The gods appear in nearly every passage of Aristophanic dialogue; it is hard to imagine more than five minutes passing in the comic theatre before hearing the name of an Olympian deity. This remarkable density is perhaps less telling than it might seem, for the vast majority of such references occur in oaths. Formally, an oath calls on one or more gods to witness (using the particles nē or ma) an assertion, a denial, or a promise. Less formally, simple oaths with nē or ma add colour and emphasis to colloquial language, somewhat like ‘swear words’ in English, and it is this usage which predominates in Aristophanes; to give just one example, the most popular oath ‘by Zeus’ occurs over 250 times in the eleven comedies. So common are these ‘oaths’ that they hardly seem worthy of the name; at most, they might seem to offer no more than insight into colloquial language at the profane level. Numerous instances, however, take issue with the institution of the oath itself and acquire considerable importance due to the integral role the oath played in Greek religion, especially given the state of that religion precisely during the period of Aristophanes' career, when traditional values were assaulted from numerous directions, and the forces of orthodoxy lashed back with a vengeance.

Theocritus' poem on the women celebrating the festival of Adonis (Idyll 15) has received surprisingly little attention over the years, especially when compared with other Theocritean Idylls of like length. Matthew Arnold's notorious rhapsody (‘a page torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom! What animation! What gaiety! What naturalness! … When such is Greek poetry of the decadence, what must be Greek poetry of the prime?’) has perhaps done more harm than good, by focusing attention too exclusively on the first hundred lines or so of the poem (and indeed Arnold himself was of the opinion that the hymn to Adonis at vv. 100ff. contains ‘of religious emotion, in our acceptation of the words, and of the comfort springing from religious emotion, not a particle’). And yet the poem is second only to Euripides' Bacchae as a document revealing the ways in which religion in the ancient Greek world could offer women an escape (however temporary) from the drab banalities of their everyday existence. And the central contrast between the eternal and idealized glamour of the world of myth and the time-bound existence of Praxinoa and Gorgo (a contrast which is crucial for the above-mentioned role of religion) is absolutely characteristic of one essential aspect of Hellenistic poetry, an aspect that looks back to the world of Euripides and forward to that of Roman poets like Catullus or Propertius. In this paper I shall examine both these features of the Idyll. Also, inspired by those scholars who have illuminated facets of the Dionysiac religion by adducing comparable (if secular) twentieth-century material, I shall try to achieve something similar for Theocritus' poem by drawing on comparative material from late twentieth-century Japan relating to a phenomenon that allows Japanese housewives temporary escape from a tedious and restricted way of life.

Our sources present us with three different versions of Themistocles' death. The purpose of this article is to examine these different versions, explain how and why they developed in the form they did, and show which version is most likely to be correct.

In letter 4.14, Pliny the Younger remarks that he doesn't worry too much about criticism of his poetry since he's not planning to give up the day job (§10):

nam si hoc opusculum nostrum aut potissimum esset aut solum, fortasse posset durum uideri dicere ‘quaere quod agas’: molle et humanum est ‘habes quod agas’.

For if this little work were my chief or sole effort it might possibly seem unkind to tell me to ‘find something else to do’: but there is nothing unkind in the gentle reminder that I ‘have something else to do’.

The creation of a political image based at best on a tenuous reality is a fragile and delicate process. None knew it better than Gaius Julius Caesar. Early in his career, he had fostered the belief that he was the heir of the ‘true’ Marian/popularis tradition with some credibility and lasting success. He presented himself as the great general in the Gallic commentaries and for good reasons this image too gained widespread popularity. There were other important but sometimes less convincing messages to follow. The commentarii on the civil war sought passionately to justify his part in the outbreak of hostilities: this was the published form of a process his intermediaries had begun in the first months of hostilities whereby they stressed his respect for peace and the traditional order, even when he himself was busy ignoring both. In an effort to reinforce this ‘constitutional’ regard, Caesar returned to Rome from Spain in 49 to establish a ‘properly elected’ government with himself and P. Servilius Isauricus as consuls; the correct number of praetors (all eligible to hold the office), aediles, and quaestors. The dictatorship was cast aside after a mere eleven days; Rome was to function as it always had. The uprising of Marcus Caelius Rufus and Titus Annius Milo in 48 B.C. ruined this admirable picture and brought home to Caesar the realities of attempting to dominate Rome by leaving the constitution in its traditional form and hoping for the best from the supporters he had entrusted with office. Moreover, the chaos of civil war and urban disorder combined to allow others to project their own policies and power struggles.

Over the last twenty years, the study of the women of the Greek and Roman world has experienced a boom that, if it is judged by the sheer output of relevant publications, dwarfs any other recent innovations and redirections in the field of ancient history. In view of the ongoing proliferation of studies on this topic, I can only hope that my present paper not only adds to the bulk but also a little to the stock (to heed Laurence Sterne's lament over the historian's business) in that it seeks to redress an imbalance that informs most previous research on women's life in classical antiquity. In short, the large majority of studies in this particular field concentrate on urban environments and, as a consequence, give undue prominence to a certain segment, actually a minority group in terms of quantity, of ancient society. Needless to say, however, that, given the nature of our sources, anything else than this biased focus would have been a big surprise and probably impossible to achieve. Even so, the busy study of those layers of ancient society that produced, or caught the eye of, the authors of Greek and Roman literature, inscriptions, papyri, and coinlegends, can be fully vindicated only when the more shadowy and obscure regions of ancient history are not allowed to be passed over in complete silence. The contribution of women to ancient agriculture is an issue that falls squarely within that latter, underprivileged category of subjects. In her introduction to a collection of essays on new methodological approaches to the study of women in antiquity, Marilyn Skinner pointed out that ‘Real women, like other muted groups, are not to be found so much in the explicit text of the historical record as in its gaps and silences – a circumstance that requires the application of research methods based largely upon controlled inference’