This paper is intended to discuss the household in which Classical Athenians typically lived, and the interest in it shown by the polis. Aristotle saw the household – in his vocabulary the oikos, or sometimes the oikia – as the basic social unit of the polis. He defines the primary relationships within the household as: master and slave, husband and wife, father and child. Clearly for Aristotle the household was paradeigmatically made up of the nuclear family together with whatever slaves the family owned. Modern scholars, while often differing about the roles of the members of the household, have generally accepted that the polis, and in particular Classical Athens, was indeed made up of a number of such households. The slave's role in the household, though important, was obviously different from the roles of the members of the nuclear family, and slaves will be left out of account in this paper.

Just as there was a canon of three tragic dramatists, so the ancient world recognized a canon of three dramatists of Athenian Old Comedy: Aristophanes, of course, but also Cratinus and Eupolis. This article is chiefly concerned with Cratinus and Eupolis — a frustrating and unsatisfactory subject. Their plays are lost, and we have to rely on meagre fragments, preserved in quotations or on papyrus, and on various kinds of indirect evidence about their work. There is therefore very little that can be said about them, and even less that can be said with confidence. Nevertheless, the attempt to say something is worthwhile, in part because of the light that it may shed on Aristophanes' surviving works if we can discern something of the context in which he was working, but also because these men were evidently masters of their craft. One word of warning is in order: despite their mastery of the comic craft, uproarious entertainment is not to be expected from a paper on Cratinus and Eupolis; if jokes that have to be explained are notoriously unamusing, what can we expect of jokes that have to be reconstructed conjecturally before they are explained?

In recent years a considerable literature on the scope and meaning of the word hubris has done much to clarify the nature of this important concept. However, some important aspects of hubris deserve more detailed attention. In particular, a full account of the social context and moral psychology of the ideology, social practices, and legal prosecutions involving hubris would make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of Athenian society and the role which litigation played in moderating or exacerbating social conflicts. Indeed, such an account, particularly if it drew upon recent advances in the social anthropology of agonistic societies, would necessarily increase our appreciation of the centrality of hubris and the related values of honour and shame in Athenian social relations. While the goals of the present study are far more modest, in a sense they represent a first step in this direction. Since, as I will argue, the relation of the law of hubris to certain kinds of sexual misconduct and to sexual aspects of honour and shame has not been fully recognized, an exploration of this relation may help to mark out some of the ground which a fuller treatment would have to cover.

Throughout the ages the undersides of earthenware vases have been the home for all manner of cryptic abbreviations and signs. The importance nowadays placed on such marks varies considerably according to the date and origin of the material, though generally it is greater when the signs refer in some manner to the potter, decorator, or producing factory, especially when considerations of the mark may affect the value of the piece.

This article attempts to survey certain aspects of parody as it appears in ancient literature: it is concerned mainly with the nature and purpose of parody, the techniques which it employs, the relation of parody to certain other literary forms, and its origin. In any such discussion the principal difficulty is likely to be one of definition and classification, for the terms ‘parody’, пαρῳδή, &c., cover a range of divergent meanings, and a certain looseness can sometimes be detected in their use. What then is the basic meaning which пαρῳδή in itself conveys?

In recent years, a series of reports have appeared in the British press about the fate of Iraqi interpreters employed by the British forces in Basra. As well as the day-to-day risk of death or injury in the course of their work, interpreters have been vulnerable to reprisals from insurgents who view them as collaborators and traitors. There have been a large number of documented cases of Iraqi interpreters being murdered, often in an especially brutal manner. Many other cases have gone undocumented, in part because of the tendency for interpreters to work under pseudonyms and even wear masks to conceal their identity, making it difficult to identify a particular victim as an interpreter. The issue of protecting interpreters came to a head in 2007 with the handover of Basra to Iraqi administration and the subsequent withdrawal of British troops. A special protection scheme was set up, whereby those who had worked for the British forces for twelve months would be eligible for resettlement in the United Kingdom. The issue, however, has remained a contentious one: many interpreters were ineligible for resettlement or did not want to move to the UK, and many of those who did accept resettlement found themselves economically disadvantaged and socially marginalized. One group of Iraqi interpreters have taken legal action against the British government.

