The New York crater, 14.130.15 (PLATES I–III), was first published by Miss Richter fifty years ago. Since then it has frequently been accorded illustration and comment both for its figure scenes—notably the prothesis, the chariot friezes and the occurrence of ‘Siamese twin’ warriors—and for its place in the development of Attic Geometric vase painting. There are, however, a number of features in the figure scenes which have escaped notice hitherto in publication, and which are of some interest to the student of Geometric funeral practice and iconography.

The prothesis itself (PLATE II a) is conventional enough in most of its details. The child crouching over the legs of the dead man extends his arms over them. The child standing behind the head tears his hair with one hand while the other seems to be stretched towards the dead man's mouth. Certainly no branch or fan is held—the motif found in some other prothesis scenes. Before the child's leg is a small fish. The gesture and the fish (an odd filling device, if it is one) are not readily explained but may be borne in mind when other features of the frieze are discussed.

Following the example of Meleager and Philip of Thessalonica, Agathias of Myrina, poet, lawyer and continuator of the Wars of Procopius, compiled in the sixth century A.D. an anthology of epigrams, generally known as the Cycle (κύκλος) which, together with those of Meleager and Philip, was incorporated into the later anthology of Constantine Cephalas and partially survives in the Palatine and Planudean anthologies. But unlike Meleager and Philip, Agathias included only the work of contemporaries, representatives of that Indian summer of Greek poetry which illuminates the age of Justinian. And it has always been assumed that the Cycle was published during Justinian's reign, and that the (unnamed) Emperor to whom Agathias' (surviving) preface is addressed is Justinian himself.

But the arguments on which this dating is based are as flimsy as could well be imagined, and neglect moreover a number of material pieces of evidence which point decisively to a later date. P. Waltz, editor of the (alas unfinished) Budé Anthology, observes that the allusions to Italy and Rome in Agathias' preface (AP iv 3) ‘permettent d'en dater la publication des années qui suivent la reprise de Rome par Narsès’ in 553. Not a very helpful terminus post quem. In 553 Agathias was hardly more than 20. No one, surely, would wish to suggest that he published the Cycle before he was out of his teens.

The literature is now full of references to the scientific achievements (so-called) of the Presocratics, and the earlier the figure (and consequently the less information of reliable authenticity we have of him) the more enthusiastically do scholars enlarge his scientific knowledge—a proceeding which, of course, has plenty of precedent among the doxographers and commentators of antiquity. The classic example is Thales, whom I have discussed in an earlier article; it is chastening (but hardly surprising) to find that the views there expressed have had very little influence on the traditional, vastly exaggerated estimate of Thales as the founder of Greek mathematics and astronomy and the transmitter of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian wisdom. Professor Guthrie, in a work obviously destined to be the standard English textbook on early Greek philosophy for decades to come, can still say (p. 58) ‘…according to an unchallenged tradition, [Thales] had himself visited Egypt’ (my italics), despite my demonstration that nowhere in the primary group of sources is Thales' name linked with Egypt, and that the whole story of his introducing Egyptian mathematical knowledge to the Greeks is a mere invention (probably by Eudemus) based on separate, unrelated statements by Herodotus. One must, however, be thankful that the uncritical acceptance of Thales' alleged prediction of a solar eclipse is now discountenanced.

Aristophanes' encomium on Eros (Smp. 189c 2–193d 5) is a story with a moral. Once upon a time, all human beings were double creatures, each with two heads, two bodies and eight limbs. Then, by the command of Zeus, each double creature was cut in half, and so humans as we know them came into being. Every one of us ‘seeks his other half’, and this search is Eros. If we are pious, we may hope to be rewarded by success in the search; if we are impious, Zeus may cut us in two again, and each of us will be like a flat-fish or a figure in relief.

The story is amusingly told, and the comedies of the real Aristophanes are also amusing; but when Sykutris says that the story ‘reminds us of the plot of a comedy’ and when Robin constructs a hypothetical comedy out of it, they are confounding essence and accident. The affinities of Aristophanes' story do not lie with his own comedies or with those of his contemporaries, but elsewhere.

