For the writers of the imperial period, music theory presented a sharp dichotomy. One might be an Aristoxenus, or one might be a follower of the mathematikoi or Pythagoreans. The methods and doctrines of the two schools were thought of as radically incompatible with one another; and it is true that from the fourth century B.C., when their respective doctrines were first formally articulated, members of each tradition held views which their opposite numbers denied. But their disagreements are easily misunderstood. I have argued elsewhere that Aristoxenus' attitude to the Pythagoreans has sometimes been distorted. Here, in discussing the Sectio, which appears to be the earliest continuous treatise surviving from the other side of the fence, I shall try to show some of the ways in which its objectives differ from Aristoxenus', and thus the sense in which certain major disagreements between them reflect an oblique rather than a direct confrontation. I hope also to show that further study of this rather arid looking work for its own sake would repay both musicologists and philosophers.

In the spring of 328 Alexander the Great was at a critical point in his career. During the previous summer he had pressed too far too quickly and underestimated the resistance of the local population to his authority. Consequently, when he was engaged with nomad hordes on the banks of the Iaxartes (Syr-Darya), the whole of the populous satrapy of Bactria–Sogdiana rose in rebellion, from the fringes of the Hindu Kush in the south to the frontier cities by the Iaxartes. His morale was moreover weakened by a compound fracture of the fibula, sustained near Maracanda and exacerbated by a severe bout of dysentery at the Iaxartes.

In one sense the Second Athenian Confederacy did not fail. It was simply abolished in 338 by Philip in the Peace of Demades (Paus. i 25.3), but up till then it continued actively enough. In 346 we see the synedrion engaged in the deliberations on the Peace of Philokratcs (Aisch. ii 60, 86 iii 69–70, 74); a Tenedian went on both the embassies to Philip, representing the allies (Aisch. ii 20, 97, 126); the Peace was made by Philip with Athens and her allies, i.e. the Confederacy. In 346 Mytilene chose to resume membership (GHI 168) and in 343 the synedroi were available in Athens to give evidence about the events of 346 (Aisch. ii 86). In the later 340s, as the fifty-eighth speech of the Demosthenic Corpus shows (cf. §§37–8, 53–6), the machinery of the Confederacy continued to work, and the impression gained from the two surviving decrees which concern the Tenedians (GHI 175, and IG ii2 232) is of willing co-operation between allies and hegemon.

Il. xxiv 22–30

It is now almost half a century since Karl Reinhardt first published what must still rank as the most brilliant and perceptive attempt to explain the significance of the above passage for the Iliad as a whole.

There is a fundamental problem in Aristotle's metaphysics which has received a good deal of attention ever since Eduard Zeller emphasized it in his book on Aristotle in the nineteenth century. The difficulty has often been expressed as an inconsistency between three propositions to each of which Aristotle is committed:

(1) No universal is substance.

(2) Knowledge is of what is most real.

(3) Knowledge is of universals.

The American excavators in the south-west area of the Forum at Corinth have revealed an intriguing architectural complex, which they have called the ‘Punic Amphora Building’. Evidently it housed a thriving import business with a speciality in fish and wine, whose trade extended in one direction to Sicily and perhaps Spain and in the other to Chalkidike and Chios. Masses of fragments of Punic and Chian amphoras were found crushed and pounded in the make-up of successive floor-levels in the courtyard, together with numerous pieces from Mende and elsewhere. Many others emerged from the single floors of most of the rooms or were discovered in the littered debris from the final phase of occupation. The life of this business house was somewhat short, but a domestic building on the same site had earlier been partly devoted to the same trade. All this activity ceased with dramatic suddenness; the emporium went out of use and in the late fifth century it was overlaid in one area by a new road. The end seems to be securely dated c. 430 B.C. by Attic black-glaze pottery in the final floor-level or in the debris covering the last floor. Professor Williams plausibly links the collapse of business with the interruption of Corinth's trade caused by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: one of Athens' first war measures was to blockade both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulfs. This new material evidence for Corinthian commerce is most welcome in itself and, as I hope to show in this paper, it may help clarify other problems.

It is generally agreed that the concept of inspiration is one of the most basic and persistent of Greek notions about poetry. Yet there appears to be a certain confusion on the significance of this observation. For instance, while most scholars consider that the idea is of very great antiquity in Greece, there is a recent tendency to regard the concept as a formulation of the fifth century B.C. E. A. Havelock, for example, describes the notion of poetic inspiration as an invention of fifth century philosophers, and G. S. Kirk states, without discussion, that poetic inspiration was ‘probably quite a new conception’ at the time Euripides was writing. This type of disagreement clearly relates to the more fundamental question of the meaning of the concept of inspiration itself. For although there is an apparent consensus that ancient notions of poetic inspiration correspond in some way to certain modern ideas about the nature of poetic creativity, little attention has been paid to these modern notions of inspiration. And unless such modern notions are investigated, the mere observation that there is a similarity is of little value.

During the excavations at Aphrodisias in Caria several ancient sundials have come to light Most are only fragmentary, but one, standing as a pedestal in a paved area of the city (the post-scaenam piazza) is substantially in one piece and of considerable interest.

