Since the late nineteenth century it has been almost universally accepted that Sophocles gave lodging to the cultic snake or statue of Asclepius when it was brought to Athens in 420 BC, that he raised an altar or altars for the god, and that in recognition for these services as the so-called ‘Receiver’ of Asclepius he was heroised after his death under the name Dexion. This story derives chiefly from a Byzantine dictionary article, the earliest known form of which dates from the second half of the ninth century.

The stele from the harbour (‘la stèle du port’) of Thasos, SEG xlii.785, has been so named because it was dredged up from the small fishing harbour on 13 June, 1984. The inscription is of the greatest importance for Thasian epigraphy and dialect as well as for its contents, and has been amply published by H. Duchêne. While the stele of Thasian marble is preserved complete, the inscribed surface has suffered much from the effects of its immersion in the sea. The lower part is well preserved, and from line 42 to the end (49) there is no problem in reading the letters on the stone. Above that, it is a very different matter; some parts seem irretrievably lost, and much of the preserved lettering consists of faint traces only. My own examination of the stone confirmed that we can have complete confidence in Duchêne's facsimile. He and those who helped him have achieved wonders of skilful decipherment on this difficult text. Unless fancy new technology may one day offer better ways of recovering the letters on the stone, it seems unlikely that the readings published by Duchêne could be improved.

The main narrative of Thucydides is characterised by a third person ‘objective’ style where signs of the narrator are concealed. But this predominant narrative mode is punctuated by passages (2. 65, 6. 15, etc.) where the narrator interrupts the main account, referring to himself in the first person and/or to time outside that of the main narrative. These rare intrusions of the voice of the narrator-historian—‘narrator interventions’—are the most quoted and discussed in the whole History. Reaction to them has been of two sorts. They have either been seen as later additions and used as the centrepiece of analyst interpretations of the History, or they have been treated as expressions of the ‘judgement’ of the historian, providing the key to the History's meaning. The result of these approaches is unsatisfactory. The interventions are either bracketed as foreign to the original plan of the historian, or given special status as the exclusive source of his meaning. The effect is to cut them loose from the reading of the rest of the work, as intrusions of another stage of composition or of another voice which no longer narrates, but gives judgement. Worse still, such interpretation compares the decontextualised ‘judgements’ it has isolated from the narrative and declares them inconsistent with each other. Such ‘extrinsic’ approaches to the interventions risk reducing Thucydides’ text to a patchwork of differing and competing voices and opinions.

All editions and translations of Homer's Iliad present the epic as a series of twenty-four segments always marked off in the same places. In this respect the Iliad conforms to, and seems even to originate, a practice in which narratives of any considerable length are almost always presented in marked segments, usually called chapters. Similarly, dramas, except very short ones, usually run as a series of acts whose dimensions are determined in the composition (i.e., not afresh with each performance). Acts may be marked by curtains, intermissions or briefer pauses, or other variations in the performance: in ancient Greek drama the segmentation is unmistakeably marked by the placement of choral lyrics (Arist. Poet. 1452b). It is not exactly clear why the chapter and the act should be so indispensable, but authors and audiences alike know intuitively that they are. Yet many scholars since antiquity have believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey originally lacked marked segmentation, and that the now-familiar presentation was imposed upon them later by someone other than their composer(s). Even today, when few scholars see profit in analyzing the Iliad and Odyssey into earlier and later strata, the so-called 'book divisions’ continue to offer a tempting target for analytic criticism.

One of the most interesting of the myths concerning the migration to the West of those Trojan heroes who survived the destruction of their city is that of Antenor and his sons. That Antenor and his family received the embassy of the Greeks, saved them from attack by a group of Trojans and consistently urged peace and the return of Helen is already established in Homer. The consequent decision of the Greeks to spare the Antenorids at the sack of Troy is almost certainly present in the epic cycle. Somewhat later, two further traditions emerge: first the claim that Troy was betrayed by the Antenorids; second, that Antenor and various of his sons travelled overseas and settled in distant lands, notably Cyrene in Libya and Patavium in the Veneto. For anyone concerned with the development of the myth, it is therefore deeply frustrating that so little should remain of what must have been a crucial text: the Antenoridae of Sophocles. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that there is far more to be known about this play than has hitherto been perceived.

The myth of Athens and Atlantis in Plato's Timaeus and Critias can be, and has been, interpreted on a number of different levels. On the most fundamental, philosophical level the myth sets into narrative motion the paradigm of the ideal state elaborated in the Republic. Gill, in a series of publications, has done much to throw light on the nature of this invention: its relationship with modern categories of fiction and with antecedent historiography. Yet the extent to which the myth of Atlantis is embedded in larger fourth-century political and historiographical concerns has been insufficiently appreciated. In what follows, I shall attempt to reconstruct some of these concerns. I shall argue, first, that the narrative set-up of the Atlantis myth corresponds to the conditions specified in the Republic for the successful creation of a charter myth (the ‘Noble Lie’) for the ideal city, and that this is a valuable indication of the truth status of the myth and of the function it is expected to perform. This function is not merely a matter of abstract philosophical interest, since there are close parallels between the Atlantis myth and contemporary panegyric versions of Athenian history; in Section III, therefore, I shall explore these parallels through an examination of some Isocratean orations. Sections IV and V will investigate how such panegyric history illuminates areas of ideological concern for Athenians in the first half of the fourth century, most notably worries about legitimating the constitution (politeia) under which they lived, and about the attitude that should be taken towards Athenian maritime interests in the Aegean. The Atlantis myth creates a vision of Athens that is true to Plato's political ideals, but which is animated by contemporary historical topoi. The result is a narrative for an audience of philosophical cognoscenti that both rejects and transforms such topoi, and sparks a second-order consideration of the forces at work in the construction of history.