In an age like the present which is sceptical of untutored inspiration and sets a high value on style, it is not surprising that the Aeneid should have regained some of the prestige it held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The hostility which the nineteenth century felt for its deliberate and self-conscious progress has abated, and Virgil is again regarded as the poet of unfaltering taste in emotions as in words. But the reviving admiration for the Aeneid has no word of praise for Aeneas. He is either neglected or dismissed with a few disparaging sentences. Even so generous a critic as Professor Garrod calls him ‘the wrong man in the wrong place’, and the hero of the Aeneid seems relegated to that undistinguished limbo which contains so many heroes of great epics. It seems that he is no better and no worse than Tennyson's King Arthur or Milton's Jehovah or the indistinguishable heroes of the different books of The Faerie Queene. He is as lifeless as they are, and for the same reason. His appeal is not to the imagination, but to the conscience, and the conscience has changed its ideals and left him and them behind. Perhaps to the Romans he was a symbol of much inspiring morality, but he means nothing to us. So far as he has any personality, he is a prig and a bore.

The Romans have always been regarded as a rugged and energetic people. Originally farmers and fighters, they established a world-empire. It must therefore strike many people as curious that the Latin word indicating business, negotium, is primarily of negative connotation; it indicates the lack of leisure, leisure being semantically prior. The word otium itself, like many Latin abstract terms, bears many meanings, some relevant to the conditions of the time.

Why is the shield of Achilles, instrument of war in a poem of war, covered with scenes of delightful peace, of agriculture, festival, song, and dance? I shall try to approach an answer to this question by looking at the scenes on the shield in relation to the rest of Homer, I mean the Iliad and Odyssey.

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’

In book 5 of the Politics Aristotle discusses the causes for change in constitutions. He argues that, since people have opposing and often mistaken views about their just share in government, the main condition of political stability – that is, justice according to proportionate equality – is impaired. Aristotle then gives eleven particular reasons for civil strife (stasis) of which the last one may serve as a starting point for this paper:

Sometimes poleis enter into the civil strife because of the regional conditions (dia tous topous), because the land is not well suited for a polis to become a single unit. As for example, the people at Chytus in Clazomenai, or those from Colophon and Notion. And also at Athens they are not all in harmony (ouk homoiôs eisin) but those living in Piraeus are more democratic (mallon demotikoi) than in the city (13O3b7).

One of the major puzzles in the history of the Graeco-Roman world lies in the great discrepancy between its considerable achievements in art, in literature, in philosophy, in mathematics, and in medicine, and its very marked backwardness in most branches of technology. This is less surprising where the Romans are concerned, since, for all their admirable qualities in other directions, they were not a conspicuously original or inventive people. Even in those spheres in which they most excelled, the arts of government and warfare, they made few contributions of their own, and their strength lay rather in their skill at adapting to their own purposes the bright ideas of other men. It is significant that those two simple but important aids to improved horsemanship and cavalry tactics, the saddle and the stirrup, were not invented by the Romans, nor indeed by the Greeks, but by the nomadic tribes that pressed in on the Roman empire from the third century A.d. onwards. But with the Greeks the case is different. They were a highly intelligent people, gifted with a degree of inquisitiveness which made them unwilling to accept without question the outward appearance of the world in which they lived. Consequently in mathematics and certain branches of pure science they were able to make quite astonishing progress. But these intellectual advances were not accompanied by any marked degree of technological improvement. While Eratosthenes in Alexandria was calculating the circumference of the earth, and obtaining a figure that was less than i per cent short of the real one, the world around him was still more or less at the same technical level as it had been since the end of the Bronze Age. This contrast between theoretical brilliance and practical incompetence is great and dramatic, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest some of the reasons why it existed.

Isocrates was perhaps the first in antiquity to focus his political theories on the idea of Europe and the opposition between Europe and Asia. No doubt, if we look into his doctrines and what he said about that theme, they seem to our modern eyes terribly simple and sketchy: they just provide a beginning, a starting point. But even that is remarkable; and it seems worth going into the trouble of seeing what he meant by ‘Europe’, and what place the notion had in a programme which he never stopped defending, all through his life.

Trimalchio's whole household and way of life is presented to us as though it were a stage-show, or so Petronius implies through Encolpius' remarks, strategically and thematically placed (cf. above, 83–4) at the opening. Still marvelling at the musicality of Trimalchio's household (cf. 197–8), he comments ‘you'd think it was the chorus of a pantomime, not the dining room of a paterfamilias’ (31.7); a page later (33.5) a basket of straw with a wooden hen is brought in and while two slaves search the straw for ‘eggs’ (to music) Trimalchio turns to look at his ‘show’ (hanc scaenam). Trimalchio himself sings a number from the mime Laserpiciarius (35.6) and mangles the songs of Menecrates (73.3, cf. 197). He claims (55.5, above, 80) to recite verses by Publilius Syrus, composer of mimes; his comoedi perform Atellan farce (53.13, above, 80) and Habinnas' slave executes a horrid medley of Atellana and Virgil (68.5, cf. above, 79). If we compare these references with those to music (197–8) simply in terms of bulk and scale, the theatre appears substantially less important, though we may note that all the references except the last (68.5) do refer to Trimalchio himself or to his slaves, thus perhaps serving as a deliberate element on Petronius' part to characterize and distinguish him.

