Afoolish fondness for domestic pets, and a desire to have some kind of animal to share one's hearth and home, is usually regarded as a characteristically British trait, and it seems at first sight scarcely probable that the ancient Romans would have had any sympathy with such a sentimental weakness. Yet, if we turn to the literature of the notoriously practical Romans, we shall find plenty of evidence that they enjoyed the possession of those engaging companions no less than we do, and that they ranged over a wide field in choosing an object for their affections.

There can be no doubt that birds were first favourites with all classes of Roman society, and the first instance which springs to mind, no doubt, is that of Lesbia's sparrow, immortalized in the verses of Catullus. Two poems were written in its honour, one describing its happy lot as Lesbia's darling and delight, and one, the famous elegy, mourning the untimely death of the little bird, Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque. The custom of writing elegies on one's mistress's pets persisted, but with the general increase in wealth and luxury under the Empire, my lady's taste in birds became more sophisticated. The humble sparrow—or was it really a bullfinch?—which cheered Lesbia's heart would have been regarded with disdain by Ovid's Corinna. Her affections were centred on a psittacus, one of those jewel-bright parrots from the East, and especially from India, which are frequently mentioned in Imperial days, forming an elegant addition to the salons of society.

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.

The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.

As a goddess Eris or Strife plays no role at all in Greek religion and an extremely restricted role in Greek literature. In èpic she briefly appears in the preliminaries to the Judgement of Paris, but is normally confined to emblematic appearances in mass battle scenes. As a concept Hesiod gives her some importance by distinguishing between a good and an evil Eris. Generally, though, whether as a goddess or a concept, eris remains inconspicuous until Euripides gives the word a thematic importance in a number of his works. This is most obvious in Andromache and most impressive in a nearly unbroken series of plays starting with Helenand ending with the posthumous Iphigeneia in Aulis.

Early Roman education had been based on the mos maiorum rather than on reason, the guiding light of Greek education. It had been education not so much for intellectual achievement as for a clearly envisaged type of character, summed up in the word gravitas. A Roman, learning a way of life rather than a body of formal knowledge, was ‘usu … et domesticis praeceptis multo magis eruditus quam litteris’. This training was conducted largely by the father and was entirely un-supervised by the state, hi contrast with education in Hellenistic cities, whence, by 100 b.c., many new ideas had come. Such training, however, though suitable for a rural community, was bound to change when Rome became a city and when foreign campaigns during the expansion of her empire took fathers away from home for months on end. Moreover the influence which had been exerted from an early date by the near-by cities of Magna Graecia began to increase after the capture of Tarentum in 272 b.c., and the result of Rome's successive conquests of Sicily, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia during the third and second centuries was so great an increase of Greek culture in Roman life that Horace was finally able to say ‘Graecia capta ferum captorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio’.

In Dio's debate on constitutions, set in 29 B.C., the speech favouring democracy occupies chapters 2–13 of book 52, and the speech urging monarchy runs from 14–40: most of this speech, indeed the main content of the whole book, is a detailed set of proposals for the administration of the Roman Empire, written with a view to being applicable in the writer's own time, more than two hundred years after the dramatic date of the debate. the dramatic date of the debate. Millar calls these chapters ‘a political pamphlet’, and suggests that Dio abandoned an earlier plan to fit them in to book 52. There is evidence, though, that the book was planned in its present form, but for the lacuna between chapters 13 and 14, and that the relatively brief speech of Agrippa was composed not as part of what was intended to be a balanced debate (balanced in terms of length, with point answering point in the rival speeches), but as a brief preliminary piece in explicit and implicit contrast and opposition to the ideology of the speech which forms the main thesis of the book; in a coherently planned debate, Dio states first the case for democracy in order to provoke the reader to question whether it could have been put into action – whether it is realistic.

Tacitus, in a famous passage of the Annals,2 comments: ‘Older men who had leisure to compare the present with the past noted that Nero was the first of our rulers who had need of borrowed eloquence. The dictator Caesar could hold his own with orators of the first rank; and Augustus had a ready and fluent mode of speaking which well befitted his imperial position. Tiberius had a rare skill in weighing out his words; he could express his meaning forcibly or conceal it as he chose. Even with Gaius, the disorders of his mind never interfered with his powers of speech; and when Claudius delivered a prepared discourse, his style left nothing to be desired.’

Classical literature abounds with references to natural phenomena which have no obvious counterparts in the present day; and it is always difficult to know how to interpret such references, whether they should be dismissed forthwith as the excesses of overwrought imaginations, or whether they should be classified as poetic licence, or whether they should be taken more seriously still and explanations sought in terms of subtle or uncommon natural processes which occurred in ancient times as well as modern.

