Classical scholars have always lived in a united Europe. Our subject matter is the birth and youth of Europe and fellow scholars all over Europe and all over the world are our daily companions.

Within our own traditions we work with the same data on the same problems and our solutions are common property. In theory the political unification of Europe is irrelevant to us. We have always been a republic.

Isocrates was perhaps the first in antiquity to focus his political theories on the idea of Europe and the opposition between Europe and Asia. No doubt, if we look into his doctrines and what he said about that theme, they seem to our modern eyes terribly simple and sketchy: they just provide a beginning, a starting point. But even that is remarkable; and it seems worth going into the trouble of seeing what he meant by ‘Europe’, and what place the notion had in a programme which he never stopped defending, all through his life.

By 1994 no less than 2,500 years will have passed since Kleisthenes (in 507 B.C.) introduced democracy to Athens, and the anniversary will undoubtedly be celebrated by all nations that call themselves democracies, i.e., practically everywhere in the western world. But during the celebrations sceptics will probably ask at least two fundamental questions: first, how much do Athenian demokratia and modern democracy have in common and second, to what extent were modern democratic ideas and institutions shaped by looking back upon the ancient model? Was Athens the school not only of Hellas – as Perikles claimed in his funeral speach – but also of the political system and ideology that are universally accepted in the western world of today? Or, alternatively, is the Athenian example just one small piece in the great jigsaw puzzle that constitutes modern democracy and even a fairly unimportant piece, one of those elusive pieces that has nothing but sky or water on it and, accordingly, is almost impossible to place correctly?

Long before his obsessional wish was finally fulfilled in 146 B.C, the elder Cato had yet other concerns than Carthaginem delendam esse. In his manual for the farmer, De agricultura 143, he gives ample prescriptions concerning the way the wife of the bailiff (the vilica) of an estate should behave:

‘She must visit the neighbouring and other women very seldom, and not have them either in the house or in her part of it. She must not go out to meals or be a gad-about. She must not engage in religious worship herself or get others to engage in it for her without the orders of the master or the mistress; let her remember that the master attends to the devotions for the whole household.’ (translation: W. D. Hooper & H. B. Ash. Loeb)

The two ivory tablets in Paris and London, dating from late antiquity and forming parts of one diptych (Plates 1, 2), have been convincingly placed in their stylistic setting by the scholar to whom this article is dedicated. With other works in ivory from about A.D. 400 and with the Rothschild cameo, they form a ‘classicistic’ group, some manufactured in Rome, some in Milan. The cameo probably refers to the marriage in A.D. 398 of the young Emperor Honorius to Maria, daughter of Stilicho. We may assume that the diptych under consideration here also has reference to an aristocratic wedding, although its iconography is quite different. It shows not the portrait of a bridal pair, but two female figures, hitherto regarded as pagan priestesses. It is not these figures, but the tabulae ansatae at their heads that give support to the hypothesis that the diptych was made on the occasion of a marriage between the two families named on the tablets, the Symmachi and the Nicomachi. Matrimonial unions between members of the pagan aristocracy in officially Christian Rome may not only be presumed, but in the case of the Nicomachi and Symmachi may be actually shown to have happened. The following observations would seem to provide appropriate reinforcement for reference to a wedding on iconographic grounds.

As a contribution to the study of ‘Latin in use’, we focus in this article on the ways a writer indicates what s/he wants to emphasize within the sentence; the specific linguistic signs s/he uses to that end; and the range of effects that these may have for an alert reader. We have used, on the one hand, recent developments in the study of narrative, discourse and general linguistics and, on the other, the work of earlier pioneers in the field of word order in Latin.