The focal point of this article is the detailed study of the concept of hybris recently published by N.R.E. Fisher, and the differences of interpretation which exist between that study and other recent work on the concept. Though I dispute much of what Fisher has to say about hybris, I also defend many of his most important insights, and readily admit that my own task has been made immeasurably lighter by his industry and integrity in the presentation of a wealth of valuable data. That I take issue with his thesis is no token of disesteem, rather a recognition that he has made a strong case for his interpretation and that disagreement with a study as well documented as his must rest on detailed discussion of individual passages.

Forensic oratory must of necessity deal with the subject of law, and rhetoric which aspires to be of use in the courts must offer the potential litigant or logographer guidance on the way to deal with questions of law. Accordingly, Aristotle devotes some space to this issue in the Rhetoric. Although the morality of Aristotle's advice has been debated, little attention has been paid to the more basic question of the soundness of his advice. The aim of this paper is to examine Aristotle's presentation of the rhetoric of law in the Rhetoric in comparison with actual practice in surviving forensic speeches. The fourth century Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, commonly ascribed to Anaximenes of Lampsakos, also offers advice on the manipulation of argument from law, and the general similarity of that advice to Aristotle's suggests either direct influence or a common source. Anaximenes' discussion of the use of law in forensic oratory is both more brief and less systematic, and will be given more cursory treatment.

In this article I am concerned to form a view of the interaction of Homer's Iliad with other texts prior to his. This is an issue whose legitimacy, particularly in English-language scholarship, has been rather obscured by scholarly discourse in terms of oral poetics, an issue I shall discuss presently. Yet, unless they are completely new fictions, the Cyclic epics do show us some of the material with which Homer was bound to be interacting, and it has been the achievement of the Neoanalysts to detail that interaction. In the following I do not claim to add greatly to the repertoire of neoanalytic data, but I do hope to build on it some sense of Homer's achievement in this area and to make clear our entitlement to respond to Homer's intertextuality.

Among early Greek historians, Herodotos and Thukydides, owing to their survival, inevitably dominate our attention. But of course they were not alone. We have some substantial citations and numerous shorter fragments of many contemporaries. Difficulties of interpretation and the authority of their greatest modern interpreter, Felix Jacoby, have for many years prevented a thorough re-evaluation of early historiography and the position of Herodotos within it. The present paper is a contribution to this effort. In the first section, the list of Herodotos' contemporaries is drawn up as a necessary starting-point. We shall find that Jacoby's assessment of the evidence, and in particular his late date for some historians, is to be rejected, and that his conclusions about Herodotos' position in the development of historiography, which still dominate the field, lack at least part of their foundation. In section II an alternative method, in the absence of certain chronology, is developed for identifying the salient characteristics of the individual historian; the method owes something to narratology. It is illustrated from the fragments of the authors listed in section I, together with those of other historians down to the beginning of the fourth century. Section III then focuses on Herodotos; it will emerge that the most distinctive thing about him is his constant talk about sources and how to assess them. Other historians (and, indeed, poets) knew that sources contradict each other, but Herodotos first realised that this situation exists as a theoretical problem requiring the development of new methods. His is a second-order, or meta-cognitive awareness. Section IV goes on to deal, as seems necessary, with Detlev Fehling's theory about Herodotos' sources, since if he is right Herodotos is not really serious about them. An epilogue draws attention to a fifth-century passage in the Theognidean corpus with striking parallels to a passage in Plato's Protagoras; the two together throw light on Herodotos' proem, and confirm the picture drawn in this paper of his historical activity.

The bridging of the Hellespont by Xerxes was a unique achievement. How was it done? The Chorus of Elders in Aeschylus' Persians expressed their wonder at ‘the flax-bound raft’, and Herodotus described the construction of the two bridges, each with warships as pontoons, with cables well over a kilometre long, and with a roadway capable of carrying a huge army. Classical scholars have generally found these accounts inadequate and even inexplicable, especially in regard to the relationship between the pontoons and the cables. The Hellespont has strong currents which vary in their direction, turbulent and often stormy waters, and exposure to violent winds, blowing sometimes from the Black Sea and sometimes from the Mediterranean. How were the warships moored in order to face the currents and withstand the gales? Did the warships form a continuous platform, or was each ship free to move in response to weather conditions? What was the function of the enormous cables? How and where were they made? Did they bind the pontoons together? Did they carry the roadway? How were they fixed at the landward ends? This article attempts an answer to these questions through the collaboration of a classical scholar and a mechanical engineer.

My objective in this paper is to consider the question of the mysteriousness or numinosity of the gods in the Iliad by examining first how heroes talk about and react to the gods, and second how Homer handles fate. My aim is to integrate the findings into a wider thesis about the Iliad's narrative strategy.

Griffin (1980) 152 discusses the mysteriousness and numinosity of Homeric gods, and cites Il. i 43–52, Od. iii 371–82, xix 33–42, saying ‘It is perhaps worth emphasising that in each of these … episodes, we see not only the god behaving like a real god, mysteriously, but also the characters who are present at the moment of revelation responding to it in what can only be called a religious way: adoration or reverent silence’.

