The continuing and polemical debate over the authenticity of the Peace of Callias has become so complicated that it would be a positive service to scholarship to remove some of the more contentious evidence and reduce the scope of the argument. That is the object of this article. A fragment of Callisthenes has bulked very large in the modern literature. According to the received view the Olynthian historian denied the existence of a formal peace between Athens and the Persian King and alleged that the King observed a de facto limit to his empire, never venturing west of the Chelidonian islands. For sceptics this is grist to the mill. A writer of the mid-fourth century rejected the Athenian patriotic tradition, and it is assumed that he had good reason to do so. On the other hand defenders of the authenticity of the Peace stumble over Callisthenes' apparent denial and are forced to counter-denial or to sophistry. What is common to both camps is a tendency to refer to the evidence of Callisthenes without noting that the original text is lost. The ‘fragment’ (which it is not) is preserved by Plutarch in a sophisticated passage of source criticism and due attention needs to be paid to his mode of citation. Only then can we begin to elicit what Callisthenes may have said and reconstruct the probable context in his historical exposition. As always, we need to approach the unknown through proper study of the known.

Passages from Plato often inspired in late antiquity a speculative profusion of ingenuities that can scarcely have been intended by the author. Even in the Timaeus, however, few passages could be found which were to undergo so much elaboration as the sparse and incidental remarks in the Sophist concerning Being, Life and Mind. These terms are given some prominence in the Enneads of Plotinus, where it remains nonetheless very difficult to reconstruct a hierarchical order either of dignity or of procession, or to give the triad that cardinal place in his system which is certainly accorded to the triad One-Mind-Soul. If the term Life is to take a place between Being and Mind it must be sharply distinguished from Soul, which is always inferior to the intellect in the ontology of the true Platonist. Plotinus is one of the most exact of philosophers, and if he fails to make the discriminations which would be necessary to anyone wishing to understand this nomenclature, it is because he is not expounding such a triad even as a subordinate part of his system: at most it might be thought to be implied or presupposed.

Aktaion's own hounds devoured him, convinced by Artemis that he was a deer. This grim reversal, the great hunter who dies like a hunted beast, was the strongest element of the mythic tradition associated with the Boiotian hero and inspired numerous scenes in Greek art. Aktaion's Offense, on the other hand, received little iconographic attention before the imperial era, and Greek literature accounted for Artemis' hostility in a variety of ways. The chronology of the extant sources suggests a neat sequence of misdeeds, and the resulting succession of versions is the object of a well-established scholarly consensus. The information which survives is actually too scant and too fragmentary to bear so straightforward a reading, but a critical approach can suggest the outlines of more plausible, if less neat, picture.

From Draco onwards, if not before, the laws of Athens were preserved in writing, and some of them were also displayed to public view: notably the laws of Solon, written up on objects called axones and kyrbeis. No other publication of Athenian laws had such renown as this, or these, of Solon's. In fact it is hard to find any publication at all on the same scale, or any publication but of single documents in scattered places. In the later fifth and the fourth centuries, the period best known to us, each new document is published, if at all, on a separate stele. Moreover, there is no thought of aligning this stele with any existing publication, either of similar laws or of laws in general; instead the stele is set up at whatever spot seems indicated by the business at hand; if the business is urgent, more than one stele is set up at more than one spot. Such episodic publication is the rule for laws as well as other public documents. Or to put it differently, for a long while the Athenians did not distinguish laws from other binding decisions, mainly decrees of the Assembly; if they did not so distinguish when publishing on stone, they did not either in their filing system of papyrus and whitened boards. By the early fourth century a distinction was made, and afterwards insisted on, between ‘laws’ and ‘decrees’; but even then professed laws were published as before, on separate stelae in various places. From these facts we might be tempted to conclude that any general or comprehensive publication of laws, as of Solon's, was so to speak an accident, occurring only when many so-called laws needed to be published all at once, as will happen at an early stage of society.

In Kreon's famous edict in Sophokles' Antigone the punishment for attending to the dead Polyneikes is death by public stoning (36). In the event,at the climax of his bitter argument with his son Haimon, who is betrothed to Antigone, Kreon threatens to have Antigone killed in front of Haimon's eyes (760–1). But when Haimon then angrily departs, Kreon orders Antigone to be imprisoned in a deserted place, underground in the rock, with a little food (773–5). Various motives have been suggested for this change of penalty, e.g. that the city may not want to cooperate in the stoning of Antigone. But the main factor must be the aptness of imprisonment underground for the specific case of Antigone. As Kreon himself ironically puts it, ‘there she can ask Hades to save her from death, Hades who is the only god she reveres’ (777–8). Imprisonment underground, in what is described as a tomb, suits the crime of one who has seemed too devoted to Hades, and produces the complementary inversions described by Teiresias (1068–71): the dead Polyneikes is above the earth, while the living Antigone is below, in a tomb.

Given the increasing interest in ancient military history it seems timely to set Perikles' Peloponnesian War policy of avoiding major land battles in the context of the military options available and how these worked in practice. I should, however, sound one note of caution from the start. My discussion (especially sections I and II) represents a modern assessment of the defence strategies and options available to Athens in 431. While Perikles and his successors undoubtedly considered how best to fight the war, it would be misleading to even imply that their thought processes involved conducting an analysis anywhere near as sophisticated as the one which follows. Quite simply they lacked the theoretical concepts and even the technical vocabulary to do so. There was no history or tradition of staff college appreciations in fifth century Athens and no body of technical or theoretical military literature, and it seems clear that even experienced and successful commanders did not look at war with the same sort of theoretical constructs which we take for granted today.

