Showing papers in "Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies in 1976"

How Many Athenians Attended the Ecclesia

Abstract: I N MOST MODERN BOOKS on democracyl the author opens his account by distinguishing between direct and representative democracy.! Even in systematic treatments of the subject this problem is invariably dealt with in a historical context. Everyone acknowledges that direct democracy does not exist any longer, in any case not as a form of government,3 and this indisputable fact is usually followed by a statement, not quite as convincing, to the effect that direct democracy nowadays is impossible because of the size of modern states."

Trouble in Alexandria in a Letter of the Sixth Century

Abstract: A MONG THE PAPYRI from Hermoupolis now in the papyrus collection of the Egyptian Museum in West Berlin, l a fragment of a letter has come to light which, although found at Hermoupolis, must have been written in or near Alexandria: P.Berol. 25009 measures 14.7 cm. by 31.7 cm. and is incomplete at the top and the bottom. The text of the letter is written across the fibres in a handwriting which can be compared with R. Seider, Paliiographie der gnechischen Papyri I nos. 55 (probably written in A.D. 551) and 57 (A.D. 595) and appears to belong to the second half of the sixth century (see PLATE 2). Apart from diacritical marks on initial iota and upsilon, the writer uses no lectional signs and does not write iw'TCX aV€K¢>wVT}'TOV.2 The surface of the other side of the papyrus has been partially rubbed away, but the beginning of the address of the letter is still legible. It is written roughly in the middle of the fragment parallel to the fibres in the narrow, stylized uncials often used for addresses and runs: +LlEEII(OTHI) M(OY) TA II( ANTA) MErAAOIIP(EIIEETATQI) KO¥!TI ..... As the addressee is called comes, he must belong to the 'upper class', presumably of Hermoupolis where the papyrus was found, and might be, for instance, an official in the administration or the owner or steward of an estate. Above and below the address are, in all, eight lines of what appears to be a draught written later than the letter and in a different hand. The few phrases of this badly preserved text which can be read are:

The Theoric Fund and the graphe paranomon against Apollodorus

Abstract: O NE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT sources for the history of the Theoric Fund is the first part of the speech Against Neaera (Oem. 59.3-8). The plaintiff Theomnestus gives an account of how Stephanus of Eroeadae in the spring of 348 B.C. indicted Apollodorus of Acharnae for having made an unconstitutional proposal concerning the Theoric Fund. Since antiquity historians have been puzzled about some important details in Theomnestus' account of Apollodorus' proposal, because his information seems to be at variance with what Demosthenes tells us about the Theoric Fund in the Olynthiacs (Oem. 1.19ff; 3.lOff, 31ff) and with the law paraphrased by Libanius in the hypothesis to the First Olynthiac (Oem. 1 hyp.5). The discrepancy between these sources, however, is only superficial, and accordingly I shall argue in this paper that we should accept the data both of the Olynthiacs and of the speech Against Neaera instead of rejecting one of the sources, as some scholars have done, or reversing the chronology of the events, as other scholars formerly preferred to do. Through such a combination of the sources it should be possible to obtain a clearer view of how the Athenians provided capital for the Theoric Fund. By way of introduction I will outline how this problem has been dealt with during the last decades.1 It is generally accepted that from the beginning of the fourth century B.C., or possibly from 378,2 there existed in Athens a special military

