I cite throughout the readings of Mr W. S. Watt's edition of 1958, the best and most recent text of these letters.

In the Theaetetus, after identifying Theaetetus' conjecture that knowledge is perception with Protagoras' theory that man is the measure of all things, Socrates associates this view with what he suggests may have been a ‘secret doctrine’ of Protagoras. What we say ‘is’ really is only in process of becoming: nothing is really of any definite sort. What is called white colour simply arises between the eye and the ‘motion’ which it encounters and is something peculiar to each several percipient. At this point (154b) Socrates goes on to say that ‘the thing which measures itself against the object or touches it’, like ‘the thing that we measure ourselves against’, is constantly undergoing change, for otherwise ‘when a different thing came into contact with it or were somehow modified, it, on its side, if it were not affected in itself, would not become different’. He continues, ‘For as things are we are too easily led into making statements which Protagoras and anyone who maintains the same position would call strange and absurd’, and he instances the case of six dice, which are said to be more when compared with four and fewer when compared with twelve, and himself, who is now taller than Theaetetus, but within a year will be shorter, without having lost in height (because Theaetetus is growing).

The sixth century B.C. was a brilliant age in Ionia. Milesian academic research and Samian opportunism set the bounds for intellectual and mechanical progress, the Chians made money and the Phocaeans sailed the seven seas. The surviving fragments of Ionic sculpture and architecture, the massive relics of the biggest-ever temples, and engineering feats like those of Polycrates in the town of Samos still demonstrate the scale on which the Ionic achievement was conceived. But when the archaeologist turns his attention to the fifth century in Ionia he seeks in vain for comparable creations. Sculpture has virtually disappeared, while painting seems to have come to an end with the Clazomenian sarcophagi and the schools of vase decoration that were associated with them. There are no new city layouts rivalling that of Samos; and only one small temple at Miletus stands out as a meagre creation of this century. The minor arts also were virtually at an end; and—whether in excavation or in surface reconnaissance—the archaeologist discovers scarcely any recognizable testimony of Ionic culture, or even of habitation, on the sites of the Ionic cities in this epoch. In material civilization the fifth century seems to have been the Dark Age of Ionia.

ll. 21–3. quis non periurae doluit mendacia puppis,

desertam vacuo Minoida litore questus,

quicquid in antiquum iactata est fabula carmen?

23 in C β et C (supra lin.) et in S.

I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation of l. 23 above. Scaliger's crimen has been unjustly ignored. If combined with the variant et it gives a good sense: ‘and whatever ancient crime is now a hackneyed tale’. For antiquum crimen Gorallus compares Mart. Lib. spect. VII, II, vicerat antiquae sceleratus crimina famae. For quicquid adjectival cf. Hor. Carm. II, 13, 9–10, et quidquid usquam concipitur nefas / tractavit, for iactata fabula cf. Ov. Am. III, 1, 21, fabula, nec sentis, tota iactaris in urbe, for quicquid et introducing a generalizing statement to end a list cf. l. 84.

Altogether in his History Thucydides finds occasion to mention about 530 persons, of whom 496 are men, twenty-two are heroes, seven are gods and six are women. Most of these people are never introduced or described in any way, so that the mere presence of an introductory phrase or description in itself may be thought to have some significance. Especially, Thucydides is notoriously reticent about the private and personal affairs of his public characters; so that any exceptions to that rule ought to be interesting. Especially interesting, as I see it, is anything that he may see fit to tell us, that he evidently judges to be something we need to know about a man before he makes his first appearance, or before he begins the particular course of action that is just about to be described. That is the point of using the phrase ‘when introducing persons’ in the title of this paper.

Increasing acceptance that the Iliad and Odyssey are in essence oral poems, built by one or two monumental composers out of traditional elements of various dates, has altered the perspective of the problem of Homeric composition. We have become more interested in the question of which parts of the poems can be associated with which phases of the tradition; or, if this question cannot be precisely answered, in the broader problem of the general stages of development of an oral heroic tradition in Greece.

Recently there has been great emphasis on the importance of the Mycenaean period for the formation of the dactylic hexameter tradition. This emphasis has been helped by the partial understanding of the Linear B tablets, although they contain, of course, no hint of Mycenaean poetry. On the other hand they do confirm the identification of the Arcado-Cypriot forms in Homer as Mycenaean in derivation, and they add a few new forms to those known from inscriptions in, or grammarians' reports of, the dialect of classical Arcadia and Cyprus.

Galen, in the second century A.D., refers to Antiphon three times in his commentary on Hippocrates. On the first occasion, Gloss. Hippocr. Prooem. V, 706 Bas., XIX, 66, 77 K., he says (after mentioning Aristophanes' Daitaleis): . A conversation follows between a son who has just acquired a city education and his father. The son keeps using new words, which are identified by the father each time as borrowed from Lysistratus, ‘the rhetores’, Alcibiades, and Thrasymachus. On the second occasion, in Hippocr. de offic. XVIII, B., 656 K., Galen cites two fragments from the first book of Antiphon's Truth (). And on the third occasion, in Hippocr. epid. XVII, A., 681 K., he refers to a passage in the second book of the same work, which explains how hail is formed in the atmosphere.

Treaties of course did not come into force by the appendage of signatures to documents, but after each of the contracting parties had sent envoys to administer the oaths of ratification to the authorities of the other state. In the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1957 Andrewes and Lewis in an illuminating article on the Peace of Nicias wrote that in the early part of the fourth century B.C. it was the regular practice for Athenian treaties to specify the authorities who were to swear the oath on either side, and that although the fifth-century evidence is more scanty three clear instances suggested the habit was already established by 425.

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This sentence belongs to a passage in which Thucydides discusses the reactions of the Athenians (108, 1–2) and of their subject allies (108, 3–6) to the fall of Amphipolis. He describes very graphically the incautious enthusiasm with which the allies embarked upon plans for revolt, encouraged by the Athenian failure to save Amphipolis, which closely followed the defeat at Delium, and by the tempting propaganda of Brasidas. The phrase ὅση ὔστερον διεϕάνη in the sentence quoted above is widely interpreted as a reference to the unexpected recovery of the Athenians in the period after the Sicilian disaster and is accordingly accepted as evidence that this sentence at least, and perhaps the whole discussion to which it belongs, cannot have been written before the closing years of the Peloponnesian war.