Aeschylus' account of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia in the Agamemnon has elicited an extraordinarily wide range of interpretations–a critical response which, in its veryproductivity, may signal a central aspect of the description itself. While more recent explications have been profitably informed by research in cult and ritual, there remains, I would like to suggest, an important literary possibility which merits consideration, particularly in a text where so much has been shaped from a close and profound engagement with the Homeric tradition. The description of the sacrifice (Ag. 228–47) is forcefully carried by enjambement from one stanza into another by the sheer weight, as it were, of the force that crushingly silences, βίαι χαλινὦν τ᾿ άναύδωι μ⋯νει (238). In the midst of much that is dark and difficult to construe, the composition yields a sudden effusion of colour, a striking trail of saffron. The sense of concealment, of a figure enveloped or enshrouded, which has been suggested by the phrase πέπλοισι περιπετή (233), opens on to an image of unfolding, the falling spread of a robe caught in itsflow towards the ground, κρόκου βαφάς δ ⋯ς πέδονχέουσα (239).

It is the purpose of this paper to argue for a new interpretation of the Delphic response to Cleisthenes of Sicyon at Herodotus 5.67: the oracle's reference is to pharmakeia, the Greek ‘scapegoat’ ritual.

In the first book of his History Thucydides shows ‘the Spartans and the Allies’, to give the Peloponnesian League its formal title, making the decision that Athens had broken the Thirty Years Peace. After receiving the complaints of various allies, the Spartans discussed in the assembly the conduct of Athens and what should be done about it (ch. 67ff.) and ended by voting that the treaty had been broken and that the Athenians were in the wrong (ch. 87). This decision they communicated to the allies who had come complaining, and declared that they wished to summon all the allies and submit it to the vote, ‘in order that after general consultation (κοινμ βονλενομενοι) they might make war, should it so seem good“ (87.3 & 4). Then, after the Excursus on the Pentekontaetia, Thucydides records the congress of the League in which the Spartans put to the vote whether it was necessary to go to war and the majority voted for war (119–125). Thus Sparta proposed and the allies disposed.

In the light of the remarkable changes of political colour which Aeschylus has undergone in the hands of scholars, there is a certain amusing irony about the fact that the satyr-play which followed the Oresteia was the Proteus. Sadly, we know too little of the Proteus to say whether it would have resolved this debate about the Oresteid's political stance, though one may have one's doubts.

Students of the relations between Greeks and Persians in classical antiquity usually depend entirely on Greek authors, as there are no extensive narrative texts among the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, our extant Oriental sources for the history of the Persian empire. Hence modern scholars have raised the question of the reliability of the Greek sources and emphasized the need to reveal the ideology and presuppositions of the Greek writers. For, if language embodies social reality, the assimilation of information is conditioned by the character of the mind, individual or collective, which comprehends the data within its own terms of reference, fits them into its own set of concepts and records them in that form. Thus, it has been argued that ‘the impression we get of the Persians in the Greek authors is in some ways a deceptive one. Too much emphasis is laid on what is pejorative’, that the labelling of Persia ‘as an Oriental Monarchy: a state and society ruled less by rational actions than by the writing and caprices of its king and court… is to be traced back directly to the Greek sources on Persian history’; and that the ‘discourse of barbarism’ which projected upon the Persians ‘the opposite of qualities admired’ in the Athenian society, ‘is ultimately to be referred to the ideology binding together democratic Athens and her empire’.

Madness and emotion could be said to share, to a certain extent, their definition as kinds of human response to influences from their environment. The connection between madness and emotion is stressed in modern psychological observations establishing strong links between the causation of madness and human emotionality. Despite the fact that similar insights were absent from Greek medical theorists, or indeed from other contemporary writers, this would come as no surprise to either Sophokles or Euripides. Both tragedians handled their material in such a way as to demonstrate how the strong pressures of familial or social influences can lead to mental disturbance. While it is most probably Sophokles who, for the first time, turns to the influence of internal forces in the process of madness, the lack of subject matter in his surviving plays allows us little scope for further comparison. On the other hand, Euripides seems to have dedicated more of his portrayals to madness. These portrayals offer an almost unique opportunity to examine the introduction, not only in drama but perhaps in the whole of Greek literature, of the emotions as contributing factors in madness.