The extant plays of Aristophanes are firmly rooted in the present, and each of them explores the possibilities of a fantasy constructed out of the present. Mythology was exploited by the comic poets—rarely by Aristophanes himself, more extensively by some others—in order to present humorously distorted versions of the myths which were the traditional material of serious poetry. Some comic titles point to theogonic myths (e.g. Polyzelos, Birth of the Muses and Birth of Dionysos) or to myths about the era before the rule of Zeus (e.g. Phrynichos, Kronos, and the younger Kratinos, Giants and Titans).

Among the manifest improbabilities in the tale of Aristeides' message to Themistocles on the night before Salamis, most notable, certainly, is that the information Aristeides imparted supplied indeed a lack but effected no response until its duplication by the crew of a Tenian trireme. The rejection with which the episode has been met is thoroughly deserved. But a problem, that of motive, remains, and other questions arise. For unlike the setting of the story, which has some claim to dramatic, though not to historical, validity, the supposititious message cannot, as it neither illustrates character nor exaggerates truth, simply be explained as a fanciful and harmless accretion to the Aristeides legend. How, then, came the story to be told? One possibility is worth considering. As it is likely prima facie that Herodotus derived his account of Aristeides at Psyttaleia (viii 95) from the same source that brought him to Salamis with his message, the message may have been intended to smooth his way to Psyttaleia. The story of his deed on that island, therefore, deserves attention.

The account arouses suspicion. Its context, the epilogue to the battle, where Herodotus metes out blame and praise, is not reassuring. Whatever information was related to Herodotus about the exploit, it was not embedded, apparently, in the sequence of events of which the battle of Salamis consisted. He seems to have only the vaguest notion of the relation of the exploit to the battle as a whole— viii 95; and lightly does he accord to Aristeides, apparently a private person, the leadership of the landing party.

One of the features of the Homeric poems which has often excited comment is the marriage system, both in its apparent difference from that prevailing in classical Athens and for its own inconsistencies as they appear on the surface. Dr M. I. Finley in a paper to which my debt will be evident throughout this discussion, despite my disagreement with some of his arguments, has shown that the old theories of ‘Bride-Purchase’ will not really hold water, and that at a Homeric marriage the bride was part of an exchange of gifts or services between the prospective bride-groom and the bride's father, and that these gifts were called ἕδνα.

What this paper attempts to do is to suggest that (1) there were in fact two different patterns of marriage in Homeric, as in classical times; (2) that ἕδνα belonged essentially to only one of these patterns; (3) that ἕδνα were not δῶρα, although they had many of the facets of gifts, most particularly in that they expressed the giver's quality, and this in turn carried the assumption that to be outdone in ἕδνα, as in gifts, would incur a slur on a man's rank and quality as an ἀγαθός, and this would lead to criticism and ἐλεγχείη; and (4) (in a second part) that, if the analysis of ἕδνα attempted in the first part of this paper is acceptable, the apparent confusions and contradictions in the arrangements proposed for Penelope's second marriage disappear.

In Book viii ch. 6 Polybius describes the structure and use of a siege-engine, the σαμβύκη, so called from its resemblance to a musical instrument of that name. The purpose of this article is to review the evidence for the shape of the musical instrument, and for the structure of the siege-engine, and for possible points of similarity between them.

References to the musical instrument are not uncommon in literature from the fifth century B.C. onwards; there are a number of points on which they agree. The σαμβύκη was a stringed instrument, and was generally thought to be of non-Greek, near-Eastern origin. The alternative view, that it was invented by Ibycus the lyric poet of Rhegium, was probably based on a fanciful etymology, and can reasonably be disregarded. The derivation of ἰαμβύκη (probably just a variant spelling) from ἰαμβός is also fanciful.

As regards chronology, the σαμβύκη seems to have been introduced into Greece in the late fifth century B.C., and was at that time regarded as something of a novelty by the comic poets. Some later scholars, however, saw fit to correct this impression, and point out that it was in fact a very ancient instrument. Its main use was apparently to provide a musical accompaniment for debauchery: in fact, so disreputable was the instrument that the word for a female player of it, σαμβυκιστρία, was virtually synonymous with πορνή.

In the paper that I read to the Third International Congress of Classical Studies in London in 1959 I tried to delimit the sphere of human reflexion and freedom of decision, as opposed to the sphere of divine intervention, in Homeric poetry. The conclusion I reached was that there was a mutual and often indissoluble fusion of these two spheres. In trying here to say something about the significance of personal decision in the dramas of Aeschylus, I am in fact continuing my inquiry in a different literary genre. But the problems are basically the same: in both cases the question is what significance the poet ascribes to the personal decisions of the human agent within the frame-work of a basically God-governed ‘Welt-bild’, how the limitations upon his freedom are defined, and what degree of responsibility is thus entailed.

