This paper examines the evidence for the life and career of the Lesbian tyrant Myrsilos. Following an examination of the ancient testimonia for Myrsilos in the text of Alcaeus and later sources, the name Myrsilos is then considered in relation to the Hittite royal name Muršiliš, Myrsilos as an alternate name for the Lydian king Kandaules and various toponyms in Lydia and Caria that appear to be derived from the same underlying name or title. The consequences of the distribution of these names is then considered in the cultural and historical context of the Aegean-Anatolian interface, with implications for early Lesbian history and cultural continuity from the Late Bronze Age down to the Archaic period.

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 199 : best candidate. We have been influenced by Thucydides' selection, emphasis, and portrayal of the events of 425; so had the Hellenistic scholars; Aristophanes had not. i (ii) If the slave is Nicias, he is not necessarily invested with the character ; which the Sicilian Expedition, several years after Eq., revealed in Nicias. (iii) In the whole of the opening dialogue of Eq. there is no passage which '• requires for the appreciation of its humour any knowledge of the character of any real person.

This paper examines the walwet and kukalim legends appearing on early electrum coinage from Lydia. After a survey of previous interpretations, it is argued that the appurtenance suffix in kukalim functions as a patronymic, ‘I am a son/descendant of Gyges’, referring to Alyattes, whose name is now generally and correctly seen in walwet. Building on this, the chronological implications that this reading poses for the dates of Alyattes are then considered in relation to the revised dating of coins from the Artemisium deposit. It is suggested that Alyattes was already on the Lydian throne by ca. 635 BC, a dating which has further implications for the chronology of other rulers of the Mermnad dynasty.

Herodotus’ Histories begin in earnest with Lydia and the infamous tale of the fall of Candaules and the rise of the Mermnad dynasty under Gyges. Yet, for all that Gyges was evidently a transformational figure in Lydian history and, through the story of his usurpation of the throne from Candaules, came to occupy a prominent place in the received memory of the Lydian world, Herodotus tells us very little about Gyges himself or his reign. Chapters 1.13–14 tell us about the role of the Delphic oracle in legitimizing the rule of Gyges in Lydia, as well as his lavish dedications at Delphi, in which he set a precedent followed by Alyattes and Croesus, the more notable among his successors. Yet, the remainder of his reign is summarized in less than one sentence: ‘He sent an army to Miletus and Smyrna as soon as he took power, and seized the citadel of Colophon, but no other great deed was done by him during his thirty-eight year reign … ’.

I Am not proposing in this essay to treat at length and in detail of the metric of other lyric poets. In most cases questions of metre are intimately involved with questions of text, into which so many other considerations enter that in dealing with them proportion would be lost, while metrical analysis of such material would still remain largely speculative. What follows is therefore little more than a general account of the principles of composition which these poets appear to me to follow; I have, however, indicated a few passages where emendations made purely on metrical grounds and widely accepted seem to me, in the absence of responsion, based on too ready a desire to reduce all poems to the best-known formulas of versification.