Robert Cook has again placed us in his debt by two characteristic Notes in JHS cvii (1987) 167–71 which sharply dissect, scrutinise and reject some recent hotheaded theories. Of one directed against a theory that I (with others) have proposed over recent years, he writes (n. 2) ‘and I think he [Boardman] agrees with much that I say’. In this he is correct.

The problem is the possibility of the political manipulation of myth in the archaic and classical periods in Athens. Cook admits some political allusions which reflect ‘results of political action [but] need not have political intent’ in the popularity of Theseus from the end of the sixth century on ‘with official encouragement it seems’.

Most academic disciplines are bedevilled with perennial cruces which seem destined to sprout up generation after generation to vex the ingenuity of their practitioners. The science of nautical archaeology is no exception. It is, however, doubtful whether any of its problems can vie in this respect with that of the ancient trireme. The arrangement of the oars, date of introduction, inventor and many other difficulties have been for decades—sometimes for centuries—the subjects of bitterest controversy. In these discussions the evidence of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the earliest surviving Greek historian, has played an all-important role, in particular an extremely interesting passage which occurs in his account of Ancient Egypt in Book ii.

When he had desisted from the canal Necho turned his attention to military campaigns and triremes were constructed, some for the Mediterranean and others in the Red Sea for operations in the Erythrian Ocean. The slipways of the latter are still to be seen. And these ships he put to use when the need arose, (ii 159, 1–2)

Since the late nineteenth century it has been almost universally accepted that Sophocles gave lodging to the cultic snake or statue of Asclepius when it was brought to Athens in 420 BC, that he raised an altar or altars for the god, and that in recognition for these services as the so-called ‘Receiver’ of Asclepius he was heroised after his death under the name Dexion. This story derives chiefly from a Byzantine dictionary article, the earliest known form of which dates from the second half of the ninth century.

The vase painting reproduced in Fig. 1 is taken from a large red figured pyxis in the National Museum at Athens. Both lid and body are decorated with wedding scenes, which will be described in detail below (see p. 150); we are here more particularly concerned with the group on the body, in which the bridal pair are represented as driving to their new home. They are seated in a low cart drawn by two horses; the bride appears to be sitting in front of her husband, but is probably meant to be by his side. The horses are led by a young man, whose exomis and pointed cap mark him as a servant. The attempt to render the cart in a realistic manner has involved the artist in great difficulties. The two wheels, which are of the ordinary four-spoked type, are supposed to be seen in perspective, but they are drawn as if they were both on the same side of the cart, the one over-lapping the other.

The territory once occupied by the Mithridatic kingdom of Pontus lies between the Euxine and the northern edge of the high Anatolian plateau. It consists of a long strip of seaboard and a broader central tract of alternate river valleys and mountain ranges. The mountains and valleys run more or less parallel to the coast, and rise one behind another up the slope, like lines of gigantic entrenchments scored along a hillside. The channels whereby the Iris and the Halys pierce their way northwards are mere rifts cleft across through the ridges. The main trend of hill and dale is from east to west.

The northernmost chain of mountains steeply overhangs the Euxine and cuts off the seaboard from the country behind. Roads across this barrier are few and difficult. In the whole stretch of coast, from Amastris on the west to Trapezus on the east, Amisus is the only open door into the interior. Here, between the Paphlagonian mountains and the Paryadres range, the Halys and the Iris find an exit to the sea, and there is a slight dip—it cannot be called a gap—over which a great road penetrates to Amasia and Cappadocia. The road is not really difficult, but it is toilsome, for although this central section of the country is relatively low, yet the ridges and valleys pursue their course without interruption across the hollow, and if the former are not quite so high as in the east and west the latter are deeper.

