Arma virumque cano Virgil sang, or professed to sing, at the start of his epic, and one may reformulate the import of his programmatic words to fit a new context. Obtaining weapons he can call his own is very often a key moment near the start of the career of a folk-tale hero. And very often it is the hero's mother who equips him with them. Paradoxically, this truth may be confirmed, e contrario, by reference to the Welsh story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes from the Mabinogion, for, in that narrative, the hero's mother Aranhry seeks to thwart at its inception the career of her son – whom she had exposed, since his very existence causes her so much embarrassment – by placing a Destiny or interdiction upon him: he will never bear arms unless and until she herself bestows them. The ban is circumvented by a cunning ruse: the magician Gwydion disguises her son and himself as peripatetic bards, in which capacity they are entertained in Aranhry's castle. When Gwydion conjures up a phantom army and fleet to besiege the citadel, the alarmed Aranhry is all too ready to bestow weapon and armour on the younger of her two guests – only to find the army vanished and her own son in possession of the arms she had sworn he would not bear.

It is surprising how many first impressions of the sight of Rome have been put on record. Some of these first impressions are unashamedly imaginary and come to us mediated by or through a persona. This is a common ploy in Augustan poetry, and it is worth remembering that none of the great Augustan poets was a Roman of Rome, so the impressions attributed to the persona may well reflect those of the writer on his first coming to the metropolis as a young man or boy. First impressions can be conveniently divided into two groups. Some are just that, first impressions, with no hint that the visitor might have had some expectations of what would be seen and experienced. A second group, perhaps the more interesting one, distinguishes itself by a shared anticipation: their actual impressions on visiting the city are not really ‘first’ impressions at all. Few have ever brought to Rome an innocent eye: even in antiquity many visitors always already seemed to know what they were going to see there. Considered chronologically, the very first impressions of Rome of this second group were formed in the imagination, by hearsay, by reading, or in modern times by seeing images of the city: theirs is a virtual Rome. When they finally visit the ‘real’ Rome there often occurs a disjunction or contrast; it might be of enhancement.

The New York Daily Tribune for 20 December 1859 reported a pro-slavery meeting held the day before under the banner of ‘Justice for the South’ (the Civil War was less than eighteen months away). A lawyer named O'Connor spoke as follows:

Now, Gentlemen, to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature…. He has strength, and he has the power to labour; but the Nature which created that power has denied him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to work. (Applause)…. And that Nature which denied him the will to labour gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make him a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living useful for himself and for the master who governs him…. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him…nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labour in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labour and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and to the society.

That thoroughly Aristotelian defence of black slavery was identified as such by Karl Marx, reprinted in Kapital as a modern commentary on Aristotle's thinking on the role of the slave-owner.

Introduction

The search for a more powerful entity to provide some form of order to the chaotic nature of human existence is a phenomenon that can be seen throughout much of human history. For a Roman, the gods were everywhere, as powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life. Religion formed part of the broad-based homogeneity of the western provinces following the process of cultural transformation after conquest. Inscriptions, sculpture, and temple architecture all point to a similar material culture, and, although there is an apparent continuity in the names of the deities being worshipped from the pre-Roman to the Roman periods, their association with the traditional gods of Rome through syncretism negates the idea of direct continuity. However, religious changes are often overlooked in accounts of the Romanization of the western provinces, and we are left with the rather uncritical concept of ‘Romano-Celtic’ religion as a hybrid phenomenon. There is a danger of using the archaeological evidence of temples and inscriptions as diagnostic of change, rather than undertaking a more rigorous analysis in order to understand how religion and ritual formed part of this broad-based homogeneity, and the way in which the people of the provinces made sense of how to act and behave within a new social and political world.

Most ancient Greek vases in modern collections were found in Etruscan tombs. To state this is not a revelation: however, it is a fact of provenance often overlooked or marginalized in discussion about Greek vases. Some years ago, by way of contributing to a Festschrift assembled in honour of my postgraduate mentor, Robert Cook, I attempted an explanation as to why so many Greek-made pots had been hoarded by the Etruscans: an explanation steered predominantly by the final funerary context of those vessels. Since then, a number of further studies relating to this phenomenon have been made, most notably by Christoph Reusser; and our archaeological understanding of how Greek vases were used by the Etruscans has become markedly more refined. Traditionally, the separation of Etruria into ‘cities’ and ‘cemeteries’ has favoured the generous material evidence of the cemeteries. Investigations of the elusive cities – including the major centres of Tarquinia and Cerveteri – now offer some opportunity to review the ways in which certain artefacts frequently found buried among the ‘community of the dead’ were also in active circulation amid the society of the living. The assemblage of a corpus of Etruscan inscriptions on Greek vases attests to one highly significant local and particular value accrued by these objects. And further to all this (or because of it), there has also been a palpable softening of the tendency, on the part of Classical art historians, to depict Etruria as a place where affluent barbarians took ‘whatever they were offered’ by trans-Mediterranean traders.