Plutarch of Chaeroneia stands almost alone among Greeks of the Roman Empire in displaying in his works an extensive knowledge of, and interest in, Rome and Romans. The knowledge of Roman history and the many notes on Roman institutions and usages seen in the Lives together with the work specifically devoted to Roman customs, the quaest. Rom., and the celebration of Rome's good fortune, the de fort. Rom., testify to his great sympathy with the Roman way of life. For us Plutarch is a unique bridge between Greece and Rome. But what sort of bridge does he himself envisage between Rome and his own world? In particular, how far does Plutarch believe that Romans share his own Hellenic culture? In answering this question I shall argue that in his presentation of Romans Plutarch often shows himself to be conscious that Hellenic culture had been imported to Rome and could never be fully taken for granted among Romans as it could among Greeks, and that as a consequence it is worthwhile for him as a student of character to consider how well and with what benefit Romans absorb it.

This article examines the ethical and theological universe of the Homeric epics, and shows that the patterns of human and divine justice which they deploy are also to be found throughout the wider corpus of early Greek hexameter poetry. Although most scholars continue to stress the differences between the Iliad and Odyssey with regard to divine justice, these come not (as is often alleged) from any change in the gods themselves but from the Odyssey's peculiar narrative structure, with its focus on one hero and his main divine patron and foe. Indeed, the action of the Iliad embodies a system of norms and punishments that is no different from that of the Odyssey. Values such as justice are shown to be socially constituted in each epic on both the divine and human planes, and each level, it is argued, displays not only a hierarchy of power (and the resulting tensions), but also a structure of authority. In addition, the presentation of the gods in the wider hexameter corpus of Hesiod, the Epic Cycle and the Homeric Hymns is analysed, revealing a remarkably coherent tradition in which the possibility of divine conflict is combined with an underlying cosmic order. Finally, consideration of Near Eastern myths relating cosmic order to justice brings out the distinctiveness of the Greek system as a whole and, in particular, of the way it uses the divine society under Zeus's authority as a comprehensive explanatory model of the world.

Avroman is a town in Persian Kurdistan lying close to the Turkish frontier between the sources of the Lesser Zab and the course of the Diala River some distance to the north of the highway from Bagdad (say Ctesiphon) to Hamadán (Ecbatana). Near it in a cave in the mountain called Kuh-i-Sálán, a peasant found about the year 1909 a stone jar hermetically sealed; in it were decayed millet seeds and several documents. These passed from hand to hand and some were lost, only three have survived; two, which being Greek most nearly concern us, are almost perfect, they have only suffered a certain amount from wear and from the gnawing of mice; the third written in an Aramaic script which has not yet been deciphered is said to have been much larger when found; what is left has been a good deal torn and is patched with modern leather.

The date and circumstances of the first Greek settlements on the Black Sea are matters of considerable disagreement. This is the result both of the scattered nature of the literary evidence on the subject, and of the dearth of archaeological evidence for Pontic settlements other than those on the western and northern shores. A century ago it was commonly thought that although the great majority of colonies were sent out in the seventh and sixth centuries, Trapezus and Sinope, as our sources say or imply, were founded in the middle of the eighth. For a variety of reasons, among them an increased reliance on archaeologically secured dates, this view went out of favour, and opinion inclined toward the view that the Greeks did not enter the Black Sea at all until after 700. This view was both expressed in and supported by Rhys Carpenter's thesis that not until the penteconter was invented (an invention which he dated to the early seventh century) could the Greeks make head against the four-knot current which flows through the Bosporus from the Black Sea. Articles by B. W. Labaree and A. J. Graham, however, have undermined Carpenter's argument, and it is now once again not unusual to find references to Greek activity in the Black Sea before 700.