It is the purpose of this paper to draw the attention of classical scholars to an Arabic theory of prophecy and divination which, though known for a long time in the original text and in modern translation, has quite escaped the notice of those interested in the history of late Greek philosophy and its continuation in mediæval Islam. I mean here by prophecy and divination, like the Arabic author I am going to deal with, all kinds of apparently supernatural knowledge, concerned with the realm of the transcendent as well as with particular events in the future and special happenings at the present time. The possessors of this knowledge are characterised as individuals of a peculiar excitability and a range of imagination which exceeds the normal. Attempts at explaining phenomena of this kind in rational terms were not uncommon in Greek philosophy from Plato's days down to late Neoplatonism. I propose to show that the Arabic theory continues these Greek discussions and to suggest that it represents, at the same time, a facet of Greek thought which has not survived in its original context.

Al-Fārābῑ (c. A.D. 870–950), a well-known Muslim Neoplatonist and Aristotelian of outstanding importance in the history of Islamic philosophy, deals at some length with prophecy in his work The Views of the People of the Best State. Since, in accordance with the Greek tradition, he connects divination and prophecy with an innate faculty of the soul itself, and does not describe it as a state of possession by supernatural powers, his explanation of these phenomena is linked up with his analysis of man and his Neoplatonic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Prophecy is auxiliary to the rational faculty and as such an indispensable ingredient in man's perfection; divine inspiration (wahy) can be understood as the union of the highest philosophical knowledge with the highest form of prophecy; but the primacy of reason and philosophy is maintained, prophecy being confined to the faculty of imagination, which is given a less humble position than in Aristotle's De anima, but still ranked as inferior to philosophy.

A few words will suffice to introduce the following report on the work of the Cyprus Exploration Fund at Salamis. It was intended to prefix a brief sketch of the history of the city, but it was found that to be of value the sketch would outgrow the limits defined by the occasion, and the present account is already too long. That history is often difficult and obscure, and I hope to handle it in another place, but the main outlines are sufficiently familiar, for which it is enough to refer the reader to the material accumulated by Engel in his monograph “Kypros,” a book which, although published half a century ago and by no means free from errors, still remains the standard authority on the subject. The site has been described by many travellers from Pococke and Drummond to the latest account by Mr. Hogarth in his ‘Devia Cypria.’ Our plans and Mr. Tubbs' narrative are a sufficient supplement to their notices.

Excavation at Salamis is no new project. General di Cesnola ‘spent large sums of money at this place on three different occasions, but with no result in any way satisfactory.’ His brother Major Alexander di Cesnola for some time kept a band of diggers at work among the tombs between the monastery of S. Barnabas and the village of Encomi. His extraordinary topographical remarks show that he had little or no personal acquaintance with the site. After the British occupation Sir Charles Newton took up the project on behalf of the British Museum, and through Mr. C. D. Cobham, the Commissioner of Larnaca, employed the well-known archaeologist M. O. Richter to conduct an excavation on the site of Salamis. Part of a Roman house, including a bath and small mosaic, was discovered, and is marked on our plan. Beyond a few remarks in the Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 1886, vol. ix. p. 204, I am not aware that any account of this excavation has been published. Herr Richter has also worked on the necropolis of Salamis, of which he has given some description in the Mittheilungen des Instituts in Athen 1881, vi. p. 191 and p. 244. Readers of this Journal will remember his account of the prehistoric ‘Tomb of S. Catherine’ in the fourth volume.

Two postwar studies have given a new direction to discussions of the oligarchic revolutions in Athens. In 1956 Mr G. E. M. de Ste Croix attacked the accepted doctrine that the régime which succeeded that of the Four Hundred, in the autumn of 411 (which I shall refer to as the intermediate régime), was one in which all political rights were restricted to men of hoplite status: instead he suggested that the basic rights (membership of the assembly and δικαστήρια) were restored to all who had enjoyed them before the democracy was overthrown, and that the privilege reserved for men of hoplite status was that of holding office. Professor B. R. I. Sealey has advanced a stage further on this line of reasoning, and argues that this form of modified democracy is what was wanted also by those who campaigned in the spring of 411 for rule by the Five Thousand: then, as in the autumn, all citizens were to retain their basic rights, and the Five Thousand were to be the body of men eligible to hold office. This allows Sealey to play down dislike of democracy, as such, and to attach more importance in the agitation for reform to other motives, such as the desire to save public money by excluding from office men who could not afford to serve unless they were paid a salary. My object here is to suggest that this new interpretation is mistaken. Much will have to be taken for granted on other issues, but it may be helpful if I first reveal my presuppositions in a brief note on the sources and the kind of narrative I would reconstruct from them.

