Plato's Menexenus opens with a scene of typical Socratic interest in the young, as Socrates questions Menexenus about his activities and intentions. This scene, however, I would suggest, is not simply an illustration of Socrates' characteristic behaviour, forming a suitable introduction to this or any other dialogue. Its relation to the work as a whole is closer than this: it raises a question with which the Menexenus may best be understood as being essentially concerned.

The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of what archaic verse epitaphs meant to contemporary readers. Section I suggests their fundamental message was praise of the deceased, expressed in forms characteristic of poetic encomium in its broad, rhetorical sense, i.e., praise poetry. In section II, the conventions of encomium in the epitaphs are compared to the iconographic conventions of funerary art. I conclude that verse inscriptions and grave markers, not only communicate the same message of praise, but do so in a formally parallel manner. Section III, drawing on Pindar as a preserver of archaic thinking, attributes the parallelism between verse epitaph and grave marker to their common debt to funerary ritual. The epigrams will be seen to share with their monuments the goal of memorializing this ritual.

The fourth century BC Scythian King Ateas is mentioned in no contemporary, or near contemporary extant classical work, yet he is the subject of numerous stories in the works of such later writers as Trogus Pompeius (as epitomised by Justin), Satyrus (as quoted by Athenaeus), Polyaenus, Plutarch, Strabo, Frontinus, Lucian, Clement of Alexandria and Jordanes (in the sixth century AD). These stories all refer to events which might be dated to a period beginning a year or two before Philip's siege of Perinthus and ending the year after the siege. They would have fallen outside the scope of Ephorus' ‘Ιοτορίαι which seem to have come to a sudden end with Philip's siege of Perinthus in 341/40, but would not have fallen outside the scope of Theopompus’ work, Books xlvii–l of which contain many references to Thrace in this period (F217-26). The present paper is an investigation of the historical and historiographical significance of these stories. It will be argued that the various stories dealing with Ateas are historically reconcilable with each other, offer insights into the progress of a Scythian migration into the region south of the lower Danube and are compatible with, perhaps derived from, Theopompus' account of events in that period.

A botanical study of crop processing was undertaken on the semi-arid, southern Aegean islands of Karpathos and Amorgos. The present article provides details of the crop processing activities, and some contextual information concerning the wider agricultural economy. Attention is drawn to three aspects of this wider economy (time stress, scale and risk) which are of particular significance for understanding both recent ‘traditional’ and ancient farming practice in the region. Amorgos is discussed in greater detail as the period of fieldwork was longer.

The contention of this paper is that the growing disbelief in the ancient casualty figures of one's own side and the tendency to regard them as ‘propagandist’ are generally mistaken. The arguments turn on the origins of the figures and on the practicalities of warfare. In the last section special attention is given to those of Alexander's citizen forces. The casualties of mercenaries are not considered.

At the end of the Trachiniai, the dying Herakles gives orders for his cremation on Mt. Oita and is carried off to his fiery end. One of the thorniest critical questions about the play is what we, the audience, are to make of this. Did Sophokles intend the audience to remember Herakles' apotheosis from the pyre and complete the story in their own minds? Or did he omit it in order to deny it, the better to deepen the play's supposed general pessimism or censure of Herakles? The case for assuming Herakles' exaltation suffers from two major weaknesses. Its champions do little to answer the arguments of their opponents, which are often forceful and take into account things in the play which the devout would rather ignore, and they do surprisingly little to explain how their position on the question affects the interpretation of the play. Nevertheless, their case is a strong one and deserves better support than it usually receives. This study will present it in some detail, addressing the objections and in the process offering an interpretation.

Moments before Euripides' Polyneices and Eteocles square off for their final, fatal battle in the Phoenissae, each prays for divine assistance (1359–76). Their prayers, though very brief, are by the standards of Greek drama rather formal. Polyneices, as Theban as his brother Eteocles, is leading a force of Argives against Thebes to recover the kingship he claims is rightfully his. As he prays he looks toward distant Argos and invokes ‘Lady Hera’, for, he says, ‘I am now yours, because I married Adrastus’ daughter and dwell in his land' (1364–6). He has left his homeland, married into an Argive family, and now lives in Argos, and he must therefore appeal to an Argive deity. Hera is here made a doubly appropriate recipient of his prayer—by locality as patroness of the Argolid and by function as protectress of marriage, her two major roles in the religion of Greek life and tragedy. Eteocles, commanding the home forces against invaders, looks to the nearby temple of ‘Pallas of the golden shield’. He invokes her as the ‘daughter of Zeus’ and, like Polyneices but less explicitly, explains why he appeals specifically to her. He wishes to kill ‘the man who has come to sack my fatherland’ (1372–6). This Athena ‘of the golden shield’ is patroness of Thebes and, in more general terms, a goddess who aids the city in defence against foreign invaders. Like Hera she is doubly appropriate, in terms of locale and function, to her worshipper's needs.

