The theme of this paper is intolerance: its manifestation in late antiquity towards the pagans of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the immediate reactions and long-term attitudes that it provoked in them. The reasons why, in spite of copious evidence, the persecution of the traditional cults and of their adepts in the Roman empire has never been viewed as such are obvious: on the one hand no pagan church emerged out of the turmoil to canonise its dead and expound a theology of martyrdom, and on the other, whatever their conscious religious beliefs, late antique scholars in their overwhelming majority were formed in societies whose ethical foundations and logic are irreversibly Christian. Admittedly a few facets of this complex subject, such as the closing of the Athenian Academy and the demolition of temples or their conversion into churches, have occasionally been touched upon; but pagan persecution in itself, in all its physical, artistic, social, political, intellectual and psychological dimensions, has not as yet formed the object of scholarly research.

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars (usually comfortable citizens of a colonial empire) who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’.

Lines 380–7 have been much discussed, sometimes in isolation, without due regard for context in speech, scene, and play; and sometimes with regard primarily to the history of ideas, or of Greek moral values. Phaidra states that virtue may be subverted, despite knowledge, by pleasure, of which αὶδώς—dual, harmless and harmful—is an instance. A notorious problem of interpretation centres on the related questions of how αὶδώς, shame can be listed among ήδοναί, pleasures; and of what is meant by dual αὶδώς. The interpretation here advanced is bold, but in essence simple: in this context, αὶδώς is a euphemistic metonymy for ἔρως, which is harmless and pleasurable in its proper place (allied with sexual σωφροσύνη), but potentially troublesome or painful (bringing sexual αὶσχύνη).

The so-called ‘Cyrenean Foundation Decree’ describes and paraphrases what appears to be the oath of the seventh-century Theran colonists who founded the city of Cyrene in Libya. This oath contains a conditional self-imprecation, a common enough feature of many Greek oaths, but one which in this case involves wax effigies in what can best be described as a ritual employing ‘sympathetic magic’:

Frequent references have been made by several scholars to the use of Gregory's writings as a ‘mine’ for Byzantine hymnography. The discussions have usually stopped with three or four quick citations of the instances that best exemplify the borrowing. To date there has not been any systematic effort to research the topic in greater detail. This failure is understandable. Such a research presupposes knowledge not only of Gregory's writings, a major task in itself since his works occupy four volumes of PG, but also of Byzantine hymnography which is scattered throughout several volumes used by the Orthodox Church in its daily heortologion. Adding the possibilities that might exist among the mss of Grottaferrata and those that might exist in the Vatican Library, one can easily understand the magnitude of the task and its complexities. This paper attempts a limited but still daunting undertaking: the ferreting out of the borrowings from Gregory by the Byzantine hymnographers whose hymns are still used by the Orthodox Church. Beyond the obvious borrowings by the hymnographers from Gregory lies the insoluble problem of what may be directly borrowed and what indirectly. How can one prove that similarities or even identities in the language denote direct borrowing of one author from another? The complexities of such an investigation notwithstanding, the effort should be made, even on a limited scale, because of the interest and the challenge involved.

‘Death is bad for those who die, but good for the undertakers and the grave-diggers’. (Dissoi Logoi i 3)

And for archaeologists and for epigraphers as well, even though epitaphs, and especially simple or formulaic ones, are probably the most understudied and unloved area of ancient epigraphy. Yet the mere fact of an inscribed epitaph indicates deliberate and intentionally enduring commemoration, and therefore embodies a social attitude; epitaphs thus constitute a matter of historical importance that can be studied for the very reason that so many—in Athens over 10,000—survive. Most Athenian epitaphs which have been found have been dated, and for approximately two-thirds of them a general find-spot has been recorded (very few are actually found in situ with a body or grave-goods). Temporal and spatial variations within the distribution of Athenian epitaphs (Part I) prompt not only the question of why aspects of this habit should change over time, but why the habit of epitaphs should exist at all; the answer suggested here links the function and distribution of Athenian epitaphs to changing concepts of (and importance attached to) Athenian citizenship. For epitaphs function as more than testimonials to grief: they represent what survivors saw as defining the deceased (Part II), and the significantly greater number of epitaphs in fourth-century Athens derives from Athenians' emphatic definition of themselves as citizens at that time (Part III). Finally, the Athenians's use of tombstones has no parallel in the classical Greek world (Part IV), for the Athenians' developing perceptions of their own city and of their own special relationship, as citizens, to it, were also unparalleled.

