The date of Phrynichos' Satyroi is not known, but it seems fair to assume that in the late 420s a certain Philoxenos ‘enjoyed’ a vogue in comedy as an alleged effeminate and catamite (note the descriptions of him as θήλεια, καταπύγων, πόρνος, οὐκ ἄρρην. Both Dover and Henderson comment that καταπύγων in can mean just ‘worthless’, but here the more precise and homosexual meaning of the term is meant. Dover is very probably right that in Cl. 686 the poet has selected as male names those of ‘three men whose masculinity could be called in question’.

With the publication recently of two valuable studies on Attic demes, we are now more fully aware of what we know, and do not know, of the deme. With Osborne's work, we now have some idea of the tendency of Athenians to own and maintain property in the deme of origin, but the role of marriage in consolidating property in that deme is more difficult to assess. In contrast to Osborne's focus on the ancestral deme, this brief study will concentrate on the deme into which the woman married; such a deme will be termed the deme of marriage or the marital deme. The study will focus particularly on the families who contracted more than one alliance for their kinswomen into the same outside deme and will emphasize the importance of siblings in securing and maintaining these alliances in the marital deme.

One of the most curious series of Anatolian inscriptions known to me has been published by Mr. Hogarth in this Journal, 1887, pp. 376 ff. Their importance lies in the fact that they show us the manners and religion of one district hardly affected by Greek civilisation, and almost purely native in character. As the use of the Greek language and knowledge of Greek civilisation spread, the native manners were proscribed as barbarous, and even native mythology was discarded and Greek tales adapted to suit the locality. I have frequently given instances of this. At Magnesia ad Sipylum, for example, if we may judge from the references of Pausanias, the mythology of the district was re-modelled under the influence of the Greek literary tradition of Niobe, and localities had to be found to suit the details of the story.

As to the inscriptions published by Mr. Hogarth, Nos. 12–20, probably no one who reads over the texts can doubt that Greek was strange to the writers. They were native Phrygians, speaking their own language with a smattering of Greek, quite uneducated, but impressed with the belief universal over Asia Minor that Greek was the one language of education, and trying to express themselves in Greek. In every part of the country where the inscriptions enable us to penetrate below the Graeco-Roman varnish, the same inference is forced on us. Greek did not succeed in forcing itself on the native population of Phrygia, Galatia, Lycaonia, and Cappadocia (except in the large cities which were centres of Graeco-Roman civilisation) until Christianity gave it the additional power of being the language of the Scriptures.

The presentation of Lokris and the Lokrians in the Iliad is problematic. The entry for Lokris in the Catalogue lists an unusually large number of towns for such a small area, but many of those towns are obscure. Despite the small size of the region of Lokris, it has given the epic not one but two major heroes of very different characters: the Lokrian commander Oilean Aias and Patroklos, Achilles' friend and warrior companion. Although Aias is praised in the Catalogue entry as the greatest of Homeric warriors, elsewhere in the Iliad he is only a second-rank hero and his men, the Lokrians, are relatively insignificant archers. Seeking a resolution of these difficulties, this paper integrates information derived from the text of the Iliad with what is known of the topography and archaeology of Lokris between the Late Mycenaean and Archaic periods. It is concluded that Aias, the more traditional hero, is firmly embedded in Lokris, whereas Patroklos, who appears to be ‘reinvented’ by the poet of the Iliad, has no traditional connection to the land. The contrast between these heroes may reflect the division between the mountainous Epiknemidian and the urban Opountian parts of Lokris. Oilean Aias encapsulates the ancient virtues of the mountain warrior and is linked with Epiknemidian Lokris; Patroklos, with his gentle disposition, is representative of the citizen of the polis and as such is linked to Opous, the capital of Lokris.

When Alexander turned back at the Hyphasis (Beas), how much did he know about what lay before him? And why, in the vulgate tradition, does he know of the distant Ganges and the distant kingdom of Magadha, but not of the next great river to the Beas, the Sutlej (a question often asked), or of anything else between the Beas and the Ganges? The answer is not difficult, once the elements of our tradition are sorted out chronologically; that, as in so many questions, is the real problem.

We possess one contemporary document bearing on the matter which has escaped notice, a satrapy-list or gazetteer of ‘Asia,’ i. e. Alexander's empire, dating from the last year of his life; very possibly Hieronymus used it by way of introduction to his history of the Successors, and it now forms the basis of Diodorus 18, 5 and 6. We can date this document with certainty. It includes the Indian provinces, and so is later than Alexander's return from India. The ‘Hyrcanian sea’ (not Caspian) is still a lake, so it is earlier than Patrocles. Chandragupta is unknown, so it is certainly earlier than Megasthenes and probably earlier than circ. 302. Porus is still alive, so it is earlier than 317.

