The fifth-century horoi of sacred lands, found in Aigina, marked the property of two named cults, of Athena and of Apollo and Poseidon. They are inscribed (for the most part) in the Attic dialect and script, surprising features one or both of which they share with similar stones from Samos, from Chalkis and from Kos. The accepted view is that they were set up following Athens' seizure of Aigina during the summer of 431 BC, when the Athenians expelled the islanders and installed a colony of their own people who remained until 404. For the setting aside of temene for the gods would naturally accompany such a foundation in confiscated territory, as it did in Mytilene four years later. Yet some of the inscriptions bear such early letter-forms as angular tailed rho and three-barred sigma, forms long regarded as confined in Attic texts to the period before 446/5. There is thus a clear contradiction between the accepted view of the context of these inscriptions and the tenets of ‘orthodox’ epigraphical doctrine. In editing the inscriptions for IG iv (see on nos 33–8), Fraenkel acknowledged the contradiction but was unshaken by it, though he did concede that the placing of the horoi could have been no later than the very outset of the colony: ‘Tantum vero rationi palaeographicae erit tribuendum, ut statim post occupatam insulam instituisse terminationem sacrorum Athenienses sumamus.’

With these robust words Müller sought to argue that the Furies were actually visible to the audience at the end of Choephori. More recent scholars, while generally agreed that this is not so, have still held a variety of views on the relation between the invisible Furies of Cho. and the visible ones of Eumenides, and the kind of existence that they should be conceived to possess. Thus Wilamowitz, who believed strongly in the subjectivity of Orestes' visions in Cho., was prepared on occasion to carry this over into Eum., and a similar thesis has been elaborated in detail by H. J. Dirksen. Conversely F. Solmsen uses the objective reality of the Furies in Eum. to argue against Wilamowitz's conception of the end of Cho. (‘it is after all impossible to regard the μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνες in one play as “Gewissensqualen” and in the other as real deities’), and others have taken up a similar position. Finally John Jones claims that the image of ‘a line extending from pure subjective fantasy to pure objective fact … provides a false frame of reference’, or else that we must ‘place the Furies at both ends of the line simultaneously’.

Anyone who has read my book Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford 1974) (hereafter ‘GPM’) and has also read Professor A. W. H. Adkins' book Merit and Responsibility (Oxford 1960) (‘M&R’) will have noticed that the two books differ substantially in their approach to the history of Greek moral values and in some of the conclusions which they reach. Adkins' critical review of GPM, entitled ‘Problems in Greek Popular Morality’, CPh lxxiii (1978) 143–58 (‘Problems’), explains very clearly why he finds GPM in many respects inadequate or misleading, and it has greatly helped me to understand my own disquiet at the influence exercised by the presuppositions, methods and conclusions of M&R. My purpose in this paper is not to offer a review of M&R twenty years too late, nor to attempt a rebuttal, point by point, of the criticisms of GPM contained in Problems, but to examine one major issue: how should the portrayal of moral evaluation on the tragic stage or in epic narrative be used as evidence for the history of Greek moral values?

A very important proposition is stated in M&R 127: ‘A drama is a practical work; it involves action. People appear on the stage and behave as they do in real life.’ With this proposition I agree, subject to three provisos, of which one limits its application and two amplify it. The limiting proviso is obvious.

‘Most things in Greece’, so Pausanias tells us, ‘are subject to dispute.’ Nowadays, however, the chronological development at least of archaic and early classical art is no longer regarded as a matter for controversy. Indeed so little dispute remains that the art of this period is being used with increasing confidence to reconstruct the social, political and economic history of Greece. Before new orthodoxies arise, however, it may be in order to question some of the old ones by re-examining the ‘fixed points’ on which the chronology of Greek art is based. These points of contact between art and history are familiar. They include, for example, the sack of Hama in Syria, Thucydides' dates for the western colonies, the siege of Old Smyrna, the Greek occupation of Tell Defenneh and other Egyptian sites, the construction of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, the youthful careers of Athenian kaloi (notably those of Leagros, son of Glaukon, and of his son Glaukon), ostraca, the Marathon tumulus and the Persian sack of Athens.