Imperial Provisions for Pergamum: OGIS 484

Abstract: I N HIS BOOK Banques et banquiers dans les cites grecques (Leiden 1968), R. Bogaert made valuable observations concerning the interpretation of the intractable document OGIS 484, directing his attention in the main towards its financial aspects (pp.231-34). The contribution offered here in the form of translation and commentary incorporates Bogaert's work and has two principal ends: to explain the financial. commercial and juridical features of the text and to emend misinterpretations which have gained currency over the years largely by default. The inscription, fragmentary at its beginning and end, preserves an imperial epistula, \vhich addresses itself to problems of currency exchange experiened in the Pergamene market and to matters of legal procedure having to do with default, distraint and trial. Written in response to a petition made to the Roman emperor about various abuses perpetrated by money changers, it upholds the institution of an exchange monopoly locally at Pergamum and at the same time establishes corrective measures on the basis of what purports to be a thorough examination of the complaints. Though its tenor is predictably paternalistic, nonetheless it was framed with an eye towards consumer welfare and with the clear intent of eliminating duress. In fine, it provides an intriguing insight into entrepreneurial pressures and schemes in the marketplace. Nowhere in the surviving portion of the document do those at the centre of the controversy, those who stand accused of illegal-or, at the very least, arbitrary-conduct, receive a name. Their prime activity is described as money-changing, but they were also involved in lending. It will do no harm to refer to them as 'bankers' and their business concretely as

The Authenticity of the Letters of St Nilus of Ancyra

Abstract: T CORRESPONDENCE of Nilus of Ancyra is a mess and a puzzle. The only available edition is Migne's inaccurate reprint (PG 79 [1865] 81-581) of the only (more or less) complete edition ever published, that of Leo Allatius (Rome 1668). And the recent researches of]. Gribomont have admirably demonstrated how arbitrary and unsatisfactory was Allatius' treatment of a complex yet basically soluble manuscript tradition! (see below, p.191). A proper critical text is urgently needed, but even so it is not in further detailed study of the MSS that the major problems will find their solution. Most were fully and fairly set out by K. Heussi in his indispensable Untersuchungen of 1917.2 Many of these so-called letters are intolerably short, abrupt and impersonal, a bare scriptural quotation and a word of commentary, some consisting of only one sentence. Often the MSS present as a series of separate letters with fresh headings what would appear to be the consecutive paragraphs of a single letter. No less often, on the other hand, such snippets recur verbatim or nearly so in other letters. The two most startling examples are Ep. 3.33 to Thaunlasius, which contains material reappearing in fourteen other letters;3 and what Heussi christened the C 53-chapter letter' (quoted in a number of MSS though not printed as such in any edition), no fewer than 52 chapters of which reappear in or as other letters!4 In both these cases Heussi argues, probably rightly, that the longer documents were put together out of the shorter rather than vice versa. Either way the consequences are disturbing. Even more disturbing, a large number prove to be extracts from other writings of Nilus and (worse) other writers altogether, in particular, Irenaeus, Athanasius, the two

Simon the Shoemaker as an Ideal Cynic

Abstract: ~ CORDING TO DIOGENES LAERTIUS (2.122) Socrates often visited the workshop of a shoemaker named Simon, who took notes of their conversations and even included thirty-three of them in a book.1 The association of Socrates with Simon is assumed in other ancient references to this shoemaker-philosopher.2 Most scholars, however, have been suspicious. They point out that neither plato nor Xenophon ever mentions Simon and that the traditions themselves, besides being late, are scanty, improbable and legendary. Consequently, they deny that Socrates visited Simon's workshop, or even

Teiresias as Magus in Oedipus Rex

Abstract: He goes on to attack Teiresias' supposed prophetic powers, which could not solve the riddle of the sphinx; he, Oedipus, had had the wisdom to do that (and thus become king). Creon is motivated by envy (380ft), Teiresias by the ambition to stand next to Creon's throne (399£). Why does he call Teiresias a 'Magus'? The traditional view is eloquently stated by Jebb: \"The word p.ayoc expresses contempt for the rites of divination practised by Teiresias: ayvpT7Je taunts him as a mercenary imposter ... The passage shows how Asiatic superstitions had already spread among the vulgar, and were scorned by the educated, in Greece ... So Bur. Or. 1496 (Helen has been spirited away), ~ t/Jap/LaKOLCLV (by charms), ~ p.aywv I TExvaLCLv, ~ 8€wv KA01TaLc.\"l Kamerbeek has commented recently in a somewhat different vein: \"The word is very common in Hdt. denoting the well-known Median priesdycaste. As a term of abuse its first occurrence is Heraclitus 14 D. (if indeed Clemens Protr. 22 quotes his own words); with the sense of 'enchanter' Bur. Or. 1498 (monody of the Phrygian) ... It is possible that a relation withp.ayyav€vw etc. was already felt in Sophocles' time.

