At Aristophanes, Equites 230–2, one of the slaves who speak the prologue informs the audience that, when the Paphlagonian appears onstage, his mask will not resemble him, for the σκεoπoιoí were afraid to make one that depicted him accurately. In an important article, K. J. Dover argued that it must in fact have been very difficult to create easily recognizable portrait-masks, and suggested that the joke in Eq. 230–2 may be that the Paphlagonian's mask is horribly ugly but allegedly still (...) nowhere near ugly enough. In response, D. Welsh, following an anonymous ancient commentator on Lucian, argued that Cratinus fr. 228 K-A shows that the historical Kleon had strikingly unattractive eyebrows. Had anyone wished to caricature the demagogue's physical appearance, therefore, he coule easily have done so, and portrait-masks may not have been so uncommon after all. Welsh's argument is at first glance quite appealing, and has been endorsed without further comment or argument by Sommerstein and Storey. I suggest, however, that the ancient commentator was confused, and that Cratinus’ remark is much more easily explained by reference to what is known about the use of facial expression as a communicative strategy in classical and early Hellenistic Athens, particularly as it appears in the comic poets. Kleon's eyebrows were probably no more ugly than those of anyone else, although he may have used them in an offensive way, and as Dover saw long ago, Eq. 230–2 cannot be taken as evidence for the use of portrait-masks on the late 5th-century comic stage. (shrink)

The staging of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae is complicated considerably by the large number of individual male citizen parts in the play. These include Praxagora's husband Blepyrus, Blepyrus' anonymous Neighbour and his friend Chremes, the First Citizen and the Second Citizen, the Young Man ‘Epigenes’, and the δεσπτης who leads out the Chorus. These are not necesarily all independent characters, but the great difficulty with the play is in deciding precisely who is to be identified with whom. R. G. Ussher, the most (...) recent Oxford editor of the text, distinguishes four separate characters, and divides the parts in the following way. (shrink)

One of the ironies of literary history is that the survival of Aristophanic comedy and indeed of all Greek drama is due to the more or less faithful transmission of a written text. Reading a play and watching one, after all, are very different sorts of activities. Unlike a book, in which the reader can leaf backward for reminders of what has already happened or forward for information about what is to come, a play onstage can be experienced in one (...) direction only, from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’. Nor can a play be put down and picked up again at one's leisure or interrupted while the audience puzzles over a difficult or intriguing passage. Live theatre is an ephemeral and essentially independent thing, which must be experienced in its own time and on its own terms or not at all, and as a result we modern readers, dependent on the written page, are at a marked disadvantage in understanding ancient drama. Taplin's study of staging in Aeschylus has shed considerable light on the dramatic technique of Athenian tragedy. Stage-practice in Aristophanic comedy, and in particular the ways in which names and naming are used there, has received much less attention. (shrink)

Over sixty years ago, Walter Headlam identified Ecclesiazusae 960–76 as a paraclausithyron, or song sung by an excluded lover from the street to his beloved within. In 1958, however, C. M. Bowra suggested that the whole of Eccl. 952–75 was actually the sole surviving example of a previously unrecognized genre of Greek lyric poetry, the informal love duet. The thesis has been widely accepted, and is adopted by Rossi, Henderson and Silk, as well as by the Oxford editor, Ussher, who (...) rejects Headlam's identification explicitly. Only Zimmermann has failed to embrace Bowra's interpretation wholeheartedly, although he offers no detailed discussion of the passage. In fact, Eccl. 952–75 is not evidence for a lost lyric genre, but a sophisticated literary parody, carefully designed as an elaborate poetic comment on the larger action of the play in which it appears. Bowra's ‘love duet’ is a critical fantasy, whose fictional existence only serves to obscure the real purposes and humour of this Aristophanic love-song. (shrink)

So far am I from rejecting the use of what has been well stated by others, that I would wish that everyone said the same things about the same things and, as Socrates puts it, in the same words, and then there would be no undisputed quarrelling among men about the matters at hand.

So far am I from rejecting the use of what has been well stated by others, that I would wish that everyone said the same things about the same things and, as Socrates puts it, in the same words, and then there would be no undisputed quarrelling among men about the matters at hand.

