Thucydides reports that in 414/13, after severe losses in Sicily, Nikias wrote to Athens, asking to be replaced in command and saying that it was necessary either to recall the expedition from the island or to send a new army as a reinforcement. The Athenians, however, [When the Athenians had heard his letter,] instead of relieving him of his command, chose two members of the force in Sicily, Menandros and Euthydemos, to act as additional commanders until the selection and arrival (...) of other colleagues, so that the position of sole commander would not cause Nikias suffering in his illness. They also voted to send another force, both military and naval, composed of Athenians on the muster-roll and of their allies. After the selection of Demosthenes, the son of Alkisthenes, and Eurymedon, the son of Thoukles, as Nikias' colleagues, they sent Eurymedon forthwith, around the winter solstice, to Sicily with ten ships and one hundred and twenty talents in silver …. (shrink)

Thucydides reports that in 414/13, after severe losses in Sicily, Nikias wrote to Athens, asking to be replaced in command and saying that it was necessary either to recall the expedition from the island or to send a new army as a reinforcement. The Athenians, however,[When the Athenians had heard his letter,] instead of relieving him of his command, chose two members of the force in Sicily, Menandros and Euthydemos, to act as additional commanders until the selection and arrival of (...) other colleagues, so that the position of sole commander would not cause Nikias suffering in his illness. They also voted to send another force, both military and naval, composed of Athenians on the muster-roll and of their allies. After the selection of Demosthenes, the son of Alkisthenes, and Eurymedon, the son of Thoukles, as Nikias' colleagues, they sent Eurymedon forthwith, around the winter solstice, to Sicily with ten ships and one hundred and twenty talents in silver …. (shrink)

In this paper I shall offer an hypothesis to explain the process by which the inventories of the contents of the three chambers of the Parthenon were inscribed in the fifth century and to account for all the surviving fragments of those inscriptions. At the end of their annual term the treasurers of Athena prepared separate inventories of the Pronaos, the Hekatompedon, and the cella which they called the Parthenon. But the four boards of treasurers whose terms filled a Panathenaic (...) penteteris co-operated with each other in stewarding the sacred possessions and began in 434/3 to have their inventories inscribed on the same stelai. The four inventories of the Pronaos filled one face of one stele, the four of the Hekatompedon one face of a second stele, and the four of the Parthenon one face of a third stele. In the course of time the treasurers began to post their records on the backs of stelai erected by their predecessors. This process was apparently changed in 410/09 to allow the four inventories to fill both the obverse and reverse faces of a smaller stele. In 406/5, with the creation of the unified board of the treasurers of Athena and the Other Gods, the inventories began to be inscribed year by year on individual stelai, and the Four Archai disappear. (shrink)

‘The Greeks have two treaties with the King: the one which our city made, which all praise; and later the Lacedaemonians made the one which all condemn,’ says Demosthenes c. 350. Isocrates, however, did not always run with the pack, for a few years earlier he urged the Athenians to make peace on the basis of the treaty ‘with the King and the Lacedaemonians [which] commands the Greeks to be autonomous, the garrisons to depart from the cities of others, and (...) each people to have its own territory’. (shrink)

Twice in this chapter, according to the commentators, Plutarch has confused a pair of military engagements, Spartolos with Poteidaia and Nikias' campaign in the Megarid during 427 with that of Demosthenes in 424. In both instances this view seems to me to be of doubtful validity. In one case I would propose that instead of confusing two campaigns Plutarch simply misunderstood a very difficult passage in Thucydides, while in the second there is only flimsy evidence for rejecting Plutarch's version. His (...) statement that the Athenians under the command of Kalliades and Xenophon were defeated in Thrace by the Chalkidians refers to the battle of Spartolos , but it has become a critical dogma that Plutarch 'gives Kalliades as the commander, clearly by confusion with Kallias son of Kalliades',3 who led the Athenian forces at the battle of Poteidaia . The only apparent reason for this view is the coincidence of the names Kallias and Kalliades, but the frequent occurrence of these names makes this coincidence of no significance. (shrink)

In a previous article in this journal I proposed the hypothesis that the First Stele of the Hekatompedon inventories was originally opisthographic. Subsequently, when eleven fragments of this stele were placed in plaster in the Epigraphical Museum, it became possible to examine its reverse face thoroughly and to see clearly the architectural features of the stone.

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition , but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original (...) plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969. (shrink)

Meritt, Wade-Gery, and McGregor have interpreted the rubric to signify that the Hellenotamiai transferred to the commissioners of the Propylaia any un-expended funds left from a grant of money authorized by the demos for a given military campaign. While this idea of surplus funds seems a perfectly possible explanation, I would suggest an alternative, that the Hellenotamiai transferred to the commissioners of the Propylaia an aparche of booty collected by an Athenian expeditionary force. Herodotus and Xenophon4 mention the dekate from (...) the booty of several battles, and Thucydides speaks of the dedication of spoils as a customary procedure. (shrink)