Volume 151, Issue 1

The importance of determining the exact origin of the trial of Orestes before the Areopagus at the end of Aeschylus's Eumenides has not been fully acknowledged by modern scholars. Through a close scrutiny of the surviving evidences concerning the genealogical book of Pherecydes, the aition of the Choes-festival and the roll of the Twelve Gods in the sphere of mythic history, this article suggests that there is no reason to accept the widespread belief that Aeschylus was (only) the heir of some pre-existent attic tradition. The trial of Orestes before the Athenian court turns out to be Aeschylus' own innovation, used by the poet to convey his new vision of justice.

The long sentence at Plato Pbaedo 62a has been the subject of much discussion from Antiquity on. None of the proposed interpretations gives satisfactory sense. The basic error is that everyone has failed to perceive the ultimate unity of the sentence, which leads to the wrong view that the force of the negation ουδέποτε extends to the first part of the sentence only. The reading proposed here takes account of the fundamentally oral character of Plato's language; it is shown that, when the sentence is half-way, the initial construction is resumed and simplified. The force of the negation ουδέποτε extends to the sentence as a whole. This results in an interpretation which is in full accordance with the context: Cebes is supposed to be astonished at the fact that suicide is prohibited, even for those people for whom death is preferable to life.

The modern debate over the hellenistic doctrine of the fine-material soul-vehicle, including contributions by R. C. Kissling (1922), E. R. Dodds (1933), and J. Halfwassen (1995), has seen an increasingly earlier date of origin being attributed to this doctrine. But the author who introduced the theory remains an unknown quantity. In this article I will argue that the author of this doctrine can be no other than Aristotle.

The purpose of the paper is to defend a modified version of the report given by Strabo about the transmission of the writings of Aristotle during the Hellenistic period. The basic dilemma was pointed out by Dom Jean Liron in 1717: The existence of our Corpus Aristotelicum entails that Strabo must be exaggerating either in assuming that the manuscripts brought by Neleus to Scepsis were the only manuscripts of the Aristotelian and Theophrastean writings, or in asserting that these manuscripts were severely damaged. Many writings of our Corpus are missing in the Hellenistic catalogue of Aristotle's works while they are listed in the later catalogue of Ptolemy al-Gharïb; furthermore, the single books of the transmitted treatises are labelled by means of the pre-Hellenistic system of 24 letter labels, whereas in the Hellenistic catalogue the single books are numbered by means of the Hellenistic system of 27 alphabetic numerals. This suggests that the treatises missing in the Hellenistic catalogue formed part of a collection which was inaccessible in Hellenistic times and which, therefore, preserved the pre-Hellenistic system of book-labelling. After the rediscovery of the collection (ca. 100 BC) its system of book-labelling was maintained by the editors who laid the foundations of our Corpus. The same criterion reveals the Eudemian Ethics in eight books to be a later compilation.

This paper considers the Hellenistic poets' attitude towards pre-Trojan war myths; in particular, it examines the Hellenistic reception of six narratives from the Cypria: the marriage of Peleus and Thetis; the duel between the Dioscuri and Idas and Lynceus; the story of Telephus; the love affair between Achilles and Deidameia; the abandonment of Philoctetes on Lemnos; and the involvement of the Achaeans with the priest Anius and his daughters, the Oenotropae. Furthermore, it is argued that the reception of these stories from the Cypria may be seen as a metaliterary comment upon epic poetry, firstly because narratives from the Epic Cycle are adapted to fit epic subgenres, such as the elegy, the epyllion, the hymn and the idyll, and secondly because the neoteric versions of these narratives put particular emphasis on certain motifs, types of hero and narrative techniques which are typical of Hellenistic poetics.

Conjectures to Chariton of Aphrodisias. Legendum: 1.1.12-13 νυμφαγωγη̃σαι, 1.1.15 άπέλιπεν, 1.1.15 bis προσδραμών αύτη̃, 1.7.1 έκ Λυκίας, 1.7.6 <πάντα> ενθεμένους, 2.4.3 ὓπνον μέν οὐκ έλάμβανεν, 2.4.7 τις (in beiden Fragen), 2.5.7 <εἶπεν> „αἰτου̃μαι ..., 3.2.3 τις, 3.6.7 τις, 3.9.2 ὥσπερ έμμανής γενομένη, <οὓτως> στήσασα, 4.3.4-5 ,,Χαιρέαν λέγεις τὸν φίλον;" ,,<Χαιρέαν>" εἶπεν ό Πολύχαρμος, 4.6.7 οὖν <σιγή> καί σκότος.

This essay is focused on a difficult passage in Varrò, rust. 2,5,3-4, which is quoted, explained and partially corrected by Columella (6 praef. 7). Both passages are for us a valuable source of information about the capital sentence inflicted, in a very early age, on the person who caused the death of the ploughing ox. However, a contradiction or apory can be observed in the attitude of the two authors. On the one hand - as admirers of the mos maiorum - they seem to praise the innocence and the restraint of the ancients, who showed so much respect for so beneficent an animal. On the other hand, in their roles as instructors of the most efficient farming techniques, they are keen on the profits assured by the raising of farm animals, and discuss without embarrassment the slaughter of oxen (either sacrificial or simply commercial) and the eating of beef. In Greece, the Attic Bouphonia, with all their functional ambiguities, marked the transition from the age of the bloodless sacrifice - praised and placed forever in the archives of history - to the "modern" age of slaughter; on the contrary, Roman culture lacked a similar rite that could somehow reconcile the two antithetical ideas, the ancient taboo about the slaying of domestic animals and the actual killing as performed in historical times.

Epigram 5.67 derives its point from Martial's critical and creative way of dealing with the mythical tradition. After he has described from the swallows' perspective an incident that occurred in the avian world, in the last distich the point of view undergoes a surprising shift from the victim to the agent. This is effected by a smooth transition from the swallow that has been cruelly torn to bits by its own kind to the mythical Procne, who tore her son to bits and suffered the punishment of being changed into a swallow. The aetiology that forms the concluding point of the epigram shows the incident in a new light. The nature of swallows is marked once and for all by Procne's behavior: as she once tore Itys to pieces, so the swallows of our epigram behave; indeed, at the very beginning they are pointedly designated as Attbides. The narrator's concluding comment that the guilty mother ought to have been torn to bits immediately after her impious act is an attempt, albeit a vain one, to correct the myth.

Tacitus and Sima Qian (ca. 140-85 BC, author of the Shiji, the Records of the Historian) are eminent representatives of Roman and ancient Chinese historiography. The starting-point of the paper is a striking parallel between the two historians: During the reign of autocratic emperors (of the last of the Flavian emperors, Domitian, and of the most powerful of the Han-emperors Wudi) both authors undergo experiences which not only affect them on a personal level, but also influence their historiographie practice. The paper traces this influence with respect to the representations of individual historical characters. On the one hand it analyses the representations of rulers: of Tiberius, adoptive son and successor of Augustus, and of Wendi, natural son and (indirect) successor of Gaodi, the founder of the Han-dynasty; on the other hand it studies the representations of second and third rank characters such as senators, ministers, generals, and - in the case of Sima Qian - also of people from other walks of life. The similarities which can be observed between the two authors point to the existence of certain anthropological constants, whereas the differences are to be attributed to basic differences in Roman and Chinese political thinking and to differing degrees of the intensity of the experiences undergone by each historian.