The proposition that man is the only animal capable of laughter is at least as old as Aristotle (Parts of Animals 673a8). In a strictly physical sense, this is probably false; but it is undoubtedly true that as a psychologically expressive and socially potent means of communication, laughter is a distinctively human phenomenon. Any attempt to study sets of cultural attitudes towards laughter, or the particular types of personal conduct which these attitudes shape and influence, must certainly adopt a wider perspective than a narrowly physical definition of laughter will allow. Throughout this paper, which will attempt to establish part of the framework of such a cultural analysis for the Greek world of, broadly speaking, the archaic and classical periods, ‘laughter’ must be taken, by a convenient synecdoche, to encompass the many behavioural and affective patterns which are associated with, or which characteristically give scope for, uses of laughter in the literal sense of the word. My concern, then, is with a whole network of feelings, concepts and actions; and my argument will try to elucidate the practices within which laughter fulfils a recognizable function in Greek societies, as well as the dominant ideas and values which Greek thought brings to bear upon these practices. The results of the enquiry will, I believe, give us some reason to accept a rapprochement between the universalist assumption for which my epigraph from Johnson speaks (and which most grand theorists of laughter appear to have made) and the recognition of cultural specificity in laughter's uses for which many anthropologists would argue, as emphatically asserted, from a Marxizing point of view, in the quotation from Vladimir Propp.

Phoenix's speech in Book 9 of the Iliad is generally considered prophetic of what happens to Achilles later in the story. Many scholars have argued that Achilles is punished by Zeus through ἄτη (of either Achilles or Patroclus) which causes the death of Patroclus, just as anyone who spurns the Litai in the allegory of Phoenix will be punished by Ate sent by Zeus. The Meleager episode is also regarded as reflecting almost exactly what happens later: the Achaeans have difficulty in the battle due to Achilles' withdrawal, just as the Aetolians have when Meleager refuses to fight. Achilles, like Meleager, receives a set of three supplications to go back to the battle, and, just as Meleager loses his prize because he rejects the supplications, Achilles loses Patroclus because he does not listen to the pleas of the Embassy. This seems to be, in outline, the present orthodoxy.

M. Finley in a well-known and influential article, established the theory that the bridegroom (or the potential suitors) offered gifts to the bride's father, which had their recompense in a counter-gift or dowry to the groom and the bride; these gifts must be equal in value.

Two inscriptions, one (A) found at Tylissos on Crete, the other (B) found at Argos, both dated about 450, concern relations between Argos and the Cretan towns of Knossos and its smaller neighbour, Tylissos. The close relationship between the treaties of fragment A and fragment B – and therefore the interconnection among Argos, Knossos, and Tylissos – seems generally recognized by scholars. The articles of the agreement lay down a diverse and complex set of arrangements among the three parties, but as a whole, the treaty has been interpreted in two ways: (1) the three πóλεις have entered into some sort of federal union; (2) only Argos and Knossos are signatories to the treaty, while Tylissos is a dependency of Argos. The former interpretation has gained wider acceptance than the latter, and if it is correct, just such a federal union would represent a remarkable advance in the development of Greek political institutions. In this paper we shall press a philological point based upon the information we have both from the treaty and from contemporary sources, and in so doing, we shall attempt to show that a federal union is unlikely. We shall then offer our own interpretation of the regulations governing the insular cities with regard to the formation of alliances and the declaration of friends and enemies.

This article is about the rules of succession in Bronze Age Greece as reflected in Greek tradition. The question as to whether or not the figures dealt with by this tradition are historical is of little relevance to the present discussion: what I seek to recover is not the history of one royal house or another but rather the recurring patterns according to which the members of these houses – no matter whether real or fictitious – were expected to behave when it came to the question of accession to the throne and transmission of the kingship to their successors.

‘Unhappy boy, what a deed you have done! What came into your mind? What disaster destroyed your reason?’ This version of 1228–9, by Andrew Brown in his recent commentary, represents the majority opinion. But what ‘deed’ has Haemon done that justifies such an outburst? Jebb, followed by Kamerbeek and Brown, claims that the deed which causes Creon to wail aloud with charges of insanity is Haemon's entry into Antigone's tomb. Kamerbeek and Brown justify the extremity of Creon's reaction by claiming that Creon knows that Haemon intends to kill himself. But is it reasonable to suppose that Creon's first reaction to the shocking scene of Antigone's hanging corpse and Haemon helplessly wailing would be that Haemon is on the verge of killing himself? Creon has not had time to predict his son's actions and his screams of dismay are most naturally read as a reaction to something he sees before his eyes. It would also be strange if Creon had absolutely no reaction to Antigone's death; he expected to find her alive.

The text and apparatus below are Diggle's. At the end of the article I give, for the sake of the curious, an expanded version, for 11ff., of Wecklein's ‘Appendix coniecturas minus probabiles continens’, with references where they are known to me.