A major contention of our book Hellenism in the East was that the most profitable way for making progress in understanding the Achaemenid and Seleucid empires was to try to evaluate, sensitively, the very disparate types of evidence within their own social and cultural contexts, however difficult this might be in practice. In the case of the Antiochus I cylinder we are confronted by an inscribed object whose significance lies as much in its physical form as in the content of the text it bears. These aspects are inextricably intertwined as part of a tradition specific to Mesopotamian culture—object and text combined are the physical representation of a major, longstanding, sociopolitical institution for which a mass of earlier evidence exists. It is all too understandable that Greco-Roman scholars, who have been the primary students of the hellenistic world, should find it hard to know how to approach such material emanating from an unfamiliar cultural milieu. Yet, for once, this text is not fragmentary—it is a long, well-preserved document, easy to read and readily accessible in translation which in itself demonstrates an acknowledgment by hellenistic historians of the potential importance of this non-Greek text for understanding Seleucid history.

The ransacking of Tragedy for indications of the political views of tragic poets is seldom profitable and may be disastrous. But Eumenides, like much that Aeschylus wrote, is unusual, and one of its unusual aspects is the clarity and persistence with which the hearer's attention is engaged in the political present as well as in the heroic past; one might almost say, directed away from the past and towards the present. The nature of this re-direction, and its implications, if any, for Aeschylus's own standpoint, are no new problem. My reason for discussing it once more is that not enough attention has been paid to the immediate dramatic context of the passages by which this re-direction is effected or to the relation between these passages and the language of Greek politics in general.

I. The Central Stasimon 490–565

.

Editors of Aeschylus have assumed that these words cannot mean what they appear to mean: ‘Now new ordinances are overthrown, if the cause pleaded, and the injury done, by this matricide are going to prevail.’ The old laws, not the new, it is said, are in danger of overthrow, and it can only be the old laws which the Chorus defend and lament. Attempts to escape the prima facie meaning have taken the following forms:

(a) Emendation to give the sense ‘overthrow of old ordinances’ (ἕνων κ. θ., Cornford), ‘overthrow of ordained laws’ (κ. νόμων θ., Ahrens), ‘overthrow of my ordinances’ (ἐμῶν κ. θ., Weil), or ‘change to new ordinances’ (μεταστροφαὶ ν. θ., Meineke).

In the first part of this report I dealt with the broad results of the excavations on the Greek harbour site; this, the second part, is intended to give the detail upon which those results were based. Again, it is archaeological only in the narrowest sense of the word; the pottery which forms the bulk of our historical material will be described hereafter by others, and is mentioned here only so far as it may throw light upon the use and character of the rooms; most of the other objects found figure only in the catalogue, and the description is of the buildings alone. Even so it is partial. To have given a detailed account of all the hundreds of rooms excavated and noted would have been at once wearisome and otiose. Much of the material recorded in the field notes was intended merely to establish relative dates and levels and is utilised in the plans so that its repetition in the text would have been useless. I have accordingly selected what appeared to me to be of interest as illustrating the condition in which the remains were found or witnessing to their original character, as summarised in the first part of the report, and have suppressed whatever was redundant. To the description of the buildings of each period is added a catalogue of the principal miscellaneous objects found in that level; but, at the risk of inconsistency, I have put together in a separate list certain classes of objects, seals, amulets, etc., which seemed to gain interest by such grouping; and the weights, which require special treatment, have been omitted altogether.

The author surveys the evidence for the three antiquarian epics commonly ascribed to Eumelos: the Titanomachy, Korinthiaka and Europia. He elucidates and restores details, and endeavours to grasp their poets' objectives. He argues that they were products of the Corinthian-Sikyonian sphere, and to a degree mutually complementary; that they were composed between the late seventh and the late sixth century, considerably after the supposed lifetime of Eumelos; and that they were perhaps attributed to him for lack of other claimants, he being famous as the Corinthian poet of the Messenians' treasured Prosodion.