Tragedy was a product of the classical polis, but took its themes (with very few exceptions) from an imagined earlier age, the heroic age that is also the subject of the Homeric poems. The result, it has been argued, is a creative tension, notably between the spirit of heroic autonomy and the rule of law characteristic of the polis. The institutions of the polis make themselves felt, anachronistically, in the tragic representation of heroic myth.

Socrates is asked to arbitrate a dispute about the ‘correctness of names’ between Cratylus and Hermogenes. While Hermogenes regards the assignment of names as merely arbitrary, Cratylus holds that they belong to their nominata either naturally or not at all. He has annoyed Hermogenes by informing him that Hermogenes is not his real name. But he is too laconic to offer any explanation, thus leaving it to Socrates himself to work out the etymological principles which his theory implies.

The royal house of Pontus claimed to be descended from the cream of the old Persian nobility, the Seven Families, and to have received its lands as the gift of Darius I. The claim is first attested by Polybius (although in its essence it may go back to Hieronymus of Cardia), and it became common currency in the reign of Mithridates Eupator. Since Théodore Reinach wrote his magisterial history of the Pontic kingdom, the royal pretensions of the regime have been dismissed as apocryphal.

The Homeric talent, a quantity of unworked gold, has attracted very little scholarly comment. Yet it is a conspicuous enough feature of the Homeric economy: when Agamemnon lists the gifts with which he hopes to win over Achilles, he includes ten talents of gold (khrusou talanta) in the first line of his plutocratic catalogue. The same sum also features among the gifts Achilles receives from Priam. In what follows, I argue that the talent occupies an anomalous position within the system of Homeric gift exchange, and that this anomaly has interesting implications both within and beyond the Homeric text.

John Boardman has pointed to the squat bronze jugs with lotus handles from early Iron Age contexts in Crete and at Lefkandi on Euboia as Egyptian imports ‘certainly straight from Egypt itself with no eastern intermediaries’. On close inspection, however, the Egyptian antecedents of these jugs pose a chronological, and even a philosophical, puzzle; whatever the solution, the jugs found in Crete and at Lefkandi surely do not furnish convincing evidence for early direct connections between Egypt and the Aegean.

That articles on Archilochus begin with a historical overview of the approaches to his ‘I’ and the issue of the historicity of the characters who occupy his poems is a tradition in its own right. Scholarly debate on Archilochus oscillates between total disbelief in and defensive support of the actuality of these figures and an autobiographical stance for the poet. The positions of the respective scholars have often been uncompromising and the language passionate, mirroring perhaps the generic requirements of iambos, or inspired perhaps by the ‘roguish Archilochus’ himself.

The institution of sunthusiâ, ‘joint sacrifice’, appears in many forms in Graeco-Roman antiquity, but takes a special shape in the period of the Roman empire. After a brief outline of the practice, I address particular problems in inscriptions of Iasus in Caria and Side in Pamphylia.

In the Hellenistic period, the verb sunthûein and its related nouns, sunthutês, sunthusiâ, are mainly used in two senses. In the private sphere, devotees of particular gods or groups of gods may form standing associations of ‘joint sacrificers’, sometimes with common ownership of property.

In the sixth book of the Iliad Glaukos relates the story of his grandfather, Bellerophon, who had been sent from Ephyre on the Greek mainland to Lycia carrying with him a folded tablet bearing on it baneful signs.

The single reference to this type of tablet in the early preserved literature suggests that such tablets were rare although they must have been recognizable to the audience at the time they were originally incorporated into the epic tradition.

The scene in Iliad 11 where Nestor's slave Hekamede prepares a restorative κυκεών for his guests in his great cup, which only he can lift when it is full, has often been cited in connection with the skyphos from Ischia, dated to c.735–720 BC, with its verse inscription that alludes to Nestor's εὔποτον ποτήριον. Now that scholarly opinion is increasingly swinging towards a seventh-century dating for the Iliad, it seems more prudent than ever to see the Ischia inscription as a reflex not of our Iliad but of a similar Nestorian drinking episode in earlier epic tradition. His cup, as described, has features of a Bronze Age vessel; and the motif of the mighty goblet is paralleled in the Ugaritic Baal epic, current not later than the fourteenth century.

Here I want to consider another element in the scene, namely the grated cheese which Hekamede adds to her posset. I hope to show, by a combination of metrics and archaeology, that this too, even though it cannot be traced back to the Bronze Age, belongs to a traditional account that is many generations older than our Iliad.