The dialogue begins with Meno's peremptory request: ‘Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught, or is it acquired by practice, not teaching …?’ (70a). Socrates protests that he does not know what virtue is, and hence cannot know whether it is teachable or not, explaining that in general if one does not know what a thing is, τί ἐστι, one cannot know what it is like, ὁποῖον (71b). He insists that the prior question of what virtue is must be settled before consideration of the subsequent question of whether it is teachable or not.

In accordance with this principle, Socrates gets Meno to make attempts to offer a general definition of virtue. As in earlier dialogues, Socrates quickly reduces his interlocutor to aporia, and Meno refuses to make further attempts at defining virtue on the ground that no criterion of truth exists. Socrates sums up his argument thus: ‘It is impossible for a man to enquire into what he knows or into what he does not know. For he cannot enquire into what he knows, because he knows it, and there is no need for enquiry; nor again can he enquire into what he does not know, since he does not know about what he is to enquire into’ (80e). Socrates describes this paradox as a piece of eristic, but he does not dismiss it. To resolve it, he introduces the theory of recollection, ἀνάμησιρ (81a–e).

To designate collaborating with Persia, the Greeks employed the verb Μηδίζω ‘side with the Medes’ or the noun Μηδισμός ‘leaning toward the Medes, Medism’, both derived from Μῆδος. Since this seemingly inappropriate terminology has attracted only limited consideration, a thorough discussion of its usage in Greek literature may help to clarify Greek relations with the Achaemenid empire throughout the classical period. After a brief preliminary discussion I consider the more problematic aspects of this terminus technicus.

It may be observed initially that such terms characterized the political relationships within the Greek world, and were encouraged by the struggle of each polis to maintain its independence and preserve its distinctive cultural qualities. For example, such terms as ‘Atticizing’ (Thuc. iii 62.2, 64.5) and ‘Laconizing’ (X. Hell. iv 4.2) arise during the contention for leadership in the Greek world in the late fifth and early fourth centuries.

The battle took its name from Pydna because it was fought ‘in the plain before Pydna’. Accordingly the first need is to identify the site of Pydna as it was in the year of the battle, 168 BC. Originally a Greek city, planted by settlers from the south on the coast of Pieria and possessing a good harbour (Diod. xi 12.3, xix 50.4), Pydna was acquired by the Macedonian king Archelaus, who moved the people to a site two or three miles inland (Diod. xiii 49.2). In the ensuing period the original site was reinhabited. For Pydna appeared as an independent city in the 360s (IG iv2 95, II 6), ‘a Greek city’ (Ps.-Scylax 66) ‘on the coast’ (Ps.-Scymnus6i8). When Philip II captured it, he had good reason to maintain it as a port. In 317–316 BC it was besieged by land and by sea. It was certainly on this coastal site in 168 BC.

It used to be thought that Pydna was on the elevation 56 m due cast of the old part of the village Makri Yialos (now having a regular population of 1,600). However, we found only a little pottery there and that probably of recent date; and the fact that there is a toumba, covering a Macedonian built tomb, on the elevation shows that it is not the site of a settlement. On the other hand, on the coast to the south between the hotels ‘Achilleion' and ‘Ancient Pydna’ there are the clear remains of an acropolis, its highest point being 36 m above sea level. As we walked over the site we collected one piece of Attic Black-Figure pottery, much excellent black glaze, and sherds of Hellenistic gray ware and relief ware. The present area of the acropolis is some 400 m from east to west and 150 m from north to south. Its natural defences are formed by cliffs on the seaward side and by steepish slopes on the three landward sides. These defences were reinforced by a circuit wall, of which the northern part is indicated today by a swell in the ground at right angles to the road just north of the top.

L. J. D. Richardson'S article ΥΠΗΡΕΤΗΣ, CQ xxxvii (1943) 55–61, asserted the manifest truth that the word hyperetes, for which ‘an unattested original meaning “under-rower” has been universally assumed, had ceased to be used literally by the time our records, literary and epigraphic, begin’. ‘When ὑπηρέτης and its derivative ὑπηρετέω first appear (in Herodotus saepe), both the particular transferred sense “servant” and the generally transferred sense “subordinate” were already well established to the exclusion of the original meaning (whatever it was), and, what is more, the metaphor from the seafaring usage seems to be already “dead”. The essential note, however, in the group of words (ὑπηρὲτης, ὑπηρετέω, ὑπηρεσία, ὑπηρετικός) is not hard to assess: it is implicit, unquestioning service in response to another's authoritative bidding.’ The truth of this assessment for the fourth as well as the fifth century is plain from an examination of the very frequent use of the word in, e.g., Plato. Richardson proceeded to point out ‘a source of confusion in the dictionaries’ (which still prevails), viz., that of the four chief members of the group of words mentioned, hyperesia alone, having become ‘figurative (as service) in all areas, was then reapplied in the naval domain’, as a name for part of the ship's company of the fifth- and fourth-century trireme. This pattern (of reapplication in a naval context) is in fact also true of hyperesion and hyperetikos. The former is the name given by Thucydides and Isocrates to the oarsman's cushion, called proskephalaion by Hermippus and Theophrastus, while the latter is used of a naval dispatch boat.

