En 1953, P. Amandry résumait ľopinion commune au sujet des adversaires sur mer des Grecs pendant les guerres médiques en écrivant: ‘la marine phénicienne de cette époque est mal connue’. Mon but principal, dans une étude publiée en 1969, était de combler cette lacune irritante: je crus pouvoir démontrer ľexistence, en Phénicie, ďune architecture navale originale et, surtout, ďun type de trière différent du type grec. Ce n'est que de façon incidente que je crus pouvoir attribuer les trières de Nechao au modèle phénicien, ce qui permettait de conserver les conclusions raisonnables de J. A. Davison quant à la date de ľadoption de la trière en Grèce sans mettre en doute la véracité du récit ďHérodote au sujet de ľexistence de trières en Egypte vers 600.

Il n'est pas indifférent de noter que M. A. B. Lloyd, en abordant ľexamen du même probléme, a suivi une démarche très différente: son but principal, en 1972, était ľétude de la marine saïte. Etant donné qu'il n'envisageait pas la possibilité de types de trières différents, qu'il n'acceptait pas la date traditionnelle de ľinvention de la trière à Corinthe que fournit apparemment Thucydide (704 av. J.-C.) et qu'il considérait également comme authentique ľinformation ďHérodote, il ne lui restait plus qu'à déterminer une nouvelle date de naissance de la trière, soit le milieu du 7e s. A ce moment, M. Lloyd ignorait ľexistence de mon article de 1969, auquel il devait consacrer une réfutation en 1975: souhaitant maintenir intégralement ses conclusions de 1972, M. Lloyd était contraint de soutenir que la trière phénicienne, telle que je ľavais décrite, n'avait jamais existé.

At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 most Greeks believed that, if Sparta led her allies by land to ravage Attika, Athens would be unable to hold out for more than three years at the most (Thuc. vii 28.3; cf. iv 85.2; v 14.3). Admittedly the majority of Athenian citizens—and perhaps even the senior Spartan king and general Archidamos— did not share this belief. But since the Persian Wars of 480/79 it had been dogma, both inside and outside the Spartan alliance, that such an invasion was the most potent means of compelling Athens to fulfil her enemies' will. Yet the few concrete precedents—of the late sixth century and 446—were at best inexact, at worst frankly discouraging; and in the event Spartan strategy, in so far as it was determined by the dogma, was shown to have been null and void ab initio. The Spartan alliance was of course ultimately victorious, but victory was postponed for close on a generation and was achieved even then only through massive Persian subventions (Pritchett I 47 f.; II 119 n. 19). Above all, it was secured at sea, where the Athenians had been the undisputed masters (Pritchett II 225–7), while in Attika itself the new technique of epiteichismos proved far more devastating than the timehonoured esbolai.

Thus the Peloponnesian War with its heavily ironical outcome marks a watershed in the history of Greek military practice, truly the ‘end of a chapter’ (Snodgrass 1967, 107). It is therefore an appropriate moment to turn back to the beginning of the chapter and review one of the most portentous innovations of Greek antiquity, the hoplite ‘reform’.

One of the most basic features of the imagery employed by Aischylos in the Oresteia is the consistent perversion of normally propitious aspects of human existence, with the result that they become sinister and destructive. As Anne Lebeck puts it, ‘in Agamemnon those forces which should be beautiful, benevolent, and life-giving are converted into their opposites’. Male and female interchange their proper roles, sacrificial language cloaks impious deeds of vengeance, the hunting of animals turns into the hunting of men, the wealth of the house of Atreus becomes the blood in which that house is drenched, and the fertility of the whole land is corrupted by its application to death instead of life. The deliberate misuse to which Aischylos puts each of these structures has been well surveyed; taken together they lend dramatic reinforcement to a central theme of the Oresteia, that man's world is in a state of chaotic disorder from which it will not recover until the dilemma of vengeance v. justice has been solved. What I should like to do here is to trace out a similar arrangement in the substantial fire imagery of the trilogy. Fire, of course, as Aischylos himself tells us in the Prometheia, is one of the basic tools of mankind, a device used to provide many of the comforts of civilisation. Yet the same element, when handled improperly, may also ravage and destroy (compare the problems encountered by the satyrs in the Prometheus Pyrkaeus).

