Very few critics have ever admired the structure of Euripides' Andromache. The enigmatic comment of Aristophanes' hypothesis, τò δε δρﾶµα τωv δεvτερωv has almost invariably been taken as meaning that the play is second rate, not that it came second in the trilogy or in the competition, and this is largely blamed on the structure. Most critics admire the first portion of the play dominated by Andromache, some are willing to tolerate the middle section concerned with Hermione, and many find the last portion, the sorrows of Peleus, effective, but almost no-one likes the combination of the three. It takes a rugged individualist like A. W. Verrall to say: ‘[The story is] in dexterous combination and moral interest one of the best among the extant remains of Attic tragedy.’

Have you ever stopped to think what life would be like without your alarm clock, without church bells ringing out the hour, without clocks in lecture rooms? How differently would you understand the world?

I believe that studies by social anthropologists working in mainly rural communities located in present-day Greece may help to deepen our understanding of the Greeks of antiquity, and this is a belief that I have held for more than twenty years. It is a belief, moreover, which is steadily winning a general acceptance. To put it succinctly, ancient and modern Greeks can be shown to share values in common and, thus, one enables us to understand the other more clearly. But why should values have persisted, from Homer to the twentieth century? It is not, let me stress, because of ethnic continuity, but rather because both groups comprise small-scale subsistence agriculturists, working the land as a family unit; in other words, both groups represent what a social anthropologist would classify as peasant society, and communities of this type, however widely separated in time and in geographical situation, share common values and Mediterranean peasants perhaps to an especially great extent, though this is not a point I would wish to press. Greece, of course, has changed dramatically in recent years as the drift from countryside to city has intensified. But have the fundamentals of life also changed so very much? Not according to Renee Hirschon who speaks as follows of the preoccupations of those ‘heirs of the Greek catastrophe’, that is, Greeks expelled from Asia Minor in the early twenties and now settled in the Kokkinia district of the Piraeus: ‘In Kokkinia social live revolves around the division of the sexes and their complementray roles, while family reputation and prestige were principal concerns.

People wonder at this stone [the magnet]. Indeed it often makes a chain of rings hanging from itself. For you can sometimes see five or more rings hanging down one after another swaying in light breezes, when each hangs down from another, clinging underneath it, and each feels from the other the force and attraction of the stone; so much does its force penetrate and have its effect. … It also happens sometimes that the nature of iron withdraws from this stone, and will flee it and follow it in turn. I have even seen iron rings leap up, and at the same time iron filings seethe in bronze bowls when a magnet has been put underneath, so eager to escape the stone is iron seen to be.

Livy's celebrated account of the Bacchanalia has long been a magnet for students of Roman politics, social life, religion, and private law. Two recent surveys document this extensive range of scholarship. J-M. Pailler, the wellknown French archaeologist, has published a massive monograph of 850 pages, admirably documented and containing a chapter of sixty pages reviewing the bibliography of the past hundred years. Erich Gruen, in his collected papers entitled Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy, has contributed a long essay on the political aspects, again with a full bibliography. This paper has the more modest aim of reviewing Livy's account primarily from the literary aspect, concentrating in particular on the opening chapters which describe how the alleged coniuratio was detected.

‘The toga was a garment worthy of the masters of the world, flowing, solemn, eloquent but with over-complication in its arrangement and a little too much emphatic affectation in the self-conscious tumult of its folds.’