The symposium has received much attention recently but, despite the frequency with which comedy refers to it, little has been said about its function in this genre. Pauline Schmitt-Pantel has discussed the public banquets in Aristophanes, and suggests that ‘les banquets “privés … sont décrits avec complaisance, sans que leur fonctionnement soit critiqué et que leur existence soit remise en cause … Les repas publics sont l'objet, par le biais de la distorsion comique, de critiques’. However, we shall find that the imagery of the symposium is not used in so simple and unproblematic a manner, but is employed in a number of different ways to examine and articulate the questions raised by the dramas: like a myth, the symposium seems to be ‘good to think with’.

In this paper I shall explore the motif of travel in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, composed by Philostratus in the first half of the third century AD and published after 217. This text, apart from its novelistic, hagiographic and apologetic features, is an exemplary portrait of an ideal life. One aspect of its appeal (rather ignored in modern scholars' keenness to assess its veracity and the extent of Philostratus' elaboration) is the metaphorical nature of much of the work's content—designed to create an ideal literary image of the Greek philosopher in the Roman empire. I examine the theme of travel (with its deep debts to ancient ethnography, pilgrimage writing and the novel) as a masterly rhetorical device on the part of Philostratus by which to establish and demonstrate the superiority of Apollonius.

The separate entrances of the male and female semi-choruses in Aristophanes' Lysistrata are marked by an unusual bit of stagecraft whose importance to a general theme of the play the salvation of Athens–has never been fully appreciated. The old men enter the stage at v. 254 each carrying a pair of olive-wood logs, a vine torch and a small pot of live embers. Having heard that Lysistrata and her comrades have taken control of the Acropolis, they come intent on burning down the gates of the citadel and removing the women, whom they liken to the Spartan general Cleomenes who occupied the citadel in 510. The men pile their logs before the closed gate, ignite their torches in the hot coals and then try to set fire to the logs (vv. 307-11). But after a few minutes of hilarious bumbling their plans are foiled for good by the sudden appearance of a semi-chorus of old women who rush in with water-jars on their shoulders or in their hands; these women threaten the men and then finally–with an invocation of the river-god Achelous douse them and their fire (vv. 381-82), thus effectively ending the threat of incineration. In the past, this entire choral routine has been explained in one of two ways: either it is a standard bit of slapstick humour with no importance whatsoever to the development of the comic plot, or it is part of an elaborate sexual pun of Freudian proportions in which the closed entranceway to the Acropolis assaulted by men symbolically prefigures the battle of the sexes that is about to ensue. Of course given the wonderful richness and polyvalence of Aristophanic comedy, it is extremely difficult to deny either of these interpretations. I shall argue here, however, that the staging of the parodos also reflects a very popular type of Greek salvation myth, known to the Athenians from the tragic stage, from the visual arts and from rituals associated with local mystery cults. In light of these parallels drawn from the theatrical and religious life of the city, I shall argue that when the audience saw the women rush onto the stage with their hydriai, they would have undoubtedly seen them in a very positive light as saviours of the city–precisely the role they claim for themselves later in the play.

The uprising which took place in Constantinople in January 532 has long attracted the attention of scholars, the first significant contribution being J.B. Bury's magisterial article of 1897. My present aim is to re-examine the Nika riot, and to set it in its wider context: it will be argued that the significant place assigned to it in accounts of the reign of Justinian distorts the reality of late fifth-sixth century Constantinople. The riot was by no means an isolated outbreak of popular discontent, but just one in a whole series of bloody confrontations in the capital. It has engaged the interest of historians more than other disturbances for the same reason that Justinian's reign attracts such frequent biographies, while Anastasius' remains neglected: the wealth of sources available for the riot of 532 is much greater than for any other such event.

