(i) Heracles

64 ὃς l, ὡς L οὓνεκ᾿ ὄλβου Canter, οὐκ ἐν ὄλβω L

Megara's father was boasted a great man because of his ὄλβος, possessing as he did a tyranny ‘about which long spears are launched, through desire of it, at the bodies of the fortunate’ (Paley's translation). The sentiment and the language are alike absurd. We can scarcely disagree with the verdict of Wilamowitz: ‘Sinnlose Worte, deren Heilung unmöglich scheint, da sowohl die “Lanzen” wie das “Springen” wie die “Liebe” ungehörig sind, so daß der Sitz der Verderbnis unbestimmt bleibt.’ I shall not transcribe the conjectures: he who is prepared, like Macbeth, to sup full with horrors, may find more than a dozen conjectures in Wecklein's edition.

ALCMAN 58 (D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci) = 38 Bergk; 36 Diehl.

It is not Aphrodite, but wild Eros plays like a boy (or ‘like the boy he is’), coming down over the tips of the galingale flowers: don't touch them!

There are no serious textual variants; Bentley's παῖς looks a certain supplement. The context in which the fragment is quoted (Hephaestion 13. 6, p. 42 Consbr.) is a discussion of the cretic; the lines are cited as a metrical example, without reference to their meaning.

Meineke's comment on the passage was sensus non plane liquet, but it is tempting to go further, because this is the earliest extant reference to Eros at play, an idea that was to be interestingly influential in later poetry.

Recent works on Stoic logic report that among complete λεκτά only a sub-class was regarded as capable of being true or false: by contrast with statements (ἀξιώματα), such other sentences as questions, orders and oaths do not bear a truth-value. But the situation is a good deal more complicated than that, at least in the case of oaths, which I propose to examine.

In characterising all such utterances as ‘sentences’ I do not wish to beg questions which will be discussed below. Surface grammar, with its distinctions of indicative, imperative, interrogative and optative, can mislead us as to the real force of an utterance. In the case of oaths there seems to be no preferred form of expression; and it is a matter for deeper philosophical probing to determine their true relation to other speech-acts.

Three main views have been put forward as attempts to answer the question what were the political affiliations of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. According to one view Callicles is seen as the very archetype of the tyrant and the oligarch, a man prepared to indulge in himself an unbridled lust for power, the absolute antithesis of the democrat and all that democracy stands for, giving expression to a doctrine, in the words of Grote, ‘not simply anti-popular – not simply despotic – but the drunken extravagance of despotism’. This view was associated with repeated attempts to identify Callicles with one or other of the known oligarchs in the fifth century – Critias being the favourite. Such attempts are now generally abandoned. But the overall view of Callicles' doctrine probably remains the orthodox one, at least in the English-speaking world, and the comparison with Nietzsche and Carlyle has become commonplace.

According to a second view, however, the opposite is the case – Callicles was not aristocratic, oligarchic or tyrannical in his views, rather he was a democrat, indeed even ‘the typical Athenian democrat’. Finally it is possible to distinguish a third view, according to which initially Callicles is presented as a champion of absolutism but is shown as undergoing ‘a strange transformation’ in the course of the dialogue to a position more in accord with ‘the growing love of equality’.

I. I. 37–40 adsitis, diui, neu uos e paupere mensa
dona nec e puris spernite fictilibus.
fictilia antiquus primum sibi fecit agrestis
pocula, de facili composuitque luto.

The comma after pocula in line 40 is the accepted punctuation. But fictilibus in line 38 is a noun and the same word immediately repeated in a different case must naturally be taken by any reader as a noun too. Therefore comma after agrestis; the pentameter is then a line like 1. 3. 38 effusum uentis praebueratque sinum (for such displacement of -que see Platnauer, Latin elegiac verse, p. 91). The movement of thought is from generic fictilia to specific pocula. For this compare 2. 1. 59–60

rure puer uerno primum de flore coronam
fecit et antiquis imposuit Laribus.

It has long been canonical to deny the Phoenicians a place in the ranks of the true colonisers of the Western Mediterranean. ‘The expansion of the Phoenicians’, says Moscati, ‘and later of the Carthaginians was predominantly commercial with no intent of conquest, requiring no stable settlements or mass emigration of the population.’ And although Moscati goes on to qualify this statement by admitting that, of course, some stable settlements did ensue, they were, he says, ‘in no way dependent on the phenomenon of expansion’. Thus by this thesis the Phoenicians may set up ‘comptoirs’, ‘relais’, ‘escales maritimes’, ‘établissements’, ‘Erkundungsfahrten’, ‘Factorei’, ‘teste di ponti’ and ‘emporia’, but never anything which might qualify as a colony in Maunier's terms, as emigration plus government.