In his ‘Essay on the value of applying the ethnic criterion to the study of Greek history and civilisation’, Edouard Will examined the two most numerous and politically important ethnic divisions of the Greek race in Classical times, the Dorians and the Ionians, and came to the conclusion that they inspired no true ethnic feeling amongst the Greeks. Other historians have tended towards a similar view. Although some writers have felt unconvinced of the thesis, no one has analysed the sources used by Will and his supporters to suggest why they may not after all imply the conclusions which Will drew. This article will attempt to do so. In particular I shall try to show first that there is good evidence for the importance of ethnic feeling at the time of the Peloponnesian war, and, secondly, that we should not regard Peloponnesian war propaganda as the sole cause of this feeling. The article will concentrate upon the treatment of this subject by Thucydides and Herodotus, the interpretation of which is, I think, most in need of revaluation. Their evidence seems to me most important because they frequently document and in some cases give their own analysis of occasions where ethnic feeling seems to play a part, many of which are either contemporaneous with them or lie in the fairly recent past. I shall, however, also consider to what extent their evidence is supported by other sources.

It has long been seen that there were two distinct versions current in antiquity of the course of events after the late summer of 411, when Thucydides' History comes to its abrupt end. Xenophon's version survives in the original, but the alternative is preserved continuously only in Diodoros' epitome, generally brief and often distorted, and it can now be taken as established that this depends on the work of Ephoros, composed in the middle of the fourth century. For much of the time the two versions are most obviously distinguished by small differences of detail, numbers of ships or of casualties or the like, but often enough the divergence is more radical, and in such cases, down to this century, preference was usually though not invariably given to Xenophon as the contemporary source. Since the publication of the London fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia it has been apparent that Ephoros made use of this work, written by a historian of high quality who was at least nearly contemporary with the events he described; and there has been much controversy over (e.g.) the irreconcilable accounts of Agesilaos' campaign towards Sardis in the summer of 395, in Hell.Oxy. 11 (with Diod. xiv 80) and in Xen. Hell. iii 4.20–4. The publication of the Florentine fragments by Bartoletti in 1949 invited us to compare divergent accounts of the Ionian War.

In preparing an article on the Erinyes in the Oresteia, to be published in JHS 1983, I found it necessary to define my attitude to a number of subsidiary issues (whether or not I felt able to solve them). I shall discuss some of these issues here, under two general headings, by way of preface to the main article.

I wish to consider three questions: when and how the chorus appears, where Apollo enters, and whether Apollo is accompanied by Hermes.

Most scholars have supposed that the chorus, or some of it, is seen by the audience immediately after the Pythia's second exit at 63. Oliver Taplin, however, in his admirable book on Aeschylus, has argued that none of the chorus becomes visible until 140, immediately before the Parodos. His first argument for this later entry is that we have only one parallel, namely Euripides' Supp., for the chorus's presence in the orchestra well before its first song. True enough, but how many parallels do we need? There are only three extant tragedies in which the chorus is so much a party to the action that its silent presence could possess some dramatic point; two of these are Eum. and Euripides' Supp., and the third is Aeschylus' Supp., which, since it begins with the Parodos, cannot affect the issue either way. So the anomaly, such as it is, will merely be a by-product of the totally anomalous character of the chorus of Eum.; one could just as well point out that this is the only extant tragedy in which the chorus is addressed before its first song in an extended rhesis.

A Love and desire, to sequester a Mans Selfe, for a Higher Conversation … is found, to have been falsely and fainedly, in some of the Heathen; As Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; And truly and really, in divers of the Ancient Hermits, and Holy Fathers of the Church.

F. Bacon, Of friendship

The holy men of Greco-Roman paganism will never inspire either the reverence or the fascinated horror that the ascetics and monks of early Christianity have commanded ever since they first impinged on the common mind in the time of Antony and Athanasios. Writing for a Christian audience, Francis Bacon could dismiss the semi-mythical Epimenides and Numa, and notorious exhibitionists like Empedokles and Apollonios, as self-evident imposters; while in our own less devout times the abundance of the hagiographical literature ensures that the Christian saint will preoccupy scholars for the indefinite future, if only as the unwitting patron of a mass of historical and sociological data that is only just beginning to be analysed. Yet this is poor excuse for neglecting the pagan holy man, who came in the later Roman empire to play a conspicuous part in his own religious tradition, and also affords instructive points of comparison with his Christian competitors. This paper offers a first orientation towards such wider perspectives, by investigating the social and historical consequences entailed by the distinctive pagan concept of personal holiness. It will be suggested that a tendency to associate holiness with philosophical learning (Section I) determined the essentially urban (II) and privileged (III) background of the pagan holy man, and also encouraged his gradual drift to the periphery of society (IV).

