Odysseus, with Herakles, was a favourite character in that mythological type of comedy which we know only in titles and fragments, though it was well liked in antiquity. The purpose of this article is to collect these stray pieces, to present Odysseus as he appears in this tradition, and to suggest reasons for his popularity on the comic stage.

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323, his successors (diadochi) engaged in a series of internecine struggles to take control of the territory he had conquered. One of the most capable of these, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus (later to become Ptolemy I Soter), took control of Egypt, initially as satrap (323–306) and subsequently as king (306–283/282). Over several decades Ptolemy was able to seize Coele-Syria and parts of Asia Minor, and achieved leadership of the League of Islanders in the Aegean. The battles between the successors were fought with sizable infantry and cavalry forces. However, one of the most notable and highly valued components of these military forces were battle elephants.

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.

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.

Hesiod's Works and Days is self-consciously a poem of the Iron Age. It is addressed to Iron Age men about how to manage the Iron Age human condition. The narrative ventures out of the Iron Age only to explain how we got here and how the present age compares to those which came before. The Iron Age audience is addressed by a narrator who situates himself explicitly (and discontentedly) as a contemporary:

μηκέτ᾽ ἔπɛιτ᾽ ὤϕɛλλον ἐγὼ πέμπτοισι μɛτɛῖναι
ἀνδράσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἢ πρόσθɛ θανɛῖν ἢ ἔπɛιτα γɛνέσθαι.
νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρɛον·
Would then that I was no longer among the fifth race of
men, but either died earlier or was born later.
For now indeed it is a race of iron.
(Works and Days, 174–6)

In 1941, E. S. Forster wrote a short article, published in this journal, which compiled all of the instances he could identify in the ancient source material that described dogs being used in a military capacity. G. B. A. Fletcher, who had identified a few obscure references that Forster had not cited, responded to Forster's paper later that same year. The purpose of both papers was simply the compiling of a list, a purpose that had been inspired by Forster's interest in the French army's recruitment of dogs on the outbreak of the Second World War. The result was a thorough catalogue of known examples, showing the ancient dog being used for a variety of purposes such as patrol work or observation duties, or being used as combatants or despatch couriers. The primary aim, according to Forster was to ‘make a comparison with modern practice’ – that is, the French practice he had read about; the only exception for which he could find no ancient evidence was what he called ‘Red Cross’ work.

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.

During the three centuries from Homer to Hippocrates, views of human ageing and longevity evolved in a socio-cultural sense, with relationships to Greek medicine and science. I, as a biomedical scientist, examine ancient literature for roots of the idea that life-course outcomes can be influenced by tangible ‘natural’ factors, whether these are environmental or the result of lifestyle. The concept that an individual has any choice in health and ageing departs radically from ancient, persistent beliefs in the primacy of the supernatural, that the gods could predestine one's life span by birth or could alter it at any time.

The shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 is the culmination of the poem's ‘propaganda', the political climax of the Aeneid. We can read the ecphrasis in optimistic mode, as Hardie and Binder did, for example; or like Gurval and Putnam we can try to cast a pessimistic light even on this passage that is so obviously encomiastic and ‘ideologically sound'. However, what I shall be concerned with in this paper is not so much the shield itself as what Vergil has to say on his own composition of the shield, on the motivation of the artist in writing this encomiastic passage, on his ‘inspiration', or (if you prefer) on the ‘constraints' which compel him to deliver the ecphrasis. In my view Vergil gives us not only the ‘propaganda' of the shield, its mannered distortion of history, its praise of those in power, together with the critical reactions to that ‘propaganda' made out by pessimistic critics; he gives us also some metapropagandistic reflections on his writing of the shield as a piece of ‘propaganda' and encomium, an illustration of the forces that drive an artist to write a piece of this sort (that is, his ‘inspiration'), and he gives us some thoughts on the nature of the distortion and repression that are in operation here.

On the eve of the Peloponnesian War Athens was a great urban agglomeration. It was almost invulnerable to an enemy. So in 431 B.C. the Athenians began to migrate from the countryside into the city on the advice of Pericles (Thuc. 2.14–16). This recalled to Thucydides the time of Theseus (Thuc. 2.15). S. Hornblower regards this migration as the long-postponed physical synoikism, or synoikism in its physical aspect. He insists on the difference between political and physical synoikism, the former being the political unification of the state and the latter mainly the migration into the city. But the Athenians did not migrate into the city for the first time in 431. At the time of Xerxes' invasion the inhabitants of Attica were to be moved into the city before being evacuated to Salamis and elsewhere, and the invasion made their vulnerability clear to the Athenians. They suffered two evacuations, the devastation of Attica and the substantial destruction of Athens. Through driving back the Persians Athens became the leader of the Delian League and acquired great naval power. The change of Athens' position in the Greek world and the damage caused by the Persians necessitated a major reconstruction of the town. The Athenians began with the town and harbour. They built the walls of the city and of the Piraeus first of all. Beforelong the Piraeus had been built on a large scale. In these years the Athenians remembered Theseus again, and he now gained honour and esteem among all the Athenians.

Roman literature of the classical period abounds in references to the difficulties and dangers of a voyage by sea. Indeed both in Greece and Rome the indignant complaint against seafaring was a recognized rhetorical theme, of which we possess a most interesting specimen in the Trogymnasmata' or ‘Preparatory Exercises’ of Nicolaus the Sophist (viii. 6), to be found in the first volume of Walz's Rhetores Graeci. The two Senecas also have treated this topic in a formal way. In verse the theme is extremely common, though the thought is often compressed to a few lines. It occurs in Epic poetry (for every epic must have its storm), in comedy and tragedy, in lyric, elegiac, and didactic verse. History, epistolography, and philosophical prose furnish further examples. From this wealth of material I have selected what seem to me to be the salient features.

