Pindar's Eighth Olympian celebrates the victory of Alkimedon of Aigina in the boys' wrestling at Olympia in 460. This victory was the sixth won by a member of this family (line 76). The absence of detail about most of these victories suggests that the family had had little success in the great Panhellenic competitions and that the majority were won at minor festivals. However, one of the remaining five victories was certainly won in one of the four festivals which made up the periodos. In lines 15–18, after preparatory generalizations about the diversity of paths to achievement, all with divine aid, Pindar describes the path of achievement, and the source of divine aid, which features in the victor's family:

Tιμ⋯σθενες, ὕμμε δ' ⋯κλ⋯ρωσεν π⋯τμος

Zην⋯ γενεθλ⋯ωι. ὃς σ⋯ μ⋯ν Nεμ⋯αι πρ⋯πατον,

'Aλκιμ⋯δοντα δ⋯ π⋯ρ κρ⋯νου λ៹φωι

θ⋯κεν 'Oλυμπιν⋯καν.

Timosthenes, in your case fate allotted you to Zeus as your family god, who made you pre-eminent at Nemea and Alkimedon Olympic victor by the Hill of Kronos.

If you look up οἶκος in Liddell and Scott, you find the instances classified in three main divisions: first those meaning a house, or sometimes other kinds of building; secondly ‘one's household goods, substance’, for which I shall generally say ‘property’, though Liddell and Scott do not actually use that word; and thirdly ‘family’. This threefold distinction is sound, and I shall adhere to it here. Admittedly one sometimes finds an instance where it is not easy to decide which sense the word has. Two of the senses, occasionally even all three, may overlap. But in the great majority of instances it is clear which sense is meant.

The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of age and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households.

So begins one of the most engaging, and variously controversial, musical scenes in Euripides. The Messenger's narrative of the Phantom Helen's disappearance has proved to Menelaus that the Helen standing before him is the real Helen, altogether innocent of elopement to Troy, from whom he has been sundered for seventeen laborious years. The ensuing embrace is developed in a duet (Hel. 625–59) which is followed without a break by the so-called ‘Interrogation’ (660–97), the two together constituting the so-called ‘Recognition Duo’.

In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound (assuming that it is by Aeschylus) might seem to be an exception, since all but one of its characters are gods. But nonetheless the intervention of the gods in the life of the one human character, Io, brings pain and trouble as well as promise of benefit. Io has been driven mad because she has refused to obey the dreams that tell her to go to the meadow where Zeus wants to have intercourse with her. The god does not make his request in person, and it is only in the course of her wanderings that Io learns how Zeus will bring a gentle end to her sufferings. Her informant is another god, Zeus' adversary Prometheus, who answers her questions, at times grudgingly (778), and in ways that are not immediately clear to her (775).

Our starting point is a somewhat obscure incident which has lately attracted some attention. The year is 429 B.C., and the place is Athens in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. The plague, which had broken out only a year before, was still claiming its victims. Yet military operations were in full swing, and the general Phormio operating in the Corinthian gulf against a Peloponnesian fleet was able to score an impressive victory. The Lacedaemonians were deeply dissatisfied. This was the first sea-fight they had been engaged in, and they found it hard to believe that their fleet was so much inferior to that of the Athenians. They dispatched three advisers to Knemos, the admiral in charge, instructing them to make better preparations for another sea-fight. Additional ships were solicited from the allies, and those already at hand were prepared for battle. It is at this point that the incident in question occurred. Not to prejudge the issue, I quote the text in full leaving the controversial phrases untranslated:

4. And Phormio on his part sent messengers to Athens to give information of the enemy's preparations and to tell about the battle which they had won, urging them also to send to him speedily (δι⋯ τ⋯χους) as many ships as possible, since there was always a prospect that a battle might be fought any day.

5. So they sent him twenty ships, but gave τῷ δ⋯ κυμ⋯ξοντι special orders to sail first to Crete. Nικ⋯ας γ⋯ρ Kρ⋯ς Γορτ⋯νιος πρ⋯ξενος ⋯ν persuaded them (αὺτο⋯ς) to sail against Cydonia, a hostile town, promising to bring it over to the Athenians; but he was really asking them to intervene to gratify the people of Polichne, who are neighbours of the Cydonians.