There is no doubt that a person's gender could make a difference to their role in Greek sacrifices. But did it normally make a difference in Greece? And why did it make a difference? Two inscriptions from the island of Thasos neatly illustrate the problem. First, one dated to around 440 and found in the sanctuary of Herakles:

[Ἡρα]κλεῖ Θασῖωι

[αἶγ]α οὐ θμισ, οὐ–

[δ] χοῖρον οὐδ γ–

[υ]ναικ; θμισ οὐ–

[δ]' νατεεται οὐ–

δ γρα τμνετα–

ι οὐσ' θλται1

W. R. Connor has argued that Theopompus' critical attacks on almost all the leading figures in Greek history suggest he was writing a ‘history without heroes’. This article will argue that a similar principle applies to Theopompus' attitude towards Herodotus and other earlier historians: all fell short of his ideal, and, in the final analysis, Theopompus had but one literary hero: himself. Theopompus' mysterious Epitome of Herodotus, I will suggest, is best taken not as an independent work, but as a portion of the Philippika in which Theopompus incorporated and adapted a significant body of Herodotean material. This fact, taken together with Theopompus' polemical statements about his predecessors, suggests that Theopompus boldly challenged Herodotus on his own turf, confident he could improve upon him.

A reiteration of the main details of the case may be helpful. Euphiletus killed Eratosthenes and was prosecuted for premeditated homicide by Eratosthenes' relatives. The present speech, our sole source of information concerning the case, was written for the defendant, partially or totally, by a professional speechwriter, presumably Lysias. In this speech Euphiletus admits killing Eratosthenes. He pleads, however, that, since he killed Eratosthenes after catching him in the act of adultery with his own wife, this was a case of justified homicide. At the same time, he denies a charge of the prosecution that he had killed Eratosthenes for reasons unrelated to the adultery. The speech was delivered before a court of fifty-one judges especially set up to judge such cases, as is attested elsewhere:

T1

Arist. Ath. Pol. 57.3: ‘If…a person admits that he has killed someone but claims that he had a right to do so, as, for instance, when he has surprised an adulterer in the act,… then the trial takes place in the Delphinion’ (cf. Dem. 23.74).

Anyone who picks up a collection of fragments of comic poetry is likely to be struck by the large number of references to eating fish. There are shopping-lists for fish, menus for fish and recipes for fish-dishes, with the ingredients and method of preparation graphically described. Aristophanes and others dwell in several places on the charms of eel wrapped in beet-leaves. Other writers describe preparations for a great fish-soup, or the dancing movements of fish as they are fried. Undoubtedly Athenaeus is responsible for this preponderance among the fragments of Comedy of passages concerned primarily with food, especially fish, but some of the fragments are rather long in themselves and indicate, at the very least, that cooks were important characters in many plays, and that dinner-parties must have figured significantly in many plots. Outside Comedy, references to fish-consumption are somewhat fewer in number, but perhaps even more surprising when they do occur. It seems strange that Demosthenes, in discussing Philocrates' betrayal of his city, should think it at all relevant to state that he spent his ill-gotten gains on fish, or that Aeschines, attacking Timarchus on a capital charge, should dwell on his fondness for fish. Moreover, references to fish occur also in philosophy and the Hippocratic corpus. In fact, the frequency with which ancient authors seem to have written about fish reveals almost a preoccupation. The consumption offish clearly held a significance for the Athenians which needs to be uncovered and explained.

New evidence often complicates as much as it clarifies. That truth is well illustrated by Stephen Tracy's recent and brilliant discovery that a tiny unpublished fragment of an Attic inscription belongs to a known decree (IG ii. 402). The decree has hitherto been recognised as an enactment of the oligarchy imposed by Antipater in 322. Its proposer, Archedicus of Lamptrae, was a leading member of the new regime and held the most influential office of state, that of anagrapheus, in 320/19.2 Appropriately enough the decree confers honours upon members of the Macedonian court, but as the stone now reveals, it is phrased in a remarkable and anomalous manner: ‘in order that as many as possible of the friends of the king and of Antipater may be honoured by the Athenian people and confer benefactions upon the city’. There is no question about the meaning. The decree refers to friends of an unknown king, who are also friends of Antipater. But after Alexander's death there was a dual kingship. Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV reigned jointly and are generally termed ‘the kings’. How can the singular singular be explained?

