Plato's Sophist begins with an attempt to arrive by division at a definition of a Sophist. In the course of the attempt six different descriptions are discussed and the results summarized at 231 c-e. A seventh and final account may be said to occupy the whole of the rest of the dialogue, including the long digression on negative statements. The first five divisions characterize with a considerable amount of satire different types of sophist, or more probably different aspects of the sophistic art. The sixth division (226 a–231 b) is very different. To quote Cornford's words, ‘satire is dropped. The tone is serious and sympathetic, towards the close it becomes eloquent’.

Down to the present century the Niobe of Aeschylus was represented by eight significant manuscript fragments containing some twenty-three lines. Even in this condition it deservedly attracted the interest and attention of scholars; and in 1933 this interest was intensified by the publication in Florence by Vitelli and Norsa of a mutilated papyrus of twenty-one lines embodying two of the earlier fragments.

All commentators so far as I know have believed that lines 100–1 are simply a vague paraphrase for Jebb's translation may be taken to represent the usual view: ‘… is he threading the straits of the sea, or hath he found an abode on either continent?’ But this sense is not only poetially inept, but linguistically impossible.

The colour adjectives and have been discussed by R. Strömberg, who has removed misconceptions about their meaning. So has been shown to mean, not ‘quite white’ (L.S.J.), but a faded white, or one which has lost its essential whiteness: so often where the ‘natural colour has yielded to a dull dirty whitish colour’.

In this paper I wish to examine the meaning of the doctrine of anamnesis, with particular regard to the role assigned in it to sense-experience. I shall argue (a) that an empirical interpretation of the doctrine as it is presented in the Meno is false, and that Plato is not concerned at all in the Meno with the question of the role of sense-experience in recollection; (b) that the doctrine of the Phaedo (73 c ff.) shows an inadequate appreciation of the problems involved in assigning a role to sense-experience, and is seriously inconsistent with what Plato says elsewhere, in the Phaedo and in other dialogues, about the senses and sensible images; (c) that the revised and more responsible presentation of this doctrine in the Phaedrus is self-contradictory; (d) that misinterpretations of the theory of anamnesis are due principally to (i) either misinterpretation or neglect of what is said about it in the Meno, (ii) the custom of taking Phaedo 73 c ff. as specially representative of Plato's doctrine.

The metics of Gortyna came under the jurisdiction of the special courts for foreigners, κσενεία δίκα, and of the κσένιος κόσμος, an official who is often named in Gortynian inscriptions. From one of these we can infer that freedmen were classed with metics, because of the artisan status of both.