It is now twenty years since A. R. W. Harrison remarked in this Journal ‘For students of Athenian private and public law it is a painful, but undeniable fact that there is still grave uncertainty as to the precise methods by which statutes, one of the most important sources of law, were made at the most formative period of the history of the system from the middle of the fifth century B.C. onwards.’ His own article is entitled ‘Law-making at Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C.’ and is concerned primarily with establishing that an important change was made in or soon after the year 403/2. That was the date at which a new procedure for making laws (nomoi) was introduced, which Harrison calls ‘the fourth-century procedure of nomothesia’, involving officials called νομοθέται. Before then there was no procedural difference between making a nomos and making a psephisma. References to nomothetai in texts before 403 are irrelevant. In 403 the decree of Teisamenos laid down a procedure for review and amendment of laws, involving two distinct bodies of nomothetai; but that was a procedure for one particular occasion. The regular procedure was instituted shortly afterwards, and was to some extent modelled on the procedure of the Teisamenos decree.

For all its notoriety, Classical archaeologists find the Parthenon frieze a difficult object with which to come to terms: its position on the building is seen as perverse, its subject-matter impenetrable, and its ‘style’ anomalous. This paper sets out to show that these difficulties are inter-related.

It will not be disputed that the relationship between the sexes was a subject of great interest to Aeschylus. His first extant play turns on the question of marriage, willing or unwilling; and this is true, whether the Danaids were actuated by a passionate celibacy or by a horror of what they considered incest. The loss of the succeeding plays renders the interpretation of the Danaid trilogy speculative. But in the Oresteia, Aeschylus returns to similar themes: marriage, wife and husband, the relative status of men and women. This last issue becomes explicit during the trial of Orestes, when Apollo proclaims the superiority of the male, and Athena endorses his judgement with her vote. This scene, if variously interpreted, has been recognised to be important. Equally it has been recognised that Clytemnestra, for whose murder Orestes was on trial, is herself depicted as an anomaly: a woman with the mind and counsel of a man. The connexion between these two aspects of the trilogy deserves perhaps a further examination.

It is first necessary to consider the characterisation of Clytemnestra. Quite apart from the issues raised in the Eumenides, it is doubtful whether the accepted ‘masculinity’ of Clytemnestra has received attention commensurate with the stress which the poet has laid upon it, nor has it been fully considered in relation to the motives of her conduct. Some, indeed, will deprecate the psychological approach to an Aeschylean character. But there are no a priori grounds on which we can decide up to what point the poet's interest in character developed, as develop it admittedly did. Clytemnestra is the test-case, and we must judge by what we find.

In their invocations of the Muses the early epic poets use indifferently verbs meaning ‘tell’, ‘speak of’ (ἔννεπε, ἔσπετε, εἰπέ, εἴπατε) and the verb which we normally translate as ‘sing’ (ἄειδε, ἀείδεο, ἀείσατε) When they refer directly to their own performance they may use the non-committal μνήσομαι, or ἐρέω, ἐνισπεῖν but more often it is άείδω, ἄρχομ ἀείδειν or something of the sort; and they will pray for good ἀοιδή or hope for reward from it. We cannot make a distinction between two styles of performance, one characterized as ἀείδειν the other as ἐνέπειν the Iliad begins μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά but later has ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι; Hesiod moves straight from χαίρετε τέκνα Διός , δότε δ᾿ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν to εἴπατε δ᾿ ὡς . . . ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι . . . καὶ εἴπατε (Th. 104–15); the author of the Hymn to Pan begins ἔννεπε Μοῦσα and ends ἴλαμαι δέ σ᾿ ἀοιδῇ . . . καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ᾿ ἀοιδῆς.

For all its celebrity, Thucydides' Funeral Speech remains an enigma. ‘Unquantifiably authentic’ is how one scholar describes it, and the description betrays a measure of despair. We feel that the speech is authentic in some sense of the word. To some degree it corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery. All agree that Thucydides framed the speech in his own words and integrated it with his historical narrative, so as to recall and answer Archidamus' encomium of Sparta in Book I. It also anticipates the forthcoming description of the plague with mordant, subtle allusions.