I began the previous paper with my thanks to Bruno Snell, who was the first to clarify these problems of free human action with which we are faced in epic poetry, and I must now begin by thanking him again. Professor Snell, in his book Aischjlos und das Handeln im Drama, which appeared in 1928, emphatically placed the personal decision of the human agent in the centre of his interpretation of Aeschylus; he even went so far as to regard a decision based on free choice as the most important element in the development of a genuinely tragic conflict. I cannot enter upon the history of these problems; however, I should like to emphasise the importance of the question and the interest it has recently aroused in scholarly discussion.

The study of Athenian history in the fifth century, and particularly in the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, derives much of its flesh and blood from inscriptions, but most inscriptions lose their full value if they cannot be dated. From the Peace of Nicias in 421 onwards it was customary to include the name of the archon in the prescript of decrees, but before the Peloponnesian War the practice was rare and random. The alliances with Egesta, Leontini and Rhegium (IG i2 19, 51, 52) were dated in this way, but not the treaty with Hermione (SEG × 15). The settlement imposed on Chalcis by Athens after the crushing of her revolt is not dated (IG i2 39), whereas earlier regulations for Miletus (IG i2 22) include the name of the archon of the year. Sometimes a single archon's name will date a whole series of records: the first tribute list, for example, is explicitly dated by archon, but the name is lost and the lists that follow are numbered only in relation to the first; the archon, however, is recorded in the thirty-fourth list, and the name is preserved, Aristion archon for 421/0, and from this we can safely infer that the first list records the payments of 454/3. Similarly the early accounts of the Parthenon, while recording the first secretary of the Boule, do not mention the archon and merely add the number in the series; but from 437/6 at least the archon's name was added, and the survival of the name of Crates, archon for 434/3, at the head of the thirteenth list enables us to date the remaining records in the series.

Arkesilas III succeeded to the throne of Cyrene after the royal power had been considerably curtailed. In the reign of the previous king, Battos III, Demonax of Mantineia had carried out a tribal reorganisation and constitutional reform which was, according to Herodotus, democratic. But since the leading opponents of Arkesilas III were the nobility, it is likely that the reforms of Demonax were supported, or at least acquiesced in, by the aristocrats. As Chamoux argues, the system of tribes created by Demonax will not have diminished the local influence of the aristocratic landowners, although the more recent colonists who arrived from all parts of Greece in the reign of Battos II were given a place in the new constitution. The arrangements of Kleisthenes a generation later at Athens provide both a comparison and a contrast. He added the Athenian δῆμος to his aristocratic faction for political reasons, just as the Cyrenaean nobility accepted Demonax, and similarly the democracy of 508/7 was principally a tribal reform. But, at Athens, after the fall of the tyranny, there was a pressure towards democracy which could not have existed at Cyrene a generation earlier, and it was precisely because he had to break down the local influence of the nobility that Kleisthenes devised the system of trittues, which is not paralleled at Cyrene. The Demonax reform resulted in constitutional power for the landowning class at the expense of the monarchy.

The Purpose of this article is to present some of the available evidence for the persistence from late Mycenaean times into the early sixth century of ‘bull's-head’ vase handles, as first exemplified on the Warrior Vase from Mycenae (Athens 1426; plate V). The very similar handles on certain Cypriote vases now dated to around 700 B.C. suggest that a continuous tradition culminated, in this area, in a revival. For convenience I shall speak throughout of bull's-head handles, though in many cases it is open to question whether a bull or calf's head, or the head of a mountain sheep or goat was intended; and the same handles have been differently interpreted at different times. Generally when they appear on Cypriote vases it has been thought that a wild goat is intended, this being the principal wild animal on the island. In fact of course the modelling is often so perfunctory that nothing very convincing zoologically is achieved.

The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning and function of certain expressions used for conveying thanks in Greek. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of all the expressions which are used in this connexion, but is restricted in scope to the Greek of the classical period and to those expressions which were in common use in conversation to convey thanks when an offer, gift, etc., was being accepted or declined. These expressions it will be convenient to call ‘responsive formulae’.