LSJ s.v. A defines ἀληθινός as meaning ‘truthful, trusty’ of persons and ‘true, genuine’ of objects, and offers Amphis, fr. 26 as an example of the second sense:ὅστις ἀγοράζων ὄψον ἐξὸν ἀπολαύειν ἰχθύων ἀληθινῶνῥαφανῖδας ἐπιθυμεῖ πρίασθαι, μαίνεταιAnyone who, when shopping for dainties …wants to purchase radishes, when he has a chanceto enjoy alêthinoi fish, is crazy.The context of the fragment is unknown. But the speaker is patently drawing a contrast not between ‘real fish’ and something that resembles fish, as LSJ (...) would have it, but between a type of fish that any sensible person would buy for dinner, should the opportunity arise, and radishes, which are edible but unexciting fare. So too at Macho 28–32, when King Ptolemy's guests were served a variegated rockfish, three κωβιοί cut into steaks, and καράβων … ἀληθινῶν —literally ‘real crayfish’—they were astonished and delighted. The reaction suggests that the banqueters were happy because the crayfish Ptolemy served matched the quality of the other seafood he set before them, not because the king had declined to deceive them. (shrink)

According to the manuscripts of On the Crown, Demosthenes mockingly claims that, as the youthful Aeschines led processions in his mother's mystery-cult celebrations, he was hailed by various old women as ἔξαρχος καὶ προηγεμὼν καὶ κιττοφόρος καὶ λικνοφόρος καὶ τοιαῦθ’. Τhese are clearly special titles—Aeschines is not just one celebrant among many but a leading figure in the train of worshippers—and recent editors accordingly note that κιττοφόρος seems weak and follow Albert Rubens in printing instead κιστοφόρος, which Harpocration reports was (...) read by some authorities here. κιστοφόρος appears to be supported by ΣF2 18.260 ὁ φέρων τὰς κίστας, which is easily taken to confirm that Demosthenes meant that Aeschines stood out in the crowd of celebrants inter alia because he carried containers within which must have been sacred implements of some sort. (shrink)

One of the ironies of literary history is that the survival of Aristophanic comedy and indeed of all Greek drama is due to the more or less faithful transmission of a written text. Reading a play and watching one, after all, are very different sorts of activities. Unlike a book, in which the reader can leaf backward for reminders of what has already happened or forward for information about what is to come, a play onstage can be experienced in one (...) direction only, from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’. Nor can a play be put down and picked up again at one's leisure or interrupted while the audience puzzles over a difficult or intriguing passage. Live theatre is an ephemeral and essentially independent thing, which must be experienced in its own time and on its own terms or not at all, and as a result we modern readers, dependent on the written page, are at a marked disadvantage in understanding ancient drama. Taplin's study of staging in Aeschylus has shed considerable light on the dramatic technique of Athenian tragedy. Stage-practice in Aristophanic comedy, and in particular the ways in which names and naming are used there, has received much less attention. (shrink)

The scholia to Wasps gloss τραχήλια variously as τὰ ἄκρα καὶ τὰ εὐτελῆ κρέα , τὰ ἀποβαλλόμενα τῶν ὄψων , ὀστράκιόν τι βραχὺ τελέως , and εὐτελὲς προσόψημα ἐν λοπαδίσκοις σκευαζόμενον . These might all be guesses, but the absence of the definite article in the original text shows that Bdelycleon's reference is to something more generic than ‘the backbones’ in the next verse. The ancient commentators were thus probably right not to interpret the word ‘bits of neck’, vel sim., (...) as if this were a diminutive of τράχηλος . Instead, these must be ‘tail-ends’ of food, scraps and leftovers of a sort that might be fed to a dog; compare Hippocrates, Epidemiae 7.62 , where βόεια τραχήλια are mentioned along with ham as part of the diet of a man recovering from illness. (shrink)

Over sixty years ago, Walter Headlam identified Ecclesiazusae 960–76 as a paraclausithyron, or song sung by an excluded lover from the street to his beloved within. In 1958, however, C. M. Bowra suggested that the whole of Eccl. 952–75 was actually the sole surviving example of a previously unrecognized genre of Greek lyric poetry, the informal love duet. The thesis has been widely accepted, and is adopted by Rossi, Henderson and Silk, as well as by the Oxford editor, Ussher, who (...) rejects Headlam's identification explicitly. Only Zimmermann has failed to embrace Bowra's interpretation wholeheartedly, although he offers no detailed discussion of the passage. In fact, Eccl. 952–75 is not evidence for a lost lyric genre, but a sophisticated literary parody, carefully designed as an elaborate poetic comment on the larger action of the play in which it appears. Bowra's ‘love duet’ is a critical fantasy, whose fictional existence only serves to obscure the real purposes and humour of this Aristophanic love-song. (shrink)

