The Aristophanic relevance of IG ii2 2343, a late fifth or early fourth century cult table; of Heracles, listing a priest and fifteen thiasotai, was first argued by Sterling Dow. Dow's summary of the communication which he presented to the Archaeological Institute of America is brief and a number of his conclusions may be too confident, but something of substance appears to remain.

IN the first part of this paper we discussed R and the y family, which divides into the two groups v and Φ. Before leaving the y family, however, we may consider some of the recentiores, nearly all of which belong within it. They seem to contain no genuine tradition unknown to their elders and betters; so it is not proposed to inflict on the reader a detailed account of them all, but rather to study a representative selection. These manuscripts (...) consist of an uninterpolated and an interpolated group: the latter group includes also the Aldine edition. (shrink)

The present study of the manuscripts of the Knights arose out of the preparation of a text of the scholia for a forthcoming edition. The completion of a collation of all the manuscripts for the scholia seemed a suitable occasion for extending the inquiry and re-examining our manuscript tradition in both text and scholia, especially as the scholia in a manuscript, provided they come from the same source as the text, can often reveal facts that might escape an investigator who (...) confined himself to the text. The scholia are far greater in bulk than the text, and scribes are often less careful and so more self-revealing in scholia; so that both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view scholia are important for the student of the tradition. (shrink)

Every living science, especially in its early stages, is compelled to devise fresh terms, either by coining new words or by giving new meanings to old ones. Unless and until these fresh terms become absorbed in the vocabulary of everyday speech, their unfamiliarity makes them a target for the shafts of the humourist. There can be no doubt that in the late fifth century B.C. literary criticism was still a new science. We can trace its beginnings in the treatises of (...) the Sophists, many titles of which have been handed down to us. Strepsiades' lesson in metric, though of itself amusing enough, would certainly gain in topical appropriateness if enacted at a time when such investigations were not only much in the air, but were still novel. And the whole ‘Agon’ of the Frogs, the character of which is forecasted in lines 796–802, depicts in the strongest colours the contrasted views of technician and inspirationist. We should therefore naturally expect a play of such a kind, written at such a time, to be full of technical jargon, barely understood by the ‘man in the street,’ and forming the object of his half-contemptuous amusement. That is, I believe, exactly what we do find, to an extent insufficiently recognized. Professor Radermacher, in his recent edition of the Frogs, has rendered valuable service by pointing out the frequent occurrence in that play of technical terms which meet us later in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and other critics. But I believe that technical language lurks unsuspected in many other passages, though the precise meaning may often be beyond recovery. (shrink)

Kenneth Dover proposes an explanation of this joke in which the gist is to be understood in terms of ‘homosexual rape as an expression of dominance’, so that Dicaeopolis is offering himself up for use as a pathic by Lamachus. Dover believes that the joke becomes ‘intelligible if the assumption is that the erastēs handles the penis of the erōmenos during anal copulation’. Others have seen a circumcision joke here. Alan Sommerstein explains how the joke would work either of these (...) ways. (shrink)

in memory of Eric HandleyDicaeopolis brushes the informer aside and closes his deal with the starving Megarian: ΔΙ. … λαβὲ ταυτὶ τὰ σκόροδα καὶ τοὺς ἅλαςκαὶ χαῖρε πόλλ’. ΜΕ. ἀλλ’ ἁμὶν οὐκ ἐπιχώριον.ΔΙ. πολυπραγμοσύνη νῦν ἐς κεϕαλὴν τράποιτ’ ἐμοί. 833 Even before Douglas Olson's thorough study of the tradition in his commentary on Acharnians it was clear that the oldest manuscript, R, has as much weight as the agreement of the others that editors report. In 833 it reads πολυπραγμοσύνη, the (...) others –σύνης. A scholion runs λείπει τὸ ἕνεκα, ἕνεκα τῆς πολυπραγμοσύνης, plainly written for a text that had –σύνης, which is also the lemma in one manuscript; the lemma in the other that has one is –σύνῃσιν. It has not been shown, however, either that this scholion is ancient or that its agreement with all the manuscripts but R overrides the testimony of R. As regards attestation, therefore, the tradition offers two readings of equal weight, or three if –σύνῃσιν is taken to be a relic of a text different from the one that prompted the scholion. (shrink)

Disjunctivism is the focus of a lively debate spanning the philosophy of perception, epistemology, and the philosophy of action. Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson present 17 specially written essays, which examine the different forms of disjunctivism and explore the connections between them.