This essay presents a new interpretation of what happened in the opening of the Pylos campaign; one that rests mainly on an attempt to discover, in Thucydides' text, Demosthenes' original plan for the campaign and the Spartan reaction to it. Thucydides says little about plans for Pylos; indeed, he seems to describe this part of the campaign as unusually haphazard and fortuitous. Unfortunately, his account of it (iv 2–16), which is our only real source, is so compressed, obscure, and elliptical that no interpretation of these events can now approach proof or certainty. All scenarios and explanations are therefore speculative. They can be evaluated only by their degree of consistency with all the data, unsatisfactory as these may be, and by their relative plausibility—a subjective and fallible measure at best since human affairs so often turn out less plausibly than we expect. Despite these limitations and caveats, rigorous analysis is possible, and can reveal enlightening and previously unnoticed connections both between events within the Pylos campaign, and between these difficult chapters and other, clearer parts of Thucydides' text.

Plutarch of Chaeroneia stands almost alone among Greeks of the Roman Empire in displaying in his works an extensive knowledge of, and interest in, Rome and Romans. The knowledge of Roman history and the many notes on Roman institutions and usages seen in the Lives together with the work specifically devoted to Roman customs, the quaest. Rom., and the celebration of Rome's good fortune, the de fort. Rom., testify to his great sympathy with the Roman way of life. For us Plutarch is a unique bridge between Greece and Rome. But what sort of bridge does he himself envisage between Rome and his own world? In particular, how far does Plutarch believe that Romans share his own Hellenic culture? In answering this question I shall argue that in his presentation of Romans Plutarch often shows himself to be conscious that Hellenic culture had been imported to Rome and could never be fully taken for granted among Romans as it could among Greeks, and that as a consequence it is worthwhile for him as a student of character to consider how well and with what benefit Romans absorb it.

The starting-point of this paper is one of the most disastrous pieces of advocacy in modern legal history. In October 1960, Penguin Books were prosecuted under Section 2 of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. On the first day of the trial, Mr. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Senior Treasury Counsel (i.e. Crown Prosecutor), did his best to wreck his case on the strength of one remark. He had previously tried to show that he was himself a man of the world: ‘Let me emphasize this on behalf of the prosecution: do not approach this matter in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct, mid-Victorian manner’. He now proceeded to work this out in practice: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?’

A fundamental assumption throughout this article is that the text of Homer is no different from that of other classical authors, since it has been preserved by the same kind of manuscript tradition. The difference is that while all our texts go back to the editions of the Hellenistic scholars, the gap between these and the author is relatively short for fourth and fifth century writers, but very much longer for Homer, if we assign to him a very approximate date of the late eighth, or even early seventh, century.

Seven inscriptions have been classified as recognition decrees for the Delphian Soteria. One of these is so fragmentary as to defy analysis. In a second, only the end of the decree survives, and relatively little can be learned from it. The other five decrees have been the subject of considerable disagreement since Pomtow's publication in 1914.

Arrian's Anabasis is distinguished by two prefaces. The first takes the form of an introduction explaining his use of previous historians. The second takes the form of a digression after Alexander has crossed the Hellespont. It asserts the need for an historian worthy of Alexander's achievements and proclaims Arrian's own worthiness for that position, dismissing previous historians (i 12.2–5). Alexander did not find his Homer as Achilles did, choral poets did not write for him as they wrote for the tyrants of old Greece, and Xenophon made even the inferior exploits of the Ten Thousand better known than his. Yet no man had achieved so much before.

The combination of these words: ήδύν–ἄλυπον was labelled ‘litoteslike’ in a former note in this journal (JHS civ [1984] 177); the present note aims at suggesting a more fitting label.

The meaning of the words is clear: Kritias describes the poet Anakreon as an extremely pleasant man: ‘sweet, not sour’, ‘pleasant, not a sore-head’. This high degree of pleasantness is made clear by stating the central idea of pleasantness (ἡδύν) and juxtaposing to it the negation (ἀ-) of its opposite (-λυπ-); this is tantamount to the use of a litotes, which points in its turn to extra emphasis: cf. e.g. Hom. Il. xviii 46, where ‘the meaning of the name Nemertes seems to be strengthened by the immediately following name Apseudes' (JHS civ [1984] 177).

But the attributes named seem to belong even to the majority of men, poor creatures though they may be. Are we to say then that in so far as they are satisfied with themselves and think they are good, they share in these attributes? Certainly no one who is thoroughly bad and impious has these attributes, or even seems to do so. They hardly belong even to inferior people; for they are at variance with themselves, and have appetites for some things and rational desires for others.

Creon addresses the citizens of Thebes with a τόπος familiar in Greek poetry: it is impossible to tell what someone is really like from initial appearance, and therefore we cannot know anyone's quality until it is too late. Here the idea is expressed in a more specific form, a variant on the ἀρχὴ ἄνδρα δείκνυσι attributed to one or other of the Seven Sages. The only real difficulty editors have found in Antigone 175–181 is the use of γάρ in 178. How do 178–181 (‘I think the timid ruler worthless’) explain 175–177 (‘You cannot know anyone until he has ruled’)? This problem led some to reject the text given above, but the majority of editors, including the most recent, seem to have accepted it.

In CMS II.3 1. Pini set out a very persuasive case for the view that there are no good stylistic arguments against the authenticity of the Herakleion ring CMS II.3.326 (H.M.216?) [PLATE IV(a)]. Here I want to argue that there are, nevertheless, strong iconographical reasons for doubting that authenticity.

I will begin by reexamining two iconographical arguments against the ring's authenticity which have been considered and criticised by Pini. In my view, though his general criticisms are correct, the particular modalities and forms involved in the case under consideration are such as to suggest that the arguments in question, when focussed in certain particular ways, do have force in this particular situation.