The two ivory tablets in Paris and London, dating from late antiquity and forming parts of one diptych (Plates 1, 2), have been convincingly placed in their stylistic setting by the scholar to whom this article is dedicated. With other works in ivory from about A.D. 400 and with the Rothschild cameo, they form a ‘classicistic’ group, some manufactured in Rome, some in Milan. The cameo probably refers to the marriage in A.D. 398 of the young Emperor Honorius to Maria, daughter of Stilicho. We may assume that the diptych under consideration here also has reference to an aristocratic wedding, although its iconography is quite different. It shows not the portrait of a bridal pair, but two female figures, hitherto regarded as pagan priestesses. It is not these figures, but the tabulae ansatae at their heads that give support to the hypothesis that the diptych was made on the occasion of a marriage between the two families named on the tablets, the Symmachi and the Nicomachi. Matrimonial unions between members of the pagan aristocracy in officially Christian Rome may not only be presumed, but in the case of the Nicomachi and Symmachi may be actually shown to have happened. The following observations would seem to provide appropriate reinforcement for reference to a wedding on iconographic grounds.

Although recent and ongoing excavations of the sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus have prompted archaeologists to discuss anew the aetiological references to the same god and his altar at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, these discussions have yet to make any impact on literary scholars working on the poem itself. Indeed, we now know that in archaic Miletus an altar of Apollo Delphinios was erected, as in the hymn, directly upon a sandy beach beside a harbour and was probably the focus, as in the hymn, of some kind of sacrificial ritual, before the annual procession to another famous Panhellenic oracle of Apollo at Didyma. These new revelations provide an incentive for returning to the somewhat puzzling details in the scene on the beach at Crisa in the Homeric Hymn, with its agrarian offering and meal (both of roasted barley) followed by a paeanic procession of musician and singers. I will argue that the Milesian parallels allow us to see more clearly that, like the Delian episode at the start of the Homeric Hymn, the events at Crisa seem to reflect a shorter hexametrical hymn originally composed for a seaside sanctuary at Crisa and then later adapted, again like the Delian section, by a poet intent on praising Apollo as a Panhellenic deity, whose most important place of worship was Delphi. Such an argument leads, finally, to a positive assessment of the recent suggestion that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo does not have a bipartite structure (Delian–Delphic), as is usually assumed or argued, but rather a tripartite one (Delian–Delphic–Crisaean) that organizes the poem into three hymnic movements: birth, oracle, priesthood.

The first two verses of Chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel are amongst the best known of the whole Bible, and historically amongst the most controversial. Luke refers to a census decreed by Augustus, of which we appear to have no other record, and implies that P. Sulpicius Quirinius was governor of Syria at some time around 6–5 B.C, the possibility of which has been much debated. This is all very odd, particularly since Luke is usually so careful with political background, if not with exact chronology, and is clearly trying in his account of the Nativity to place the event in its historical context, as well as to explain why Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not at the family home in Nazareth. One must assume that the details about the Nativity which Luke gives did at least make some sort of historical sense to his earliest readers, and yet the versions which we read so frequently can hardly be said to do so. But what exactly does Luke say? If we are to doubt the accuracy of his statements we should first be certain that we understand precisely what it is that he is saying.

The year 1983 marks the 2300th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Punic War, one of the most momentous conflicts in history. The outstanding figure of that war was, of course, the Carthaginian leader Hannibal, son of Hamilcar Barca. His invasion of Italy at the outset of the war was a model of strategic daring and skill. His tactics in destroying the much larger Roman army at Cannae remain a classic exemplar of a battle of envelopment. He came near to bringing down Roman power, a near-miss for which his Roman contemporaries never forgave him, while their descendants accorded him grudging respect or even admiration. These achievements have made him, indeed, the most famous of the adversaries of Rome and one of the three most highly rated generals of antiquity (with Alexander and Julius Caesar). There is some irony in this, for of the three he was the only one to fail ultimately in his enterprise.

In view of the interest of Columella's De Re Rustica it is strange that it is not better known. Indeed, it is difficult to secure a text of it, since the last complete edition was published in the eighteenth century and the nearest approach to an English edition is a short selection from his works published in Dublin in 1732.

As to the man himself our knowledge is derived almost wholly from his own writings. His full name was Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. He was a contemporary and friend of Seneca, who lived from 4 b.c. to A.D. 65 and, like Columella, was a native of Spain, and of Seneca's brother Gallio, proconsul of Achaea, who figures in the Acts of the Apostles (xviii. 12) as ‘caring for none of these things’, and also died in A.D. 65. The elder Pliny (A.D. 23–79) quotes freely from Columella. Without going into further detail, I think we may say that the De Re Rustica was probably published in the sixties of the first century A.D.

Columella was born and spent his early years at or near the town of Gades, the modern Cadiz, in the south-west corner of Spain. He does not mention his parents but often speaks of his uncle Marcus, who was also a keen agriculturist and lived in the Spanish province of Baetica in which Gades was situated. Possibly Columella lived with his uncle during his early years. At some period of his life he found himself on military service at Tarentum, where an inscription has been discovered which describes him as a military tribune of the Sexta Legio Ferrata, which is known to have been recruited at Gades.

