Volume 94, Issue 1 -

Numerous astronomical records are passed down through ancient sources. Astronomical observations can be used to obtain absolute dates. Solar eclipses are the main source for such purposes. Here I present an electronic solar eclipse canon which was designed especially for the needs of historians: it contains maps of all solar eclipses in the geographical region between (20° N, 5° O), (20° N, 50° O), (50° N, 5° O) and (50° N, 50° O) which were potentially noticeable and therefore candidates for identifications of solar eclipse records even if the eclipse was not foretold. The solar eclipse canon is online available at http://www.gautschy.ch/~rita/archast/solec/solec.html. As examples of use the so called Ugarit eclipse and the Ennius eclipse are discussed.

The victory of Perikle over Arttumbara is depicted on the relief above the tomb of Tebursseli at Limyra, according to the inscription under it (TL 104a). Text and picture suggest that the dynast was killed, and therefore that the battle took place some time after the coin which he minted around 370 B. C. in Pamphylian Side. In Pinara Ddapssmma recorded on his sarcophagus that he was urebillaha “when Arttumbara ruled Lycia” (TL 11). On his sarcophagus near Tlos Inguwe mentions Arttumbara between the later Carian dynast Idrieus and Alexander the Great (TL 29). The next word, medese , does not designate Arttumbara as a ‚Median’, as long supposed, but is a chain of particles beginning the next sentence. Pajawa recorded on his magnificent sarcophagus in Xanthos that it was erected in the funeral temenos of A[rttumba]ra (TL 40c), so that the latter dynast was probably buried in the pillar-tomb towering above the sarcophagus. The name Pajawa is Pamphylian, so he had probably come with Arttumbara from Side to Lycia. His evidently high office under Arttumbara seems to be designated by manaχi (- ne ) (TL 40a–b). The relief on the left flank, according to the inscription (TL 40d), shows the handing over of a gift of the satrap Autophradates ‘in front of’ the dynast, who accordingly must be recognized in the enthroned person. Izraza’s endowment in Tlos (TL 26) should belong to the time of Arttumbara itself, although, of the characteristic date formula “when … ruled Lycia”, only the beginning is preserved. According to his claim Arttumbara ruled over the whole of Lycia, but in practice presumably only over western Lycia. Also, he was not called ‘king’ ( χñtawati ), but telẽzijẽ , as the dynast Trbbenimi previously had been on the pillar-tomb in the agora at Xanthos. However the memory of a king Artumberi lived on until at least 1900 in the traditions of the Greek island of Kastellorizo, off the Lycian coast, which must go back to a Greek inscription.

The goal of this paper is to offer a new interpretation of a crucial passage of Hesiod’s “Theogony”, the episode of the mischievous division of the carcass of an ox by Prometheus in Mekone. There is a striking incongruity in the scene featuring Zeus deceived by, and enraged at, Prometheus’ trick but at the same time fully aware beforehand of the Titan’s deceit. In the eyes of Hesiod’s contemporaries, the confrontation between the two divinities owed much to an underlying experience of deceitful political struggles fought in public by prominent political leaders. Despite his foreknowledge, Zeus cannot help choosing, in the presence of the crowds in Mekone, the pile of the gleaming fat that pretends his royal ‘part of honor’. On this interpretation, one can subscribe to a brilliant emendation of this difficult passage (ll. 538–541) by the 17 th -century scholar François Guyet – against its diverse emendations and interpretations by later editors of Hesiod.

The Pseudo-Xenophontic treatise on the Athenaion Politeia has been the subject of lively scholarly debate. Much scholarly attention has been lavished on the date of the treatise, but there has been little or no attention paid to aspects of military theory. The paper is trying to fill this gap. This was shown in a first step on the basis of a comparison with the pioneer of modern sea power and naval strategy, A. T. Mahan. The Pseudo-Xenophontic treatise on the Athenaion Politeia shows not only intertextual relations, but also a high degree of similarity in the strategic analyses: our comparison shows clear parallels between Mahan's concept of sea power and the Pseudo-Xenophontic treatise. In a second step, the passages from Pseudo-Xenophon, which deal with sea power and naval strategy, were compared with the war speech of Pericles in Thucydides (1,140–144). We come to the conclusion that the similarities in form, structure and content suggest a dependence of Thucydides from Pseudo-Xenophon. Thus, the Pseudo-Xenphontic Athenaion Politeia takes a central place in the canon of strategic thought as the first treatise on military theory in western thought.