In a short article published one hundred years ago, J.W. Headlam presented the thesis that in Athenian law the function of the challenge to torture slaves was to propose an alternative method of trial outside the dikastêrion, a kind of ordeal. The thesis met immediate opposition and despite a brief rejoinder by Headlam to his first critic it has been rejected by those writing on Athenian law up to now, including G. Thür, whose monograph is by far the most important work on the subject. However, the significance of the issue compels us not to let it drop. For it touches not only upon the use of torture, which affects our understanding of the position of slaves, but also upon the Athenian rules of evidence, indeed, their entire method of dispute resolution. The purpose of the present paper is, first (I) to revive Headlam's thesis in a modified form and (II) to answer the criticisms against it. I shall argue that Headlam was essentially correct with regard to the judicial function of the challenge, but his association of it with the trial by ordeal was misplaced. Finally, (III) I shall touch upon the influence of rhetoricians in Athens, for they appear responsible for some of the disagreement.

The strong point of D. Mirhady's work (hereafter ‘M.’) lies in his interpretation of the rhetorical handbooks (technai). I agree in general with Part III, though admitting my lack of specialist knowledge in this field. To a large extent Part III confirms my observations on procedural law published in 1977 (Beweisführung, quoted supra n. 4). I approve of the opinion that, despite the use of written rather than oral testimony, the formulas, by which the evidence was used, did not change (M. after n. 62, see my recent article in: Die athenische Demokratie, ed. W. Eder [Stuttgart 1995], p. 329 f.). M. states an appealing hypothesis, that the introduction of written testimony did not so much change the procedure as provide the cause for a new handbook on rhetoric to be written, which he suggests was the common precursor to Aristotle and Anaximenes.

That the physical description of a biographer's subject constitutes a natural and (one should think) necessary element of the genre seems an unremarkable premise on which to entertain a reading of Plutarch. In such chronicles of wasted time as we possess, after all, descriptions of the fair and the not-so-fair are hardly unusual, regardless of literary category. And, at least since the time of Leo, the prevailing scholarly assumption has been that Plutarch's Lives ordinarily include an account of the subject's appearance as a standard structural component of the biography—an idea still to be found in P. Stadter's magisterial commentary on the Pericles. One ought perhaps to hesitate in speaking of generic requirements for Plutarchan biography, if only because we are now more than ever quite uncertain in which exact literary tradition our author is most appropriately situated, though it is fair (I think) to observe how commonly physical descriptions are to be found in the extant biographies of Cornelius Nepos and in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars. The narrative conventions of biography, one instinctively supposes, require a personal description. Moreover, the eikonismos was by Plutarch's day a staple of rhetorical technique, useful to encomium and invective alike, and regularly discussed in handbooks. Literary and rhetorical expections, then tend to support Leo's proposition.

At p. 319 n. 203 of my recent book, I discuss

the appearance of the letters ΑΙΔΟΣ … designating the figure of Artemis on an Attic red-figure amphora (depicting the rape of Leto by Tityos) by Phintias (Louvre G42; ARV2 23,1 [Paralipomena 323, Addenda 154; see now also LIMC ii pl. 275, Apollon 1069, vi, Leto 34; PLATE I] …). That this constitutes an association between the goddess and aidôs is the position of Kretschmer [Die griechischen Vaseninschriften (Gütersloh 1894) 197], Norwood [Essays on Euripidean drama (Berkeley 1954) 76 n. 2], and Schefold [Götterund Heldensagen der Griechen in der spätarchaischen Kunst (Munich 1978) 68].

Poésie d'apparat et de célébration, la lyrique de Pindare s'identifie à la préciosité d'un métal ou d'une pierre, et à l'art somptueux de l'orfèvrerie ou de l'architecture. Rivalisant avec elle, l'éloquence d'apparat reprend et développe ces images à l'époque impériale, pour se représenter et exposer son esthétique, l'esthétique de la seconde sophistique, qui, inspirée de celle de Pindare et de Platon, unit la fable et la vérité de l'ailleurs, l'illusion et la sagesse divine.

At Knossos Mackenzie seems again to have performed the duties that we would now designate as those of the site supervisor. But the exact nature of his responsibilities, the limits of his authority and the personal relationship between him and Evans are something of an enigma. The problem has important scientific implications in view of the controversy that has developed since 1962 about the dependability of some aspects of Evan's publications. The conundrum, in short, concerns the exact roles that the two men played in the gradual evolution of theories from the moment of discovery of crucial evidence until the final arguments and conclusions appeared in definitive publications.

In a note to volume cxi of this journal, I observed that the word , although a diminutive, did not at all periods describe a piglet. In the classical period, it seems to have meant a small but not necessarily immature pig; in Hellenistic Delos and in Egypt, a pig fullgrown or nearly so, apparently synonymous with the non-diminutive ; then by the first post-Christian century the term came indeed to mean ‘piglet’, a meaning previously expressed by .

The debate over the chronology of the history of Athens in the fifth century BC has entered a new phase recently with the publication by Mortimer Chambers and his colleagues of physical evidence that seems to confirm Harold Mattingly's view that a crucial inscription bearing three-bar sigmas and tailed rhos (IG i 11) was cut during the archonship of Antiphon in 418/7, and not during that of Habron in 458/7 as was generally thought.