This paper examines the phenomenon of individual Athenians adopting elements of Persian clothing, making use of exotic items such as gold and silver drinking vessels, and the like, by comparison to what I argue is a similar sort of contact and exchange involving the European fabric trade and evolving standards of dress and fashion in the Early Modern Atlantic. The ancient literary and archaeological sources discussed document the reaction of a relatively insignificant, marginal people to the dress practices of a (...) more powerful and arguably far more sophisticated imperial power. I suggest that an appreciation of the character and intentions of the much better documented encounter between the English court and Amerindian ambassadors who visited it in the early 18th century provides a potentially useful corrective to the indigenous perspective of our Athenian sources. (shrink)

πέπλους τε νῆσαι λινογενεῖς τ’ ἐπενδύταςτε νῆσαιCanter: τε νίσαιPoll.A: τάνυσαιPoll.FSnêsaimantles and outer garments born of flaxGreek has three verbs νέω: ‘swim’, ‘spin’ and ‘heap up, pile’. The aorist infinitive of both and is νῆσαι. LSJ takes Sophocles, fr. 439 R. to be an instance of νέω. Pearson comments: ‘νῆσαι is loosely used for ὑϕαίνειν. The process of spinning, being preparatory to that of weaving, was apt to be regarded as part of the same operation rather than as a distinct art (...) … Soph. probably had in mind η 96 πέπλοι | λεπτοὶ ἐΰννητοι βεβλήατο, ἔργα γυναικῶν’. Lloyd-Jones accordingly translates the fragment ‘to weave robes and tunics made of linen’. (shrink)

This article examines a number of key terms in Pollux’ discussion of the anatomy of the human spine as a way of assessing both his reliability in regard to technical language of all sorts and the relative strengths and weaknesses of two major representatives of the modern philological and lexicographic tradition, the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek-English Lexicon and the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek.

ἔγωγε νὴ τοὺς κονδύλους, οὓς πολλὰ δὴ ᾽πὶ πολλοῖςἠνεσχόμην ἐκ παιδίου, μαχαιρίδων τε πληγάς.

In 1977, French excavations at Aï Khanoum in north-east Afghanistan—a foundation of Antiochus I Sotēr and subsequently one of the major cities of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom—of a building dating to shortly before the destruction of the place in 145 b.c.e. uncovered inter alia the remains of a papyrus and a parchment document. The papyrus text, dated by Cavallo on the basis of its letterforms to the mid third century b.c.e., preserved a fragment of a philosophical dialogue seemingly to be associated (...) with the Peripatetic school. The second document consisted of two separate portions of a piece of parchment roughly assigned on the basis of its letterforms to the second half of the third or the first half of the second century b.c.e.; as also in the case of the papyrus, the letters survived not on the parchment itself but impressed upon the hardened dirt that surrounded it. Only column II of the original editors’ ‘Texte 2a’ contains a significant amount of text, which appears in neither TrGF nor PCG. I present it here without regard to standard editorial niceties, which are rendered impossible by the desperate state of the original document, now almost certainly lost, and the nature of the original publication. (shrink)

Aristophanes' Peace is preserved in ten manuscripts, the oldest and most complete of which are the tenth-century Ravennas 429 and the eleventh-century Venetus Marcianus 474 . A third manuscript, Venetus Marcianus 475 , is almost certainly a direct copy of V and can therefore be eliminated. The seven remaining manuscripts of the play, along with the Aldine edition of 1498, share numerous variant readings, as well as lacunae at 948–1011 and 1076b, and can accordingly be described as a family. As (...) I will argue in detail below, the stemmatic relationship among the members of this family can be most economically represented as shown in Figure 1. (shrink)