The Acarnanian chrēsmologos Amphilytos spoke the verses to Peisistratos just before the battle of Pallene in 546 b.c. They contain a prediction of imminent victory for Peisistratos and total defeat for the Athenians. The Athenians will be routed and deprived of political self-determination, while the victory will restore to Peisistratos the tyranny from which he was twice forced, ‘rooting’ it once for all. Of course, all of this appears quite evident from the narrative. But as the verses form part of Herodotos' account of Peisistratos' ascent to power they amount to much more, for they constitute penultimate proof of Peisistratos' irresistibility (and his tyranny's inevitability), a recurrent theme in Herodotos' logos, but one which was undoubtedly encouraged by his Athenian sources as a means of explaining how the Athenians were forced to yield the tyranny. Indeed, the theme of irresistibility helps to excuse the Athenians for being overcome; as much of the logos, which is historically quite vague, it is a reaction to fact, not factual itself.

My recent edition of Antigone (Warminster, 1987) was not intended primarily as a contribution to textual criticism. I did no work on the manuscripts, and little work on tracing the sources of old conjectures. Nevertheless, some of my thoughts on the text may merit fuller discussion than I was able to give them in a beginners' edition. And there have been more recent developments: in particular we now have a new Oxford Text of Sophocles with a companion volume of Sophoclea, and I have benefited from stimulating discussion with Dr David Kovacs, who has kindly allowed me to see a draft of some forthcoming notes of his own.

The staging of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae is complicated considerably by the large number of individual male citizen parts in the play. These include Praxagora's husband Blepyrus (312–477, 520–727), Blepyrus' anonymous Neighbour (327–56) and his friend Chremes (372–477), the First Citizen (564–871) and the Second Citizen (746–876), the Young Man ‘Epigenes’ (938–1111; cf. 931), and the δεσπτης who leads out the Chorus (1128–83). These are not necesarily all independent characters, but the great difficulty with the play is in deciding precisely who is to be identified with whom. R. G. Ussher, the most recent Oxford editor of the text, distinguishes four separate characters, and divides the parts in the following way:

In Frogs Aristophanes presents the comic katabasis of Dionysus, whose quest is to bring back the recently deceased Euripides and restore him to the Athenian literary scene. In the prologue Dionysus and his slave, Xanthias, seek out Heracles and ask his advice about the journey below. After some comic play, as they consider various short-cuts, Heracles finally gives Dionysus a serious lesson in Underworld geography (136–64). The various items on this itinerary – Charon, terrifying beasts, filth and excrement, sinners, μσται – are all encountered on Dionysus' journey, each transformed for humorous effect. Dionysus crosses the lake on Charon's barque, but is forced to row (180–270). At this point we have the introduction of the off-stage chorus that gives the play its name. In what appears to be a kind of false parodos Dionysus engages in a metrical tug-of-war with the frogs that finally spoils his rowing rhythm. After disembarking, he is joined by Xanthias, who was forced to walk around the lake, and they find themselves in the place of σκτος κα βρβορος (273), where they see the miscreants (here, comically, the audience). In place of ϕεις and θηρα μυρἱα δειτατα (144), our heroes are terrified by the figure of Empousa, who is seen by Xanthias alone (285–305). When Empousa is gone, there appears the chorus of initiates, whose song (with comic interruptions from Dionysus and Xanthias) constitutes the parodos (316–459).

In 246 we should, as Dodds suggests, get rid of the feeble δεινς and adopt Mau's δειν κγχνης. (Dodds suggests that K was misread as IC and the resulting δειναῖς was ‘corrected’ to δεινς.) Verdenius, Mnemos. 41 (1988), 254, defends the reading of the MSS., saying that δεινς serves to distinguish the noose of punishment from that of suicide, but this is untenable: why is one noose more ‘terrible’ than the other, and who on hearing ‘worthy of the terrible noose’ would draw conclusions about it that could not be drawn from ‘worthy of the noose’? The question raised about the kind of noose is important (see below) but cannot be answered by these means.

A. H. Sommerstein has recently directed our attention away from the belaboured topic of the essential and original structure of Old Comedy to the more productive question of how the extant plays of Aristophanes are shaped. He begins with the question of the source of ‘the five-act principle, standard in Menandrian comedy’ (140). Correctly looking to the chorus as the key element in articulating a play's form, Sommerstein finds that the five-act format already dominates the shape of Old Comedy, although he argues that the number of acts ranges from four to seven and that only in the fourth century do the acts become about the same length. His analysis is largely correct, I think, but it is in danger of being ignored because his criteria are not objective and have not been applied systematically. Thus, B. Zimmermann has more recently described the structure of Aristophanic comedy as free

There existed in Greek a multitude of words denoting or connoting sexual congress. The list of verbs given by Pollux (5.92) only skims the surface. In what follows I discuss words which with one exception (ληκ) are absent from this list and belong, as will be seen from their distribution, to the lower register of the Greek language. They are all demonstrably direct expressions, blunt and non-euphemistic. Only one of them, κιν, is at all common in non-sexual contexts. As for the rest, if they originated through metaphor like many more respectable verbs of intercourse, this had long since been forgotten by native speakers. They rarely undergo any significant weakening, retaining their basic sexual denotation.