The Homeric poems are the subject of such a flood of print that a definite justification is needed by one who adds to it. Especially perhaps is this so if the Epic Cycle is to be involved; ‘enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle’, said T. W. Allen in 1908. My argument will be that the Cycle has still not been fully exploited as a source to show, by comparison and contrast, the particular character and style of the two great epics, particularly the Iliad. With the domination of Homeric scholarship in English by formulaic studies on the one hand and archaeology on the other, the poems themselves have perhaps been less discussed than might have been expected, and the uniqueness of the Homeric style and picture of the world has not been fully brought out. Most treatments of the Cycle have been concerned to assert or to deny that it contained poems or incidents earlier than the surviving epics, a question which will not be raised here. Most recent writers on Homer have more or less ignored the Cycle; even Hermann Fränkel, the first part of whose book Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (2nd edition 1962; now available in English, Poetry and Philosophy in Early Greece [1975]), is perhaps the most illuminating single work to have appeared on Homer in this century, does not discuss it, although it could have been made to support many of his arguments. No inferences are based on it, for example, in Wace and Stubbings, Companion to Homer, nor by Sir Maurice Bowra in his posthumous Homer. ‘My remarks are restricted to the two epics’, says J. B. Hainsworth in his short account; and G. S. Kirk, who does refer to the style of the fragments, does so summarily and without quotation. Yet after all the Cycle was a large body of early Greek heroic poetry, composed at a time not too far removed from that of the great epics, and at least passing as being in the same manner. We have some 120 lines quoted in the original, and a good deal of information about the content of the poems. If it proves possible to draw from this material any clear contrast with the Iliad, it may be felt that this will bring out the individuality of the latter even more strikingly than does the epic poetry, currently more often invoked, of the ancient Hittites or the modern Yugoslavs.

Thucydides' brief account of the events which have come to be known as the First Peloponnesian War has left considerable doubts about Sparta's precise role. Her first clearly attested expedition is that to help Doris in 458 or 457, but fighting had been going on for some two or three years before this and several members of the Peloponnesian League were involved in it. The question is whether Sparta and her League as a whole were also involved, and if so, from what date. Scholars have taken differing views on this problem and one of the most recent, and important, treatments of it firmly advocates an early commitment to war by Sparta and her League. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest a different interpretation of the evidence and to claim that it is one which fits better into the context of Spartan behaviour throughout the whole period c. 460–445 B.C.

Aristotle and Theophrastus are the two major sources for our knowledge of the atomist theory of weight.

In the De generatione et corruptione Aristotle argues that one atom may be hotter than another and that therefore the atoms cannot be impassible, since an atom which is only slightly hot could not fail to be acted upon by an atom that was very much hotter (i 8 325b36–26a14, esp. 326a6–12 = in part DK 68A60). The premiss to the argument Aristotle derives in part from a comparison with weight. It would be ridiculous, he claims, to suppose that hotness and coldness belong to the atoms, but that heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness do not belong to them (326a6–8). And in fact, he continues, Democritus does claim (καίτοι…γε… φησίν) that each of the ‘indivisibles’ is βαρύτερον…κατὰ τὴν ὑπεροχήν (a9–10). Aristotle has already supposed that one kind of atom, a round atom, may be accounted as hot (a3–5). The use of the comparative for weight (βαρύτερον) Aristotle now takes to justify the use of the comparative for heat (θερμότερον a10–11): from this there follows the argument that the atoms cannot be impassible.

The recent little book by Heinrich Drerup, Griechische Baukunst in geometrischer Zeit, is considered by the fashionable school of Homer's interpreters to be the one and only study of the Homeric House. Thus, for M. I. Finley, in ‘The World of Odysseus Revisited’, his presidential address to the Classical Association for 1974, it ‘replaces all previous accounts of the subject’; and it seems to him particularly refreshing because it sees, in the rude buildings of c. 800 B.C., sufficient material for all the true descriptions that Homer may give of architecture. If Drerup is right, we shall need no recourse to the Bronze Age to explain anything; and in Drerup's own words, as translated by Finley (p. 21), ‘the over-worked Mycenaean palace has probably played out its rôle in Homeric archaeology’. Our initial feelings, that it was rather tendentious to include a work on Geometric Baukunst in a series on Homeric archaeology, are thus to be rudely brushed aside.