The humour of the passage in the Frogs (1419 ff.), in which the tragic poets reply with riddles on burning political issues, is explicable: research on the Eumenides shows that in this play Aeschylus projected political notions in much the way that he is presented by Aristophanes speaking in the Frogs: concentrating the attention of the spectator on the past of the Areopagus and on the circumstance of its foundation, he touches directly on the question which arose in 462–1 through the abolition of the political competence of this body, but he replies to it through a parable which is enigmatic for us. It is obviously such an expression as this that Aristophanes had in mind. It rests with philological and historical criticism to show whether in surviving tragedies other than Eumenides themes of an immediate public interest are put forward under the cover of myth, themes which, through ignorance of the date or of the exact conditions of the composition of the plays, have so far not been revealed. This essay examines from this point of view the Danaid tetralogy of Aeschylus.

The subject of the Danaid tetralogy is taken from the story of Danaos and his daughters. For this, Aeschylus could draw on both a literary source, the Danais, and probably also on Argive traditions.

Very little is known about the Danais. It did, however, include an account of the events which took place in Egypt between the houses of Danaos and Aigyptos, and it is likely, therefore, that it traced the course of this quarrel from the beginning.

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.

Empedogles' simile of the clepsydra (DK6 31B100) is a crucial document for historians of ancient science. It has been much discussed, and often quoted in evidence, in spite of formidable differences of opinion about its significance. ‘Empedocles undertook an experimental investigation of the air we breathe’ (B. Farrington). ‘The star example of a physical “experiment” in the natural philosophers, the clepsydra, was not an experiment at all, in the proper sense of the word’ (G. Vlastos). ‘All Empedocles did was to draw the explicit inference: “the vessel cannot be simply empty: the air in it cannot be nothing at all”. He did not invent the clepsydra in a laboratory’ (F. M. Cornford). The simile ‘ha tutto il carattere di una esperienza scientifica’ (A. Traglia). Now whether the fragment describes an experiment or not, it is certainly a simile, and the first step must be to understand the force of the simile. It is possible, in my view, that the differences of opinion about the fragment spring from various misunderstandings of the simile; and I propose in this article to offer an explanation of its details which I think is new and which may enable us to form a clearer picture of its place in the history of science.

The reputation of Alexander and the judgement on his character have oscillated between two extremes down the ages. At times he was taken by ancient moralists as the prime example of one corrupted by power and ambition. At other times, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he has been seen as the ideal leader of men in war and peace. These extremes of interpretation are possible because his brief and incomplete career contained a number of highly dramatic episodes of different kinds, which can be enhanced or explained away to produce either effect. The most extreme instance leading to an adverse judgment is the massacre of the Branchidae, and it is not surprising that Tarn, whose work on Alexander represented a peak of eulogy, argued strongly for the view that: the event was entirely fictitious. He has been followed by most writers since then, who usually do not try to account for this episode; in fact they simply omit it. This is strange, for the evidence that it occurred goes back to Callisthenes, the earliest to write on Alexander's campaigns, and an eye-witness of the happening, if it occurred.