Whilst Theophrastus (Char. 17.8) implies that the logographos had a great deal of control over the oral version of a forensic speech and what went into it,2 the part played by the logographos and the client in the content and circulation of the oration after oral delivery is controversial, and has attracted a fair share of attention.3 Sir Kenneth Dover argued that joint or composite authorship of the speech (i.e. client and logographos together) could take place, and that it was the client who could publish the speech after the trial and was free to include his own remarks.4 Thus, as Dover would have it, in the case of Lysias (and of other orators too if joint composition occurred), no unique style of that orator could be discerned in his speeches as we have them today. This composite authorship was first questioned by T. N. Winter,5 and denied even more vigorously by S. Usher,6 who argued that responsibility for a speech's later circulation lay only with the logographos, who also revised the speech as he saw fit.7 Their arguments, which nicely complement each other, are convincing enough on the evidence we have (although a case will be made below that in certain circumstances some, but probably not many, speeches appear to be the work of joint authorship). However, two other factors may be brought in as further support: the stylistic nature of the revised speech and the extent of literacy. The argument of this paper is that the composition of the final circulated speech was beyond the ability of the ordinary client and could only have been produced by the logographos.

In Aeschines' dialogue Alcibiades, Socrates sees his brilliant young partner's haughty attitude towards the great Themistocles. Thereupon he gives an encomium of Themistocles, a man whose wisdom and arete, great as they were, could not save him from ostracism by his own people. This encomium has an extraordinary effect on Alcibiades: he cries and in his despair places his head upon Socrates' knee, realizing that he is nowhere near as good a man as Themistocles (Aesch., Ale. fr. 9 Dittm. = Ael. Aristid. 286.2). Aeschines later has Socrates say that he would have been foolish to think he could have helped Alcibiades by virtue of any art or knowledge, but nonetheless by some divine dispensation he has, in virtue of the eros he felt for the youth, been allowed to make him better (fr. lla, c Dittm. = Ael. Aristid., Rhet. 17).

When entering into a legal agreement, it is not unusual for one of the parties to ask the other to provide some security so as to ensure that the latter's obligations under the agreement will be fulfilled. There are two basic forms of security, personal and real. In personal security for a loan, the borrower arranges for a third party to come forward and to promise the lender that he will fulfil the borrower's obligations in the event that the borrower does not make interest payments or repay the principal. In real security, the borrower pledges some of his property, either movable or immovable, as security to the creditor. If the borrower defaults, the creditor has the right to seize the property pledged as security, and, if he wishes, to sell it for cash in lieu of repayment.

Herodas' Mimiamb VII is now generally admitted to be a sequel to VI insofar as Metro is a main character of both and Kerdon, the ‘Shoemaker’ who gives to VII its title, is a main topic of VI. Controversy remains as to whether the leather ‘baubons’ (dildoes) which Kerdon makes with consummate skill (VI 68–73) and purveys in secret (VI 63) is also an underlying topic of VII

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so.

Plato targets the encomiastic genre in three separate dialogues: the Lysis, the Menexenus and the Symposium. Many studies have been devoted to Plato's handling of the funeral oration in the Menexenus. Plato's critique of the encomium in the Lysis and Symposium, however, has not been accorded the same kind of treatment. Yet both of these dialogues go beyond the Menexenus in exploring the opposition between encomiastic and philosophic discourse. In the Lysis, I will argue, Plato sets up encomiastic rhetoric as a foil for Socrates' dialectical method; philosophic discourse is both defined and legitimated by way of its opposition to eulogy. In the Symposium, Plato offers a much more complex critique. First, he illustrates and comments on the vices that inhere in the encomiastic genre. Second, he juxtaposes Socrates' ironic ‘praises’ of his interlocutors with traditional encomiastic discourse, thus inviting the reader to explore the relation between Socratic irony and the rhetoric of eulogy (and censure). And, third, the Symposium exhibits two untraditional ‘encomia’ – Socrates' eulogy for Eros and Alcibiades' for Socrates – that illustrate and interrogate the false ontology underlying the rhetoric of praise.