In this paper we evaluate the evidence of two well-known buildings which are generally thought to have been constructed in the sixth century BC. We argue that available evidence may not require this chronological conclusion. We begin by attempting to demonstrate that the marble Temple of Apollo Daphnephorus at Eretria with its pedimental Amazonomachy was erected in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, not in the sixth century. We then reconsider in the light of this suggestion the traditional date of the Siphnian Treasury (c. 530–25 BC).

In 1954 a small red-figured cup was found in the Athenian Agora. Its style of drawing resembles that of one of the greatest Athenian vase-painters—the Berlin Painter, active shortly before 500 BC to around 460 BC. Any of his vases, newly discovered, excites scholarly interest; if the vase is possibly his earliest, and a shape which he is not known previously to have decorated, interest is very great. Martin Robertson, to whom this article is affectionately dedicated, argued persuasively for an attribution of the cup to the Berlin Painter. Sir John Beazley agreed, although with reservations. The cup has continued to attract attention and provoke controversy: no one denies a close connection with the Berlin Painter but some feel that the stylistic similarities are not sufficiently compelling to attribute the cup firmly to his hand. The cup is, therefore, an excellent example of the difficulties inherent in connoisseurship.

My interest in the Berlin Painter was deepened by preparing for publication drawing (PLATES Vld, Vllc–d) which Beazley ‘traced’ off more than fifty of the artist's vases. The Berlin Painter (Oxford 1983) presents Beazley's Berlin Painter. It attempts to show how Beazley looked at the painter's vases and what criteria he valued most highly in their attribution; it does not enter into the controversy over Gorgos' cup or other vases of the artist's earliest years whose attributions have been questioned. Elsewhere I discuss connoisseurship in Greek vase-painting; here my purpose is an explanation of method. My ‘conclusion’—that the Berlin Painter probably did not decorate Gorgos' cup—is relatively unimportant.

Few problems in the Oresteia have been more debated in recent times than that of why Artemis sends the calm which detains the Achaean fleet at Aulis. ‘The main problem, a much vexed one’, wrote Eduard Fraenkel, ‘… arises from the fact that we are not told anywhere in the ode why the wrath of Artemis is directed against the Atreidae’. By ‘the ode’ Fraenkel means, of course, the parodos of the Agamemnon; he might have written ‘in the play’ or ‘in the trilogy’. He believed that Aeschylus had in mind the story, told in the Cypria and in the Electra of Sophocles, that Agamemnon had angered Artemis by boasting that he surpassed her as an archer, but that he made no allusion to it because it seemed to supply a motive too petty to accord with his great theme.

Others have protested that in a trilogy concerned with guilt and retribution it is strange that so important an action should be left unmotivated. Sir Denys Page revived the view of Conington and others that Artemis is angry with the Atreidai because they are symbolised by the eagles which appear at Aulis, and these eagles kill a pregnant hare, an animal under her protection. That is to confuse the world of the portent with the world of reality which it symbolises, besides assigning to the goddess a motive of a still more objectionable pettiness. In pointing this out, twenty years ago, I contended that since the eagles stand for the Atreidai the hare must stand for Troy, and deduced from this that Artemis must be angry at the prospective massacre of the Trojans. In Homer and in the later tradition, Artemis takes the Trojan side against the Greeks, and I argued that since the hare stood for Troy the partiality of Artemis for wild animals and their young must stand for her partiality for the Trojans.

Two important studies have recently appeared of the career and philosophy of the celebrated first-century Cynic Demetrius—an article by J. F. Kindstrand and a monograph by M. Billerbeck. Both scholars discuss Demetrius' defence of P. Egnatius Celer in AD 70. The purpose of the present paper is threefold: (i) to argue that Kindstrand's and Billerbeck's interpretations of this incident, different as they are, must, like all previous interpretations, be rejected; (ii) to offer a new perspective, in the hope of showing that Demetrius' action can be understood as thoroughly honourable; (iii) to demonstrate that Demetrius' action can be understood as not only thoroughly honourable, but also profoundly Cynic. It may be objected that investigation of motive in such a case is intrinsically misguided. The only evidence is a short notice in Tacitus, and it is of course true that we shall never be able to say for certain what Demetrius' motives were. Some modern historians, moreover, deprecate on principle analysis of motive, in the ancient world especially. It seems, nevertheless, both legitimate and worthwhile to attempt to understand the reasons why Demetrius, a Cynic philosopher of (on the normal view) high moral character, should have defended Celer, a Stoic philosopher who (again on the normal view) had revealed himself to be a complete scoundrel. The exercise may also serve to bring out some fundamental points about the Cynics' conception of man and their interpretation of human weakness. For reasons which will become clear below Cynicism was vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Demetrius' defence of Celer, I shall argue, provides an instructive paradigm for the correct interpretation of Cynicism.

