It is widely assumed that the aoidoi, the original performers of Homeric poetry or its antecedents, sang a chant restricted to three or four notes, to the accompaniment of a 4-stringed instrument (Danek and Hagel 1995, Marshall 2002). The prestigious later performers from classical times, the rhapsodes, did not have the instrument, and the vocal characteristics of their performances are quite uncertain. In this paper I will discuss various aspects of a conjectured rhapsodic style, based on the reconstruction of the Ancient Greek pitch accent by Devine and Stephens (1994), together with some consideration of issues concerning the hexameter rhythm. For some initial orientation, it might be useful to listen to the short sample on the CD accompanying this issue; various features of the style will be discussed with reference to that.

Of all the extant sources, Suetonius' Life of Augustus contains the fullest, and certainly the most systematic, treatment of the supernatural indications of the future Augustus' greatness. Suetonius deploys the full range of divinatory techniques – both those administered by the institutions of the Roman state religion (augurs and haruspices) and those excluded from its ambit (astrology and dreams) – to underline divine approval for the dominance of Augustus. Scholars have readily explained the appearance of this unparalleled congeries of supernatural support by adducing the personal belief in supernatural phenomena of Suetonius and Dio, the two principal mediators of this material.

There is surely no one any more who requires convincing that the basis of the Augustan principate was the control of the legions. Augustus may have paraded his tribunician power and played down his potestas as a magistrate, but the Res Gestae is above all else the record of the generalissimo in control of the entire military resources of the empire. That control remained almost unchallenged for forty-four years.

William Harris brilliantly demonstrated that under the Republic military glory was the preeminent virtue of Roman politicians. The state was now in the control of one man, but nothing had changed, except that the stakes were higher. Edward Gibbon, of course, detected the truth. He had, after all, both political and military experience – however inglorious.

The function of the second choral ode of Seneca's Trojan Women in the overall thematic design of that play is a question that has aroused much critical interest over the years. Its overt Epicureanism appears at first to sit oddly with the assumptions of various characters (including the Chorus themselves) as to whether individual consciousness survives after death, and its relationship to what precedes (Talthybius' report of the appearance of Achilles' ghost, the quarrel between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon and Calchas' injunction that both Polyxena and Astyanax must be sacrificed) and what follows (Andromache's dream of Hector) has been seen as problematic; further, there is the whole issue of how it relates to the ritual killings of Astyanax and Polyxena on which the play focuses so much attention and with which it concludes.

Roman mapping can seem a mystifying process. What could any reader garner from an itinerary or a periplus – a list of successive towns and geographical features reeled off in order? The itinerary has been compared to directions given to a stranger: in both written and graphic form, it simplifies, and gives a route with a definite aim, states what is near or comes after along the route, but does not attempt to give any extraneous information about the landscape which surrounds the single route. There is no overview, no aspirations to comprehensiveness or universality.