On the life and philosophy of Bhāskarācārya, 8th cent., Vedanta philospher and commentator of Brahmasūtra.

Ii is a well-known fact that the men of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander were known collectively asor ‘foot companions’. Our first reference to the name comes from Demosthenes, who in his second Olynthiac tries unconvincingly to disparage the fighting qualities of Philip's mercenaries andDemosthenes adds no explanation, and it was left to commentators and lexicographers to unearth a relevant fragment from thePhilippicaof Anaximenes of Lampsacus.

New evidence often complicates as much as it clarifies. That truth is well illustrated by Stephen Tracy's recent and brilliant discovery that a tiny unpublished fragment of an Attic inscription belongs to a known decree . The decree has hitherto been recognised as an enactment of the oligarchy imposed by Antipater in 322. Its proposer, Archedicus of Lamptrae, was a leading member of the new regime and held the most influential office of state, that of anagrapheus, in 320/19.2 Appropriately enough (...) the decree confers honours upon members of the Macedonian court, but as the stone now reveals, it is phrased in a remarkable and anomalous manner: ‘in order that as many as possible of the friends of the king and of Antipater may be honoured by the Athenian people and confer benefactions upon the city’. There is no question about the meaning. The decree refers to friends of an unknown king, who are also friends of Antipater. But after Alexander's death there was a dual kingship. Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV reigned jointly and are generally termed ‘the kings’. How can the singular singular be explained? (shrink)

Propaganda and history are often inseparable. Most governments are in a position to control the dissemination of evidence, and if an event is embarrassing or damaging, the relevant evidence is certain to be distorted or withheld. Moreover the writers of history, however innocent their motives, cannot disregard the official apologia of their rulers. One notes with interest that the learned authors of the official Soviet history of the world portray the invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 as a (...) crusade of liberation. Of course it might be true that the people liberated by the Red Army were glad to be rid of ‘the arbitrary despotism of the Polish Pans’ and that in the subsequent elections there was absolute freedom of choice and overwhelming support for union with the Ukraine, but the fact remains that it was impossible for membersof the Moscow Academy to contradict their government's justification of the invasion. (shrink)

One of the more intriguing figures of the first period of the Successors is Nicanor, the lieutenant and admiral of Cassander. He came into prominence when he assumed command of the Macedonian garrison at Athens, late in 319 B.c. After distinguishing himself there he took a fleet to the Bosporus, where with Antigonus' collaboration he won a decisive victory over Polyperchon's royal navy. Subsequently his aspirations became sufficiently lofty to threaten his patron's security, and Cassander took elaborate precautions to ensure (...) his arrest and condemnation. Nicanor was clearly a figure of considerable importance; yet no source even hints at his origins and family background. Can conjecture go any way to filling the gaps? (shrink)

This book is a study of the second-edition version of the 'Transcendental Deduction', which is one of the most important and obscure sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. By way of a close analysis of the B-Deduction, Adam Dickerson makes the distinctive claim that the Deduction is crucially concerned with the problem of making intelligible the unity possessed by complex representations - a problem that is the representationalist parallel of the semantic problem of the unity of the proposition. Along (...) the way he discusses most of the key themes in Kant's theory of knowledge, including the nature of thought and representation, the notion of objectivity, and the way in which the mind structures our experience of the world. (shrink)

Arrian is regarded as the most authoritative of the extant sources for the reign of Alexander the Great. It is his work that is usually chosen to provide the narrative core of modern histories, and very often a mere reference to ‘the reliable Arrian’ is considered sufficient to guarantee the veracity of the information derived from him. What gives Arrian his prestige is his reliance on contemporary sources, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. It is recognized that Arrian's narrative is based primarily upon (...) Ptolemy, and, as long as Ptolemy is regarded as an impeccable mine of facts for Alexander's reign and Arrian's work is accepted as a faithful reproduction of Ptolemy, the Anabasis Alexandri stands out as a uniquely authoritative record of Alexander's reign. (shrink)

Alexander's satrapal appointments in Syria have long been a focal point of scholarly dissension, for the relevant passages in the ancient sources are uniformly inconsistent and sometimes disconcertingly corrupt. A running debate continued until 1935, when Oscar Leuze presented a monumental survey of the ancient evidence together with exhaustive refutation of the hypotheses advanced by earlier scholars. Since then the problems of Syria under Alexander have been left virtually undisturbed, which is a pity. In the first place, Leuze's treatment is (...) not impregnable. His massive discussion tends to convince through sheer accumulation of argument rather than by the cogency of its logic, which can often be faulted. (shrink)

An earlier paper, to which this is a sequel, traced the history of the Laplace Transform up to 1880. In that year Poincaré reinvented the transform, but did so in a more powerful context, that of properly conceived complex analysis. Rapid developments followed, culminating in Doetsch' work in which the transform took its modern shape.

In a recent article Professor Brunt has made an eloquent plea for greater rigour in handling the remains of non-extant authors. When the original is lost and we depend I upon quotation, paraphrase or mere citation by later authorities, we must first establish the reliability of the source which supplies the fragment. There is obviously a world of difference between the long verbal quotations in Athenaeus and the disjointed epitomes provided by the periochae of Livy. As a general rule, the (...) fuller and more explicit the reproduction in the secondary source, the more confident we can be that it approximates to the original. Our doubts should increase as the references become less precise and resort to paraphrase rather than direct quotation. The wider context is also important. One always needs to know why the secondary author is making his citation and what interest he has in a strictly literal reproduction. These principles are unexceptionable, but they are difficult to maintain in practice. One rarely has the opportunity to make a sustained experiment, checking an author's techniques' of quotation and digest against sources which are now extant. As a result the historian all too often feels constrained to squeeze the last drop of meaning out of testimonia which are by their very nature imprecise. The standard work, Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, is a pitfall for the unwary. It presents all citations, whether full quotations or the vaguest of references, on the same status as ‘fragments’; and the context is necessarily reduced to the barest minimum, so that the reader's attention is focussed directly upon the lost original and diverted from the machinery of transmission. (shrink)

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to (...) moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’. (shrink)

There is relative agreement among modern scholars that the bulk of Arrian's literary activity came late in his life. What has become the standard theory was evolved by Eduard Schwartz, who maintained that it was only after the end of his public career that Arrian turned to writing. According to this hypothesis the Пєρίπλους of 131/ A.D. was a tentative preliminary monograph, which was followed in 136/7 by a work of similar genre, the.

One of the most enigmatic figures in Macedonian history is Alexander of Lyncestis, son of Aeropus and son-in-law of the great Antipater. During the reign of his royal namesake he achieved sensational prominence, deposed from his command of the élite Thessalian cavalry under suspicion of treasonable correspondence with the Persian court. Still more sensational, however, is his involvement in the murder of Philip II. Our sources are unanimous that together with his brothers, Heromenes and Arrhabaeus, he was party to the (...) murder, but secured pardon by his immediate recognition of Alexander as king.The immediate recognition is certain, the participation in the murder much less so. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of Plato's last and most difficult work. Professor Morrow's theme is that in the Laws Plato is applying his basic principles to the precise historical conditions of his time, out of consuming interest in the moral and political development of mankind. The concept of the "mixture" or "mean," as developed in the Politicus and Philebus, is treated as the key to the philosophical interpretation of the Laws, law itself being the "limit"; human nature, the natural environment, and (...) existing laws and customs, the "unlimited." Prof. Morrow places the weight of his interpretation on the latter, since a determination of the actual character of Greek institutions, as Plato knew, seems essential to a correct analysis of the "composite" institutions we find in the Laws.--. (shrink)