Now I must agree that the end of the Bronze Age does mark a great, if ragged break in building science. The Mycenaean range of materials was never recovered in Classical Greece; and certain technical achievements of the Bronze Age were not repeated either in Classical Architecture or at any time since. One of my favourite examples, though one to which the textbooks give little attention, is the neat design of ceremonial doorways during the later Bronze Age.

It was once a commonplace of early Greek history that a major factor involved in the demise of the aristocratic regimes of the dark ages was the adoption of the hoplite form of warfare: that the rise of the early tyrants and other contemporary political developments were brought about at least in part by the inability of aristocrats to maintain their monopoly of privilege in the face of demands from non-aristocratic hoplites for political power commensurate with their new military importance. But in an important article in this Journal (lxxxv [1965] 110–22) Snodgrass challenged this view. He first argued that the hoplite phalanx was unknown in Greece before c. 650, and that its adoption can therefore not have affected the rise to power of the earliest tyrants. Similarly, if the Spartan rhetra is to be dated to the early seventh century, it cannot have been the result of demands made by a hoplite class. His case was not, however, merely chronological, for he suggested that it is in any event difficult to believe that the hoplite reform had immediate political consequences. The reaction to his case has been mixed, but his arguments have not been subjected to the careful examination they deserve.

To defend the fatherland, to obey the laws and authorities, and to honour the State's cults are the principal points the Athenian citizen promised to fulfil in his oath of allegiance—called ephebic, because he took it as a recruit (ephebos)—at least since the second half of the fourth century B.C. (Lycurg. Leoc. 76). These duties are fundamental for the citizen's attachment to his polis, so one will hardly assume that the content of the oath depends upon the existence of the Athenian institution of cadet-training (ephebeia) which is attested by inscriptions not earlier than 334/3 B.C. Some ambiguous passages in fifth- and fourth-century authors give no reliable clue to determine the form or origin of the ephebeia. I shall consider sworn civic duties and the organisation of military training as different things, and shall treat the oath independently from the disputed question of when the ephebeia came into existence. My purpose is to draw attention to some fifth-century allusions to the oath which seem to have remained unnoticed so far.

This oath is transmitted by Pollux (viii 105 f.), Stobaeus (iv 1.8), and a fourth-century inscription from the Attic deme Acharnae. I give the epigraphic version, following G. Daux's text. I omit the first part of the whole inscription (lines 1–4: dedication of the stele by the priest of Ares and Athena Areia, Dion of Acharnae) and the last part (lines 20 ff.: oath before the battle against the Persians at Plataea).

The dates of performance of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae are still not generally agreed. The most widely accepted opinion is perhaps that of Wilamowitz, that Lysistrata was produced at the Lenaia and Thesmophoriazusae at the City Dionysia in the same year, 411 B.C. But both Schmid and Gelzer, in their authoritative works on Aristophanes, have given reasons for reversing these assignments and putting Th. first; Russo holds that both plays were produced on the same occasion; and Rhodes has recently revived the view—which goes back to Dobree and beyond—that Th. is to be dated to 410, during the régime of the Five Thousand.

The one unequivocal and undisputed datum we have comes from Hypothesis I to Lys., which tells us that that play was produced in the archonship of Kallias (412/1). Further information can be elicited from a variety of sources:

(1) statements by scholiasts giving the date, relative to one of the plays, of an event whose date is independently known;

(2) references (or, less safely, failures to refer) in the plays themselves to datable events;

(3) references to the season of the year at which the performance took place;

(4) considerations of the type of play more likely to have been produced at one or the other festival;

(5) references in one play to the other;

(6) the political, military and diplomatic conditions, movements, prospects and attitudes reflected in the plays, considered with reference to contemporary events.