The present study of the manuscripts of the Knights arose out of the preparation of a text of the scholia for a forthcoming edition. The completion of a collation of all the manuscripts for the scholia seemed a suitable occasion for extending the inquiry and re-examining our manuscript tradition in both text and scholia, especially as the scholia in a manuscript, provided they come from the same source as the text, can often reveal facts that might escape an investigator who (...) confined himself to the text. The scholia are far greater in bulk than the text, and scribes are often less careful and so more self-revealing in scholia; so that both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view scholia are important for the student of the tradition. (shrink)

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Linguistics; Arab languages; teaching and learning.

When Mommsen saw foll. 28r line i–29r line 6 of cod. Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 7530, an eighth-century grammatical miscellany from Monte Cassino, he realised immediately the importance of their contents. He wrote to Bergk about his discovery on 2 November 1844 and Bergk published the material early the next year as being an epitome of a treatise on signs applied to literary texts by Probus and earlier Latin grammarians. There had long been known Diogenes Laertius' account of the χ (...) and other signs placed in the margins of texts of Plato's dialogues, Hephaestion's account of the colometrical παράγραος, κορωνίς, διπλ and στερίσκος placed in texts of lyric and dramatic poetry, the chapter de notis sententiarum in Isidore's Origines, the names of various treatises περσημείων mentioned in the Suda, the references to σημεα in Eustathius' commentary on Homer' and in the marginal scholia to Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes in Byzantine manuscripts, Cicero's allusions to the βελός and the διπλ scattered reports of the signs with which Origen equipped Greek versions of the Old Testament and Jerome's adaptation of Origen's system, and Cassiodorus' account of his own method of noting orthodox and heterodox opinions in ecclesiastical writings. (shrink)

Greek philosophy; stoicism; influence; Islamic philosophy; history; MA thesis.

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

Scholars often assume that Old Comedies based on mythological stories differed from other Old Comedies primarily by their mythological plot material, and that therefore they shared the structural features of the surviving plays of Aristophanes. I show that the evidence may instead indicate that these Old Comedies did not as a rule have a parabasis or an agon. The structure of mythological Old Comedy could then have resembled the satyr play more closely than Aristophanic Old Comedy, meaning genre did (...) not necessarily determine form. (shrink)

The paper examines a single, apparently simple argument for the existence of incompatibilities between the virtues as traits of character. This argument appeals not to empirical truths about human psychology or human nature but to the possibility of conflict between the exercise of different virtues in action. There are, for example, situations in which we can exercise the virtue of truthfulness only at the expense of not exercising the virtue of tact, as when we are asked a question to which (...) the straightforward answer will pain our questioner. The person who in these situations would give a straightforward answer possesses the virtue of truthfulness to a higher degree than the person who would respond more evasively, whereas the latter person possesses the virtue of tact to a higher degree than the former. But since the two responses are mutually exclusive, it follows that the degree to which we possess the virtue of truthfulness must, at least in some measure, correlate inversely with the degree to which we possess the virtue of tact. And similarly for many other pairs of virtues. My paper focusses on the two cardinal assumptions of this argument, viz., (i) that sometimes the exercise of one virtue can conflict with the exercise of another, and (ii) that the degree to which a person possesses a virtue correlates directly with the extent of its exercise, and defends both assumptions against a variety of objections which allege that, in different ways, they are insensitive to the complexity of the virtues. (shrink)

Scholars often assume that Old Comedies based on mythological stories differed from other Old Comedies primarily by their mythological plot material, and that therefore they shared the structural features of the surviving plays of Aristophanes. I show that the evidence may instead indicate that these Old Comedies did not as a rule have a parabasis or an agon. The structure of mythological Old Comedy could then have resembled the satyr play more closely than Aristophanic Old Comedy, meaning genre did (...) not necessarily determine form. (shrink)

In this paper I want to examine a view of the Darwinian theory of evolution which was put forward fairly recently by A. R. Manser. His approach is of interest not only in itself, but also because it may be expanded to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of the science of biology in general. I shall not consider these further implications here, but shall concentrate on an examination of his thesis in the context in which it is raised. (...) My paper falls into two sections. In the first I shall state Manser's thesis and some of the arguments with which he supports it, and shall try to show how a series of objections raised by A. G. N. Flew and K. Connolly may be answered. In the second I shall offer on my own account a positive argument to provide a possible basis for his point of view, with the aim of indicating why the theory should be of the kind he suggests, and what form the study of evolution must take. (shrink)

At the risk of proving myself such a caviller, I want to ask a question which I have seldom heard raised, and which I have never seen discussed in anything that I have read about Berkeley. If I am right, it poses a problem for his immaterialism, not only different, but coming from a different direction, from those objections that are commonly levelled against him. If I am wrong, it will show how right Berkeley was to stress the difficulty of (...) using for one purpose our language which has become fashioned for another. At least, I hope that I shall not fail to be the ‘fair and ingenuous reader’for whom he asked. (shrink)