Twenty-five years ago Paul Wilpert called for a thorough re-examination of our knowledge of the content of Aristotle's lost work De Philosophia. Expressing his reservations about the validity of our current reconstruction of the work, he wrote: ‘On the basis of attested fragments, we form for ourselves a picture of the content of a lost writing, and this picture in turn serves to interpret new fragments as echoes of that writing. So our joy over the swift growth of our collection of fragments is clouded by the thought that we are not thereby really nearing the original character of the work, but we are entangling ourselves ever more tightly in a picture we ourselves have created.’ As a corrective Wilpert called for a critical retracing of our steps since 1830 to establish a more secure reconstruction of this important lost work.

Since then there have been numerous, searching analyses of the ideas and fragments of De Philosophia, but at least one venerable old theory has escaped critical reappraisal: namely, the theory that in De Philosophia Aristotle discussed his doctrine of a fifth element, i.e. his belief that the heavenly bodies are composed of an element distinct from the four earthly elements, earth, water, air, and fire. This theory has become so widely accepted that it has virtually become a fact. When support is needed, most modern authors simply cite one or both of the two modern authorities on the early Aristotle, namely W. Jaeger and E. Bignone. The more meticulous restate the traditional evidence with complete confidence that this evidence proves their case. If Wilpert's hope for a firmly grounded reconstruction of the De Philosophia is ever to be achieved, one of the important desiderata today is a critical re-examination of the evidence for the fifth element in this work.

In this paper an attempt is made to establish the chronology which Herodotus intended to convey for events in Book vii on the basis of his arrangement of topics for a listening audience. The relationship of the Decree to those events is then discussed. The question of the authenticity of the Decree's contents is considered with special reference to the arrangements for manning the fleet. Thus the paper falls into three parts. An Appendix on the later tradition is added.

Fundamental questions have recently been raised about the way hoplites fought and about reason for the survival of this curious form of warfare over a period of some three centuries. The present paper seeks to examine the grounds on which traditional views have been assailed.

The traditional view is that in the fully-developed hoplite line the soldiers were packed closely together, each man relying on his right-hand neighbour for protection because his own shield, on his left arm, could not adequately cover his right side. A famous consequence of this situation was the tendency for the man on the extreme right of the line to edge further to his right in order to outflank the enemy and protect his own vulnerable side. This process is attested in Thucydides and elsewhere.

It has recently been alleged that there was, among Greek men of the classical period, a deep-seated fear of the female genitals, and that pubic hair was a focus of that fear. On account of this phobia, it has been suggested, in order to achieve a satisfactory sexual relationship, Greek men required their women fully to depilate their genitals. The thesis has logical problems: if the cause is the sight of the mother's genitals during childhood, the syndrome can affect only one generation. Besides this, it is clear that any depilation would tend to make the vulva more visible, while a heavier growth of hair would tend to hide it. To put the alleged phobic syndrome further to the test, three questions must be answered: Did Greek women practise total pubic depilation? Did they practise pubic depilation at all? If they did depilate, why did they? As for most questions of daily life, there are two major sources of information: Comedy and vase painting. The evidence presented will show that Athenian women did practise partial genital depilation, and that female genital display—including display of pubic hair—is an important element in Attic erotic painting. These two facts are not compatible with a theory of genital phobia.

Throughout the Peloponnesian War, no state remained as aggressively hostile toward Athens as Corinth. Following the affairs of Corcyra and Poteidaia, Corinth successfully argued that war be declared against Athens. After ten years of fighting, when Sparta agreed to the Peace of Nikias, Corinth refused to accept its terms and make peace with Athens. We know that Corinth and Athens were directly engaged in hostilities in 419 and 416 and were on opposing sides in the fighting between Epidauros and Argos in 418. After Athens sent forces against Sicily in the summer of 415, Corinth voted independently to support Syracuse and encouraged Sparta to increase hostilities against Athens in both Greece and Sicily. When the Peloponnesian War came to an end in 404 with the final Athenian defeat, Corinth continued to oppose peace with Athens and urged that the city be destroyed.

