Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece

The oath was an institution of fundamental importance across a wide range of social interactions throughout the ancient Greek world, making a crucial contribution to social stability and harmony; yet there has been no comprehensive, dedicated scholarly study of the subject for over a century. This volume of a two-volume study explores the nature of oaths as Greeks perceived it, the ways in which they were used (and sometimes abused) in Greek life and literature, and their inherent binding power

Unagreement is an illusion

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9311-yThis paper proposes an analysis of unagreement, a phenomenon involving an apparent mismatch between a definite third person plural subject and first or second person plural subject agreement observed in various null subject languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern Greek and Bulgarian), but notoriously absent in others (e.g. Italian, European Portuguese). A cross-linguistic correlation between unagreement and the structure of adnominal pronoun constructions suggests that the availability of unagreement depends on whether person and definiteness are hosted by separate heads (in languages like Greek) or bundled on a single head (i.e. pronominal determiners in languages like Italian). Null spell-out of the head hosting person features high in the extended nominal projection of the subject leads to unagreement. The lack of unagreement in languages with pronominal determiners results from the interaction of their syntactic structure with the properties of the vocabulary items realising the head encoding both person and definiteness. The analysis provides a principled explanation for the cross-linguistic distribution of unagreement and suggests a unified framework for deriving unagreement, adnominal pronoun constructions, personal pronouns and pro

The history of the text of Aristophanes

An account of the transmission of Aristophanes' text from his own time to the present day

Sófocles y la culpabilidad de Edipo

This article, in response to Harris (2010), reconsiders whether Oedipus, on his own account in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (798-813) of his encounter with Laius, would have been regarded by fifth-century Athenians as legally guilty of homicide (either wilful or unwilful), and concludes that he would not, because he was responding to a potentially lethal attack. There is no inconsistency between the treatment of this issue in Oedipus Tyrannus and its treatment in Oedipus at Colonus.Este artículo, en respuesta a Harris (2010), replantea la cuestión de si Edipo, a partir de su propia narración del enfrentamiento con Layo en el Edipo Rey (798-813) de Sófocles, habría sido considerado legalmente culpable de homicidio (voluntario o involuntario) por los atenienses del siglo V, habida cuenta de que su acción era la respuesta a una agresión potencialmente letal, y se llega a la conclusion de que no lo sería. No hay ninguna incoherencia entre el tratamiento de este asunto en Edipo Rey y en Edipo en Colono