The dial (PLATE II) is in the form of a cylindrical pillar of marble, the upper surface of which is horizontal and stands approximately one metre above ground level. The top is slightly larger than the main body of the column because of a lip and was originally an oval of diameters 88·5 cm (east–west) and 78 cm (north–south) though the south side is broken away for perhaps one fifth of its original width. The base of the dial, 40–50 cm below pavement level, also has a similar lip, which betrays its earlier use, which was as an altar. The religious symbols have been erased—unless the crescent within a circle on its north side is one (but see below).

In their invocations of the Muses the early epic poets use indifferently verbs meaning ‘tell’, ‘speak of’ (ἔννεπε, ἔσπετε, εἰπέ, εἴπατε) and the verb which we normally translate as ‘sing’ (ἄειδε, ἀείδεο, ἀείσατε) When they refer directly to their own performance they may use the non-committal μνήσομαι, or ἐρέω, ἐνισπεῖν but more often it is άείδω, ἄρχομ ἀείδειν or something of the sort; and they will pray for good ἀοιδή or hope for reward from it. We cannot make a distinction between two styles of performance, one characterized as ἀείδειν the other as ἐνέπειν the Iliad begins μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά but later has ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι; Hesiod moves straight from χαίρετε τέκνα Διός , δότε δ᾿ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν to εἴπατε δ᾿ ὡς . . . ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι . . . καὶ εἴπατε (Th. 104–15); the author of the Hymn to Pan begins ἔννεπε Μοῦσα and ends ἴλαμαι δέ σ᾿ ἀοιδῇ . . . καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ᾿ ἀοιδῆς.

In recent years there have been several attempts to find support for a sexual interpretation of ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν at Aristophanes Frogs 1198–1248. It would add real point to the discomfiture of Euripides and his predictable prologues if his heroes were to lose their virility every time they lost their lekythia. But the matter has been hotly contested, and the linking of this problem with the mysterious αὐτολήκυθοι of Demosthenes liv 14–17 has compounded confusion in both passages. I shall discuss them separately in the first instance.

I

Two main objections are advanced by Jeffrey Henderson2 to a phallic lekythion in the Frogs: apart from the absence of unequivocal literary parallels, the context does not call for it, and the standard shapes of lekythia do not resemble male genitals anyway.

The family of Peisistratos did not indulge in strikingly uncommon names but it is noteworthy that all but one of them also appear in Chios. Neleus or Neileus (e.g. c. 150a, SEG xvii 381 A 1.2), Hippokrates (c. 420a, RE s.n. 14), Hipparchos {s. Ia, BSA lxi [1966] 199 no. 3.15), Heges[istratos?] (e.g. s. IVa, NC xv [1915] 430), Peisistratos, Hippias and Thessalos (see below): only Iophon is certainly missing. Their occurrences cover many centuries and no long filiations can be established, nor is there any positive argument that they all belonged to the same family, but for the late fourth and third centuries there is a hint. Chian social units had a family-based molecular structure. A catalogue of one of them gives us about 70 names c. 300a with an average of two additions p.a. thereafter (BSA lv [i960] 181–7 = SEG xix 580). On it there is a Hippias of the later fourth (father of the named member) and a Thessalos of the later third century. At least one Hippias appears on coins of the later fourth (NC xv [ 1915] 430) and another (or the same) on a subscription list of the mid third as father of the subscriber (SEG xix 578.12). A Chian Peisistratos dedicated in Rhodes in the second century (IG xii.i 113), a Peisistratos son of Peisistratos made a patriotic subscription in the later third (BCH xxxvii [1913] no. 27. 18—19), a Chian Peisistratos, grandson of Peisistratos, is given proxenia at Delos in the mid third or a little earlier (IG xi.4 598), a Peisistratos put his name on coins belonging to the same chronological group as those of Hippias (NC xv[i9i5]430). That the Hippias-group and the Peisistratos-group were somehow related is put beyond doubt by the name which one fourth-century Hippias and one fourth-century Peisistratos gave to their sons.

In 1967 Miss Olga Alexandri reported the discovery often trenches on the road from the Dipylon gate to the Academy. The area into which the trenches were dug measures c. five by seven meters; the individual trenches measure 1.10–1.35 m in length, 0.35–0.65 m in width, and 0.80–1.05 m in depth. They are arranged to form two pairs and two further groups each of three trenches set one behind another. In attempting to interpret the trenches, the excavator was reminded of beddings for stelai such as are attested for the archaic period. Apt as this observation is, it does not help to explain the number ten nor the togetherness of the trenches.

In the introductory chapter to the Funeral oration by Perikles, Thukydides (ii 34) describes in general terms what the patrios nomos, the ceremony for the public burial of Athenian soldiers consisted of.

The periodic festival known as the Χρυσάνθινα celebrated at Sardis in the late Imperial period is known already from numerous inscriptions, noted below. This note concerns an unpublished letter of the year 1838, which contains a brief allusion to an inscription, apparently now lost, in which the festival is mentioned.

In 1838 Henry Wentworth Acland, aged at the time 23, and an undergraduate of Christ Church, visited the Troad from H.M.S. Pembroke, in which he was cruising in the eastern Mediterranean for the sake of his health, to study the topography of that region.