Because the techniques and the approach described in this paper are perhaps unfamiliar to readers of this Journal, we offer a short introduction on the background to the project. In 1979, after working on the Egyptian mummies in Manchester as part of the Manchester Museum Mummy Research Project, one of us (R. A. H. N.) felt it would be interesting to attempt the reconstruction of some Greek skulls. It seemed that the technique offered interesting new possibilities in the study of Greek portraiture, quite apart from the fascination of an objective method of tackling the appearance of the ancient Greeks. That the very first skull on which we were able to work proved to be such an intriguing one was a stroke of good fortune arising out of the Society's centenary celebrations, when I had the opportunity of discussing the project first with Dr N. Yalouris, and then at his suggestion with Professor M. Andronicos. It is to the latter's great generosity that we owe the privilege of working with a skull that proved much more exciting than even we had anticipated: from the detailed study of the bones that the reconstruction entailed, set against the historical and archaeological evidence, we found that we could not merely reconstruct the dead man's appearance, but provide evidence for his medical history and his military career which identified him (in our view conclusively) as Philip II: we could in fact answer for Professor Andronicos the question that has hung over these tombs at Vergina since he first discovered them in 1977, and identify for him the occupant of the main chamber of Tomb II, the most important of them.

The Greeks under Roman rule suffer from a double prejudice. On the one hand, Hellenists lose interest in the Greeks after the classical period; on the other, Roman historians find it hard to avoid a Romanocentric perspective. This double prejudice becomes particularly acute when the issue is the religious language used by the Greeks to refer to the Roman emperor. For example, the Greeks called the living emperor both theou huios (‘son of god’) and also theos (‘god’). The language looks odd from the perspectives both of classical Athens and of imperial Rome. One way to make sense of it is to treat it as a translation out of Latin. Thus the bizarre practice of calling the emperor theou huios is seen as perfectly natural because it is simply the translation of divi filius. Why natural? Because, as the heirs of Rome, we can attempt to ignore the cultural differences between us and the ancient world. But the tactic of treating Greek as a translation out of Latin does not always work. Calling the living emperor theos cannot be seen as a translation of divus, a term which applies only to dead emperors. Modern scholars are therefore forced to treat the usage as ‘deviant’, the product of either folly or flattery. In fact the failure of theos to translate divus undermines the first assumption that theou huios is a translation of divi filius.

The importance of Schliemann's excavations at Troy, Mycenae and elsewhere is beyond dispute. Yet the aura of greatness which his remarkable achievements have rightly conferred on his name has tended to blur our perception of the man himself. Psychoanalytic studies by W. G. Niederland have offered fresh insight into his complex character, but it is the paper given by W. M. Calder III on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth that marks the beginning of the new sceptical attitude to Schliemann. Calder pointed out that Schliemann's autobiographical writings contain many false claims and purely fictitious episodes which biographers have uncritically accepted as fact. This new view of Schliemann as an unreliable witness, which, incidentally, was held by many of his contemporaries, has now been confirmed and expanded by subsequent research.

It is principally in matters of his personal life that recent studies have exposed Schliemann's propensity for lies and fraud. However, G. Korres has shown that in his scholarly work too Schliemann did not shrink from seriously misrepresenting the truth. It is the purpose of the present article to demonstrate that even Schliemann's archaeological reports are vitiated by this kind of behaviour. We are not here concerned with Schliemann's interpretations of his discoveries.

A fragment, cited by Athenaeus (Deipn. xiii 557b–e =fr. 21) from the life of Philip II of Macedon by the Peripatetic biographer Satyrus, has been regarded by modern scholarship as a fundamental source for Philip's early campaigns and ‘matrimonial politics’. Here Satyrus lists Philip's wives, apparently in chronological sequence. The fragment, as it is usually printed, also states that during his reign Philip αἰεὶ κατὰ πόλεμον ἐγάμει. This has led scholars to infer a reasonably accurate account of Philip's method of conducting foreign policy through contracting political marriages.