In global business, business organizations and their representatives frequently encounter corruption and may be the perpetrators, victims, or simply participants in such acts. While international corruption has existed in multiple forms for several years, many individuals, companies, nations, and international organizations are currently attempting to reduce or eliminate corrupt acts because of their harmful effects on local economies and the quality of life of citizens. Several of these corruption curtailment efforts have been directed toward the supply-side of corruption, i.e., those (...) who make corrupt payments. In developing an understanding of corruption, however, and formulating strategies for its reduction, consideration must also be given to the demand-side of corruption, i.e., those who demand and accept corrupt payments. Accordingly, this study examined the demand-side of corruption and several related factors in the categories of government, economy and poverty, education, geography, and culture. Analysis of these factors employed the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), formulated annually by Transparency International (TI), and other sources. Several factors in each of the five categories were found to correlate significantly with perceived corruption, and strategies for addressing these issues were developed and discussed. (shrink)

Although stockholders may benefit from information regarding the frequently substantial charitable and political contributions of the corporations they own, US corporations are typically not required to disclose any information about such payments in annual financial statements or information submitted periodically to regulatory agencies. This lack of transparency is confounded by disclosure requirements of private foundations, which a corporation may choose to establish for the purposes of administering charitable giving for the corporation. The resulting disclosure fog engendered by extant regulations may (...) be confusing to those corporation owners who would like to know what corporation contributions are being made to charities and politicians. This article enumerates the magnitude of the charitable and political gifts of 40 of the most generous public corporations in the USA, the current disclosure requirements for public companies, the role of foundations, rationales for withholding relevant information from owners, and ethically questionable strategies that corporations may use to manage those disclosures for their benefit. (shrink)

The history of corporations in the United States (U.S.) is much older than the country, as it must be understood in the context of the history of peoples of Europe who eventually dominated the North American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These European settlers came, in part, to achieve economic prosperity for themselves and, in many cases, for early forerunners of the modern corporation. These business organizations had predecessors in Europe millennia earlier as ancient Romans had developed a (...) functional and successful form of corporation for the purpose of conducting commerce in the Roman Empire. In the decades that followed the founding of the U.S. in 1776, corporations evolved from rare, small, closely controlled business organizations with a multitude of restrictions to very large, very powerful modern institutions that enjoy many of the legal rights of humans. With this evolution came ethical issues, as (1) the ethical distance was altered between corporate decision-makers and those affected by those decisions, and (2) many of the legal rights of individual humans were extended, through litigation, to corporations. This article explains the historical development of the U.S. corporation and identifies 20 Critical Events in the Ethics of Corporation History (CEECH). An understanding of these historical events may facilitate comprehension of many of the current ethical issues associated with a legal organizational form that profoundly affects business and society. (shrink)

Tuition and government funding does not adequately support the mission of many colleges and universities, and increasingly, corporations are responding to this need by making payments to institutions of higher learning with significant contracted expectations, including influence of the curriculum and content of college courses. One large, public banking corporation, BB&T, has funded grants to more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States to address what the corporation refers to as the “moral foundations of capitalism.” These grants vary (...) in size but average $1.1 million and typically require design of a new course that includes discussion of Atlas Shrugged, one of the novels of the author Ayn Rand. With many of the participating universities, the agreement with BB&T also stipulates the creation of chaired faculty positions, library reading rooms, designated capitalism centers, speaker series, scholarships, and the distribution of free student copies of Atlas Shrugged. Several ethics concerns about these grants, including their threat to academic freedom, are discussed in this article, as well as the need for focused guidance for university administrators regarding the temptation of large donations with attached questionable expectations. (shrink)

Tuition and government funding does not adequately support the mission of many colleges and universities, and increasingly, corporations are responding to this need by making payments to institutions of higher learning with significant contracted expectations, including influence of the curriculum and content of college courses. One large, public banking corporation, BB&T, has funded grants to more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States to address what the corporation refers to as the “moral foundations of capitalism.” These grants vary (...) in size but average $1.1 million and typically require design of a new course that includes discussion of Atlas Shrugged, one of the novels of the author Ayn Rand. With many of the participating universities, the agreement with BB&T also stipulates the creation of chaired faculty positions, library reading rooms, designated capitalism centers, speaker series, scholarships, and the distribution of free student copies of Atlas Shrugged. Several ethics concerns about these grants, including their threat to academic freedom, are discussed in this article, as well as the need for focused guidance for university administrators regarding the temptation of large donations with attached questionable expectations. (shrink)

