Anachronism-hunting has been out of fashion with scholars in recent times, for the good reason that it can easily seem like a rather trivial sort of parlour game. But given that Greek tragedy draws so heavily on the past, a close look at some examples may perhaps throw light on a far from trivial subject, the dramatists' perception of the heroic world.

So long as anachronism was treated as an artistic failing the debate was bound to be unproductive; one can symphathise with Jebb's view (on Soph. El. 48 ff.) that Attic tragedy was ‘wholly indifferent’ to it. And one can see why later scholars have objected to the very idea of anachronism as irrelevant and misleading. Ehrenberg, for example, wrote in 1954: ‘It is entirely mistaken to distinguish between mythical and thus quasi-historical features on the one hand and contemporary and thus anachronistic on the other. There is always the unity of the one poem or play, displaying the ancient myth, although shaped in the spirit of the poet's mind and time.’

The Homeric description of the shield made for Achilles by Hephaestus (Il. xviii 478–608) is the type for all later ecphrases of works of art in ancient literature. It stands out as an extravagant example of the epic poet's powers of elaborate and vivid description, so extravagant that one notable ancient critic at least, Zenodotus, felt that it was more comfortable simply to athetize the greater bulk of the passage. More symphathetic commentators of modern times have sought ways of integrating the scenes displayed on the divine artefact with the primary subject-matter of the Iliad; the most common approach is to take the Shield as a summary of all human life, a mirror of society in all its aspects, against which to measure the significance of the narrow range of warfare and death that dominates the rest of the poem.

The requirements of internal coherence and external relevance also guided the interpretative strategy of ancient critics less austere than Zenodotus. This paper is an inquiry into the ways that antiquity perceived and exploited the Homeric Shield of Achilles. In the first section I examine early Greek responses to the question of the contextual function of a decorated shield such as that of Achilles.

Factoids—a word coined by Norman Mailer in his introduction to Marilyn—are mere speculations or guesses which have been repeated so often that they are eventually taken for hard facts. There is something decidedly unbiological about such factoids: the tendency to get stronger the longer they live is one of their most insidious qualities. Factoids occur in all branches of scholarship and many are of course still well disguised—their complete discovery would create havoc in the subjects concerned. Archaeology, converted from treasure hunting into an historical discipline, is for obvious reasons prone to create a number of factoids.

The process by which mere hypotheses attain the apparent rank of established fact, without ever having been proved, presents a linguistic and a psychological aspect. Linguistically, words or particles indicating the hypothetical character of a statement are dropped one by one in a process of constant repetition. The subjunctive is exchanged for the indicative, and in the end the factoid is formulated as a straightforward factual sentence. Psychologically, the repetition of unproved hypotheses is facilitated by an attitude which is as indispensable in research as it is ambivalent: a certain amount of implicit trust in the results of other scholars' research.

The fine modern scholarship on Athenian law has concentrated on (a) the scope of particular laws, and (b) the technical aspects of the legal process. This paper attempts to examine how the legal system worked in practice.

The Athenians classified legal cases in various ways. On the one hand there was a division by subject matter between private cases (dikai idiai) and public cases (dikai dēmosiai), and on the other there was a division according to the procedure involved. There were a number of specialised procedures, but the most important procedural division was between those cases which anyone was free to bring (graphai) and those which only an interested party could bring (dikai in the narrow sense). These divisions on grounds of subject matter and on grounds of procedure overlap, but they are distinct and neither corresponds to the modern European legal division between civil and criminal cases.

The reputation of Alexander and the judgement on his character have oscillated between two extremes down the ages. At times he was taken by ancient moralists as the prime example of one corrupted by power and ambition. At other times, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has been seen as the ideal leader of men in war and peace. These extremes of interpretation are possible because his brief and incomplete career contained a number of highly dramatic episodes of different kinds, which can be enhanced or explained away to produce either effect. The most extreme instance leading to an adverse judgment is the massacre of the Branchidae, and it is not surprising that Tarn, whose work on Alexander represented a peak of eulogy, argued strongly for the view that: the event was entirely fictitious. He has been followed by most writers since then, who usually do not try to account for this episode; in fact they simply omit it. This is strange, for the evidence that it occurred goes back to Callisthenes, the earliest to write on Alexander's campaigns, and an eye-witness of the happening, if it occurred.