Beloch was among the first of modern scholars to link Philip's marriages (as listed in the fragment) with specific wars and even to alter their chronological order so that most of them can be pegged to the few known campaigns of Philip's early career. He tacitly repudiated Satyrus' order by placing the marriage of Phila of Elimeia before that of Audata of Illyria and relegating Audata to the position of Nebenfrau, raising her status to that of Gemahlin only after the (hypothetical) death of Phila. He gave no specific reason for doing this, but it would appear that he regarded the marriage between Philip and a woman of the politically unstable region of Elimeia as being more appropriate to the time of his accession and therefore more likely to have taken place before his marriage to the Illyrian.

On 12th March, 1800 Charles James Fox wrote thus to Gilbert Wakefield, imprisoned for seditious libel in Dorchester Gaol. ‘I have lately read Lycophron, and am much obliged to you for recommending it to me to do so: besides there being some very charming poetry in him, the variety of stories is very entertaining. … There remain, after all, some few difficulties, which if you can clear up to me, I shall be much obliged to you. … The most important of these is, that which belongs to the part where he speaks of the Romans in a manner that could not be possible for one who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, that is, even before the first Punic war.’ Fox accordingly inferred that either the Roman passages (1226–80, 1446–50) were interpolated (which he thought the more probable hypothesis) or the poem as a whole was not the work of the author to whom it was traditionally ascribed, Lycophron the tragedian, who organised the texts of comedy for the Alexandrian library under Philadelphus. Wakefield, though normally a far from conservative critic, was not convinced: ‘Is it incredible, that an attentive observer of the times, and the rising greatness of the Romans, might venture to predict the extent of their future sway in the general terms of ver. 1229?’ Fox thought this ‘morally impossible’, and the subject continued to occupy their letters during the remaining months of Wakefield's incarceration. In this remarkable correspondence we find clearly adumbrated the main lines on which the Lycophron Question was to develop. If our hearts sink before the considerable bibliography generated by this controversy, we may find reassurance in the characteristic air of invincible common sense with which its initiator, having hit on a peculiarly happy expedient for cheering the enforced leisure of his imprudent friend, steadily maintained his position, armed against Wakefield's superior erudition by better judgement and a stronger sense of style.

A. J. Holladay has effectively reasserted the traditional view of the hoplite phalanx—that it was a dense mass of men, relying on the weight and cohesion of the whole rather than on the prowess of individuals in order to break the enemy's line.

Further evidence in his support is provided by Plato's Laches, where Nicias is made to praise the art of fighting (that is, single combat) in hoplite armour, as a fitting part of a liberal education. But when it comes to its utility in warfare he is less enthusiastic. ‘This science will help somewhat even on the actual battlefield, whenever one has to fight ranged in order with many others. But its chief benefit will be when the ranks are broken, and one has to fight singlehanded against a single adversary, and either, in pursuit, attack someone who is defending himself, or else, in retreat, protect oneself from the attack of another.’ Nicias clearly has in mind a situation like that from which Socrates extracted himself so handsomely at the Battle of Delium, as the speakers in the dialogue have just recalled; though Socrates of course made his retreat without benefit of the newfangled art of fencing.

For the uprising of 323 and 322 BC by the Greek states against the Macedonian domination, the name ‘The Lamian War’ has universal currency, identifying the overall conflict through reference to the siege of Lamia in the winter of 323/2. Given the relative insignificance of that particular event in determining the outcome of the war, the name does not seem to be particularly appropriate. Yet there is ample ancient evidence to indicate that the term ὁ Λαμιακὸς πόλεμος was used also in antiquity to signify this struggle.

The construction of Pythagorean musical theory rests philosophically on the foundation provided by Sectio Canonis. Indeed, the treatise may have performed this role historically too. Andrew Barker has recently contributed to this journal a discussion of the methods and aims of the Sectio—JHS ci (1981) 1—16. In so doing he has pinpointed lapses in the theoretical reckoning of the treatise, especially in the case of proposition 11 (P11). I should like to reply to Barker's article. My remarks concern the authorship and date of the treatise, the introduction, a few propositions, and ultimately the historical and philosophical settings for the Sectio.

The article ‘Signa priscae artis: Eretria and Siphnos’ in JHS ciii (1983) 49—67, by David Francis and Michael Vickers (hereafter ‘FV’), is part of a programme of investigation of ‘fixed points’ in Archaic archaeological chronology, the tendency of which is to demonstrate that the conventional chronology is some half-century wrong. This broaches various problems of wider significance, not made explicit in the article and not considered here. The present Note considers the article alone, since some features of the content and manner of the arguments give ground for concern. It is written mainly as a guide to students who may have been puzzled or impressed that such radical new views could be published so confidently. Briefly, FV argue that the Temple of Apollo at Eretria should be dated to the 470s, and that, although Herodotus places the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi c. 525, we ought to be happy with a date in the 470s for this building also.