6. So ⋯ μ⋯ν λαβὼν τ⋯ς να⋯ς. went to Crete, and helped the Polichnitans to ravage the lands of the Cydonians, and by reason of winds and stress of weather wasted not a little time.

It has become necessary to enter any discussion of the date of the Kallias decrees, IG i3.52, armed with apologies and justifications merely for bringing up the matter again; such is the result not so much of the quantity of articles and chapters written on the subject as of the belief that the orthodox date, 434/3, has been proved, despite reliance on circumstantial evidence and some forceful objections levied against it.1 Indeed, that the case is considered closed can find no better reflection than the assignment of the date 434/3 in IG i3 without even a question mark.

Polybius in a familiar passage, lists goods moving past Byzantium between the Mediterranean. world and the Black Sea region; among these goods, slaves are accorded a prominent place:

…as regards necessities it is an unidsputed fact that the most plentiful supplies and best qualities of of cattle and slaves reach us from the countries lying round the Pontus, while among luxuries the same countries furnish us with an abundance of honey, wax and preserved fish; from the surplus of our countries they take olive-oil and every kind of wine. As for grain, there is give and-take – with them sometimes supplying us when we require it and sometimes importing it from us

There is little evidence to support any estimate of the sizes and number of the phratries in Classical Attica. According to the author of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, there were four tribes, 12 phratries and 360 gene, corresponding respectively to the seasons, months and days of the year. Most older discussions of the tribal organization of Attica were based on this passage. More recently, however, scholars have come to agree that this information is too schematic to be historical, and in any event was not intended to describe the constitution of Attica in the Classical period. Currently, in spite of this passage, many contend that there were probably numerous phratries in Classical Attica (perhaps as many as there were demes or gene), which varied greatly in size.

The death of Socrates gave birth to an industry of biographical literature which often took the form of a defence (apologia) or prosecution (katēgoria), sometimes purporting to be the actual defence or prosecution conducted at his trial. Plato and Xenophon wrote works in his defence. Among his critics, one Polycrates had a certain notoriety. Lysias, Theodectes and Demetrius of Phalerum, orators and rhetoricians like Polycrates, were credited with further works of apology. There were doubtless many others. The aim of this paper is to show that Xenophon wrote his Defence in the light of the rhetorical theory that required that a speaker utter words and thoughts appropriate πρεποντα to his character.

The present paper concludes that P. Oxy. 2463 contains remnants of a commentary on the Aitia of Callimachus. Identifying the commentary makes it possible to reconstruct the missing part of Heracles' conversation with Molorchus (SH 256–7), confirming its place in the Victoria Berenices and settling the latter's relationship to the Aitia. The argument takes its departure from a vexed passage in Lycophron.

Despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary, the running slave (‘servus currens’), and particularly the often lengthy entrance monologue of the running slave, is generally considered a distinctly Roman phenomenon, an exuberant growth of the Latin soil, albeit from Greek seed.1 There are two reasons for this. One reason is the frequency with which the motif appears in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in sharp contrast with the absence of any single undisputable New Comic example. The second reason is Eduard Fraenkel's Plautinisches im Plautus which, sixty-five years after its publication, remains the most authoritative scholarly work in the field of Roman comedy. In this book Fraenkel argues that Plautus' running-slave scenes, particularly the monologues of the Curculio (280–98) and the Captivi (790–828), are a veritable nexus of original Plautine traits.

The two central themes of Fasti are twice (1.1, 4.11) linked in this way. The association, which at once gives the poem the appearance of having a literary ancestry in the aetiological tradition, might have seemed inevitable: any verse narrative account of a festival is very likely to contain an αἲтιоν of it. Callimachus' hymns illustrate this assertion, and there are clearly defined hymnic elements in Fasti to bear out the comparison, for example the listing of Venus' ⋯αεтαί and Πρáξεις at 4.91ff. and the instructions to the devotees of Pales at 4.731–48. 4 To state the obvious fact that the poem combines Roman antiquities with Alexandrian aetiology, a blending of which more straightforward examples are to be found in the fourth book of Propertius, is only a prelude to establishing what Ovid really achieves in Fasti. Traditional elements are, as I hope to show, cunningly exploited to create ‘counter–effects’ and to subject the material to the constantly varying and wide–ranging influences of the poet's literary background. Though the notion of causa is central to Fasti, the poem is much more than an amalgam of such influences as the aetiological prose works of Varro and (possibly) Verrius Flaccus with the aetiological poetics of Propertius 4.5 These sources combined to provide material for the foundation of the finished structure, which was to be the creative manipulation of these antiquarian and literary stimuli directed at providing a vehicle for the regular themes of the Ovidian persona.

