The Cassandra scene in Aeschylus' Agamemnon occupies over 250 lines, yet scholars and critics, preoccupied with such large issues as the changing conception of justice in the Oresteia and the male/female and Chthonic/Olympian conflicts, have tended to give it relatively little attention. In a sense this is understandable: the scene in no way Advances the action of the drama, and critics who have learned from Aristotle that the ‘plot’ is the ‘soul’ of a tragedy might well feel that it is unnecessary to bother about a scene which could be omitted with no effect on the movement of the story. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Aeschylus would have inserted so long and unexpected a scene in his play, just at the point when the audience would expect Agamemnon to be murdered, if it did not have an important dramatic purpose. Furthermore, in actual performance, Cassandra frequently rivets our attention more than any other character; on stage her scene can be the most gripping and affecting part of the play. In this essay I shall try to account for the powerful effect that the Cassandra scene has on the audience; then I shall discuss its place and function in the Agamemnon and the trilogy as a whole.

Modern Aristophanic scholarship is based on the belief that Aristophanes' plays are funny. Such a belief has not been universal; in antiquity, his characters and their language were regarded, at times, with strong distaste. Aristotle, for one, was not amused: indeed, he would have thought Aristophanophiles scarce gentlemen, since only an ⋯παίδευτος (an uneducated man) could relish the Old Comedy's γέλοια (E.N 1128 17 ff.). The pleasures appropriate to ignorance and learning could be seen (he contended) by comparing the old comedies (whose laughter was raised by α⋯σχρολογία, ‘obscenity’) and the new (which, achieving this same goal by ὑπόνοια, was fitter for gentlemen and scholars). Old Comedy's adherents, in fact, countenance buffoonery, and that is vastly different from wit (E.N. 1128a 15; Rh. 1419b 8).

The strategy of the Carthaginians, in the writer's opinion, must be regarded as an aggressive one that had been devised long before the outbreak of the war in 218 B.c. The view that their operations in Spain did not have an attack on Italy as their ultimate object is naïve. The truth is that they went to Spain after their defeat in the First Punic War precisely in order to build up a base. They hoped to make it the point d'appui for their planned war of revenge against Rome: the Iberian peninsula was to be for them a springboard for attack.

The indebtedness of the Aeneid to Homer in terms of plot and structure has been analysed in minute detail, and the hunt is indeed by no means at an end. Here and there, notably but not exclusively in Aeneid 4, long narrative sequences have been followed back to Apollonius Rhodius. Isolated episodes have been identified as owing much to Greek tragedy. But the pursuit of Virgil's principal narrative sources, already undertaken with furious critical acerbity in antiquity, is perhaps too heavily committed to a limited quantity of likely literary models and to certain patterns of enquiry, though these last have changed a good deal in recent years. If I seem to grumble about a narrowness of outlook that becomes at times oppressive and about the danger of conclusions ever more forced and improbable if we continue barking up the same few trees, it is because (i) I have worked on and off for nearly twenty-five years on Aeneid 7, where Virgil's sources are as mixed, complex and anomalous as they ever become and because (ii) I published recently a study (Vergilius 35 (1989), 8–27) of narrative sequences in Aeneid, which seemed to point strongly towards Virgil's attentive reading of Greek colonization stories. This is not the place to continue my one-man pursuit of Herodotus and Pindar in the Aeneid? but it is high time that we looked at certain large narrative structures in the epic and asked whether we have really been framing the right questions about them.

When the first edition of the Metamorphoses appeared in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city. His literary début, the Amoves, immediately established his reputation as a poetic Lothario, as it lured his tickled readers into a typically Ovidian world of free-wheeling elegiac love, light-hearted hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery. Connoisseurs of elegiac poetry could then enjoy his Heroides, vicariously sharing stirring emotional turmoil with various heroines of history and mythology, who were here given a literary forum for voicing bitter feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing their strong hostility towards the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei, and once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition à la mode Ovidienne, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos presented in his Ars Amatoria, his (male and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true Barthian jouissance in the act of reading a work, which is, as a recent critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’. And after these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, his readers, having become hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote Ovid offered in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris, a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid.

Is Aeneas right or wrong to kill Turnus at the end of the Aeneid? Virgil himself has raised the issue by creating Aeneas' dilemma. In the equivalent scene of the Iliad the first wound which Hector receives in combat with Achilles is fatal, and so the possibility of sparing his life does not arise; but Turnus is not mortally wounded, he asks for mercy, begins to be successful, and then is killed after all. About this moral question all the logically possible opinions have been recently asserted by scholars: that the killing is right, that it is wrong, and that it is morally neutral. One of these must, of course, be right.

