan antecedents for the cult of Zeus Diktaios at Palaikastro and for the hymn have been suggested and explored.

The epistates of the prytaneis is last attested in 403/2 and the epistates of the proedroi is first recorded in 379/8. So much for the direct epigraphic evidence. Though Rhodes believed that the proedroi might not have been in existence as late as the 390s, MacDowell and Hansen proposed that they were instituted soon after 403/2. But a little noted passage of Apollodorus suggests a low date for the introduction of proedroi.

“Je me propose de faire un jour une étude sur les notes de métrologie dont on a rempli les parties laissées en blanc dans nos manuscrits médievaux (...) Tout de même que sur le dos de nos cahiers nous avons l'habitude d'imprimer des tables de multiplication, tout de même les Byzantins utilisaient les bas de page de leurs manuscrits pour y inscrire des répertoires arithmétiques que la complication de la métrologie ancienne rendaient particulièrement indispensables.”

The messenger goddess Iris alights at Birds 1199 in the city of Cloudcuckooland. She has been dispatched by Zeus to instruct mortal men on earth to maintain their sacrifices in honor of the Olympian gods, not yet aware that the birds, with the protagonist Peisetaerus as their leader, have founded this city as the hub of an empire that aims to wrest control of the universe from her divine family. This, however, she learns from a tense exchange with Peisetaerus, who forbids her passage through the birds' aerial domain.

The centerpiece of Oliver Taplin's recent monograph on Greek drama and South Italian vase-painting is an Apulian bell-krater of the early fourth century in a New York private collection (Plate IV). The vase belongs to the genre conventionally known as phlyax vases, though Taplin would reject that label, since it is the thesis of his book that many, if not most, of these vases reflect Athenian Old Comedy and not an indigenous Italic entertainment, the phlyax play.

In the first stasimon of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the estranged Helen and Menelaus share the second strophe. Beginning with an account of Helen's departure from Argos and her arrival in Troy, the chorus shifts its focus, moving back to the city deserted by the Queen, and to Menelaus grieving in the palace. With Helen no longer there, and Menelaus prey to the pathos that her absence inspires, ‘a phasma shall seem to rule the house. And the charm of beautiful kolossoi is hateful to the husband, and in the absence of eyes, gone is all Aphrodite’ (415–19). The difficulties of the stanza are legion.