So Pearson. The strange series of hypodochmiacs here and at O.T. 1207 ff. (cf. E. Or. 982–4), with brevis in longo without pause at Aj. 421 and O.T. 1208 (possibly also 1217), seems metrically self-contained, despite their syntactical interdependence (esp. Aj. 421–2 οὐκέτ' ἄνδρα μὴ | τόνδ' ἴδητ', so that the word-overlap of οἷον into iambics in Pearson's text is unlikely. ἑξερῶ μέγα should therefore be written plena scriptura. Then οἷον οὔτιν' ἁ Τροί|α στρατοῦ… is possible, but the ithyphallic with word-overlap, sometimes found in the syncopated iambics of Aeschylus, is foreign to Sophocles. Divide ἐξερῶ μέγα, | οἷον οὔτινα | Τροία… Then ϕίλοι τοῖσδ' ὁμοῦ = οἷον οὔτινα, i.e. δ = hyp., which is not certainly found, and the antistrophe has two syllables extra.

In the course of examining the entire corpus of Athenian decrees I have become increasingly aware of certain ‘irregularities’ in restorations involving negatives. The purpose of this paper is to challenge such restorations.

In Clio Medica 7 (1972) 1 ff. D. Gourevitch published an article (which I have not seen) on ‘Les représentations des soins donnés a Philoctète’. Among these the author included the picture on an Attic red-figure column-krater in Salerno. The next year Albin Lesky republished the pictures with a new interpretation: the death of Talos, the brazen giant who guarded Crete and was destroyed by the Argonauts with Medea's help. It has since been published again, for the first time officially, by the excavator, G. ďHenry, who gives the correct provenance: Montesarchio (the ancient Caudium), near Benevento. He reverts to the interpretation as Philoctetes on Lemnos. I know the vase only from these publications, none of which illustrates or describes the picture on the back of the vase, but it is not likely that this is iconographically relevant or interesting. One detail as well as the general view of the main picture is given by Lesky (after Gourevitch).

A small Attic red-figure cup of considerable charm was recently acquired by a private collector in Hamburg. It is decorated outside as well as inside and has been mended from several fragments. The tondo and foot are undamaged, but a few minor rim fragments are missing, the largest robbing us of part of the central horseman: gone are the back of his neck, his right shoulder, the upper part of his right arm, most of the pelta and a section of the spear shafts, as well as three letters from the inscription. The surface is in superb condition, despite one or two chips and the slight flaking under the right hand of the woman on the interior. The measurements of the cup are as follows: height 7.2 cm, diameter without handles 19.5 cm and diameter of the foot 8.0 cm. The shape is of type ‘C’, with the fillet at the lower end of the stem. The handles are long and rather flat, scarcely rising above the rim. The lip has a reserved line inside and out. The fairly flat bowl meets the rim at a sharp angle. The stem is short, as is normal with type ‘C’ cups, and is strongly flaring at top and bottom. The fillet is marked by a reserved groove above and below. The foot has a flat upper contour. The profile of the edge of the foot is richly formed: the upper third being concave and the lower two thirds convex, while in the middle of the former there is a very slight ridge. Under the foot is a wide black band, as is usual among cups of type ‘C’.

In my review of R. D. Dawe's Studies in the text of Sophocles (JHS xcvi [1976] 171 ff.), I reached the conclusion that scholars now possess all the information about manuscripts that is needed in order to constitute the text of the Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus, subject to two provisos.

The first of these concerns the Jena manuscript (Bos. q. 7), a copy written late in the fifteenth century and containing only the first two plays. Reports of interesting readings found in it were given by Purgold in 1802, and since collations were not always undertaken very carefully at that date it seemed worth while to examine the book again to see whether the reports were correct. Thanks to the good offices of the University Library in Jena I was able to collate a microfilm, and am now in a position to state that Purgold did his work well. The interesting readings cited by subsequent editors are correctly reported, and so far as I can see there are no others of striking merit.

The other manuscript which seemed to deserve further investigation is in Milan (Ambrosianus E 103 sup.). It is usually assigned to the fourteenth century, and if this date were certain it would not deserve any special attention. In my opinion the script is of a type that must almost certainly be placed before the year 1300, probably c 1275, and in that case the book might be of some interest, since it could be early enough to escape the reproach of offering a text affected by Palaeologan scholars. I have now collated the text from a microfilm kindly supplied by the Ambrosian Library. A very small number of valuable readings came to light.