The chicken meat, or broiler, business in the United States is a vertically integrated industry in which integrator corporations control all aspects of the business. Primarily through a series of business acquisitions, an industry duopoly has evolved. The two dominant integrator corporations, Pilgrim's Pride and Tyson Foods, are profitable, and their officers and stockholders benefit from the corporations’ financial success. The multitude of local growers who nurture the chickens to maturity for the integrators, however, benefit minimally from the financial success (...) of the integrators, as the growers face a myriad of financial, environmental, community, and health problems. Many growers have difficulty in extracting themselves from an occupation that requires their initial, personal expenditure, or debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Additionally, many who live in regions or states of broiler growing facilities suffer from gases emitted by these facilities and correspondingly lower property values. Several demographic, economic, education, health, and quality of life metrics were analyzed for the 50 U.S. states to provide insights regarding the ethics of the broiler industry and why some states produce significantly more broilers than others. (shrink)

This book is the fourth in a series of essay collections on defences in private law. It addresses defences to liability arising in equity. The essays range from those adopting a mainly doctrinal perspective to others that explore the law from a more philosophical perspective. Some essays concentrate on specific defences, while others are concerned with the links between defences, or with how defences relate to the structure of the law of equity generally. One aim of the book is to (...) shed light on equitable doctrines by analysing them through the lens of defences. The essays offer original contributions to this complex, important but neglected field of scholarly investigation. The contributors – judges, practitioners and academics – are all distinguished jurists. The essays are addressed to all of the major common law jurisdictions. (shrink)

Since 2000, the Charles Koch Foundation has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to US universities in contractual exchanges. Many of these contracts have dictated the establishment or support of a CKF-affiliated center or institute on campus and university employment of CKF-affiliated tenured or tenure-track professors who agree to promote the CKF philosophy of minimal government regulation of business. While many in the academic community are opposed to these contracts because of concerns about academic freedom and the transfer of university (...) decision-making from the campus to the external wealthy, the CKF has successfully forged many such contracts with universities. While most of these contracts are undisclosed, 14 of these contracts were obtained and analyzed to determine what the CKF has been purchasing from these universities. (shrink)

Many professions, in order to enforce their ethics codes, rely on a complaint-based system, whereby persons who observe or discover ethics violations may file a complaint with an authoritative body. The authors assume that this type of system may encourage ethical behavior when practitioners believe that a punishment is likely to result from a failure to adhere to the rules. This perceived likelihood of punishment has three components: detection risk, reporting risk, and sanction risk. A survey of potential violation witnesses (...) related to the accounting profession revealed that the profession's complaint-based enforcement system may not provide practitioners with the necessary disincentive to refrain from code violations. (shrink)

In an empirical study, we compared how lay people judge motivation enhancement as opposed to cognitive enhancement. We found alienation is not seen as a danger associated with either form of enhancement. Cognitive enhancement is seen as more morally wrong than motivation enhancement, and users of cognitive enhancement tend to be judged as less deserving of praise and success than users of motivation enhancement. These more negative judgments of cognitive enhancement may be driven by differences in perceived fairness rather than (...) differences in effort exerted by the user, although lay people generally see effort as necessary to deservingness of praise and success. (shrink)

While ethical norms for conducting academic research in the United Kingdom are relatively clear, there is little empirical understanding of how university research ethics committees (RECs) themselves operate and whether they are seen to operate well. In this article, we offer insights from a project focused on the Scottish university context. We deployed a three-sided qualitative approach: (i) document analysis; (ii) interviews with REC members, administrators, and managers; and (iii) direct observation of REC meetings. We found that RECs have diverse (...) operation and vary in terms of what members understand to be the remit of their REC and what should constitute the content of ethics review. Overall, though, most participants perceive university RECs as operating well. When asked what they consider to be areas for further improvement, most commented on: implementation of an online system; more experience with how to evaluate various kinds of research projects; best practice exchange and training opportunities; more accurate reflection of the REC role as part of the university’s workload allocation model; and greater recognition of the importance of research ethics governance in the university’s research environment, and, for the members themselves, their career advancement. Based on our findings and subsequent discussions during an end-of-project roundtable with stakeholders, we propose a model of collaboration that can address some of the identified areas that could benefit from further improvement. This model would facilitate a heightened awareness of the importance of supporting REC members in their own effort in assisting students and staff alike in undertaking as ethically robust research as possible. (shrink)