Aeneas' stopover at Actium has struck most readers as an Augustan interlude in the odyssey of Aeneid 3. The scene is conspicuous among the other episodes in the trip for its brevity and for the fact that it does not advance the action toward the Trojan exiles' Italian goal. Instead the accent falls on prefiguring actions of Aeneas' distinguished descendant, Octavian, after he achieved victory over Antony at the same site in 31 B.C. Where the future Augustus dedicated spoils from the battle to Actian Apollo and instituted a festival called the Actian Games, the Trojans celebrate athletic games at Actium and their leader affixes an enemy trophy to the temple of Apollo there. This last act, however, Aeneas' dedicatio, points allusively to the mythical past as well as to the Augustan future. To appreciate the full force of that complex reference, which enriches the thematics of the entire scene, hinges on our recognition of a mythological figure whose identity has been long in doubt. The narrator Aeneas reports that he hung up on Apollo's shrine ‘the bronze shield worn by great Abas’ (3.286 ‘aere cavo clipeum, magni gestamen Abantis’). Who is this Abas, and why is his mention here significant?

Old scholarly myths die hard. It was K. F. Hermann, the discoverer of the ‘Socratic period’ in Plato's development, who first proposed (in 1839) that Book 1 of the Republic must originally have been an earlier, independent dialogue on justice, parallel to the Laches on courage, the Euthyphro on piety, and the Charmides on temperance. Hermann also introduced the separatist enterprise of analysing the rest of the Republic into three or four distinct compositional stages. Analytical proposals of this sort were then formulated by a number of other scholars, including Krohn, Usener, and Rohde. The notion of an earlier, partial publication seemed to be supported by two bits of external evidence: a statement in Aulus Gellius that ‘about two books’ (duo fere libri) of Plato's Republic were the first to appear; and a number of striking parallels on the community of women between Republic 5 and Aristophanes' Ekklesiazousai, produced c. 392 B.C.

Here, in the middle of the well-known simile that depicts Aeneas and Turnus as bulls fighting for territory and a herd (12.715–22), Vergil registers the reactions of the onlookers. Commentators and lexicographers disagree about what the heifers are doing, interpreting ‘mussant’ in different ways. Servius (followed by Conington–Nettleship) glosses the verb as ‘dubitant’. By contrast, Heyne offers the paraphrase ‘anxii expectant’, responding to the theme of fear in the two preceding cola: cf. ‘pavidi’ and ‘metu’. Forbiger's explanatory ‘tacite expectant’ stresses rather the note of silence introduced by ‘stat pecus omne metu mutum’. Lewis and Short (s.v., II) and Georges (s.v., 112) concur with Forbiger when they translate ‘mussant’ ‘expect in silence’ and ‘stumm harren’. Other authorities, however, underscore the verb's onomatopoeic sense. Julius Caesar Scaliger, for example, observes of Vergil's usage: ‘sane verbum factitium, neque absonum a bourn voce’. Accordingly, some older commentators interpret ‘mussant’ as a restrained form of ‘mugiunt’. More recently, the OLD (s.v., 3a) and TLL (s.v., II2b [8.2.1709.26–32]) cite Aen. 12.718 under the definitions ‘mutter in indecision’ and ‘mussantem (i.e. murmurantem) dubitare’. Although there is general agreement that ‘mussant’ (followed by indirect deliberative questions) connotes uncertainty, there still remains the problem of whether it indicates silence, faint lowing, or muttering. The purpose of this note is to call attention to an unrecognized etymological wordplay in line 718 (‘stat pecus omne metu mutum, mussantque iuvencae’) which helps explain what the heifers are doing and why there are varying interpretations of ‘mussant’.