The islands of the Marmara group, of which the largest are Marmara, Pasha Liman, Aphisia, and Koútali, lie north and west of the Cyzicene peninsula in the sea to which they give their name. The following account is derived from my own gleanings during a short stay in Marmara and Pasha Liman (1907), supplemented from the detailed monograph published by M. Manuel Gedeon of the Greek Patriarchate, who visited all the islands of the group in 1894, studying chiefly the Byzantine and later antiquities.

On rhythm amd metre Aristoxenus always talks the plainest common sense—which is more than one can say about certain other ancient metricians. On Time, in its rhythmical aspect, he remarks: ‘Time is articulated by each of the three ῥυθμιƷόμενα, λέξις, μέλος and κίνησις σωματική.’ The Greek choral lyric was a triple partnership of poetry, song, and dancing, and Aristoxenus here points out that they share a common rhythm. (He goes on to develop the idea, but that need not concern us here.) We could safely infer for ourselves, even if Plato and Aristotle had not told us, that the music and the dance were far from being merely decorative or casual additions to the poetry. The poetry may have been Queen, as Pratinas maintained, but the philosophers took the other two partners very seriously as ‘imitators’ of moral ideas and the like; and there is every reason to suppose that the dramatists did the same. But writers on Greek Tragedy have had much to say about the λέξις of the odes; nothing about its two partners—for the good reason that we know nothing about them. Yet it does seem possible, here and there, to say a little about the dance. Whether it is worth saying, the reader must judge.

The audience, sitting in the theatre, saw some kind of ordered physical movement in the orchestra as it listened to the singing or chanting of an ode. If in any given case we were asked what this movement was, our only answer is that we cannot possibly tell. Nevertheless, there are moments where we can infer, with more or less probability, the sort of thing that was being done by the dancers, and occasionally—notably in the Agamemnon—this dim and doubtful picture will contribute something to our appreciation of the drama.

In JHS xciv (1974) 38 ff. (with Plates IV–V), J. G. Griffith discusses the subject-matter of the scene on the late fourth-century amphora discovered in 1949 at Panagjurischte in Bulgaria, in which a group of four determined-looking men armed only with swords attacks a house-door which has just been half-opened by a startled servant of diminutive stature. Connected, apparently, with the assault is a trumpeter, and finally there is another pair (not obviously involved in the action) consisting of a bearded figure, taken to be a seer since he holds ‘a liver, lobe and all’, which he shows to his more youthful companion.

Griffith has little difficulty in exposing the improbability of earlier attempts to identify a mythological scene—Achilles discovered at Scyros, the Seven against Thebes, or the preliminaries to the murder of Neoptolemus at Delphi, and proposes a novel view that the attackers are komastai, whether the occasion is a ‘genre-scene’ from comedy, or a characteristic scene from real life, in either of which cases help in identifying the individuals would be unnecessary and irrelevant. But I must confess that I find this proposal far-fetched: the attempts to account also for the trumpeter and seer are desperate enough, but he really fails to make a credible case for the use of swords in such escapades, even granted the violence often referred to in literary evidence about the komos, whether fisticuffs among rivals for the favours of the courtesan or mistress, or the use of cudgels, levers and torches to break down, or burn, the door by the ‘exclusus amator’.

By the kind permission of Professor Sieveking and of Mr. A. M. Woodward, who has informed me of the existence of these objects and has sent me the photographs here reproduced and the necessary notes, I am able to publish a few small objects in ivory, bone, and bronze which were acquired in 1911 by the Museum der Kleinkunst in Munich. A summary account of them by Professor Sieveking has already appeared in the Münchner Jahrb. der bildender Kunst, 1912, p. 73. The channel by which they reached Munich is naturally obscure, but there can be no doubt that they were found at the Orthia sanctuary at Sparta, the excavation of which was finished in 1910, the year before the objects were acquired at Munich. Even before this information reached me, I had learned by a curious accident that there had, in fact, been some small pilfering from the Orthia excavation by one of our workmen.

The three of the excavators of the Orthia Sanctuary most concerned confess to a feeling of discouragement on finding that in the case of one reader at least all their endeavours to tell a plain tale plainly have failed, and that their power of expression has not been equal to the task laid upon it. The reader in question is the writer of the very careful and painstaking review of ‘Artemis Orthia’ which has appeared in the J.H.S. for this year over the initials V. W.-G. It is plain that to the reviewer the grounds on which the latter periods of Laconian pottery, the periods of its decay, upon which so much depends, have been classified are neither clear nor convincing. And since, in fact, the evidence on which that classification was made was both clear and convincing, the failure must lie in the exposition. In the excavators' hands the spade has been mightier than the pen. Or does the fault lie in an historical training which has not been adequate to the appreciation of the minutiae of archaeological evidence? ‘The historian,’ we are told, ‘may differ from the excavator in his estimate of what is proved.’