Bringing it all back home, Odyssey xxiv holds an encounter with narration in the relative calm of Laertes' garden, a final and significant retrospection and re-narration of narrative. Always ‘une mise en scène du Père’, Narrative invites us to relive with Odysseus the ‘inferential walk’ on which his father once took him through the trees of his childhood. We explore with and through him the force of narration in forming his (or any?) life-story. Of the signs that persuade father to recognize son, the scar on Odysseus’ thigh has sutured healthy readings; the fruit-trees in Laertes’ orchard have scarcely picked their weight. This essay explores the sign of the trees, beginning with its interaction with the scar, as the staging of an exemplary model of cultural/narrative productivity.

Just in case there were any hardened sceptics who still doubted, in the second half of the twentieth century, that our world is ruled by an inept and rather junior God with immature judgment and a nasty sense of humour, He did his best to convince them by arranging for the discovery of the Derveni papyrus in 1962. The soldier who was cremated and buried in that Macedonian village towards the end of the fourth century bc had intended that the text of this papyrus be devoured by the flames of his pyre; but as it happened one of the burning logs fell onto the roll, covering and charring its top third and thereby saving that part both from immediate annihilation by the fire itself and from subsequent destruction by organic decomposition; then the Greek excavators sharp-wittedly recognized that the roll was not wood but papyrus, and the restorer of the Viennese papyrus collection managed to put together the more than 200 fragments into 26 columns of text. As A.E. Housman wrote in another connection, such a series of highly unlikely incidents can evidently not be ascribed to ‘chance and the common course of nature’, but only to divine intervention: ‘and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere’.

In a book I published a few years ago, entitled Towards a Poetics of Modern Greek Folksong, I examined certain aspects of the poetics of modern folksongs in the light of the ‘oral composition theory’ of Homeric poetry, originally expounded by Milman Parry in the late twenties and early thirties and subsequently elaborated by Albert B. Lord. In this paper I propose to follow the opposite course, and inquire whether some of my findings regarding the verse-making techniques of the modern folksongs could be applied to the Homeric epics, and whether they could be made to cast some additional light on the making of ancient epic poetry. More specifically, in my study of formular and otherwise similar verses in the folksongs, I was able to distinguish five degrees of kinship, as it were, or of decreasing similarity, from identical formulas to sense units of similar type. Can a comparable scale of similarities be found in Homer, and, if it can, could it be used in modern discussions of ancient epic versification and composition, without further encumbering a terminology that is not always clear or generally agreed upon? The purpose of this exercise is not merely taxonomic; by using some basic concepts of structural linguistics as tools, I think we may perhaps come a little closer to understanding the verse-making process, which is a prerequisite for understanding Homer's manner of composition and, in the last analysis, his ‘creativity’ or even ‘originality’ vis à vis the tradition to which he belonged.

It has long been recognised that money is both a reality and an ideology. Yet the interaction between the two, the extent to which all-purpose money, in ancient Greece first realised in the use of coinage, brings about particular ideologies of value and exchange, while at the same time being framed by them, rarely comes into focus. Like literacy, money has frequently been taken as a culturally independent cause for particular effects both at the social and economic as well as the ideological level. In this paper I wish to complicate the story of monetization by relating its ideological superstructure in the Greek polis to the particular institutions in which it circulated.

In AJA xcviii (1994) 609-16, F.B. Faklaris discussed the location of Aegeae, founded by the first Temenid king of the Macedonians and famous thereafter as the burial-place of the Macedonian kings (Pliny NH iv 33 ‘Aegeae in quo sepeliri mos reges’). He located it at Kopanos and not at Vergina, where I had put it in 1968. The geographical difference between the two sites is considerable. Kopanos is east of Mt. Bermion, and being some 19 km south of Edessa and 5 km east of Naoussa, it looks towards the plain of Pella. Vergina lies at the northern end of the Olympus massif, which consists of the Pierian mountains and Mt. Olympus; and it faces the Haliacmon and the western end of the plain. The choice between the two sites is to be determined by the interpretation of the literary evidence and by the ongoing flow of the archaeological discoveries.