The evidence of the Marmor Parium confirms that Sophokles ‘died under Kallias’, who was archon from the summer of 406 to the summer of 405. The Frogs was produced during the archonship of the same Kallias, at the Lenaia: that is, in January/February 405. The Frogs refers to the dead poet in the prologue, in the second prologue, and in the exodos (76–82, 786–94, 1515–19): in the prologue and in the exodos Sophokles is mentioned in connexion with the return of Dionysos from Hades with a good tragic poet (cf. 71–85 and 1414–1533), and in the second prologue in connexion with the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides for the tragic throne in Hades (cf. 757–1410).

Why should Antigone in Sophocles' play want to return to Polyneices' body, after apparently successfully burying it, if we may judge from the guard's report to Creon at lines 245ff.? Ever since it was first raised by Jebb in his note on Antigone 429, this question has given scholars almost as much trouble as the original burial gave Antigone herself. Basically, there are two opposed views on the problem. Firstly, that both burials were performed by Antigone and their duplication is to be explained primarily in terms of the play's dramatic organization. Secondly, that not only is it impossible within the framework of the play's chronology for Antigone to have performed the first burial but that, had she done so, there would have been no need for her to return to the body after sprinkling the symbolic dust. Therefore it was not Antigone, but the gods, who first buried Polyneices.

‘In the study of history’, says Livy in the preface to his work, ‘the most salutary and profitable advantage to the reader is that he sees before him examples of every kind set out in their true light. From them he may choose for his own benefit and that of his country what to imitate and what to avoid.’ Whether Livy's moralistic attitude to history is legitimate or not, the fact that he always has a moral purpose clearly in mind lends a unity to his work which bears a compelling appearance of truth. All events, all actions are recounted, interpreted, and judged according to a single norm: how far they reflect and illustrate the glory of ancient Rome or the decline of his countrymen from the Golden Age of times past. It is the purpose of this article to examine the part accorded to women in this scheme, and the history will be judged not as a factual record but, as Livy would have expected, as a work of art and moral instruction.

Clothing has both a material and a non-material dimension. Far from merely covering one's body, clothes reveal and reflect something about the wearer's identity: his or her character, gender, social status, ideas, and emotions. The opposite is also true, insofar as clothes can be used in order to ‘disguise’ and conceal one's real values and beliefs, thus transforming existing identities and creating new ones. In other words, clothing has the power both to reveal and to conceal levels of reality. According to Gilman, symbolism is one of the strongest of the primary motives in dress: we dress not only in order to cover the body but also, and most importantly, because clothing is a kind of costume and, as such, it enables us to communicate and at the same time to confirm our identity. As she remarks, ‘The element of symbolism is interwoven with even such a practical garment as the trousers. The small boy's mad desire to get into his first trousers is not based on added comfort or freedom, but on the proud exhibition of the fact that he is a boy.’

Throughout history, little has been known about the land of Illyria. ‘As ”savages” or “barbarians” on the northern periphery of the classical world’, the historian John Wilkes writes, ‘even today the Illyrians barely make footnotes in most versions of ancient history, and more often than not they are simply ignored.’ Shut in by mountains, north of the betterknown Greece and covering roughly the area of modern-day Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia, Illyria has remained a closed world to outsiders, dismissed as barbarian in ancient times and remembered in more recent centuries only as an unexplored outpost of the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. As a result, Illyria has become a place of mystery, the site of myth and legend as much as of historical civilization-building or battles, a by-word for the realm of the imagination. Oscar Wilde summed up the popular association of Illyria with fiction when, in a review of an amateur production of Twelfth Night, he wrote with characteristic succinctness: ‘Where there is no illusion there is no Illyria.’

It is not long since it was commonly thought that the art of blowing glass was known for several thousand years before Christ. Certain Egyptian tomb-paintings of the twelfth dynasty (c. 2OOO b.c.) and later, which really depict metal-workers blowing the flames of their furnace, were thought to represent glass-blowers. As a corollary, it has been said that not a few of the vessels of blown glass found on ancient sites in Greece and other Mediterranean countries belong to the Greek period. Such beliefs are quite incorrect. There is no evidence that the process of blowing glass was invented until about the time of Christ. Scientific excavation in Greece has proved beyond question that any fragments of glass vessels found there belong to Roman or later times; the tombs in Cyprus that contain Hellenistic or earlier pottery contain no blown glass, whereas in tombs of Roman date blown glass tends to displace pottery as funerary furniture; and similar observations have been made during scientific excavations in the other Mediterranean countries.

It would be possible to say, perhaps, that madness is a fundamental aspect of Greek tragedy, for the excessive act is committed when the tragic figure is in the grip of some passion larger than himself. Euripides, however, presents characters actually mad, acting under the influence of this affliction. The two plays I discuss here, the Herakles and the Orestes, show two very different aspects of μavia, and develop very disparate conclusions.