It is ‘commonly asserted’, says G. S. Kirk, and ‘almost universally assumed’, that Hesiod came ‘at the point of transition from mythopoeic to rational modes of thought’. H. Diller gives this ‘common assertion’ a more precise meaning: Hesiod represents ‘a bridge from mythical to philosophical thought (my emphasis). This view of Hesiod is justified in various different ways. Diller himself stresses the contrast Hesiod makes in the prooemion to the Theogony between what is true and what is false but resembles the true; this he interprets as the type of self-conscious rejection of rival accounts which is echoed in the work of the earlier Presocratics like Heraclitus. For O. Gigon this passage in the Theogony has a specific reference to Homer: Hesiodic ‘truth’ is there opposed to Homeric myth, Logos to Mythos. The Theogony is also philosophical both in so far as it is concerned with a search for beginnings, and because of the universality of its scope. In addition to these formal features, both Diller and Gigon find philosophical elements in the content of the poem, though on this point their conclusions differ sharply. Diller attributes to Hesiod himself that discovery which is often regarded as one of the main contributions of the Presocratics: the discovery that the world operates in accordance with impersonal laws. Gigon, by contrast, suggests that things in the Hesiodic world are seen as products of will, analogous to the products of human activity.

In his generally admirable account of the poets of early Byzantine Egypt, Alan Cameron reconstructs some of their (in his words) journalistic warfare on the basis of a supposed distinction between the use of εἰς and πρός in the titles of books and poems: εἰς denotes a work written in someone's honour, πρός something by way of discredit or refutation.

In Book i ch. 2 of his great astronomical work, the Syntaxis Mathematica (widely known since Arabic times as the Almagest), Ptolemy outlines briefly the order of topics in his exposition: (1) discussion of the position of the earth as a whole in relation to the heavens; (2) the relations between the ecliptic and the horizon at different terrestrial latitudes; (3) the movements of the sun and moon and their consequences. Without these preliminaries, says Ptolemy (9·5 ff.), a methodical treatment of the final part of his undertaking, namely (4) the so-called fixed stars and (5) the planets, is impossible. The Greek sentence in question runs as follows (9·7–11):

The Βοσπορανοί said to be located in S.W. Caria in the Rhodian Peraea have given rise to some discussion in connection with the location of the demcs of the Rhodian Peraea. The evidence for them rests on one inscription of the Imperial period (wrongly stated by Fraser and Bean, Rh.Per. 61, to rest on two inscriptions: the same inscription was first referred to in one place, and then published in another), namely that mentioned by the brothers Michael and Niketas Chaviaras in Arch.Eph. 1907, col. 217, and subsequently published by them in Arch.Eph. 1911, 64 no. 58.

The text of this passage was regarded as correct until recently. Then one sentence was held to be corrupt, and three separate and mutually incompatible emendations were made, of which no one commands general approval. Before emendations proliferate, it seems appropriate to consider whether the text is not sound as it stands. Let us begin with that assumption and come later to the emendations.

When discussing the Tabulae Iliacae in JHS xcix (1979) 26–48 (hereafter ‘Horsfall’), I followed the usual and unchallenged view in stating that the group includes twenty reliefs and that five bear the signature of the artist Theodorus (26). Both statements prove wrong. Prof. F. Jouan (Paris-Nanterre) most kindly informed me in the summer of 1979 that an unpublished Thèse de Maîtrise by one of his students, Mlle F. Legrand, (Les Tables Iliaques [1976] [hereafter ‘Legrand’]), contained new material on the Tabulae and made a copy of her work available to me. It was immediately apparent (Legrand 160 ff.) that the Tabula which I shall call 21 Froehner was unpublished and when it became clear that no publication in France was intended, I sought and was freely granted access. Examination of Tabula 20Par., also in the Froehner collection, revealed that its verso carried an hitherto neglected signature by Theodorus. Permission to publish Tabulae 20Par. (verso) and 21Fro. was unhesitatingly granted. It is a great pleasure to place on record the enthusiasm and generosity displayed by Prof. Jouan and by the staff at the Cabinet des Médailles.