The text quoted above each note is that of the edition of Seneca's tragedies by Otto Zwierlein (Zw.), OCT 1986; numerous passages are discussed in his Kritischer Kommentar zu den Tragüdien Senecas (K.K.), Stuttgart, 1986; various textual suggestions were made in a correspondence with Zw. by B. Axelson (Ax.). Other works on Seneca's tragedies, referred to by the scholar's name only, are: (i)Text and translation: F. J. Miller, Loeb, 1917; L. Herrmann, Budé, 1924–6. (ii)Text with commentary: R. J. Tarrant, Agamemnon (Cambridge, 1976), and Thyestes (Atlanta, 1985); J. G. Fitch, Hercules Furens (Ithaca, 1987). (iii) Text with commentary and translation: Elaine Fantham, Troades (Princeton, 1982); A. J.Boyle, Phaedra (Liverpool, 1987).

Voltaire's Pangloss, the man who held among other things that noses were clearly created in order to support spectacles, is the very archetype of the lunatic teleologist; a caricature of sublimely confident faith in the general and undeniable goodness of the world's arrangement, a faith that managed astoundingly to survive the Lisbon earthquake and his own subsequent auto dafé. Voltaire, of course, is poking fun at such conceptions; and, no doubt, in their extreme sanguinity as well as in their apparent imperviousness to devastating empirical counter-evidence, they do seem to be eminently risible notions. In the face of them we might be tempted to abandon ‘métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie’, and to agree with Candide that ‘Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’.

At one point in his treatise against the ‘Gnostics’ Plotinus treats his adversaries as men of flesh and blood, not merely as proponents of false books and false beliefs:

For I feel a certain shame (aidōs tis echei) with regard to some of my friends (philoi), who, having chanced upon this doctrine before the beginning of our friendship, have continued to adhere to it for reasons that I cannot understand. Not that they themselves show any compunction in saying what they say: they may believe what they say to be true (alethe), but perhaps they rather wish others to be persuaded of the truth of their own opinions. (Enneads II.9.10.3ff.)

Many have written of imperial qualities perceived or publicized, particularly of those attached to the emperor Constantine. Although only a tediously exhaustive volume could do justice to the whole subject, and any essay which does not embrace the whole runs the risk of being faulted for some omission or other, one may yet justify a particular concern. The subject of the present paper is the tension between form and function, which appears nowhere so readily as in a series of similar literary exercises spanning a number of years, and the demonstration that form will always yield to practical necessity. For example, the rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Maximian through seven of the Panegyrici Latini clearly illustrates the many functions of a standard form. Constantine's is a more complicated case which involves two kinds of form and a certain amount of Augustan posturing.

J. T. Hooker argues that at Il. 24.649 ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων must mean ‘taunting’ and, since ‘taunting’ makes no sense, that ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων must have entered our Iliad at this point from a version of the Iliad slightly different from ours in which it did make sense. I wish to argue that ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων has a meaning different from ‘taunting’, which makes good sense of this, and every other, context.

City archives, mined by Aristotle for his Didaskaliai, preserved a reasonably complete record of dramatic productions in the fifth century. But how far back did these archives go? The so-called Fasti, an inscription set up c. 346 and listing dithyrambic, comic and tragic victors year by year, must have been based on the same archives, but went back, it is thought, only as far as 502/1. Its heading πρ⋯]τον κ⋯μοι ἦσαν τ[⋯ι διονὑσ]ωι τραγωιδο⋯ δ[, however supplemented, implies an intention of going back to the beginning of things, in other words to the beginning of the archival record. This raises serious doubt as to whether that record went back to the alleged date of Thespis' première, or indeed to those given for Choerilus' and Phrynichus'.