A judicious combination of literary sources and archaeological research has often offered rewarding historical insights. In Macedonian studies such attempts have tended to be less fruitful, due to the scanty nature of the material and literary evidence. Now that archaeological investigation has expanded so widely in Northern Greece, it may be time to reassess aspects of Macedonian culture which have in the past been tackled with more enthusiasm than actual evidence, not surprisingly in view of the age-long interest in the people who shaped the Hellenistic world.

At Lysistrate 614-705, after the actors have left the acting area, the two half-choruses, instead of addressing the audience directly in a parabasis as we expect, engage in a debate which displays some of the features of a regular parabasis. The male half-chorus after removing their outer garments (615) perform a lyric stanza followed by an epirrhema, whereupon the women likewise prepare to sing by disencumbering themselves (637): ἀλλὰ θώμεσθ᾿ ὧ φίλαι γρᾶες ταδὶ πρῶτον χαμαί’ ‘but, old dears, let's first put these things on the ground’. The two most recent commentators both suppose, as scholars have long assumed, that the women at this stage remove their outer garments. I wish to suggest an alternative possibility, that the female half-chorus remove only one garment, at 686, and that at 637 they merely put down their pitchers in preparation for their first lyric stanza. This is not a new suggestion, but it has never been adequately discussed.

Ephesos was one of the great cities of the ancient world; in the period of the Roman empire, it was the capital of the province of Asia, and on one celebrated occasion its religious life came into sharp conflict with early Christianity (Acts xix 23-41). From the earliest days of methodical excavation in Turkey, Ephesos has provided a magnet to travellers and archaeologists. Hence a problem that involves the cults and the topography of imperial Ephesos can claim more than an antiquarian interest.

Thucydides (ii 9.4) records among the allies of Athens in 431 ‘coastal Karia and the Dorians living near the Karians’. All Karia and Lykia had been brought into the Delian League after the campaigns of Kimon that culminated in the battle of the Eurymedon. A number of Karian towns then appeared in the tribute lists in the mid-fifth century, but disappeared again sometime after 440. The evidence of the tribute lists, however, presents a range of communities which were still paying during the Peloponnesian War, and to this can almost certainly be added Keramos, which paid tribute in 432/1 (IG i 280.i.31).

In his Vita Plotini, Porphyry recounts a colourful episode which, for a brief moment, brings to life the dynamics within the lecture room of Plotinus in Rome. The author explains how he was in the habit of posing questions to Plotinus frequently and persistently while his teacher was conducting his philosophical discourse before a mixed body of listeners. On one occasion, such an exchange between the two over the issue of the connexion between the soul and the body continued intermittently over a period of some three days, with the following outcome (Porph. V. Plot. xiii 12-15):

The tombs at Vergina in Macedonia continue to produce more questions than answers. At the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute in San Francisco a colloquium entitled ‘The royal tombs at Vergina: continuing issues’ was presented on these tombs, their dating, and their possible inhabitants. The participants in this colloquium were not in agreement about the identity of those laid to rest in the tombs, or when these burials took place, or the nature of the grave goods which accompanied the funerary rituals. We must continue to anticipate and hope for progress in the debate over these crucial questions.

In September 1991 I came across two parties of frogs in the bulrushes on either side of a still little pool at the Ain Qilt, some ten miles east of Jerusalem. The two parties were calling to each other in turn, as though singing antiphonally. The remarkable fact which struck me was that each group had a different chant, the one distinctly chanting only βρεκεκεκέξ, while the other replied equally distinctly with a consistent κοάξ, κοάξ. I observed this phenomenon for some ten minutes, but was not able to ascertain other differences between the two groups, such as sex, age, or temperament; but I thought that this fact, whatever its explanation, might be a significant contribution to field-research on Aristophanes.

In the course of discussing Kleisthenes' reforms, the author of the Athenaion Politeia makes the following statement:

And he made those who were currently living in each of the demes demesmen of one another, so that they would not examine the new citizens by calling out their patronymic, rather they would announce them by demes; and from this practice, the Athenians call themselves after their demes.