In Eum. 1028–9 the Furies mark their transformation into Eumenides by donning red robes over their black costumes in imitation of the robes worn in the Panathenaea by metics . Greek epic was sensitive to the symbolic value of clothing and Aeschylus had experimented in the Persians with the greater scope that drama offered for clothing-symbolism. Scholars have detected a wealth of associations in the Furies' robing-scene: this culmination of the trilogy echoes the red carpet upon which Agamemnon walks to (...) his death in the first play, which is actually referred to as ‘garments’ , and the net in which Agamemnon is caught , which is brought on stage in the middle play . Another series of stage-actions of equal importance in preparing for the robing of the Furies has not been so well explained. (shrink)

In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates vents his frustration at his new pupil Strepsiades’ inability to see the eponymous chorus with the line ‘You would see them unless you have drops of rheum in your eyes as big as gourds (κολοκύνταις).’ This line is problematic, because gourds relate to eyesight in no obvious way. However, Aristophanes might have ended the verse by referring to Socrates’ initiation of Strepsiades sixty-five lines earlier by a liberal sprinkling of barley, and written ‘or you're blear-eyed with (...) barley-groats (οὐλοχύταισι)’. If some reader added κρομ(μ)ύοις ‘with onions’ to his text as a more universally valid explanation for an eye-affliction, a later scribe might have thought this an attempted correction, and substituted κολοκύνταις, which is both metrically correct and palaeographically closer to οὐλοχύταισι than is κρομ(μ)ύοις. (shrink)

Revising Clouds for publication some five years after its third-place showing in the City Dionysia of 423 b.c., Aristophanes retooled the first parabasis to praise the play's propriety, omitting as it did distasteful matter and gratuitous buffoonery, which—along with the judges’ crassness—accounted, he says, for its failure.

This article endorses with substantial modifications M. Bernal's claim that the Greeks based Memnon on Ammenemes II of Egypt. An Egyptian origin for Memnon appears likely from Zeus' weighing of his fate against Achilles' in the Aethiopis, which is similar to an early spell of the Book of the Dead; from his Amazonian ally, who resembles the Nile-god, clad in a girdle with a single breast; and from his apotheosis, which is unlike Homer's usual view that the soul is witless (...) in death, yet is reminiscent of the soteriological Osiris-cult, which was known to the Mycenaeans. Bernal's view that Memnon was specifically Ammenemes, however, rests on one word in Strabo, judged by editors to be a scribal error. Cases for two other proposed models, Khumben-numena I of Elam and Sethos I of Egypt, are too complex and fragile to accept. Since at least the first century, the Greeks themselves linked Memnon to Amenhotep III of Egypt, calling a portrait-colossus of that pharaoh "Memnon." This identification was based, I argue, on the fact that the statue faces sunrise on the winter solstice and so was linked to the dawn. Amenhotep's name is too unlike Memnon's to have attracted to him a preexisting Greek figure, but, as P. Gilbert proposed, Amenhotep may have been the basis for that figure, for archaeological evidence shows his contact with the Aegean. Like Memnon, Amenhotep formed military pacts with eastern kings, was son of a solar deity, and was exceptionally handsome. Moreover, his father's name was Tuthmosis . In short, Bernal argues well that epic based Memnon on a real person, rightly seeks him in Egypt, but fails to rule out Amenhotep. (shrink)