Much has been written in recent years on the ways in which ritual forms, patterns and sequences are remoulded into the imagery and action of classical Greek plays. A tragedy which offers exceptionally fertile ground for studies on ‘ritual and drama' is Sophocles’ Philoctetes, since theatrical and ritual strands are so intimately interwoven in its plot as to create an inextricable knot. In forthcoming work I explore in full both the ritual liminality of Philoctetes' and Neoptolemus' existence as well as the subtle ways in which the vital dramatic experiences of ‘acting’ and ‘viewing’ are inherently intertwined in this play with the initiatory strands of rites of maturation. The present note, conversely, is less ambitious in its scope, as its exclusive focus is one pivotal moment of the play's action, namely the dramatic exhibition of the bow to Neoptolemus' and the spectator's eyes. No matter how inherently interwoven with the action Philoctetes' bow is, Neoptolemus' close look, as he accepts it in his hands (Phil. 776), ‘theatricalises’ the object by converting it into a dramatic spectacle, a thea. But even before being formally delivered to Neoptolemus' custody (Phil. 762-78), the bow is prominently singled out as the prime focus of attention, becoming, as it does, a stage-prop uniquely capturing the boy's concentrated sight.

In his tract A Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham repeatedly refers to the courtroom as the ‘theatre of justice’. Bentham's description has been borne out by recent scholarship on Athenian law. As a form of civic space, the Athenian lawcourts were similar to the Theatre of Dionysos in many respects: litigants faced each other in a competitive agon, delivering lines written for them by logographers to a mass audience which would range, ordinarily, from 200 to 1500 jurors. Moreover, modern scholars have drawn on the notion of ‘social drama’ introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the Athenian lawcourts as an arena for socially constructive feuding behaviour, as a public stage for the social élite to compete for prestige, or as a forum for ongoing communication between élite litigants and mass jurors ‘in a context which made explicit the power of the masses to judge the actions and behavior of élite individuals’.

The ‘Great Bronze Athena’, or the Athena Promachos by Pheidias, was a famous statue on the Akropolis of Athens, according to the literary sources. Numerous attempts have been made in the 19th and 20th centuries to reconstruct the image of the statue based on various sources: coins, gems, lamps, Byzantine miniatures, and sculpture. However, some of these attempts have revealed a number of inconsistencies in treatment and interpretation of the various sources. This article, therefore, endeavours to separate the valid from the invalid through a careful assessment of all the available evidence relating to the Athena Promachos as the Pheidian statue rather than the iconographic type.

The hypothesis of Cratinus' Διονυσαλέξανδρος (POxy 663), one of the most important pieces of evidence for non-Aristophanic comedy, raises many problems, some of which, notably the reconstruction of the pre-parabatic plot and the staging problems in the κρίσις-scene, have received a fair amount of scholarly attention. I propose to look at a feature of this play to which much less thought has been devoted in print, but which, I believe, is central to an appreciation and understanding of it: the significance of costume and costume-change.

The iconography of this well-preserved lekythos (PLATE III) has provoked little discussion. Beazley enters it as an ‘unexplained subject’ and declines to identify any of the figures; Brouskari and Delivorrias read it as a ‘wedding scene’, identifying the female standing at the far right as Aphrodite. Commenting on the Berlin amphoriskos by the Heimarmene Painter (Plate IV), Shapiro notes that Aison's lekythos offers a close parallel for the group of Helen and Aphrodite, but he takes the observation no further. Elements of the scene do indeed fit into the ‘adornment of the bride’ iconography, documented in Oakley and Sinos' collection of images of the Athenian wedding.

The name vase of the Phineus painter in Würzburg is the largest of all known Chalcidian cups. Dated c. 530, it is also one of the most important narrative works of art of the sixth century (PLATE V). Accordingly, it is scarcely surprising that the vase itself has been often described and interpreted. If we offer now a further analysis, it is rather to exemplify and elaborate the judgment of Erika Simon that ‘the vase has the same charm as the fragments of archaic lyric’. In fact, we believe that the vase provides us with a closer and more interesting parallel to archaic lyric than has been realized, and at the same time allows us to perceive that the artist was deliberately attempting to provide us not just with a mythical history, but more specifically with an exemplum, a story from which we are required to make a deduction by analogy, or with an ainos, a story where the point is not explicitly stated, both well known features of archaic narrative.