In the numerous accounts of the Golden Age, when primitive man lived a life uncomplicated by civic developments and international relations, when he confined himself to his proper element the earth, and had neither inclination nor facilities for trespassing on the unknown expanse of Neptune's ‘second realm’, the invention of the ship is regarded as the source of many evils. Man sails the seas to reach lands which God in His wisdom has set apart as beyond His province. The course of a ship over the waves involves not merely insult to the outraged sea-god, whose supremacy is thereby challenged and whose permission has not been sought, but physical discomfort to the Ocean from the weight of the vessel, the furrow driven by the keel, and the strokes of the oar-blades.

The Romans knew that they had once been ruled by kings, and they believed, perhaps rightly, that the fall of the monarchy had taken place at what we would call the end of the sixth century B.C. The texts that tell us this – Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch, etc. – all depend on a historical tradition that can be traced back as far as the second half of the third century B.C., when the Roman literary genres of historical drama, historical epic, and prose historiography began. Before that, we do not know how the Romans conceived or recorded the memory of their own past.

In a recent article on Menander, Professor Arnott acknowledges his debt to the conclusions of the late Armin Schäfer with regard to the construction of the Dyskolos. Schäfer's theory, briefly stated, is that Menander was faced in this play with the problem of combining two different themes—the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon. Menander comes near to a solution, argues Schäfer, but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action. In the following pages I shall try to show that the conflict between the two sides of the play is an imaginary one (created in our minds, perhaps, by our knowledge of the lines along which ‘comedy of intrigue’ and ‘comedy of manners’ subsequently developed), and that the carefully integrated plot reflects a unity of theme in the comedy as a whole.

In Greece & Rome 37 (1987), 169–185, J. F. Lazenby and Ian Whiteheadhave made a most helpful contribution on the problems of advanced manoeuvres by ancient triremes — the diekplous and the periplous. They are surely right to reject the view that these manoeuvres involved a whole fleet moving in line ahead formation at the time of battle, even in the milder version which postulates several squadrons abreast – each in line ahead. Given the nature of the triremes' main instrument of aggression – the ram – such formations could not achieve what Nelson's breakthrough at Trafalgar did – with benefit of cannons: nor was encirclement the aim of the periplous, as Whitehead has well demonstrated.

Students of comparative religion have long been familiar with the evidence furnished by ancient Mediterranean myth and ritual pointing to the existence of a common fund of religious experience amongst the early civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East. In spite of wide divergences between the views of anthropologists of the extreme diffusionist and anti-diffusionist schools, there has in the last twenty-five years or so been a decided reaction in favour of the historical method in this field of study, and there appears to be general agreement that a common culture-pattern, embodied in a common fund of myth and ritual, existed in Egypt, Babylonia, and Palestine. This hypothesis of a common pattern is supported by an ever-increasing volume of archaeological evidence. Routes of migration of peoples and commercial and other cultural contacts indicate a complex interchange of ideas between the Near East and the Mediterranean region generally. Of cardinal importance for the understanding of these mutual relations in early times are the discoveries in Crete, where evidence of extensive cultural relations with the Orient and Egypt, as well as with the mainland of Greece, has come to light.

In the 1855 edition of his guide to Pompeii, the French artist and archaeologist Ernest Breton begins a chapter on the city's houses and shops with a print showing tourists in a grand Pompeian residence (figure 1). At the rear of an atrium with an enormous impluvium, a man contemplates a raised garden while a well-dressed couple approaches from the right. Behind them, in the roofless remains of the house, the garden's ancient sculptural display remains in situ; animals and deities inhabit a landscape dominated by a shrine-like niche, a pool, and pillars painted with trees. Deep shadows and encroaching vegetation set a romantic, melancholic mood. This is the House of Marcus Lucretius (IX.3.5), excavated less than a decade prior and, at the time, one of the ancient city's most famous sights. As is typical of nineteenth-century illustrations of Pompeii, the size of the house is exaggerated: while the decorative scheme and arrangement of the rooms is accurate, the garden is too highly elevated and too large in proportion to the figures. The atrium's disproportionate impluvium is a complete fabrication, the actual impluvium having been dismantled in antiquity. Despite the artistic licence, Breton and his imagined tourists follow the same path as ancient visitors to the house, drawn toward the garden and its sculptures by the manipulation of space and decoration.

Judging from its history of effect, the Wedding Cento produced by the fourth-century poet Ausonius is in fact not a poem about a wedding at all. It is a work about the ethics of textual recycling; about the impact of political power and patronage on literary production; about smut, or rather about where the responsibility lies when a reader sees smut when none was intended. It is also a poem about sexual violence, but this aspect of the text has been largely missing in its scholarly reception. Such an absence is perhaps to be expected. Sexual assault is a notoriously under-reported offence, and its invisibility tends to extend into the realm of artistic representation and its scholarly treatment. During the last couple of decades, for instance, film scholars have addressed the need to re-read cinematic portrayals of rape in order to unearth it from ‘metaphor and euphemism, naturalized plot device and logical consequence…restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring that is, the violence – the physical, sexual violation’. This issue must be addressed here, but first a few words about the Cento and the most prominent trends in its reception.