In his publication of the six grirfin–protomai formerly in the Erbach collection U. Jantzen notes how closely they agree in height not only among themselves but also with three other protomai of identical type, two in Munich and one from the Samian Heraion. By the kindness of their present owner I have recently had an opportunity of taking detailed measurements of the Erbach set; and Dr Michael Maas, to whom I am greatly indebted, has supplied me with the corresponding dimensions of the Munich pair. The results are compared in the table.

The eight protomai, it will be seen from the table, are remarkably consistent with one another not merely in height but in all their main dimensions—too consistent, surely, to allow us to suppose that they were cast by the direct lost–wax process, for which a casting-model would have had to be fashioned by hand for each protomc separately.

‘Thucydides does not himself speak the language of religion.’ Thus K. J. Dover summarizes the communisopinio about Thucydides' attitude towards religion. He is supposed to have been sceptical of oracles and to have rejected them as a form of superstition. This view is not, in my opinion, warranted by the evidence. The object of this paper will be to show that Thucydides accepted oracles, like his pious contemporaries Herodotus and Sophocles, and indeed that he exhibited a consistent interest in oracular puzzles and their correct interpretation.

Of the references to oracles in the History some do not merit extensive discussion since they are neutral in tone, and it is evident that Thucydides reports these oracles without any intention of making a special point: no criticism is involved in any of these omitted passages.

The oracles on which I will base my argument are united by having ambiguity as a common characteristic. Oracular ambiguity was ‘an article of Delphic belief’, and was accepted as a fact by the ancients.

Φθονερὸς ἰδὼν τὸν γείτονα θηριομαχοῦτα λέγει τῷ κυβερνήτῃ ᾿᾿Αρκος

This joke from Philogelos (the Greek joke-book sometimes known under the names of Hierocles and Philagrios) has been thought unintelligible. The most recent editor, Thierfelder (Munich 1968) quotes previous commentators: ‘Narratio lacuna laborare videtur. Quod superest non potest intelligi’ (Boissonade); ‘… corriget qui intellexerit’ (Eberhard).

The difficulty lies in the apparent juxtaposition of two quite different situations—the amphitheatre(θηριομαχοῦντα) and the ship (κυβερνήτῃ). But doesκυβερνήτηςreally mean ‘steersman’—even if ἄρκος, ‘Bear, Ursa Major’, is so close? The first use that LSJ records in the meaning ‘governor’ is in a sixth–century papyrus, and Philogelos is tentatively assigned to the fourth or fifth century. The metaphor, however, is frequently used in early Christian Greek (see Lampe, PGL s.v.).

Representations of Helios in his chariot rising above the sea begin toward the end of the sixth century B.C., with a small series of black-figure vases, mostly lekythoi. Five of them have been interpreted as illustrations of the myth of Herakles and the Golden Bowl of the Sun. In Pherekydes' version of the story, Herakles, vexed by the burning rays, threatened Helios with his arrows, and obtained the god's golden vessel to sail the Ocean to the land of Geryon. Although the correspondence of the picture to the story is not literal, in fact largely limited to the cast of characters, such an interpretation is plausible for four vases.

On the lekythos in Athens by the Daybreak Painter, Herakles is crouching on a spur of ground which seems to emerge from the waves; he looks at the Sun in apparent awe. The scenes on the skyphos by the Theseus Painter in Taranto are akin to the Athenian piece: on one side Herakles rushes up the steep ground, on the other he sits on the rocky outline, his right hand gesturing toward the Sun. On a third vase, a lekythos in Cambridge, and on a fourth in Oxford, both Herakles and Athena are depicted on either side of Helios; on the Cambridge lekythos Herakles is actually striding toward the Sun, lifting the bow in his right hand. Only in this case can Herakles' attitude be taken as a threat; on all four vessels, however, the hero and the Sun look at each other, as if an exchange were to take place soon, and so are shown as the actors of the scene.

Four manuscripts of Achilles Tatius break off at i 10.3 τοῖς ῥήμασιν, and a fifth originally did so. All five begin with Longus, where they descend from Vat. gr. 1348. This manuscript too has Achilles Tatius after Longus, but complete, so that they may seem unlikely to descend from it in Achilles Tatius. According to the latest editor, E. Vilborg (Gothenburg 1955), they do not descend from it: they avoid three of its errors (p. lxii, lxvi). Expectation and evidence coincide, then, and that should be that.

Every fragmentary manuscript, however, goes back eventually to a complete one, and whether three errors will bear the weight of a stemma depends on others.

Following our study of unpublished manuscripts of Hunain's translation of Galen's De Sectis ad eos qui introducuntur, a report of which appeared in JHS xcviii (1978) 167–9, we turned our attention to Hunain's translation of Galen's Ars Parva. Once again we have been impressed by the generally excellent quality of the Arabic version and we record a number of passages relevant to the problem of establishing the original Greek text. Perhaps our most important result is to confirm the existence, in Hunain's version of the Greek text, of an extensive preface including explanations of the terms ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ which are missing from the printed text of Kϋhn.