The ordinary expressions for feeling or conveying thanks combine χάριν with a verb such as εἰδέναι or ἔχειν, but as readers of Greek literature will have become aware, if only subconsciously, these combinations are not to be found used responsively in the prose or verse of the classical period. Before this sweeping generalisation provokes outright contradiction, let it be freely admitted that cases of the responsive use do exist.

The ten Minoan and two Island seals, which are here published for the first time (plate X), form part of the Bosanquet Collection of the City of Liverpool Museum. Although there exists a card-index for the collection, the entries for these twelve seals give no indication of their provenience: apart from No. 9 below which is described as having been ‘bought in Athens’ there is no record of whether they were found in the course of excavation or were purchased by Professor R. C. Bosanquet. Bosanquet was himself, with R. M. Dawkins, one of the original excavators of the site of Palaikastro, but there is no evidence to show that the Minoan seals were discovered on or near the site; and in the absence of any indication, their origin must remain unknown.

The seals themselves are in varying states of preservation. No. 7 is perhaps the least satisfactory, showing signs of extreme wear, although several of the others are by no means negligible additions to the Corpus. Nos. 1, 3 and 5 in particular are excellent representatives of their type. Indeed these ten Minoan stones offer a surprisingly wide sample of the total range of Minoan Glyptic, from the three-sided prism seal of MM IA (No. 1) to two LM III lentoids (Nos. 9–10), and including on the way examples of hieroglyphic, architectural and talismanic designs. Of the remaining two, No. 11 is a good and characteristic example of the Melian winged creature type, while No. 12 is a curious and enigmatic seal, probably also to be regarded as an Island gem.

In the recently published Corpus Vasorum Ferrara I there are two errors for which I may be held partly responsible. Pl 43, 1 and p. 17, right, below. In my manuscript in the Ferrara Museum I called the artist ‘the Painter of Ferrara T.512’; but later, perceiving that I had already used the term for a minor cup-painter, I changed the name of the artist of stemmed plates to ‘Painter of Ferrara T. 13’. Pl. 43, 1 is by die Painter of Ferrara T. 13 (ARV2 p. 1306, foot, no. 1), not the Painter of Ferrara T.512. CV pl. 44, 3: this I have never attributed to the Painter of Ferrara T.101 as stated in CV, but always to the Painter of Ferrara T. 143A. Two plates were discovered in Tomb 101: one by the Painter of Ferrara T.101 (ARV2 p. 1306, top, no. 1) and one by the Painter of T.143A (ARV2, p. 1307, no. 7). I should not, however, have described the subject as head of Dionysos, but as a female head.

984 ἐπεὶ F: ἐπί Tr ξυνεμβόλοις FTr: corr. Casaubon 985 ψαμμίας FTr: corr. Wecklein ἀκάτα F: ἀκάτας Tr: corr. Wilamowitz παρήβησ' Tr.

The above is the text of Wilamowitz and Fraenkel, which I believe correct, requiring only interpretation. Wilamowitz translated (Gr. Trag. ii 85), ‘Die Zeit ist grau geworden, seit der Sand von Aulis aufflog, da zur Troiafahrt das Heer die Taue löste’; Fraenkel similarly but more literally, ‘Time has grown old since with the throwing-in of the mooring-cables the sand flew up, when the naval host set forth to Ilion’. Denniston-Page make the linguistically correct objection me ‘sand does not “fly up” when mooring-cables are “thrown in”’. But this misses the real point, viz. that no one ever throws in a cable when a ship is leaving—it is pulled in: throwing occurs only when a ship is coming in to land.

In this chapter Diodorus is specifically giving the numbers of the various contingents who actually crossed into Asia with Alexander in 334 B.C. (οἱ μὲν οὖν μετ΄ Ἀλεξάνδρου διαβάντες εἰς τὴν Ἀσίαν κτλ.), that is to say, the numbers of the advance-party sent over by Philip in 336 are not included in his totals. If this fact is borne in mind, a possible emendation and solution can be offered to the much disputed clause Θρᾷκες δὲ πρόδρομοι καὶ Παίονες ἐννακόσιοι.

By an unfortunate error a line of type was omitted from page 103 of Axel Seeberg's article ‘Hephaestus Rides Again’ in JHS lxxxv (1965). After line 1 of section (3) on that page, the line ‘and stationary pair. In the former, lay figures as on the krater, but bearded’ should be added.