‘The historical value of an object depends not so much on the nature of the object as on its associations, which only scientific excavation can detect.’ The full significance of an inscription may equally rely on knowledge of its archaeological context. In practice, however, users of inscriptions often neglect this aspect. The standard commentaries, new and old, on Alexander's famous ‘edict to Priene’ (hereafter ‘AE’) tend to ignore the physical context of the inscription (I.Priene I) and to treat the text as an isolated or one-off document. Consequently no-one reading Dittenberger, Tod or now Heisserer would learn that it is one of a series of public inscriptions with a consistent theme belonging to an ‘archive’ of connected texts. The inscription is not discussed as one of a group of documents, its monumental setting is largely ignored and the rich corpus of Prienian inscriptions is not exploited fully as a control and source for the historical background of the AE. It is the purpose of this article to try to show that the AE cannot be properly studied in this archaeological limbo. ‘The associations’ of the AE are vital. They provide a new perspective from which to study the text.

In Book xii of the Greek Anthology many of the old motifs of erotic poetry are applied to the love of boys. Among these motifs a form of the carpe diem calls our attention. Youth and the beloved's charms are there granted a very short span: the growth of hair marks the end of a boy's attraction. Of this basic idea we find numerous variations in over thirty epigrams, Hellenistic and late, not unlike those on the more general motif of fleeting youth. We shall group the poems and interpret them according to the variations of this motif.

The boy is now willing to love when it is too late: the hairs have come. The lover, whether by threats, warnings, or vaunts that it has happened, implicitly rejects the advances of the young man.

Ia. Our first epigram (Asclep. 46 = A.P. xii 36) is headed Ἀσκληπιάδου Ἀδραμυττήνου. If by Asclepiades of Samos it would be chronologically the first in our list. Yet the ascription is far from certain, and the choice of the epigram as our starting point is, therefore, arbitrary.

Why did Athenian vase-painters choose the colours they did for the vases they decorated? Why did they choose black figures on red, or red figures on black; why were lekythoi often decorated on white ground? These are basic questions, but have rarely been asked. Many books and articles deal with the technical aspects of how these effects were achieved, but never seem to ask why. A few minutes' conversation with a modern potter will dispel any illusion that the colours so familiar from Attic pottery were the only ones compatible with the local clay. Even the orange of that clay was made more intense by the addition of a thin reddish slip, and white-ground can scarcely be accidental. It is legitimate to enquire why a particular range of colour schemes was adopted.

In the village of Beşköprü, about five kilometres to the south-west of the town of Adapazari in western Turkey, and just to the north of the main Istanbul–Ankara highway, there stands a large well-constructed bridge; its fabric is generally in good condition apart from the destruction of a short section of the causeway near its eastern end to permit the passage of the branch railway line to Adapazan. Although the bridge now only spans two minor side channels of the small stream called the Çark Deresi, which drains Lake Sophon (modern Sapanca), there is no doubt that the bridge was originally designed on the orders of the emperor Justinian to span the mighty Sangarius (modern Sakarya) which at present flows in a south–north direction about three kilometres to the east of the bridge. The only detailed first-hand account of the bridge is still that by Texier, whose description has to be corrected on some important points.

M. L. West in JHS xcix (1979) 132–3 speculates that the Chorus of Prometheus Pyrphoros may have been the Meliai. There is, however, only one reference that might just possibly link the Meliai with the gift of fire to men: Hesiod Th. 563,

οὐκ ἐδίδου μελίῃσι πυρὸς μένος ἀκαμάτοιο.