The Hellenistic temple of Apollo at Didyma presents several unique features in its plan. In its exterior it resembles the typical large Ionic temple of Asia Minor with a double colonnade surrounding it, no opisthodomus, and a pronaos containing three rows of four columns each. But at this point the plan of the temple was modified in the strangest manner. For the pronaos does not lead by a great central doorway into the cella, but where the doorway should come, the worshipper entering the building found himself faced with a blank wall 1·495 rn high with above it a colossal opening 5·63 m wide (PLATE VIIa). Consequently the worshipper in the pronaos could not even look directly into the sanctuary. Instead, just above his eye-level beyond the embrasure of this ‘window’ stretched the floor of a large room, 14·04 m by 6·73 m with its roof supported on two columns. Through this room's central door (which was opposite the window) the spectator on ground level outside could catch a glimpse of the upper part of the naiskos in the inner court (the adyton).

South-western Caria terminates in an unequal pair of prongs. The longer one, commencing at the narrow isthmus of Bencik, is the Datça (Stadia) Peninsula, which in ancient times constituted the territory of Cnidus. The shorter one (or at least its tip), which ends at the Loryma headland, is Daraçya, the Byzantine Tracheia. Pachymeres in the thirteenth century spoke of the two peninsulas together under the compound name Σταδιοτραχία). The name Tracheia may in fact be ancient; for when Strabo speaks of Λώρυμα, παραλία τραχεῖα (xiv 652) it is possible that the last word should be regarded as a proper name. The Daraçya (or Loryma) Peninsula in general corresponds to the Carian Χερσόνησος mentioned in ancient literary sources and inscriptions. But the latter was probably more extensive. Herodotus (i 174) speaks of the Bybassian Chersonese, to which the Cnidian Peninsula is attached at the five-stade isthmus (Bencik). The Carian Chersonese, which figures as a syntely in the Athenian tribute lists, evidently included the Bybassians (see below, p. 62); so it may be assumed that Herodotus' Bybassian Chersonese is identical with the Carian Chersonese, and that this Chersonese extended as far north as the modern Rena Bay at the head of the Gulf of Syme, where the bay which Mela (i 84) calls sinus Bubaesius is almost certainly to be located.

At the crisis of Perikles' career, in the middle 'forties, Thucydides of the deme Alopekê, the son of Melesias, withstood the great man for a little while, until he was swept aside. He was ostracised (the last important ostracism of which we hear) and with that Perikles begins his fifteen years' principate.

Impar congressus Achilli, Thucydides is damned by another Latin tag also: he is magni nominis umbra. Thucydides, for us and for most ancient writers, means the son of Oloros, the historian; and it has long been recognised that the second Vita prefixed to our texts of Thucydides' History contains information about the son of Melesias. The difficulty of disentangling him from his namesakes, more perhaps than the overtoweringness of his rival, has deterred historians from constating about the son of Melesias things which I think can yet be constated and should be. For indeed Kimon's political heir, who resisted Perikles on behalf of the Attic aristocracy, in the days when this aristocracy (to Athens' own irreparable damage) was being ruined, is a sufficiently important figure.

No one doubts that Perikles enjoyed exceptional moral authority. Whether or not this authority was reinforced by legal powers superior to those of his fellow-generals—that is to say, by occasional grants of extraordinary powers, or by election to a generalship differing by definition from other generalships—is disputable. It has been held on the following grounds that he did possess such powers:

• (i) In certain years Perikles and another member of his own tribe were generals together, one of the remaining nine tribes being unrepresented. To be elected must have been an honour, because it was election against competition from the whole community, not from one-tenth of the community; it follows that when there were two generals from the same tribe it was the more eminent of the two who was elected and it follows from that that Perikles was elected

• (ii) In Th. i 116. 1 and ii 13.1 Perikles is described as general

• (iii) Th. ii 21.3–22.2 describe actions of Perikles in terms which are hard to reconcile with the supposition that he was acting in concert with nine other generals each with the same authority as himself. This is notably true of 22.1