The illustration which heads this paper shows a gold ornament in the form of a bee purchased in 1875 by the British Museum. It is a neat specimen of early granulated work; but, beyond the fact that it came from Crete, nothing is known as to the circumstances of its discovery. Similar finds have, however, been made elsewhere. Furtwängler in the Arch. Zeit. vol, 41, col. 274, notices among the acquisitions of the Berlin Museum for the year 1882 ‘sundry small plates of gold from the Crimea representing a head of Dionysus, Bees, and a Gorgoneiou.’ Our own national collection possesses fourteen bodies of bees in gold of late Etruscan workmanship, and also a bee stamped in gold leaf of the same date. With these may be compared the three hundred golden bees found along with an ox-head of gold in the tomb of Childeric, king of the Franks. Doubtless other examples could be cited; and it seems worth while to attempt some investigation of their significance.

Aristophanes' encomium on Eros (Smp. 189c 2–193d 5) is a story with a moral. Once upon a time, all human beings were double creatures, each with two heads, two bodies and eight limbs. Then, by the command of Zeus, each double creature was cut in half, and so humans as we know them came into being. Every one of us ‘seeks his other half’, and this search is Eros. If we are pious, we may hope to be rewarded by success in the search; if we are impious, Zeus may cut us in two again, and each of us will be like a flat-fish or a figure in relief.

The story is amusingly told, and the comedies of the real Aristophanes are also amusing; but when Sykutris says that the story ‘reminds us of the plot of a comedy’ and when Robin constructs a hypothetical comedy out of it, they are confounding essence and accident. The affinities of Aristophanes' story do not lie with his own comedies or with those of his contemporaries, but elsewhere.

The extant plays of Aristophanes are firmly rooted in the present, and each of them explores the possibilities of a fantasy constructed out of the present. Mythology was exploited by the comic poets—rarely by Aristophanes himself, more extensively by some others—in order to present humorously distorted versions of the myths which were the traditional material of serious poetry. Some comic titles point to theogonic myths (e.g. Polyzelos, Birth of the Muses and Birth of Dionysos) or to myths about the era before the rule of Zeus (e.g. Phrynichos, Kronos, and the younger Kratinos, Giants and Titans).

From Draco onwards, if not before, the laws of Athens were preserved in writing, and some of them were also displayed to public view: notably the laws of Solon, written up on objects called axones and kyrbeis. No other publication of Athenian laws had such renown as this, or these, of Solon's. In fact it is hard to find any publication at all on the same scale, or any publication but of single documents in scattered places. In the later fifth and the fourth centuries, the period best known to us, each new document is published, if at all, on a separate stele. Moreover, there is no thought of aligning this stele with any existing publication, either of similar laws or of laws in general; instead the stele is set up at whatever spot seems indicated by the business at hand; if the business is urgent, more than one stele is set up at more than one spot. Such episodic publication is the rule for laws as well as other public documents. Or to put it differently, for a long while the Athenians did not distinguish laws from other binding decisions, mainly decrees of the Assembly; if they did not so distinguish when publishing on stone, they did not either in their filing system of papyrus and whitened boards. By the early fourth century a distinction was made, and afterwards insisted on, between ‘laws’ and ‘decrees’; but even then professed laws were published as before, on separate stelae in various places. From these facts we might be tempted to conclude that any general or comprehensive publication of laws, as of Solon's, was so to speak an accident, occurring only when many so-called laws needed to be published all at once, as will happen at an early stage of society.

How well known was Thucydides' history in the fourth century BC and the hellenistic period? Gomme, with an eye on Polybius, once wrote of the ‘nearly complete silence about Thucydides in what remains to us of ancient writers before the age of Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’. This is startling at first and has to my knowledge led to the misconception that Thucydides virtually disappeared after his own time. Gomme was however referring merely to specific mentions or discussions of Thucydides by name: he went on to speak of the ‘silent compliment paid him by Kratippos, Xenophon, Theopompos, and Philistos’. Even this is far from a complete list, and Gomme's possibly misleading paragraph can serve as my starting-point.