The Chronology of Plotinus’ Life

Abstract: HE PRECISE CHRONOLOGY of the life of Plotinus is known only from a single ancient source, the Vita Plotini, which Porphyry wrote more than thirty years after his master's death and which dates several important events to specific years of Roman emperors. Plotinus was born in the thirteenth year of Septimius Severus and died at the age of sixty-five towards the end of the second year of Claudius (Vita 2.29-37)1; Amelius came to Rome during the third year of Plotinus' residence there in the third year of Philip and stayed for twenty-four years until the first year of Claudius (3.38-42). Por­ phyry himself came to Rome shortly before the end of Gallienus'

Xenophon in Arrian’s Cynegeticus

Abstract: F THOSE who follow, earlier writers are models and quarries of ideas and modes of expression-and rivals. The Greek writers of the second century of our era felt heavily the weight of their heritage, and their prose is marked by a mixture of imitation and rejection, tradition and originality, which in poetry we associate \\vith the Alexandrines. One of the writers most characteristic for this mixture, as well as one of the most eminent, was Flavius Arrianus of Nicomedia. Subtly and effectively he imitated the great historians-Herodotus, Thucydides, but most of all Xenophon, whom he chose to mimic in different ways not only in his Anabasis of Alexander, but in his recollections of Epictetus, his Tactica and his Cynegeticus. This last work, although minor in size and less serious in subject, is of special value for illustrating Arrian's blend of imitation of Xenophon with emulation. In the Cynegeticus1 Arrian is at his most personal, treating a subject which he clearly loves and has enjoyed for a lifetime: hunting. The best previous prose handbook on hunting-the only one we knowhad been written five hundred years before. Xenophon's Cynegeticus was a classic in Arrian's day, one of the great works of their noble past which the second-century Greeks, just emerging into a renaissance of letters, held up as models for imitation.2 And yet excellent as it was in Arrian's eyes, it was fundamentally flawed: Xenophon's account simply did not fit the hunting practice of his own day. Trajan, Hadrian and the noble circles around them delighted in hunting, but they hunted from horseback, and with the fast Celtic dogs, vertragi,

The Historical Scholarship of John Bagnell Bury

Abstract: I T IS OBVIOUS, even to a cursory student of Irish history, that many persons of intellectual distinction were members of Trinity College, Dublin, in the nineteeth century. The most eminent of them, without doubt, was the inventor of the non-commutative algebra of quaternions, William Rowan Hamilton, who in early youth had combined a powerful facility in the study of languages with skill in rapid calculation. In the physical sciences an honoured place is also held by G. F. Fitzgerald, whose supposition that the length of a measuring apparatus is not an absolute property of it but depends upon its motion, explained the failure of experiments intended to determine the velocity of the earth relative to the other planets and led to the theory of relativity. In the humanities, too, there were strong performers: one thinks, for example, of the rationalist historian of morals, W. E. F. Lecky; of the witty ancient historian Mahaffy, who in middle age turned successfully to papyrology; and of Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, the coeditor of Cicero's letters and an elegant composer in Latin and Greek. Lecky's writing has classic quality, but I do not hesitate to assert that the Trinity scholar whose work has the most enduring value in the annals of historiography was Bury. John Bagnell Bury, the son of the Reverend Edward John Bury, rector of Clontibret, Co. Monaghan, was born on 16 October 1861. His mother, who had been a Miss Rogers of Monaghan, is said to have been a very clever woman and very well-read. The boy was, like Rowan Hamilton, an apt pupil, having begun Latin with his father at four; at ten, in school at Foyle College in Derry, he surprised Tyrrell, who, when examining in Greek grammar there, «was unable to puzzle John Bury."!