HELIODOROS' Aithiopika is the story of Theagenes and Charikleia: of their falling in love, their elopement from Delphi where Charikleia lives as the adopted daughter of the priest of Apollo, their encounters with pirates, bandits and unwanted suitors, and finally of their arrival in Ethiopia, land of Charikleia's birth, where she is recognised as the daughter of the king and queen, and the lovers' union is sanctioned, sanctified and implicitly consummated after the conclusion of the narrative. It is a commonplace of discussion of the novel to draw attention to the artfulness with which the story is presented, to the temporal dislocations occasioned by beginning the plot (or narration) in the middle of the story, and to the consequent shift which the author has been able to effect from the straightforward, linear, proairetic mode of simple storytelling to a hermeneutic mode which draws the reader into a quest, shared with the characters of the novel, for true understanding of facts of which he is already in possession.

The literary stock of Achilles Tatius has been increasing steadily in value since 1964, when an article about his romance Leucippe and Cleitophon in an encyclopedia of world literature began, ‘Das Werk weist alle Mängel seines Genres samt einigen zusätzlichen eigenen auf.’ To be sure, Leucippe and Cleitophon remains among the last and probably least read of the Greek romances; yet in the last decades critics have begun to draw attention to original and effective aspects of its composition. As is usually the case, this revaluation has been accompanied not so much by the discovery of new virtues which had previously been neglected, but rather by the redescription as virtues of what had always counted as vices. Thus Cleitophon's lack of heroism can now be welcomed as comic realism, the implausibly melodramatic twists of the plot praised as selfconsciously theatrical ironies, and the baroque frigidity of the style counted as loony metaphysical wit or as Brechtian Entfremdung seffekt.

The notion that texts are not read neutrally, but through perceptual filters shaped by culturally determined assumptions which determine perception and reaction would, I believe, be accepted—in some form—by most literary critics by now. But the extent and radical nature of the cultural determination of reading and their methodological implications are often not fully realized. For they entail that, if we wish to read a text such as the Antigone as closely as possible to the ways in which its contemporary audience did, we must reconstruct in detail their cultural assumptions, by means of which meaning was created, and try to read through perceptual filters created by those assumptions; otherwise we will inevitably read through our own assumptions by default, and as these are very different from those of the Athenians of the late 440s, they will inevitably produce very different meanings from theirs.

It is a widely held view that according to the Symposium the ultimate or ‘primary’ object of love is the Form of Beauty. It is almost as widely held that the Form of Beauty is identical with that of the Good. In this paper I argue that both of these views are mistaken. In a first section I present a detailed analysis of Diotima's doctrine, emphasizing features of it which I judge to be often overlooked. In subsequent sections I examine the arguments for and against the claim that Beauty is the primary object of love, and I then do the same for the assertion that the Form of Beauty is identical with that of the Good.

Robert Cook has again placed us in his debt by two characteristic Notes in JHS cvii (1987) 167–71 which sharply dissect, scrutinise and reject some recent hotheaded theories. Of one directed against a theory that I (with others) have proposed over recent years, he writes (n. 2) ‘and I think he [Boardman] agrees with much that I say’. In this he is correct.

The problem is the possibility of the political manipulation of myth in the archaic and classical periods in Athens. Cook admits some political allusions which reflect ‘results of political action [but] need not have political intent’ in the popularity of Theseus from the end of the sixth century on ‘with official encouragement it seems’.

The climactic moment of Lucian's Necyomantia occurs when the ludic Cynic preacher, Menippus, finds Tiresias in Hades and poses to him the question which provoked his Homeric quest: what is the best way of life (ποῖόν τινα ήγεῖται τòν ἂριοτον βίον, 21)? The first part of the Theban's response is clear. He praises the life of ‘the ordinary guy’ (ό τῶν ὶδιωτῶ ἂριστος βίος . . .21) and urges the Cynic to ignore the philosophers with their metaphysical speculations and instead to pursue one end alone (τοῦτο μόνον έξ ἄριστος θηράσῃ, 21.3–4). It is this end, the kernel of Tiresias' wisdom, which has not been successfully construed by commentators.