Calagurris, the modern Calahorra, is situated by the river Ebro about two hundred miles inland, in what in Roman times was the province of Hispania Citerior or Tarraconensis. Here Quintilian was born some time in the fourth decade of the Christian era. If it were not that his birthplace is recorded by later writers, we should be quite unaware of it. There is nothing in the Institutio Oratoria to suggest that its author was a Spaniard, and though there is no reason why he should have referred to his home country in a treatise on rhetorical education, his work includes just enough personal reminiscence to make it a little surprising that he did not. Moreover, on the rare occasions when he refers to Spain he gives no hint of any connexion with the country. It would be rash to assume that he was ashamed of his Spanish birth, but perhaps long residence in Rome had weakened his consciousness of provincial origin. At the same time we can perhaps see in him certain provincial qualities.

In the early Imperial Age, the steadily growing Christian movement was viewed with suspicion by both the authorities and the people of Rome; in the second century, the Roman rejection of Christian teachings, customs, and practices resulted in a most intriguing counter-movement. During this century, two types of negative response to the Christian faith had become established. The first encompasses the anti-Christian accusations circulating among the Roman population during most of the period, occasionally resulting in Christians being persecuted. At the end of the century, supplementary controversy arose from within the intellectual world. Those who engaged in this polemic were authors who had studied Christian customs, and who consequently targeted the substance of the Christian teachings.

In recent decades, archaeological and historical research on the Iron Age in the north-western Iberian Peninsula, as in many other areas and archaeological contexts, has developed a ‘pacifist’ interpretation. This is based, among other aspects, upon the rejection of the functional nature of the weapons documented in the archaeological record and on the development of a hypothesis on the non-defensive nature of walls, interpreting these structures as a symbol of the community or as an indication of the cohesion of the group living in the settlement. Such an interpretation can be integrated with the idea of a pre- and proto-historic ‘pacified past’ developed after the Second World War, which considered that ‘before civilization, war was rare, ritualised, abnormal and foreign to human psychology’ and with the belief that there has been a evolutionary progression from a primitive to a civilized way of war.

The number of religious motifs found in the Philemon-Baucis tale (Met. 8.611–724) is strikingly large. Brooks Otis is right to see the story primarily as a theodicy, designed to vindicate the power and influence of the gods. He draws attention to the contrast and balance of the Philemon-Baucis and Erysichthon episodes at the centre of the Metamorphoses: the Philemon-Baucis is a story of piety and its reward, the Erysichthon is a story of impiety and its punishment. At the midpoint of the poem Ovid tells two moralistic tales. The charm of the Philemon-Baucis can be attributed in large measure to the way in which Ovid tells the story: “he is not closely involved with the characters of Philemon and Baucis and allows humour and touches of cynicism to colour his narrative about them. The tone is sympathetic [ and the edifying character of the tale makes it stand out among the I generally tragic, erotic, and vengeful stories which fill the Metamorphoses.

Herodotos in Book V tells us how in 499 b.c. came to Athens the smooth-talking political adventurer, Aristagoras, formerly tyrant of Miletus; he was seeking support from that city, under its democratic government now a mere decade old, for the revolt of the Ionian states against the rule of the Persian King. Aristagoras had it seems initiated the revolt (though its basic causes naturally had nothing to do with individuals), and it had in theory, if not in actual fighting, clearly broken out. The Milesian ex-tyrant explained to the Athenian demos, meeting in their sovereign assembly, the great economic advantages that would flow from this participation by subsequent exploitation of the rich domains of the king. He also, as is customary in these matters, belittled the military prowess of the Persians (despite the fact that they had in half a century overthrown all the great empires of the known world); also (what may have been slightly more effective) he appealed to national sentiment, since Miletus, and some of the other coastal settlements of Ionia, claimed to be colonial offshoots of Athens herself. With these and other (unspecified) inducements Aristagoras succeeded in getting a promise of support for the Confederates—which shows, observes Herodotos, how much easier it is to fool thirty thousand people than one man. The one man, of course, was Kleomenes king of Sparta, whom Aristagoras had narrowly failed (the story went) to induce to provide support from Sparta. That the story of Aristagoras at Sparta has many implausible features does not affect the situation. Athens sent help to Ionia, Sparta did not, and whatever the hidden policies concerned, Herodotos chose the occasion to make a criticism of direct democracy.

InThe Twelve Lays of the Gipsy, one of the masterpieces of modern Greek poetry, Palamás puts into the mouth of his Gipsy these words, addressed to the Beautiful Immortals, who symbolize the achievements of ancient Greek civilization:

What if you are immortal ? Your life is over,

The full life that you lived in full bodily vigour

In the sun and air of the blissful country of your birth.

Now there is another sun, another air, and you are only

Apparitions.