As a drama and a poem the Eumenides is often regarded with unease. It brings the Oresteia to a conclusion; but its account of Athens and the Areopagus seems to many readers inspired more by patriotism (of whatever partisan tinge) than a sense of dramatic unity. Hence much attention has been devoted to Aeschylus' supposed political message in the play; as a result, the question of its fitness to crown the trilogy recedes into the background or even vanishes. On the other hand, those whose concern is with Aeschylus' poetry tend to ignore his ‘politics’. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to vindicate Aeschylus the artist: to show, that is, how the founding of the homicide court and the cult of the Semnai on the Areopagus in Athens properly marks the end of the troubles of the Argive Atridae, and how the sufferings and guilt of individual men and women are resolved in a city's institutions. In pursuing this aim, it also has to consider, and try to define, the relation of the tragedian to his audience and to contemporary society. My concern, then, is with the individual and the community, both within the play and behind it.

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.

Henry James, The Bostonians, ch. xxxix

This paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

There is still considerable disagreement about the date of Euripides' Cyclops. The most common view seems to be that it was written in the last ten years of Euripides' career. And yet in the only recent detailed study D. F. Sutton argues that it was produced in 424 BC. And so the Cyclops is perhaps the only extant Euripidean play about whose date there is still serious disagreement. This is largely because it is the only one to which the metrical dating criteria formulated by Zieliński and others have never been properly applied. This I now propose to do, as part of a case for about 408 BC as the date of the play.

The principle that the frequency and nature of resolution in the iambic trimeter can be an indication of the date of a Euripidean play is generally accepted. Taking the plays of known date, in Alcestis (produced in 438 BC) the number of resolved feet expressed as a percentage of the number of spoken trimeters is 6.2, in Medea (431 BC) 6.6, Hippolytus (428) 4.3, Hecuba (c. 12.7, Troades (415) 21.2, Helen (412) 27.5, Phoenissae (411–09) 25.8, Orestes (408) 39.4, Bacchae (posthumous) 37.6, Iphigeneia in Aulis (posthumous) 34.7. In Cyclops it is 35.0, which would entitle us to place the play after 412 BC, were it not that the figure may express no more than the greater metrical freedom that satyric drama has over tragedy. After all, Cyclops has 17 anapaests (not involving proper names) outside the first foot, and three irredeemable violations of Porson's Law—a degree of licence impossible in tragedy.

A charming black-figured olpe in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford shows two warriors playing a game (PLATE IIc). Between them stands the goddess Athena, an alert figure looking sharply to the left while holding her shield to the right. She holds it rather tactlessly, for the shield entirely obscures the head of the right-hand warrior. Although Cassandra, clinging desperately to the statue of Athena, sometimes has her head obscured in a similar manner behind the goddess's shield, it seems more likely that the painter here has simply misjudged the space available than that he has conflated two iconographical types.

The Oxford olpe, though imperfectly planned and executed, is clearly an example of the subject which is best known through the beautiful amphora in the Vatican painted by Exekias (PLATE IIIa). Exekias represented two warriors playing a game at least twice, and is generally believed to have been the first to paint this theme on a vase.

A recent article by Dr H. Plommer (‘Shadowy Megara’, JHS xcvii [1977] 75–88) has once again brought to our attention one of the many unresolved architectural problems at the Argive Heraeum—the date of the megalithic terrace on which the archaic temple was built. This terrace has been variously assigned to the Mycenaean, Geometric and Archaic periods and its role in the foundation of the cult has never been ascertained. In view of this continuing lack of consensus among modern scholars and the murkiness of the history of the origins of the Hera sanctuary, a restatement and re-examination of the evidence are in order. In this article I will first consider the date of the terrace and then attempt to place it in the perspective of early cult activity in the Argolid. This will require a survey of the proposed dates for the terrace and a close look at the remains of the Archaic Hera temple and its stratigraphic and architectural relation to the terrace. An inquiry into the form of the terrace will lead to an explanation of its unique architectural form and to a hypothesis for the reason for its construction. Inspection of the remains and a reconstruction of the original form of other early cult centers, notably Mycenae and Tiryns, will provide a context for understanding the origin and architectural form of the early Heraeum. In conclusion I will suggest that the presence of Mycenaean monuments in the Argolid, more than elsewhere, played a crucial role in the formation and architectural organization of the principal cults.

J. Pouilloux recently published a funerary epigram from Lyon, which he dates on palaeographical grounds to the late second or early third century A.D.; the inscription refers to one Ioulianos Euteknios of Laodicea (hereafter Julianus):

The three ‘notorious echoes between Kleon and Perikles’ in Thucydides all go back to Pericles' last speech made in 430 BC (Thucydides ii 60.1–64.5). The concepts and language of two successive Periclean statements from ii 63.2, viz.