• (iv) Th. ii 65.4. After his temporary disgrace in 430,

After Herodotus describes the stock-taking in Greece on the eve of Xerxes' invasion, and before he passes to the actions at Thermopylae and Artemisium, we are briefly told of an expedition to Thessaly (vii 172–4). As Xerxes approached the Hellespont, Thessalian envoys appealed for help to the Greek loyalists, who sent a large army in response. This enterprise argues a very high degree of confidence and organisation among the loyalists, and yet the sequel is strangely disappointing, for just a few days after reaching their destination the Greek forces withdrew again and were seemingly disbanded. Understandably enough the episode has puzzled scholars, and no ogreement exists as to either the motives behind the expedition or the reasons for the withdrawal. The facts need to be re-examined, especially as Herodotus' testimony has in one respect been misconstrued and another vital piece of evidence has escaped attention. I shall argue that the expedition was capably and resolutely planned as the main line of defence against Xerxes; that the federal authorities in Thessaly co-operated to the fullest; that the Greek army adopted the best strategic position for their purpose; and that the scheme miscarried only because of obstruction from an unexpected quarter. The dismaying failure of the Thessalian expedition helps to explain why the subsequent efforts of the loyalists during the campaign of 480 were so often confused or behindhand.

The main narrative of Thucydides is characterised by a third person ‘objective’ style where signs of the narrator are concealed. But this predominant narrative mode is punctuated by passages (2. 65, 6. 15, etc.) where the narrator interrupts the main account, referring to himself in the first person and/or to time outside that of the main narrative. These rare intrusions of the voice of the narrator-historian—‘narrator interventions’—are the most quoted and discussed in the whole History. Reaction to them has been of two sorts. They have either been seen as later additions and used as the centrepiece of analyst interpretations of the History, or they have been treated as expressions of the ‘judgement’ of the historian, providing the key to the History's meaning. The result of these approaches is unsatisfactory. The interventions are either bracketed as foreign to the original plan of the historian, or given special status as the exclusive source of his meaning. The effect is to cut them loose from the reading of the rest of the work, as intrusions of another stage of composition or of another voice which no longer narrates, but gives judgement. Worse still, such interpretation compares the decontextualised ‘judgements’ it has isolated from the narrative and declares them inconsistent with each other. Such ‘extrinsic’ approaches to the interventions risk reducing Thucydides’ text to a patchwork of differing and competing voices and opinions.

Mr. Newton in his History of Discoveries, p. 583, gives the following account of an excursion to the peninsula which lies to the west of Budrum (Halikarnassus) where he was then excavating:—

We next proceeded to examine the hill with the level top. This hill is called Assarlik.

Ascending from this gateway we passed several other lines of ancient walls, and on gaining the summit of the hill found a platform artificially levelled. There are not many traces of walls here. The sides of the hill are so steep on the north and east that they do not require walls. The platform terminates on the north-east in a rock rising vertically for many hundred feet from the valley below. The top of the rock is cut into beds to receive a tower. The view from this platform is magnificent.

[After brief mention of several tombs passed in the way down, Mr. Newton proceeds:]

The acropolis which anciently crowned the rock at Assarlik must have overlooked a great part of the peninsula and commanded the road from Halicarnassus to Myndus and Termera. From the number of tombs here, and their archaic character, it may be inferred that this was a fortress of some importance in very early times.

1. I happened to be staying in Constantinople in the late summer of 1922 as the guest of General Sir Charles Harrington, and I was there when the Chanak crisis of that year arose. I visited the Narrows of the Dardanelles at a time when Kemal's leading troops were approaching the Asiatic coast of the Dardanelles, and there was then naturally much debate as to whether and how he would attempt to cross into Europe. It occurred to me at the time that it would be of interest to study what Xerxes had done 2402 years previously, and on returning to Constantinople I borrowed a Herodotus from the American College, and when the crisis had died down I went back with it to the Dardanelles. In that district, during the dry season, the problem of water supply looms large, and I was at once struck on reading Herodotus by the fact that this had been also Xerxes' chief difficulty, in that portion of his march which took him from the Scamander, the modern Mendere, across the Hellespont to the Hebrus, the modern Maritza.