Local Cults in Graeco-Roman Phrygia

Abstract: D URING my travels in Phrygia since 1968 for the preparation of the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions of that region, undertaken at the advice of Professor and Mme L. Robert,! I have recorded numerous dedications to a great variety of divinities, which form one of the principal features of interest of the epigraphy of Phrygia. In advance of the corpus volumes I shall make known a few of these here.2

Reelection to the Ephorate

Abstract: A NY CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATION on reelection to a collegiate magistracy is bound to affect the character both of the magistracy itself and of the political system to which it belongs. According to Aristotle it was a principle of democracy that no one might hold the same office more than once, apart from offices involving military responsibilities and a few others.1 This principle is seen to have been strictly observed in the fully developed Athenian democracy.2 In the forms of oligarchy in which magistracies were elective, there seems normally to have been no restriction on reelection, though in some instances a further term of office was permitted only after an interval of some years.3 The question whether at Sparta anyone who served as ephor was eligible to serve again, in the following year or after an interval, is strangely obscure. Its obscurity is not attributable to the notorious Spartan secretiveness, of which Thucydides complains (5.68.2): the Spartans could hardly have concealed the names of their ephors and do not appear to have tried to do so. Explicit evidence on this point seems to be lacking, and the principles relating to democracy and oligarchy do not suggest an answer, since the Spartan constitution was a mixture containing elements of both.4 In a somewhat confused passage of the Politics Aristotle describes the ephorate both as democratic and as tyrannical (2.1270b 8-28). The question of eligibility for reelection, though clearly important to anyone seeking to establish how Sparta was governed, has been ignored in almost all the multitudinous surveys of Spartan institutions produced in the last fifty years. Two recent works contain brief statements that no one might hold the ephorate

On the Problem of a Thoman Recension of Aristophanes

Abstract: T GREAT PROJECT of a complete edition of the old and Byzantine scholia on Aristophanes seems to be making steady progress. The latest volume to appear is fasc. III 2 containing Koster's edition of the Thomano-Triclinian scholia and the scholia recentiora on the Nubes (Groningen 1974). There can be absolutely no doubt about the debt all classical scholars must owe to the untiring energy of Professor Koster and his colleagues involved in this magnum opus, but it seems to me that this most recent volume is open to criticism on important counts. l Some years ago Koster put forward the theory of two Thoman recensions of Aristophanes,2 and he has now edited the scholia on the basis of this theory. Koster believes that the MS Cambridge Nn.3.15 is the only extant representative of an early recension of the poet by Thomas and that the MS was written under Thomas' supervision. It is quite obvious that Koster was to some degree led to this theory by the example of Turyn, who in his Euripides books stated the Cambridge MS Nn.3.14 to be a first Thoman recension of Euripides, and by the example of Elizabeth Bryson, who likewise tried to account for the position of the Aeschylus MS Nn.3.17.A among the Thoman MSS on the supposition that this book was the single extant representative of a first recension by Thomas.' It is easy to see that a theory of two recensions by Thomas of the

The Riddle at Colonus

Abstract: T. C. W. Stinton T RIDDLE with its solution is a familiar pattern in early Greek poetry.! Often enough it consists simply in a more or less complex periphrasis followed by the standard term explaining it, usually in apposition. A particularly elaborate and self-conscious example of this pattern occurs in the second stasimon of Aeschylus' Septem (720-23),2 where the first strophe and antistrophe each open with a riddle. The riddle is first stated in general terms, then each clue is added in a separate colon until the answer is given at the end of the fourth line: in the strophe, the Erinys, in the antistrophe, Iron; the word ct8apoc corresponding exactly in position and shape to 'E I pLVVV.