When the Erinyes catch up with Orestes in Athens they find him clutching the archaic wooden statue of Athena and invoking her aid along with that of Apollo (Eum. 235 ff.). The Erinyes scorn his prayers and bid him hear their ‘binding song’: ὕμνον δ’ ἀκούσῃ τόνδε δέσμιον (306). Wecklein in his 1888 edition of the play remarked ‘erinnert an magische Künste’ and quoted Laws 933a, where Plato, discussing murder by poison, makes brief mention of the popular belief in sorcerers, incantations and binding spells (καταδέσεις). Subsequent commentators repeat Wecklein's brief note nearly verbatim and then elaborate it along two different lines, either claiming some vague Orphic source (Thomson 1938) or citing Wuensch's Defixionum Tabellae Atticae (Blass 1907; Groeneboom 1952). More recently, Lebeck argued that the ostensible title (‘binding song’) is incompatible with the actual content of the stasimon (Apollo's encroachment on the Erinyes’ power); she concluded that the title is irrelevant or at best only of secondary importance.’ Thus on the whole, this ὕμνος δέσμιος has been treated as a remnant of magical or chthonic lore too obscure to have any real bearing on our understanding of the immediate dramatic situation in Eumenides. I shall argue to the contrary that the song is closely related to a specific kind of curse tablet used to affect the outcome of law cases in Athens as early as the 5th century bc, and as such it is important to the dramatic context of a tragedy which depicts the mythical foundation of Athens’ first homicide court.

ἀμμένει need not have an object: ἐλεινὸν can be taken adverbially. The only substantial objection to the text is thus metrical, for reasons already advanced by others and summarized below.

The paradosis has ἐλεεινὸν. However, the forms δεεινός, κλεεινός and ἐλεεινός are identified as invalid in Attic by Porson and Ellendt. Porson plausibly explains the several corruptions in the MSS at e.g. Aesch. PV 246 as due to scribes’ over-familiarity with Homer and ignorance of most metre.

The contention of this paper is that the Macedonians had their own names for the offices in their state; that Hieronymus, who spent a long life in the Macedonian administrative service, used those names in his history; and that some of the names have come through to us—not always consistently—in the accounts which were derived from the history of Hieronymus. Those accounts are in Diodorus, Justin and Photius' epitomes of Arrian and Dexippus. The account in Curtius is not inspired by Hieronymus; it is therefore not discussed here.

In JHS xcvii (1977) 54–63 I argued against the view that the prevalent Spartan attitude towards Athens throughout the Pentekontaetia was aggressive and that in the First Peloponnesian War Sparta was eager to engage and crush her, being prevented only by the barrier of Mt. Geraneia with its Athenian garrisons. There seemed to me to be four main difficulties in this view:

(a) The Corinthians succeeded in crossing Mt. Geraneia with their local allies early in the war, even though the Athenians were already present: so why not Sparta?

(b) A full Peloponnesian army was able to reach central Greece by sea after the war had been in progress for some three years, and their reluctance on that occasion to cross the northern frontier of Attica even after they had defeated the Athenians seems inexplicable on this view.

The so-called Second Preface in Arrian's Anabasis is an important statement of both his conception of the work and its place in his intellectual biography. Despite extensive scholarly discussion, interpretative problems remain. Close literary analysis furthers understanding.

On July 17, 1977 what appears to be the most recently found ancient Greek musical fragment was unearthed some twenty-five meters northeast of the palaestra at Epidaurus. Carved on red limestone in the third century ad, the inscription consists of eleven fragmentary hexameters from a hymn to Apollo and other divine offspring, only the first line of which seems to contain suprascript musical notation. M. Mitsos published the inscription three years later without musicological analysis, and S. Sepheriades then attempted a preliminary analysis at the 1982 Eighth International Greek and Latin Epigraphical Congress. The present paper explores in greater detail the purported music of this brief, enigmatic inscription in the hope of furthering (but certainly not completing) our understanding of this, a possible fourth ancient Greek musical fragment on stone.

Our knowledge of the early life of Alexander the Great is based upon very slender literary evidence. Arrian devotes only a few sentences to the years prior to Alexander's campaigns. Plutarch's coverage of Alexander's youth is also very condensed, and both he and Arrian rely almost exclusively upon pro-Alexander sources such as Ptolemy and Aristoboulos. The books of Curtius which deal with the early years of Alexander have been lost, and Diodorus' coverage is as usual very scanty. Justin's epitome of Trogus is among our longest and most comprehensive accounts, but it is often rhetorically unreliable and careless with details. Yet apart from occasional flashbacks and allusions in these sources and a few fragments of other historians, this evidence—heavily biased, meager, and unreliable as it is—comprises all we know concerning the first twenty years of Alexander's life.

In the opening lines of the Eumenides Aeschylus' Pythia says that the first prophetic deity at Delphi was Gaia. She was followed by two of her daughters in succession, Themis and Phoibe. Phoibe gave the oracle to Phoibos as a birthday present, and it is from her that he had his name.