By the last quarter of the fifth century it was generally agreed that there were three basic forms of government: monarchy, democracy and oligarchy, and this basic division continued to the end of the classical period. For the Athenians, this choice was for practical purposes reduced to one between democracy and oligarchy: kings might appear on the tragic stage, but in contemporary Athens sole rule was synonymous with tyranny, a form of government which had been beyond the pale since the expulsion of the Peisistratids. Indeed, in the late fifth century it was the object of a public hysteria which affords Aristophanes much scope for satire, particularly in Bdelycleon's speech in Vesp. 488 f.

Over the last few years the late E. D. Francis and M. Vickers (after this referred to as F. and V.) have been promulgating a revised chronology for Greek art from its later Geometric to its Early Classical phases. The subject is large and they have dealt with it in instalments, scattered over various journals. In Table 1 I give a list, though it may not be complete.

In this note it is assumed that the bibliographical remarks in the Works and Days are true or anyhow true enough.

Hesiod's father started at Cyme in Aeolis. For a time he tried the sea—for trade, to judge by 631–4, where trade is regarded as the only object of seafaring. After that, to flee from poverty, he migrated to Ascra in Boeotia, where he came into possession of a farm, prosperous enough when divided between his sons to allow each of them a reasonable livelihood (37 for division; 298–307 for implication that Perses' share too was in land).

Hesiod does not say how his father obtained his farm at Ascra. The most popular explanation is that he reclaimed waste land, but there are objections. First, Hesiod does not mention reclamation as a way in which a landless man could become landed or a landed man enlarge his property, though he approved enlargement, but by purchase (341).

In the myth of Pelops in Ol. 1.25-93, Pindar makes various selections, elaborations and innovations of the mythic material available to him. Kakridis has shown that the mention of Zeus' house (line 42), of the anxiety of one of Pelops' parents (46) and of wondrous horses (87) makes the story conform to that of Ganymede, which Pindar cites as a parallel in lines 43–5, while other choices, which cannot be so explained, Kakridis attributes to Pindar's striving for variation.

Krischer has further shown that in lines 65–94, the explicit parallel with Ganymede is replaced by an implicit parallel with Achilles. Achilles has an ally in battle (Thetis), a divinity to whom he prays alone by the sea-shore (ll. i 349-50), who suddenly appears to him (ll. i 359), and to whom he claims to prefer a short life with honour to a long inglorious one (ll. xviii 155-21).

Amongst the legendary heroes who appear in leading roles in the surviving plays of Sophocles, it is noteworthy that Oedipus, Ajax and Heracles all received some form of divine worship in Attica, not to mention localities more readily associated with each of them. Sophocles is not unaware of this aspect of each of these figures, but where the future prospect of their cult is alluded to in the plays, such allusions are not always prominent or explicit; though the future cult of the Oedipus of the Oedipus Coloneus is crucial for the play, it is only directly mentioned in a few passages, while the Ajax of Ajax is seen as a future receiver of cult only in a single unusual scene of supplicating his dead body, and it is unclear in the Trachiniae whether the audience is intended to supply a future cult on Oeta and apotheosis for Heracles. I should here like to argue that in Philoctetes Sophocles again consciously employs a hero destined to receive worship after his death, and that this is subtly suggested at the end of the play.

For a long time there has been a dispute about the gravity of the disaster suffered by the Athenians and their allies in Egypt in 454 BC. Thucydides i 104 and 110.4 says that 200 ships sailed there (a figure now commonly accepted); that, six years later, a further force of 50 arrived just after the disaster; and that the majority of these was lost. As all the ships which were already in Egypt at that time were also lost the total would seem to be about 230–40.

This was generally accepted by scholars of the last century, but in this century many scholars have come to doubt so overwhelming a loss in relation to the League's total resources. This scepticism is made possible by Thucydides' failure to say specifically how many ships were actually in Egypt when the disaster befell—whether, in fact, 200 had remained there for six years (Thuc. i 109 says that the Athenians and their allies remained, but this is not conclusive for 200 nor for 6 years).

Much has been written already about the dispute between Mantitheos and Mantitheos-Boiotos (henceforth Boiotos), sons of Mantias of Thorikos; but the currently accepted chronology needs some modification and the relations between institutions and strategies have not been fully explored.

The current view (APF 9667, largely following J. Rudhardt, Mus. Helv. xix [1962] 39–64) has Boiotos born, in wedlock, c. 382; by c. 381 Mantias would have divorced Boiotos' mother Plangon and remarried, Mantitheos being born c. 380. Mantitheos entered the deme Thorikos and married c. 362; Boiotos succeeded in getting Mantias to present him to his phratry in autumn 359 and in summer 358, by which time Mantias was dead, presented himself to the deme under the name Mantitheos. Demosthenes xxxix is dated to autumn 348, [D.] xl to 347.