It will probably be a surprise, even to readers of the Journal of Hellenic Studies, to learn that there are at the present day twenty thousand persons in the south of Italy who speak Greek as their native tongue. These people form two separate groups, composed of a number of villages or townships, one of which is found in the heel of Italy or Terra d'Otranto, the other in the toe of that country, towards the extremity of the modern Calabria, in the neighbourhood of Cape Spartivento, and about twenty miles to the south-east of Reggio. The language which they speak, as might well be supposed, is not ancient Greek; nor is it in any sense a lineal descendant of that which was spoken in the colonies of Magna Graecia; but, though it is essentially modern Greek, it differs considerably from the Romaic of Greece, and these differences are of such a nature, that it must have required the lapse of many centuries to produce them. There can be no doubt that at one time it was spoken over a much wider area than at present; indeed, within the memory of man it has died out, and has been superseded by Italian, in places where it had previously been in use. Any traditions which may have existed with regard to the origin of this people and the fortunes of their ancestors they have now entirely lost; and their history, as far as it can be discovered at all, must be reconstructed from casual notices in historical documents and from intimations contained in the language.

In this paper, I address one characteristic of Classical Greek votive reliefs that has troubled scholars: the size of the gods. The reliefs depict mortal worshippers approaching gods and goddesses who are, almost invariably, larger in stature than the mortals. Scholars have generally explained the difference in scale to be art historical, rather than theological, in significance. Either the larger scale is a visual expression of the hierarchical superiority of the gods or the images of the gods represent over-life-size statues. In addition, it is widely accepted that votive reliefs are products of unsophisticated religious belief, ignorant of the conceptualization of an imperceptible, non-corporeal deity in Classical philosophy. In this paper, I accept the artistic proposition of votive reliefs at face value: in this genre, the gods are living, visible, material bodies, most often anthropomorphic in form and always larger in magnitude than mortals. I identify one significant parallel for this interpretation within Greek and Roman thought, namely, the conception of gods within the materialist theology developed by the late Classical writer Epicurus and, in part at least, by the fifth-century BC writer Demokritos. In the writings of the Epicureans and, it appears, the atomists, as in the votive reliefs, gods are human in form, very beautiful, self-sufficient, larger than humans in size and known by mortals through visual perception.

In a paper on Ancient Oil Mills and Presses I touched upon Heron's screw-cutter, an instrument for cutting an inside screw thread in wood, described by him in his Mechanics (iii. 21). In relation to the oil-presses, it was a mere side-issue; but since the editor of the text, L. Nix, did not seem to have understood the instrument fully, I gave my own interpretation of the text, and a reconstruction, on paper, of the instrument.

This interpretation, or rather, the reconstruction, has been called in question by Mr. E. J. Andre Kenny, who in Antiquity, 1933, 7. 249, declares, that it is ‘ technically impossible.’ If that is the case, either the text, or my interpretation of it (or both), would seem to be at fault. Quite apart from the general inadvisability of starting an argument against a review it seems clear that such a question could only be satisfactorily answered in one way: by a practical experiment.

This article reviews a selection of books published over the last decade that explore the relationship between humans and the environment in the ancient Greek world. These publications represent a new phase of the ecological turn in classical studies, in which ancient environmental studies has emerged as a distinct subdivision of the environmental humanities. Their contributions can roughly be divided into two groups according to their approaches and goals: one applies ecocritical analyses to Greek literature, presenting alternative ecologies to those that have produced contemporary environmental crises; the other applies historical methods to written and material evidence to illuminate the realities of ancient Greek human–environment relations. The three subsections of this review provide overviews of scholarship addressing sustainability and the conservation of natural resources; ecology and religion; and societal resilience in the face of ecological stress. I suggest productive avenues for further research in each area, arguing that interdisciplinary communication and collaboration are becoming increasingly important in this evidentially, methodologically and theoretically variegated field.

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’.

The best start in the attempt to understand Aeschylus is Professor F. M. Cornford's clearsighted explanation of his method. On the stage of Aeschylus, great forces are broadly symbolised, working, according to the Pythagorean scheme, through antagonism to a new harmony. It is also important to see the life-work of any great poet as a single process; Aeschylus solves problems in early plays, and afterwards surpasses them in more complex problems, which find their solutions in their turn. His material is a great range of political, moral, intellectual, and religious conflicts, all active in his own world. By symbolising them on the stage, he found a way from small things such as party quarrels to a sublime comprehension of the work of God and man, interacting together, within the framework of time. This is not so strange as it appears. The grandest and truest achievements of humanity often look like by-products.

I suggest that a poet may, and perhaps always does, first assimilate his world in time, and next create from that world a universe not limited to time and known actuality. A great poet's world is like ours, full of everyday things, but he likes them more, fascinated alike by the good and the evil. What he makes is not an everyday affair, but something more eternal. The transition from the poet's world to the poet's universe is like a transition from politics to religion and mysticism.

The following report has been compiled at the request of the Editors of the Journal of Hellenic Studies and has been made as complete as the short notice given has allowed. I have to thank my colleagues of the Greek Archaeological Service and of the other foreign schools in Athens for the information, which they have so courteously placed at my disposal. Thanks are also due to the Managing Committee of the British School for permission to give a brief account of its latest work.