The biography of Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), the most brilliant scientist of antiquity, contains many unresolved contradictions, which are best explained as follows. After he ‘predicted’ the fall of the meteorite at Aegospotami in 466, he lived nearby at Lampsacus as the protege of its ruler Themistocles. In 460 Pericles became his patron at Athens, where he lived for the next 30 years. In 431, Pericles was taking part in an expedition to the Peloponnese when the sun was eclipsed; he tried to dispel his helmsman’s fear by covering his face with his cloak, illustrating Anaxagoras’ correct account of eclipses. In 430 he led a second such expedition, which failed badly; its return coincided with the plague. The seer Diopeithes brought in a decree that targeted the ‘atheist’ Anaxagoras by banning astronomy. This enabled Thucydides son of Melesias and Cleon to attack Pericles by prosecuting Anaxagoras, on the ground that Pericles’ impiety had angered the gods, thereby causing the plague. Pericles sent Anaxagoras back to Lampsacus, where he soon died; Pericles was himself deposed and fined, in a first triumph for the Athenian populist reaction against the fifthcentury Enlightenment.

The Epicurean Colotes, in a work entitled Περὶ τοῦ ὅτι κατὰ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων φιλοσόφων οὐδὲ ζῆν ἔστιν, cited two fragments of Empedocles in order to prove that the poet denied that existence exists (frr. B 8–9 DK = 12–13 Wright). Both are prominent in controversies about Empedocles’ physics and his usage of the term φύσις, but fr. 9 is very corrupt. To have any hope of restoring it, we will need to examine carefully Plutarch's explication de texte in his Adversus Colotem (10–12, 1111f–1113e). Although there have been two detailed treatments of this passage, neither has resolved the difficulties.

In his magisterial work Persephone, Zuntz drew a basic distinction between two sets of Orphic gold leaves—those known from the elaborate tumuli at Thurii, which he called Group A, and a more widely scattered series, Group B, then represented by two longer texts from Petelia in southern Italy and Pharsalus in Thessaly, and, in a shortened form, by a series of six (now seven) short texts from the environs of Eleutherna in Crete (his Group C). Three further finds have reinforced Zuntz's distinctions: first, a tablet from Hipponium, the colony of Epizephyrian Locri in southern Italy, published by Foti and Pugliese Carratelli, then a lamella said to be from Thessaly but now in Malibu and published by Breslin, and finally a tablet said to be from Entella in Sicily and recently in Geneva, which was published in a bad transcription by Frel and much clarified by Riedweg. The first and third belong to Zuntz's Group B, while the second is close to his Group C. Pugliese Carratelli has published an exceptionally fine set of photographs of all the texts except those from Petelia and Entella. My restudy of the leaf from Petelia has led to some improved readings. Not even a drawing exists of the Entellan leaf, which no scholar except its first editor has ever seen. This fact prompted a reviewer of this article to wonder about its authenticity. In the absence of the object itself, such doubts can only be allayed if its text consistently contributes to improving our understanding of the archetype from which it is derived. One of the aims of this article is to show that it does indeed do so.

Nouns and personal names ending in –εύς –ῆϝος are unique to Greek, and have often been deemed pre-Hellenic in origin simply on account of the lack of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) correspondences. Our failure to find convincing etymologies for βασιλεύς, ἑρμηνεύς, and βραβεύς has itself contributed to this view. However, we should hesitate, for general reasons, to posit pre-Hellenic origins for these words, since viable explanations both of βασιλεύς and of ἑρμηνεύς (if not of βραβεύς) lie near to hand. Although the explanation of βασιλεύς that will be proposed below still presents difficulties, I believe that it improves on previous attempts.

In Python's comic satyr play Agen (perhaps actually written by Alexander of Macedon) Harpalus, Alexander's errant treasurer, is mocked for erecting costly buildings left and right to honour his dead lover, the notorious prostitute Pythionice:

ἔστιν δ’ ὅπου μὲν ὁ κάλαμος πέϕυχ’ ὅδε
†ϕέτωμ’ ἄορνον, οὑξ ἀριστερᾶς δ’ ὅδε
πόρνης ὁ κλεινὸς ναός, ὃν δὴ Παλλίδης
τεύξας κατέγνω διὰ τὸ πρᾶγμ’ αὑτοῦ ϕυγήν.
(TrGF 91 F 1. 1–4)

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse.