The nature of the bond connecting the work of Ammianus Marcellinus with the now fragmentary history of Eunapius of Sardis or with Zosimus' Νέα Ἱστορία is an old and intriguing problem rather more notable for the multiplicity than for the finality of its hypothetical solutions. The question arises out of the perception that Ammianus and Zosimus provide coincidental material in their accounts of Julian's Persian expedition. Eunapius figures in the equation because, as we generally assume, it was he whom Zosimus followed. Since all scholars but Dillemann are satisfied that these correspondences indubitably require some hypothesis of literary affiliation, all of the formal possibilities have one by one been tried. Sudhaus, whose investigation of the similarities proved influential, denied that Ammianus could have been used either by Zosimus or by his source (Eunapius); he affirmed instead that Ammianus and Eunapius must have been linked by their own use of a common source, namely, Oribasius, the physician of Julian and his companion on the Persian expedition.

At the close of the Cyclops adventure Odysseus piously sacrifices to Zeus the ram that has carried him out of Polyphemus' cave. Yet the god spurns his offering and ponders instead the destruction of Odysseus' ships and their crews (ix 553–5):

These lines need explaining, as they present two difficulties, one formal, the other thematic. How can Odysseus know what Zeus is pondering? As a first-person narrator Odysseus assumes temporarily the role of the epic poet, yet without being given the latter's omniscience. He retains therefore the restricted perspective of an epic character which precludes any precise knowledge of supernatural processes.

It is now a commonplace view that fine pottery may not have formed the major part of any cargo in antiquity. The archaeological evidence of shipwrecks seems to confirm the view held by most students of the ancient economy that pots—both fine and coarse—were merely ‘parasitic’ on the main items of trade, staples, metals and slaves. However there are some who plead a special case for the fine wares—especially the figure-decorated—during the archaic and classical periods. J. Boardman, for example, though in principle in agreement with the general view that pottery accompanied ‘more important materials’, still seems to hold the view (which he formulated in 1964) that ‘Corinthian vases were being carried for their own sakes, as objets d'art, or at least best plate’. This paper will examine the recent claim—in response to those who, it is maintained, have ‘demoted the consignments of Greek pottery, plain or decorated, to “space-fillers” or “profitable ballast”’—viz., that ‘Athenian decorated pottery was not cheap and … was as valuable and profitable a trade commodity as most that any classical ship took on board’.

For at least several decades of its official history of performance at state festivals—the period usually and, in part for this very reason, known as that of Old Comedy—Athenian comic drama was marked by an exceptional degree of indulgence in ridicule and vilification of named or recognizable individuals: ὀνομαστὶ κωμωιδεῖν, as it became termed by Hellenistic scholarship. In character and extent this practice belongs to a cluster of generic features (alongside, most notably, obscenity and outspoken comment on topical political issues) which give urgency to the question of the relation between the comic stage and the laws, mores, and values current in Athenian society of the time.

A major contention of our book Hellenism in the East was that the most profitable way for making progress in understanding the Achaemenid and Seleucid empires was to try to evaluate, sensitively, the very disparate types of evidence within their own social and cultural contexts, however difficult this might be in practice. In the case of the Antiochus I cylinder we are confronted by an inscribed object whose significance lies as much in its physical form as in the content of the text it bears. These aspects are inextricably intertwined as part of a tradition specific to Mesopotamian culture—object and text combined are the physical representation of a major, longstanding, sociopolitical institution for which a mass of earlier evidence exists. It is all too understandable that Greco-Roman scholars, who have been the primary students of the hellenistic world, should find it hard to know how to approach such material emanating from an unfamiliar cultural milieu. Yet, for once, this text is not fragmentary—it is a long, well-preserved document, easy to read and readily accessible in translation which in itself demonstrates an acknowledgment by hellenistic historians of the potential importance of this non-Greek text for understanding Seleucid history.

Discussion of the problems must begin with the allegations made in Lysias' speech XXX) Against Nicomachus:

When he became writer-up (anagrapheus) of the laws (nomoi), who does not know how he defiled the city? His instructions were to write up the laws of Solon in four months, but he set himself up as a lawgiver (nomothetes) in the place of Solon, instead of four months he made his office last six years, and every day he was taking money to insert some laws and wipe out others. (3) We were brought to this point, that the laws were doled out to us by his hand, and opposing litigants in the courts would produce conflicting laws, each claiming to have received them from Nicomachus. When the archons tried to impose fines on him and to bring him to court, he refused to hand over the laws: the city was brought to the direst disaster before he could be removed from his office and made to submit to examination (euthynai) for what he had done. (4) And yet, gentlemen, after failing to pay the penalty for those offences, he has done the same thing with his present office. First, he has been writing up for four years, when he could have had done with it in thirty days.

In or around 594 BC Solon was given extraordinary powers as διαλλακτὴς καὶ νομοθέτης, mediator and lawgiver, to try to solve a crisis in archaic Athenian society. His solution was termed the σεισάχθεια, disburdenment; it was a liberation of the land and the people.

The primary literary evidence on this most important episode in Athenian history is Solon's own testimony. For more information recourse must be had to authors who were writing not less than one hundred and fifty years—or five (30-year) generations—after Solon's reforms were enacted. The most important of these later sources is the author of the Athenaion Politeia, henceforth AP, who was writing about two hundred years after the event.

Gordion, the principal city of Phrygia, was an important center for the worship of the major Phrygian divinity, the Great Mother of Anatolia, the Greek and Roman Cybele. Considerable evidence for the goddess's prominence there have come to light through excavations conducted at the site, first by Gustav and Alfred Körte and more recently by the continuing expedition sponsored by the University Museum in Philadelphia. These include sculptural representations of the goddess and numerous votive objects dedicated to her. The material pertinent to the goddess and her cult in Gordion during the most prominent period of Phrygian culture, the eighth and seventh centuries BC, is similar to that from other contemporary Phrygian centers. Even after the loss of Phrygian political independence in the seventh century, the cult of the goddess in Anatolia continued to flourish, and the older traditions of iconography and votive types were maintained. During the Hellenistic period, however, we see a different version of the goddess at Gordion. The earlier Phrygian forms of cult image and votive were gone, and in their stead are figurines and votive objects which are clearly of Greek inspiration. The Mother goddess was still at home in Gordion—several stone and terracotta representations of her from this period attest to that—but her visual image had become thoroughly Hellenized.

The shadow of Hecataeus, magni nominis umbra if ever there was one, constantly obstructs our attempts to assess and understand Herodotus' principles, objectives and achievements. Perplexing and elusive as the details of Hecataeus' work may be, no-one disputes his importance as an intermediary between catalogue-poetry such as we associate with Hesiod, with its clear subordination of geography to genealogy, and the more sophisticated method of synthesising knowledge about the oikoumene demonstrated by Herodotus; some have even argued that the great Milesian has a better claim than Herodotus to the title of pater historiae.

On a fall night before Issus in 333 BC, we are told by Curtius Rufus, Alexander ascended by torchlight to the summit of a lofty mountain, and in accordance with ancestral custom performed sacrifices to the chief guardian deities of the place: an intriguing historical remnant, the more challenging because Curtius provides no other details, and no other Alexander account gives reliable information about this particular display of piety. Consequently the gods in question remain unknown. The purpose of this study is to establish the likelihood that Alexander did in fact perform these rites, and to determine the probable identities of the deities in the light of what is known about religious cults at Issus before he arrived.

Why the Athenians of the classical era seem never to have set their own greatest historical moments into representational art has remained a major problem for historians and art historians alike. In attempting an answer, perhaps more attention should be given to one of the explanations by Aischines of why it would be wrong for the Demos to honor Demosthenes with a crown (iii 183-192). In brief, Aischines says that in the great days of the democracy, the days of unforgettable victories, it was undemocratic for a great man to be exalted in art when the achievement in truth belonged to the Demos. He adds pointedly that some great men of that era adhered to this patriotic ethic themselves, while others like Miltiades had their attempts at prominence in representational arts rebuffed or sharply diminished in scale.

References to the apobates have been collected by Reisch, Gardiner, Patrucco, Kyle and others, but the exact nature of this specialized event remains obscure. Patrucco in particular laments the scarcity of literary sources which he suggests provide little information. Yet the fullest account of the apobates appears in a lengthy passage in the corpus of Demosthenes (lxi 23-29, the Erotikos or Erotic essay) which strangely is not mentioned by any of the above scholars. I propose to update our knowledge of this contest, particularly as it relates to the fourth century B.C., in the light of this ‘new’ evidence. Because of the romantic nature of the essay, the reader should perhaps observe caution and allow for exaggeration on the part of Demosthenes, but even so several important observations can be made.