A short section of Aristotle's de generatione animalium embodies his final answer to the question how the faculties of soul are transmitted from parent to offspring. Aristotle here speaks in a tone which is dogmatic as well as enthusiastic; he is able to announce a new discovery. There is, he sets forth, in the sperma a peculiar substance (σῶμα) which has some connection with soul and differs in quality as the souls themselves differ in worth. This substance is identical with two of the entities mentioned in our title and ‘analogous’ to the third.

Πάσης μὲν οὖν ψυχῆς δύναμις ἑτέρου σώματος ἔοικε κεκοινωνηκέναι καὶ θειοτέρου τῶν καλουμένων στοιχείων ὡς δὲ διαφέρουσι τιμιότητι αἱ ψυχαὶ καὶ ἀλλήλων, οὕτω καὶ ἡ τοιαύτη διαφέρει φύσις. πάντων μὲν γὰρ ἐν τῷ σπέρματι ὑπάρχει ὅπερ ποιεῖ γόνιμα εἶναι τὰ σπέρματα, τό καλούμενον θερμόν. τοῦτο δ᾿ οὐ πῦρ πὐδὲ τοιαύτη δύναμίς ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ τὸ ἐμπεριλαμβανόμενον ἐν τῷ σπέρματι καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀφρώδει πνεῦμα καὶ ἡ ἐν τῷ πνεύματι φύσις, ἀνάλογον οὖσα τῶν ἄστρων στοιείῳ.

The sentences which follow state that fire has no generative or procreative power, yet such a power must be present in the Sun and in the θερμόν, the vital heat of living beings. Clearly, then, this θερμόν cannot be identical with the fire.

Nowhere else in the body of his preserved work does Aristotle establish this close connection between the vital heat, the pneuma, and the element of the stars, the so-called aether. These three concepts differ as much in their origin and past history as in their function and place within Aristotle's own physical or biological system. A brief sketch of them—skipping by necessity many significant episodes in the history of each—will suffice to make this clear.

What needs here to be said about the ‘element of the stars’ is indeed not much. It was Aristotle himself who added this element to the canonic four of the Empedoclean and Platonic tradition. The dialogue On Philosophy and the First Book On the Heaven secured it its place. It is divine, un-ageing, and unchanging, and yet a material element. Like the other elements it has its specific ‘natural motion’, to wit the circular, which makes it possible for Aristotle to explain by a physical ‘hypothesis’ the celestial motions for which Plato had resorted to the World-Soul. The place of this element is the entire heavenly region, extending from the First Heaven to the moon; below this, in the regions occupied by the four other elements, it is never to be found.

The importance of the Harpalus affair in Athenian history has always been recognised, and many scholars have laboured to clarify its obscure details and to evaluate its consequences. What has, on the whole, not been attempted has been to see it against the background of Alexander's Court—yet that alone can enable us to make historical sense of it. The reason for this apparent neglect is to be found in the nature of our sources: as is well known, Alexander, within a generation of his death, became a legendary figure—a superman or demon, a subject for nostalgic worship or philosophic animadversion. The injection of corrective doses of Court historiography, though in itself an improvement, yet did a great deal of harm with its illusion of restraint and objectivity, which captured a large part of subsequent scholarship from Arrian to Tarn. As a result, between legend and apologia, both (for us) fragmentary and adulterated, and in the absence of really important documentary evidence, we cannot at all easily write an account of Alexander's reign that will satisfy the reader accustomed to genuine political history and unimpressed by eulogy and denunciation. Yet there is more to be done than might at first sight appear: detailed study of individual incidents, approached through the relations and movements of men and (as far as this can be recovered) the chronological sequence of events, will often establish a pattern into which scattered items in the sources can then be fitted. Naturally, not all these results will be equally secure; but probability is often cumulative, and a pattern, once established, will give value to pieces that fit into it and that might otherwise have been ignored or rejected. This concrete approach, which has made other periods of history intelligible to us, may then provide some criteria that will enable the traditional argument about the sources and their relations to aid rather than retard the progress of scholarship. Above all, it may tear away the veil of unreality that still envelops the history of Alexander's reign, so that the modern student can see it in terms of human history, as he can, for instance, see the reigns of Augustus or of Napoleon.