ἦς οὐδ᾿ ἐκστῆναι ἔτι ὑμῖν ἔστιν εἴ τις καὶ τόδε ἐν τῷ παρόντι δεδιώς ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἀνδραγαθίζεται ὡς τυραννίδα γὰρ ἤδη ἔχετε αὐτήν ἤν λαβεῖν μὲν ἄδικον δοκεῖ εἶναι ἀφεῖναι δ᾿ ἐπικίνδυνον

(on the relationship between action and virtue and on the Athenian empire as a tyranny) reappear in two statements by Cleon at iii 40.4 and iii 37.2 respectively. Even more striking–at least on the surface–is the claim of both men to consistency. In ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ὁ αὐτός εἰμι τῇ γνώμῃ Cleon virtually repeats at iii 38.1 Pericles' καὶ ἐγὼ μὲν ὁ αὐτός εἰμι καὶ οὐκ ἐξίσταμαι (ii 61.2). As if to confirm that the echoes are not accidental, Cleon's words all belong (like those of Pericles) to a single speech–that made by him during the 'Mytilcnean debate' of 427 BC.

The sole reliable text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei is H. Frisk's, published in 1927. He not only re-examined the one important manuscript that has survived but brought to bear his knowledge of the language of the Greek papyri of Egypt, which is close kin to that written by the plain-spoken captain or merchant who composed the Periplus. As a result, he was able to eliminate in passage after passage the freewheeling emendations introduced by nineteenth-century editors and return to the wording of the manuscript.

As the last of his ‘artis metricae scriptorum testimonia’ for Stesichorus, 275 (b), Page gives the following entry: ‘Suda iv 586 A[dler] s.v. τρία Στησιχόρου … ἐπῳδικὴ γὰρ πᾶσα ἡ Στησιχόρου ποίησις; Diogenian. cent. vii 14 (et alii) οὐδὲ τὰ τρία Στησιχόρου γινώσκεις, sim. al., vid. L–S ad loc. i 288’. There are, in fact, far more testimonia than indicated by the out-dated and rather meagre note of Leutsch-Schneidewin, and it is essential to discover the way in which these various references are phrased. For an attempt to reach the original form of the proverb, and an interpretation based on the exact wording of this original, was the basis of Otto Crusius’ ‘Stesichorus und die epodische Composition in der gr. Lyrik’, the only truly critical examination of the proverb's various forms and sources that has so far been undertaken.

Since Daphnis and Chloe is a work of fiction, modern criticism has paid little attention to the topographical details of Lesbos which Longus scatters through his work. Today a preoccupation with biographical or topographical realism in literature is out of fashion, and Longus's world has in any case been described, by one of his most percipient modern critics, as ‘un monde des plus irréels’. Yet just as Longus's women reveal a striking blend of fictional romance and social realism, so the background to his narrative, however much adorned with items of baroque fancy, nevertheless remains solidly based on the geography and ecology of Lesbos itself. The cave of the Nymphs, with its grotto, its spring, and its clutter of statues, may derive from the pastoral property-closet; but Longus's description of Mytilene agrees with those given by Strabo and Pausanias, and many other details—the trailing vines, the wine, the flourishing orchards, the prevalence of hares for hunting—suggest familiarity with the terrain. The description in the proem of the grove of the Nymphs, thick with flowers and trees and watered by a single spring, at once calls to mind the site of the great temple at Mesa, in the Kalloni plain. Most striking of all, since often used as evidence for Longus's ignorance of Lesbos, is his vivid description of a heavy snowfall, much at odds with later travellers' accounts of the climate's perennial mildness. But in the winter of 1964, when I was living on the island, snow lay three feet deep in the chestnut forest above Aghiassos, while Methymna was icebound, with frozen taps and sub-zero temperatures, for ten days, so that all the eucalyptus trees outside the schoolhouse died. The worst winter in living memory was that of 1953/4; the mountains are frequently snowbound. Longus, like Alcaeus, who also describes such conditions, knew what he was talking about.

Referring to a copy of F. Morel's edition of Philostratus (Paris 1608), which contains MS notes by Richard Bentley and bears the shelfmark 679.g. 13, the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books clxxxix (London 1963) Col. 253 states:

Imperfect; wanting all that in the preceding copy follows the work of Euscbius against Hierocles. The first four leaves are inserted from another edition, and between the fourth and thirteenth page the leaves are wanting.