The new inscription of Public Imprecations from Teos, apart from many other interesting features, represents what is surely the most important new evidence to accrue for a generation on the relations between Greek colonies and their mother cities. The inscription was admirably published by P. Herrmann in the editio princeps, and helpful contributions followed from Merkelbach and Lewis before its republication in SEG xxxi (1981; appeared 1984) 985, and, most recently, by McCabe and Plunkett.

One of the most vexing problems facing students of ancient athletics has been the method by which overall victory in the pentathlon was determined. Testimony from ancient sources assures us that the overall victor won three events of the five contested, but that a man of lesser talent could very well emerge victorious. Because one athlete in a large field of competitors could not be expected to outclass his opponents in three of five events, two interpretations of what occurred in the pentathlon have arisen. One theory suggests a progressive elimination of competitors so as to reduce the field and facilitate the emergence of one champion. Another theory allots points to contestants for higher and lower finishes and sometimes allows elimination of athletes who consistently finish behind others.

The modern convention for printing dialogues includes printing the names of the speakers on the margin at the beginning of their statements. But this practice was virtually unknown in ancient Greek dialogues. Instead, the most common convention for showing the shift from one speaker to another is through punctuation such as the colon, the παραγράφος or a horizontal stroke. Recently, N. G. Wilson has attributed the inclusion of the names of the speakers at the transitional points in Greek dialogues to Theodoret of Cyrus (mid-fifth century CE; composed Eranistes in 447) who, in this view, ‘deserves the credit for devising a literary convention that is now regarded as essential’.

A swell of recent books on Greek athletics has resurrected, often no higher than a footnote, an old question: when did Greek athletes begin to exercise nude? Bronze Age archaeology and the Homeric poems make it fairly certain that athletic nudity was not practiced before the late eighth century. The evidence for its introduction is, however, contradictory. A complex, confused, and predominantly late tradition crediting the innovation variously to the Olympic victor Orsippos of Megara (or of Sparta), Akanthos of Sparta, or to an unnamed Athenian athlete, places it in the eighth or seventh centuries. But both Thucydides and Plato report that it was only shortly before their time that Greeks stopped wearing the zoma and began to compete nude.

Commercial buying and selling had replaced mutual gift giving long before Aristotle's time, and he gives fair exchange primacy over the other forms of justice in book five of the Nicomachean Ethics just because it provided philia for an activity which he knew to be more basic than any other in the life of the polis. He calls it ‘the salvation of states’, and repeats the judgement in the Politics.

Yet the account of fair exchange in EN v 5 has a reputation for obscurity which ought to seem surprising. There is no agreed meaning for the formula ‘as builder to shoemaker, so many shoes to a house’ (1133a23-5, 32-3), and chapter 5 has become the poor relation in book five partly for this reason. The formula has a simple explanation, however, which has been overlooked because of a mistaken belief that inequality enters into it.

L. claims that the reconstruction of the trieres proposed in AT, being based on late 5th century and 4th century evidence, is misleading for the earlier ships, and that the Greek ships of 480, unlike the later ones, were not built for speed and manoeuvrability, and carried more than ten hoplites. He goes on to say that the Greeks won at Salamis ‘because their ships stood up to ramming better’ than those of their opponents. For this last view he cites no text in evidence, and as far as I know there is none. There is the statement in Herodotus (viii 60a) that the Greek ships were heavier; but L. attributes this greater heaviness not to thicker planking but to the greater number of armed men they carried, which would entrail a broader hull and bulwarks but not thicker planking.

Aristophanes' Acharnians, performed at the Lenaea in 425 BC, is the story of Dicaeopolis' unilateral withdrawal from Athens' political system and her seemingly endless war against Sparta. What seems never to have been appreciated is the extent to which the hero's motivations are specifically economic in character. Dicaeopolis resents both his unhappy new status as an urban cash-consumer of staple goods, and the fact that he is excluded from all the pleasures the war-time city still has to offer, while others continue to enjoy themselves. It is a combination of these resentments which drives the hero to break ranks with his fellow citizens and make his separate peace with the Peloponnesians, and both problems are accordingly resolved in the ‘ideal’ new world of the second half of the play.

It is sad that Acharnians is so rarely produced on stage; it is also strange, for, visually as well as verbally, the play is immensely inventive and funny, and has deservedly engaged a great deal of critical and interpretative attention. One cannot but hesitate to add to the abundant literature. However, Mr E. L. Bowie's theory, recently propounded in this journal, that Dicaeopolis represents Eupolis would, if correct, have interesting consequences both for our interpretation of the play and of some of the surviving fragments of Eupolis, as Mr Bowie shows.