The ancient Greeks believed that the oracle at Delphi went back to immemorial antiquity. But were they right? The history of the site has been traced through excavations that are among the greatest achievements of modern archaeology. The interest of the French school in Delphi goes back to 1861, but for political reasons systematic excavation could not begin till 1893; since 1902 the series of volumes of the Fouilles de Delphes has appeared regularly. Mycenaean Delphi has been shown to have amounted to very little; and the chief centre seems to have been not on the site of the great temple, but at Marmaria, near the temple of Athene Pronaia. A few clay figurines may pertain to a private, but hardly to a public cult; an isolated Minoan marble drinking-horn shaped like a lion's head proves little. By the beginning of the Dark Age the settlement seems to have been destroyed by fire; before its life resumes during the Protogeometric period, there seems to have been a complete break in continuity. Only when the Dark Age is over does Delphi become important.

Professor D. M. MacDowell's article continues a recent and welcome tendency to question the common interpretation of hybris by study of the actual instances of the concept throughout Greek literature. MacDowell's definition ‘having energy or power and misusing it self-indulgently’ is fairly broad, and he supports it by five further points:

i) that hybris is always bad,

ii) that it is always voluntary,

iii) that it is frequently, but not always, produced by such things as youth, wealth, and excess of food and drink,

iv) that it is not usually religious, and

v) that it often involves a victim, and is more serious when it does.

Horace's Soracte Ode is a difficult poem. It begins in winter, apparently in the countryside, and concludes with the sketch of an urban incident in summer (or spring). This seeming inconsistency has provoked widely divergent critical comment. E. Fraenkel sums up one approach:

We like the Ode because it contains several passages of great beauty, among them some happy adaptations of Alcaean motifs. But we have to admit that as a whole the poem falls short of the perfection reached by Horace in many of his odes. Its heterogeneous elements have not merged into a harmonious unit. Line 18, nunc et campus et areae and what follows suggest a season wholly different from the severe winter at the beginning. This incongruity cannot be removed by any device of apologetic interpretation.