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.

It may seem strange to link the Roman Empire with a Himalayan kingdom which hardly gets a mention in most standard works on Roman history, but in fact during the second and early third centuries A. D. these two powers enjoyed a cordial and mutually profitable relationship which was of considerable economic importance to both. From the end of the first century A. D. to the middle of the third century the Kushans controlled what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, parts of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, and much of the Ganges plain. Their history has proved difficult to reconstruct, since they left no historical writing, and even the chronology of their kings is still disputed, but enough is now known for us to begin to piece together, though still somewhat tentatively, the strange and exotic relationship between this distant state and the Roman world, and perhaps in the process to contribute from Roman history to the problems of Kushan dating.

A good supply of water was rightly regarded as one of the essential commodities for the maintenance of urban life in the ancient world. One of the major problems with which city authorities had to deal was the maintenance of adequate supplies of water to satisfy the domestic, public, recreational, and industrial demands of the inhabitants. The Romans were particularly renowned for their hydraulic technology in general and the construction of aqueducts in particular, often bringing water from great distances. The geographer Strabo praised the engineering skills of the Romans, maintaining that veritable rivers of water flowed by means of aqueducts through the city of Rome. Close on a century later the first curator of Rome's water supply and one-time military governor of Britain, Sextus Julius Frontinus stated the same, if a little more pointedly, when he compared the achievements of the Romans in the field of water supply with the ‘idle pyramids of the Egyptians or the glorious but useless monuments of the Greeks’.

The biography of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos, covering the last eight decades of the Republic and written at the precise moment of the establishment of monarchy by Octavian, ought always to have been treated both as one of the best introductions to the period, and as an exposition, from a unique angle, of some of the values expressed in Roman society. But now, more than ever, there may be a place for a brief essay which attempts to bring out both some values exhibited in this particular text and the way in which these were taken up, distorted, and deployed in the propaganda of the Augustan regime. For, first, the larger background of late-Republican scholarship, antiquarianism, historiography, and biography has been fully explored by Elizabeth Rawson; second, Joseph Geiger has argued for the originality of Nepos as a writer of political biography; third, we have a major study of the ethical models which it is the purpose of the biography to hold up for emulation. Finally, John North, in an important review-article on recent works on Roman religion, has identified three significant characteristics of late-Republican religiosity: a scholarly or antiquarian perception of religious change, often seen as decline; the identification of religion as the subject of a particular form of discourse; and a shift in focus within the sphere of religion, from the community as a whole to great men within it. All three come together, as we will see below, in the passage of Nepos' biography in which he records how, some time in the 30s B.C., Atticus suggested to Octavian that the now roofless temple of Juppiter Feretrius on the Capitol should be repaired.

In his charming essay on ‘Jardins d'Humanité’ Pierre Grimal says that gardens are inseparable from the humanism of Europe; ‘the groves were God's first temples’, wrote the poet Bryant; and there is abundant testimony to these statements in classical antiquity. Sir Archibald Geikie, who, like Sir D'Arcy Thompson, belonged to those grand old Scottish scientists who added to their science a deep humanism, Geikie from whose books I learned geology forty years ago, wrote:

From the infancy of mankind, trees have been regarded with mingled feelings of admiration and awe. The combined majesty and grace wherewith they tower above the soil that supports them; their infinite variety of individual forms and colours, whether carrying their foliage all the year or at one season clothing themselves with tender leaf and blossom, at another flaming in the varied glories of autumn, and, thereafter, bare and leafless, stretching their giant arms and delicate branches to all the winds of heaven; their immemorial age; their calm endurance and seeming defiance of the vicissitudes of time, in pathetic contrast to the short and troubled span of human life; their varied music under the changeful moods of the weather, from the faint whisper awakened by the gentlest breath of summer to the loud roar or moaning wail aroused by the fury of a wintry tempest; the grateful shelter which under their canopy of leafy boughs they provide for man and beast; the endless services which they render to man's daily life in their yield of timber or leaves or fruit—these features give to trees a high place among the charms and bounties wherewith Nature teems.

The quarter century from 500 to 475 B.C. saw the supreme masters of red-figure vase-painting working in Athens. The matching of design to shape, the clarity of contour in the figures, the vivid sense of life expressed in the compositions were the hallmarks of such painters as the Berlin and Kleophrades Painters who mainly decorated large vases and such painters as Onesimos and the Brygos Painter who specialized in the smaller. It was a time too when the heavy reliance on myth that had been the staple of the sixth-century painters, was being lightened by the increased popularity of scenes from contemporary life: from the life of men there were athletics, parties, religious rituals, and manual labour, from that of women weddings, mourning the dead, and the daily tasks of the household.