In the 23rd book of the Iliad, Menelaus loses second place in the chariot race because of a manoeuvre by Antilochus. So, after Antilochus claims the second prize as his and dares others to fight him for it with their fists, Menelaus rises before the assembled heroes, sceptre in hand, to initiate a formal proceeding against him (571ff.). First he makes the charge: Antilochus has insulted his aretē and endangered his horses. He then calls upon the leaders of the Argives to judge fairly between them. But at this point he states that he will judge the case himself – in both instances the verb for ‘to judge’ is δικάζειν. He then calls on Antilochus to follow an involved procedure and finally to swear an oath that in running the race he did not purposefully use a trick. But despite the fact that Menelaus said during the race that Antilochus would not take the prize without swearing an oath (23.411), we do not know later what the result might be if Antilochus were to accept Menelaus' challenge and to swear the oath. Homer has him sidestep the challenge and concede the prize.

It has often been assumed that Plato's Apology is a faithful recreation of Socrates' speech on the final day of his trial in 399 b.c.; that it contains almost nothing of Plato's own philosophy; and that it therefore represents rather the position of the historical Socrates on how to live and how to philosophize. In this belief, Schleiermacher relegated the Apology to an appendix to his translation of Plato, along with (among others) some spurious works. His view was followed by Zeller and Grote in the late nineteenth century, and further popularized in the 1920s by Burnet's edition of the Apology.

One of the distinctions that Plato in the Laws stresses most heavily in his discussion of the proper relation between the individual citizen and the laws of the city is that between persuasion and compulsion. Law, Plato believes, should try to persuade rather than compel the citizens. Near the end of the fourth book of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, Plato's spokesman in this dialogue, asks whether the lawgiver for their new city of Magnesia should in making laws ‘explain straightaway what must and must not be done, add the threat of a penalty, and turn to another law, without adding a single bit of encouragement or persuasion [παραμυθας δ κα πειθος … ἓν] to his legislative edicts’ (Laws 720a 1–2). A few lines later, the Athenian Stranger himself condemns such a procedure as ‘the worse and more savage alternative’ (τò χεῖρον τοῖν δυοῖν κα γριώτερον 720e4). The better method is for the laws themselves to try to persuade (πεθειν) the citizens to act in the manner that they prescribe. And as a means of doing this, Plato proposes attaching preludes (προομια) to particular laws and to the legal code as a whole: such preludes will supplement the sanctions attached to the laws and will aim at persuading the citizens to act in the way that the laws direct for reasons other than fear of the penalties attached to the law. Such a practice, Plato believes, is an innovation: it is something that no lawgiver has ever thought of doing before (722b–e). And we have no reason to think that Plato is here excluding his earlier self, e.g. the Plato of the Republic and the Politicus, from this criticism.

The banker Pasion, father of the notorious fourth-century litigant and politician Apollodoros, some of whose speeches have survived under the name of Demosthenes, was originally a slave; freed by his owners, he made a substantial fortune from banking and subsequently received Athenian citizenship for his generous gifts to the city. At [Dem.] 59.2 we are given a paraphrase of the decree which enfranchised him: 'Aθηναον εἶναι Πασωνα κα κγνους τοὺς κενου ‘[the Athenian people voted] that Pasion and his descendants should be Athenian’. In common with inscriptions recording grants of citizenship, and unlike Roman military diplomata, the decree appears to have ignored Pasion's wife Archippe. The silence of the decrees of enfranchisement is echoed in the literary sources, with the result that we have no explicit testimony to the legal status of the wife of an alien who was granted Athenian citizenship. M. J. Osborne assumes that the status of the wife was in no way affected by the grant; she remained an alien. D. Whitehead has argued that in such cases the wife's status was indeterminate; in the event of the death of her first husband she might find herself married either to an Athenian citizen or to an alien, whereupon her status would be defined according to that of her husband. This article will argue that Archippe's status was unaffected by Pasion's receipt of citizenship, that is, that she remained a metic. I shall then proceed to consider the question of the implications of the difference in status of Pasion and Archippe subsequent to his enfranchisement for the legal basis of the relationship between them, and finally draw a tentative conclusion about the date of Pasion's receipt of citizenship.

This speech attributed to Demades has provoked controversy on the grounds of its authenticity and the circumstances to which the piece refers. The date generally assigned to its content of about 326 is determined by ‘counting forward’ twelve years (the title of the speech) from 338, since the speech details some aspects of Demades' political career starting with his diplomacy in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Chaeronea (2 August 338). The date of 326 and its implied context merit question, but first some remarks on the authenticity of the speech may be made since this is relevant to its subject.

In chapter 9 of the Poetics Aristotle states that poetry is concerned with the universal (τ καθλου 1451b6–15). In this paper I shall consider three questions arising out of this statement. First, what does it mean? Secondly, what constraints does it impose on the construction of (in particular) tragic plots ? I shall consider this question with special reference to the possible role of chance in tragedy. Thirdly, why is poetry concerned with the universal – that is, why is poetry such that these constraints are appropriate ?