W. S. Gilbert's very model of a modern majorgeneral knew among other things the croaking chorus of the Frogs of Aristophanes, and their refrain is perhaps the most widely-quoted line in Greek literature. But the interpretation of the Frogs’ scene gives rise to debate, and there is no agreement on even basic questions: for example, were the Frogs visible in the theatre or did they croak unseen behind the skene? What is the nature of the competition between the Frogs and Dionysus? Is the scene simply a self-contained piece of entertainment or has it an element of literary parody which would make it relevant to the main theme of the play? Here I attempt to answer the last of these questions.

What relationship exists in Alcestis and Andromache between O (Laur. 31.10, saec. xii ex.) and D (Laur. 31.15, saec. xiv) and B (Par. gr. 2713, saec. xi) is a question which, for want of full and accurate collations, has long stood unresolved. The reports of these manuscripts offered by Kirchhoff are inaccurate and incomplete. In Alcestis Prinz–Wecklein quote only occasional readings of OD and disdain to give a full collation even of B. In Andromache Wecklein ignores O and reports only occasional readings of D. In Alcestis Murray rarely reports OD, in Andromache he reports O (collated for him by Wilamowitz) from time to time, D rarely. In the Budé edition, Meridier ignores OD in both plays.

τελεσϕόρος in these lines is translated by LSJ as ‘one having the management or ordering’ and this sense of ‘being in command’, ‘having authority’ from the use of τέλος as ‘authority’, ‘magistracy’ (LSJ I 3 and 4) is followed by Sidgwick, Tucker, Verrall, Lloyd-Jones and others going back to the scholiast who glosses the term ἀρχηγός, διοικητής. τελεσϕόρος here, however, picks up in particular two significant earlier uses of the word in this play, at two moments, such as this, of high tension (212, Orestes’ first announcement of himself to Electra; 541, Orestes’ first statement of his predictive dream-analysis and plan of revenge) and it goes beyond, as I shall argue, the reductive reading of the scholia, lexica, commentators, and translators.

Von Jan first drew attention to the etymological play in 14, an allusion to the derivation of Ἀπιδανῆες from ἀ-πίνειν: at the birth of Zeus Arcadia was yet waterless, as we learn from 18 ff. The play gains added point from 40 f., where the Peloponnesians thirst no longer: παλαιότατον δέ μιν (Neda) ὕδωρ/νἱωνοὶ πίνουσι Λυκαονίης ἄρκτοιο.

In frr. 122B and 123B (DK) Empedocles mentions a series of opposite personifications, e.g. Beauty and Ugliness (122.3), Movement and Rest (123.2); the last pair mentioned in fr. 122 is Nemertes–Asapheia.

The correct interpretation of these lines significantly affects our understanding of the attitude of Dionysiac worshippers towards violence. If the chorus is here saying that power over one's enemies is the best possible gift from the gods and furthermore that this statement constitutes wisdom, violence and vindictiveness are essential ingredients of Dionysiac religion. If, on the other hand, they are renouncing power over their enemies, Dionysiac religion is essentially peaceful and non-aggressive. The first interpretation, that triumph over one's enemies is the greatest gift and that knowing this constitutes wisdom, is the popular view at the present time. It is the interpretation which is found in all current English translations of the play, including those of Arrowsmith and Kirk. It is also the view of several scholars who have undertaken a detailed study of the passage. These include Dodds, Winnington-Ingram, and Arthur. Others who have studied the passage have reached the opposite conclusion, that the greatest gift consists of caution and respect, which in turn lead to restraint and avoidance of violence. These include Blake, Festugière, and Roux. The aim of this paper is to reach a greater degree of certainty concerning the meaning of the passage by a close examination of the grammatical constructions.

P. 5: Ἀμύντου is the normal genitive of persons we normally call Amyntas.

Vv. 9–10: the date and family placing of Hipponikos discussed, on a premise rightly denied by Page, J. K. Davies, Ath. Prop. Fam. 256.

Pp. 20 ff: P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria i 778–80; I confess to some doubt about Egyptian Chersonesos.

P. 87: we might consider the gentilicium Satrius, though the reading habits of Satrius Secundus (Tac. Ann. iv 24) are hardly relevant.