In chapter nine of his Life of Demetrius, Plutarch records an amorous interlude between Demetrius the Besieger and Cratesipolis, the widow of Polyperchon's son, Alexander. Plutarch is our sole source for this incident. Perhaps he was struck—as we can hardly fail to be—by a sense of whimsy in the story of a liaison between lovers named ‘She Who Rules the City’ and ‘The Besieger of Cities’. There is nothing especially unusual about the affair itself, as Demetrius is remembered as a prodigal womaniser, but the historical context, timing and circumstances are bizarre, and warrant investigation.

One of the most pleasurable features of the plays of Euripides is his exploration of a wide range of character types, each of whom has the potential to be more exciting than the previous one. The fictional Aeschylus in the underworld of Aristophanes' Frogs (1043) remembers in particular the wicked women (Stheneboea, Phaedra), but Euripides also had his share of pious and self-sacrificing virgins (Macaria, Polyxena, Iphigenia), faithful wives (Helen in her name play, Andromache, Alcestis, Evadne), shrewd matriarchs (Hecuba, Jocasta, Aethra, Alcmene), and priestesses (Cassandra, Iphigenia in I. T., Theonoe, the Pythia).

An historian is only as good as his sources, and an assessment of any historian rests primarily on an assessment of his ability to find, to choose, and to utilise historical sources. In this regard we may, I believe, credit Ephorus, the most important of the fourth century B.C. historians, with a large degree of achievement. Before we turn to the main body of this paper, however, I must prefix some comments on the size and nature of the Ephoran corpus which chance has transmitted to us. Felix Jacoby consciously chose not to print all that has survived of Ephorus under FGrHist 70. Jacoby limited himself to those passages which specifically cited Ephorus as author of the transmitted information.

In recent years, the idea of ‘performance’ has become a more and more important concept for the analysis of literary texts, even if the notion of ‘performance’ in literary criticism still does not denote a single agreed theory, but is a collective term referring to a number of different aspects and methods. The performance approach seems obvious for some literary genres, like drama and also oratory, for which performance is an essential characteristic. In the case of orations, in antiquity already a detailed doctrine of the perfect performance was established, both in theory and practice. Building on this knowledge and trying to recover the quintessential context of a speech, people have successfully attempted to explore a Roman orator's potential and to contexrualize Roman orations by reconstructing the delivery of sample speeches.

After Marcus Atilius Regulus made inroads into North Africa as consul in 256 B.C. during the first Punic War, the Carthaginians were apparently ready to negotiate a settlement, but Regulus offered terms so harsh that they were refused out of hand. At this point Xanthippus, the Spartan mercenary-general, arrived on the Carthaginian side and soon made an impact as a shrewd and uplifting leader, not least because, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, he captured Regulus, by then proconsul, by ambush in 255. Regulus' subsequent fate, embellished in the later literary-historical tradition, was enshrined in die familiar version here represented by Valerius Maximus: