The Joint Association of Classical Teachers' Greek Course Reading Greek has been written for beginners in the upper school, at university and in adult education. Its aim is to enable students to read fifth- and fourth-century Attic Greek, Homer and Herodotus, with some fluency and intelligence in one to two years. It consists of a continuous, graded Greek text, adapted from original sources (contained in Reading Greek [Text, with vocabularies]), coupled with a grammar book (Reading Greek [Grammar and Exercises]) which runs in phase with the text.

Method

The two books are to be used in conjunction.

Stage One (using the Text and running vocabularies) With the help of the teacher and accompanying vocabularies, read and translate the Greek in the Text up to the point in the Grammar book where grammatical explanations for those sections begin. The text has been written to encourage beginners to read with increasing fluency and confidence. The running vocabularies are so written as to enable students to read ahead out of class once the main grammatical principles have been established. It is vital to encourage students to do this.

Aristarkhos had been appointed in succession to Theophemos as a trierarch, whose duty it was to equip and man, at his own expense, a trireme of the Athenian navy. It was Theophemos' duty to hand over the state-provided ship's gear to his successor, but this he refused to do. In his attempts to recover the gear Aristarkhos got into a fight with Theophemos: Theophemos then brought a charge of assault and battery which he won, thanks to false evidence and the suppression of the testimony of a slave woman. Aristarkhos sought an extension of time in which to pay the fine, but at this Theophemos and a bunch of friends descended on Aristarkhos' farm, grabbing all they could lay their hands on and mauling an old servant so badly that she subsequently died.

Aristarkhos is uncertain what action he can take against Theophemos, and consults the Exegetai, state officials who advised on what to do in cases of murder. He is returning home when he meets Apollodoros, and tells him the whole story.

The speech is datable to the time of the Social War in 357.

Note

Aristarkhos' monologue is almost entirely unadapted.

In World of Athens: liturgies 6.62; trierachies 7.43–6; exegetai 3.33; blood-guilt 3.26; revenge 4.8ff.; Social War 1.100.

Introduction

Institutionally, Athenian society was male-dominated; and nearly all Greek literature was written by men. How then can we assess the impact and importance of women in Athenian society, especially when we cannot help but see them through twentieth-century eyes? A straight, short and true answer is ‘With much difficulty’. But the question is an important one for many reasons, particularly because women play such a dominant role in much Greek literature (e.g. Homer, tragedy and, as we have seen, comedy).

One of the best sources we have for the attitudes and prejudices of the ordinary people in Athenian society is the speeches from the law courts, and much information about women's lives emerges almost incidentally from these to balance the silence of some literary sources and the ‘tragic’ stature of the great dramatic heroines.

In the Prosecution of Neaira the prosecutor, Apollodoros, charges the woman Neaira with being an alien (i.e. non-Athenian) and living with an Athenian Stephanos as if she were his wife, so falsely claiming the privileges of Athenian citizenship. Apollodoros describes her early life in Corinth as a slave and prostitute, and how her subsequent career took her all over Greece and brought her into contact with men in the first rank of Athenian society, before she eventually settled down with Stephanos. Apollodoros' condemnation of her behaviour, which he denounces as a threat and affront to the status and security of native Athenian women, indicates by contrast his attitude to citizen women.

General definitions

The laws of thermodynamics are based on observations of macroscopic bodies, and encapsulate their thermal properties. On the other hand, matter is composed of atoms and molecules whose motions are governed by more fundamental laws (classical or quantum mechanics). It should be possible, in principle, to derive the behavior of a macroscopic body from the knowledge of its components. This is the problem addressed by kinetic theory in the following chapter. Actually, describing the full dynamics of the enormous number of particles involved is quite a daunting task. As we shall demonstrate, for discussing equilibrium properties of a macroscopic system, full knowledge of the behavior of its constituent particles is not necessary. All that is required is the likelihood that the particles are in a particular microscopic state. Statistical mechanics is thus an inherently probabilistic description of the system, and familiarity with manipulations of probabilities is an important prerequisite. The purpose of this chapter is to review some important results in the theory of probability, and to introduce the notations that will be used in the following chapters.

General definitions

Kinetic theorystudies the macroscopic properties of large numbers of particles, starting from their (classical) equations of motion.

Thermodynamics describes the equilibrium behavior of macroscopic objects in terms of concepts such as work, heat, and entropy. The phenomenological laws of thermodynamics tell us how these quantities are constrained as a system approaches its equilibrium. At the microscopic level, we know that these systems are composed of particles (atoms, molecules), whose interactions and dynamics are reasonably well understood in terms of more fundamental theories. If these microscopic descriptions are complete, we should be able to account for the macroscopic behavior, that is, derive the laws governing the macroscopic state functions in equilibrium. Kinetic theory attempts to achieve this objective. In particular, we shall try to answer the following questions:

1. How can we define “equilibrium” for a system of moving particles?

2. Do all systems naturally evolve towards an equilibrium state?

3. What is the time evolution of a system that is not quite in equilibrium?

The simplest system to study, the veritable workhorse of thermodynamics, is the dilute (nearly ideal) gas. A typical volume of gas contains of the order of 1023 particles, and in kinetic theory we try to deduce the macroscopic properties of the gas from the time evolution of the set of atomic coordinates.

General definitions

Statistical mechanicsis a probabilistic approach to equilibrium macroscopic properties of large numbers of degrees of freedom.

As discussed in chapter 1, equilibrium properties of macroscopic bodies are phenomenologically described by the laws of thermodynamics. The macrostate M depends on a relatively small number of thermodynamic coordinates. To provide a more fundamental derivation of these properties, we can examine the dynamics of the many degrees of freedom comprising a macroscopic body. Description of each microstate µ requires an enormous amount of information, and the corresponding time evolution, governed by the Hamiltonian equations discussed in chapter 3, is usually quite complicated. Rather than following the evolution of an individual (pure) microstate, statistical mechanics examines an ensemble of microstates corresponding to a given (mixed) macrostate. It aims to provide the probabilities PM(µ) for the equilibrium ensemble. Liouville's theorem justifies the assumption that all accessible microstates are equally likely in an equilibrium ensemble. As explained in chapter 2, such assignment of probabilities is subjective. In this chapter we shall provide unbiased estimates of PM(µ) for a number of different equilibrium ensembles. A central conclusion is that in the thermodynamic limit, with large numbers of degrees of freedom, all these ensembles are in fact equivalent. In contrast to kinetic theory, equilibrium statistical mechanics leaves out the question of how various systems evolve to a state of equilibrium.