Precisely how long ago the Chinese began to export their silk westwards along the trade routes of Central Asia we do not know. Ezekiel seems to have been familiar with silk, and Isaiah may have heard of the Chinese. By 115 b.c. we are on firmer ground, for in that year Mithridates II of Parthia made an alliance with Wu Ti, the great Han emperor of China, designed at least in part to facilitate commerce between the two powers, who were for the first time within direct commercial reach of one another. Half-way through the following century Julius Caesar possessed silk curtains. But the trade throughout this period was no more than a trickle. The caravan routes from the Ordos region of North China to the eastern frontier of Iran passed through the territories of numerous Turkic tribes, whose possession of Central Asia had so far been virtually unchallenged.

We begin with an obvious but not simple question: Who are, or were, the elderly? There is, of course, a vague biological boundary-line, but the ‘concept of ageing is a statistical one, and no valid means ofmeasuring it in the individual are available'. Statistically, today as in antiquity, the agreed points at which to draw the line in general terms seem to be either sixty or sixty-five. In concrete terms, however, there are many lines, determined by social, economic, and political considerations, for which biology provides no more than crude limits. For example, in England today a woman qualifies as an old-age pensioner at sixty, a man at sixty-five. Retirement is normal in the civil service at sixty, compulsory in the universities at sixty-five or sixty-seven, depending on a vote taken in individual institutions more than twentyfive years ago, but in Scotland at seventy. Members of parliament and until recently judges, in contrast, are allowed to go on until they drop if they so choose, and many do so choose. That these variations are directly linked with political influence, pensions, the desire to spread employment, access to lucrative post-retirement employment, ideology, and so on, not with biology, is self-evident.

The view that the younger Pliny was sent to the province of Pontus et Bithynia (Bithynia for short) as a ‘financial expert’ who would deal with the accounts of the cities has been thoroughly and properly discredited. Pliny in his province did all the things that his predecessors and successors did or might have done. His funerary inscription at Comum shows him to have been legatus pro praetore consulari potestate, an imperial legate, but with consular power; the regular governors had been proconsuls, men appointed by the senate for one year only after drawing lots for the post with their fellows of equal seniority. But in spite of their title they had been only ex-praetors, while Pliny had held the consulship; hence his cansularis potestas, which secured him the same number of fasces as they had enjoyed, one more than he could have held as a plain legatus Augusti pro praetore. Pliny was a governor of superior standing, chosen by Trajan on the strength of a decree of the senate, to take full charge of the province and to correct all the abuses that were rampant there (‘quoniam multa in ea emendanda apparuerint’, 32.2); and he died in office near the end of his second year of tenure.

Never were more prophetic words penned than these of Friedrich Klingner. Many and various have been the interpretations put forth since then, and some of them have been very strange indeed. The reader who has duly confronted Coleman, Otis, Segal, Bradley, Wender, Wilkinson, Wankenne, Coleiro, Hardie, Joudoux, Wormell, Otis again, Parry, Putnam, Cova, Chomarat, and Stehle, feels dismay; perhaps despair. For some, the point of the Aristaeus and Orpheus episodes is political propaganda (so Coleiro: Gallus could have survived had he humbled himself like Aristaeus, the moral being the duty of subordination to the Princeps; so, rather differently, Joudoux: the poem is propaganda for the supremacy of Octavian, in terms of the threefold Indo-European structure ofDumezil). For others, it is moral (so, for instance, Wender: Orpheus turned away from the hard and morally ambiguous farmer's life, as lived by Aristaeus; Aristaeus gets bugonia as his reward, while Orpheus is dismembered and scattered in order to fertilize the earth); or religious (so Chomarat: the experience of Aristaeus is presented under the schema of initiation into a mystery religion); or political and moral (so Wormell and Otis: Aristaeus ‘stands for the sinful self-destruction, atonement and revival of the Roman people’; life emerges from death, ‘in political terms, the Augustan restoration from the anarchy of civil war’; ‘Aristaeus, it is to be presumed [sic], was induced to heed the lesson’).

Professor D. M. MacDowell's article continues a recent and welcome tendency to question the common interpretation of hybris by study of the actual instances of the concept throughout Greek literature. MacDowell's definition ‘having energy or power and misusing it self-indulgently’ is fairly broad, and he supports it by five further points:

i) that hybris is always bad,

ii) that it is always voluntary,

iii) that it is frequently, but not always, produced by such things as youth, wealth, and excess of food and drink,

iv) that it is not usually religious, and

v) that it often involves a victim, and is more serious when it does.