In Historia Animalium iv 531a3–5, Aristotle draws some sort of analogy between sea-urchins and lanterns–an analogy which, thanks to Jacob Klein, has found its way into the vocabulary of modern invertebrate zoology. At the close of the discussion in his Loeb edition, A. L. Peck observed: ‘The Text of the Greek manuscripts therefore still awaits satisfactory interpretation’. Peck's note, his footnote to the translation, and his apparatus criticus went some way toward establishing an understandable text for the passage. What the passage still lacks is a scientifically sensible interpretation.

The following note aims to bring the attention of scholars to a very fine seal (plate XIIa) in the collection of the Derbyshire Museum Service at Kedleston Road, Derby. My thanks are due to Mr D. Sorrell, County Museums Officer, for permission to publish this piece.

Following Boardman, the seal may be identified as an Island gem, probably from Melos, of the early sixth century BC. The seal was acquired in 1954 from a dealer, following its purchase at auction in London (of which no details are available), and now bears the catalogue number 833:6. It consists of a small piece of green serpentine, flecked with white, shaped to a lentoid form. 5·5 mm thick at the centre, tapering to 1·75 mm at the top and bottom, it is not perfectly round, the width being 17 mm and the height 17·5 mm. A hole is drilled across its width.

While piecing together information on some of the copies of the Athena Parthenos for the recent congress in Basle, I looked again with slightly wiser and perhaps sadder eyes at a small terracotta from the collections of the Manchester Museum that I had published in this journal some eleven years ago (plate XIIb). I found her interesting because apart from such features as the triple-crested helmet, the snake lurking within her shield, and the Nike poised upon her right hand, which identified her beyond doubt as a copy of the Parthenos, she rested her right hand on a plain column with torus mouldings. There is another figurine from the same mould in the museum in Geneva, and a third from a parallel mould in Exeter, and I concluded that they were Romano-Gallic ‘souvenirs’ of the second century ad. I was convinced of the authenticity of the type, not least because of the pedigree of the Geneva figurine. However, several scholars have had their reservations, right back to the first appearance of the Geneva example, and so at the initiative of Dr R. A. Higgins the Manchester figure was tested for thermoluminescence at the Research Laboratory of the British Museum.

Thermoluminescence (TL) applied to the dating and authenticity testing of ancient ceramics is a well established technique.

Thermoluminescence is the light given out by non-conducting crystalline materials as a result of exposure to radiation and subsequent heating. In pottery the crystalline inclusions, such as quartz and feldspars, are responsible for the TL. The radiation results from minute quantities of radioactive impurities in the pottery itself and in its immediate environment. The TL signal measured in the laboratory is related to the time elapsed since either the formation of the crystalline inclusions or since they were last fired to a temperature of about 500°C or above. The dating of pottery by TL is therefore only possible due to the removal during firing by man of the effect of previous radiation over geological time. The TL signal is then proportional to the age of the pottery. When a ceramic is fired to a temperature which is not sufficient to remove the effect of previous radiation, the TL signal is normally in saturation, i.e. addition of a laboratory radiation dose prior to heating does not enhance the TL signal. In such cases, TL cannot be used to determine the authenticity or otherwise of the object.

Ancient authors often cited each other inaccurately through misunderstanding or carelessness; and this can cause problems in the collecting of fragments of authors of whose works some, but not all, survive. For a distinction has to be made between inexact citations of extant works and citations which, although resembling such works, do in fact seem to derive from material now lost. Such problems occur repeatedly in connection with the botanical writings of Theophrastus; and one particular group of problems stems from a section in the epitome of Bk ii of Athenaeus.

A. K. Grayson's valuable volume, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, contains not only a rich collection of historiographic writing from the period before the Macedonian conquest, but has also added several new fragments to the Babylonian Chronicles series for the early hellenistic period, in addition to a useful re-edition of the Chronicle of the Diadochoi. These fragments constitute what survives (or is known at present to survive) from the apparently last chronicles of the corpus which began in the reign of Nabonassar (747–34 bc) and continued down to and into the early Seleucid period. When precisely (and why) the corpus came to an end is at present unknown. The new post-Alexander fragments are probably all from the third century bc, nos 11 and 12 from the early third century, while nos 13 and 13b are of later third century date.