The myth of the Argonauts and their voyage to king Aietes and back to Greece had already been known to the poets of the Ilias and the “Odyssee” and became the subject of many literary works. While on their voyage to Aietes the Argonauts took the direct route (Hellespont, Bosporos and Black Sea), their return journey has been described in many different versions, conditioned partly by the geographical ideas of different periods, partly by the desire to bring the Argonauts into connexion with certain places. When Apollonios Rhodios in the middle of the third century wrote his Argonautika , he could choose between four different versions for the return journey of the heroes: the same route as on the way to Kolchis, the eastern Ocean and through Libya, the northern route via the Tanais or the central European route via the Istros and back into the Mediterranean. Why did he decide in favour of the last-named route?

In the Attic orators of the fourth century B.C. as well as in Roman Republican oratory the argumentation with historical exempla is widespread. The paper looks for structural similarities and differences in this coping with the past. The results are interpreted in the political, social and cultural context.

Livy (IV, 29, 8) rejects a synchronism found in his sources which referred events of his Varronian year 431 to 409 (the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily in that year). This crux illustrates the degree to which personalities and events of the Early Roman Republic floated without secure chronological foundations. In actuality the history of the first 140 years of the Republic, as we find it in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus to the extent his work is preserved, represents an artificial structure of decades based on prominent events spaced at ten year intervals.

This essay reviews ways in which the emperor Hadrian has been portrayed in works of history, biography, and fiction. It is a historiographical study that implicitly raises questions about how the life and personality of a particular historical figure might be recovered and understood.

The reliefs of the Sebasteion in Aphrodisias or of the porticus ad nationes in Rome, with their militaristic, triumphal representational context, explicitly aim to show ἔϑνη or gentes/nationes . In contrast to this, the personifications on Hadrian’s coin series carry names of places that can all be shown to be designations of administrative regional units. The Emperor’s journeys of inspection throughout his realm provide the representational context. On the one hand, provinciae in the sense of comprehensive governor’s provinces, such as Asia or Dacia , are referred to. Identically named governor’s provinces, such as the three provinciae called Dacia or the three provinciae called Hispania , are simply referred to in a standard abbreviation by the shared part of their name, the blanket »Dacia« or »Hispania« respectively. On the other hand, provinciae in the narrower sense of the word as Greek ἔπαρχίαι , i.e. provinces respectively procuratorial areas on an administrative level below that of the governor, also appear. This can be seen in the coin legends Phrygia or Libya . This concept of imperial geography is not new, at least not in the history of Roman coinage. The administrative geographical view of conquered regions takes on concrete form during the reign of Trajan at the latest, at least in the coinages showing the personified DACIA PROVINCIA. The place name Dacia and its personification now naturally was taken to stand for the territorially defined administrative area of that name, and represented neither the eponymous landscape nor an ethnos .

The literary sources mentioning the earthquake and tsunami of 21 July 365 AD in the Mediterranean cannot be taken at face value, as they are all pervaded by geological ignorance, but must be examined against a wider context including personal backgrounds and access to the information. Cassian and Sozomen have not provided facts, but erroneous interpretations unsupported by later sources. Theophanes and George the Monk have worked from a variety of sailors’ narrations, while Ammianus Marcellinus has used a single first hand source, also consulted by Jerome who retrieved from it the name of Sicily. The epicentre of the tsunamigenic earthquake should be relocated away from Crete and nearer the Peloponnesus, and the disaster at Alexandria is to be assessed independently of its prominence in the sources.