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.

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.

The information available to us of events in Greece during the fifteen years which followed the battle of Plataea is limited enough. Any analysis of the relations between Athens and Sparta during this period must of necessity be a hazardous business. To explain the breakdown in the relations of the two states there is one cause so clear to us that it tends to fill the horizon, making us less sensitive to the circumstances which preceded and accompanied the rupture. The aggrandizement of Athens by her mastery of the Delian league was a factor which profoundly influenced the balance of power on the Greek mainland; but it did not, at first, bedevil Athenian–Spartan relations. There are signs of co-operation, if not of cordiality, in these relations for fifteen years; from then on there are the clearest signs of planned hostility. There is no doubt that relations deteriorated sharply at the time of the Thasian revolt, the Spartan earthquake, and the Helot revolt, and that hostility came into the open with the dismissal of the Athenian contingent at Ithome by the Spartan authorities. This action was the beginning of many misfortunes to both states: it drew aside abruptly the veil, which diplomacy had industriously maintained, from dark suspicions and sinister designs. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the probable reasons why the break came just when it did.

I have been invited by the editors of Greece and Rome to contribute to its pages a series of notes on recently discovered Greek inscriptions, indicating briefly their significance for classical studies but avoiding technicalities. I gladly accept the invitation, alike because of the fascination which inscriptions exercise for myself, in common with many teachers and students of the classics, and also because of the value of the epigraphical evidence for every aspect of the thought, the speech, and the activities of the ancient world. I shall select for this purpose inscriptions short enough to be transcribed in full and shall prefer those which are published in periodicals or books not everywhere accessible in this country. For the sake of those, and I hope they may be not a few, who wish to pursue the study further, I shall add to each note a select bibliography.

In discussing popular verse we may note, first, that speaking generally it is originally rhythmical rather than metrical, usually only becoming metrical under literary influence—as was probably the case in Greek and Latin; secondly, that it tends to be strongly accentual, being very often (and perhaps by origin) connected with dancing or rhythmical movement (spinning, grinding, &c.); and thirdly, that therefore the number of accents is more important than the number of syllables. These considerations are of almost universal application, many languages, indeed, never developing any precise metrical rules at all—as Old English and Hebrew.

‘Ancient Rome!’ The door of the iconic police box squeaks open. The camera pans, following a dark-haired man as he emerges, pushes through a curtained doorway, and, with a glint in his eye, glee in his smile, and a touch of London in his voice, announces their destination to his redhead companion. So begins ‘The Fires of Pompeii’, the second episode in the fourth season of the current BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) science-fiction drama Doctor Who. And so, no doubt, began the scribbling of pens on notebooks, as classicists who examine popular receptions of ancient Greece and Rome recognized a fresh opportunity to explore the dynamics of modern engagements with the classical world. At the time of broadcast, I was ensconced in my Liverpool office, writing the final lecture of a new undergraduate module devoted to Roman society. The topic was ‘Receptions of Roman Life’. My plan was to contrast depictions of Roman life in different media from distinct periods to encourage our students to recognize how modern reconstructions of Roman society are variously informed by questions of authority, genre, and cultural contexts. Serendipitously, ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ provided an engaging contemporary reception of the Roman world on television.

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.’

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.

It is curious that so little has been written in English about the Roman land surveyors and their work. Most of the nineteenth-century study of the subject was carried out by German scholars. In 1812 Niebuhr stressed the importance of the extant writings of the agrimensores and suggested that field-work in Italy would contribute to our understanding of them. In 1833 a Dane, Captain Falbe, noticed that the squares into which the land round Carthage was divided had sides corresponding to 2,400 feet and thus equalled a normal centuria. The standard edition of the agrimensores, edited by Blume, Lachmann, and others, appeared in 1848 and 1852. Mommsen contributed to this work, and he and other German scholars extended the study of Roman surveying. Before the First World War it was a Swede, Thulin, who furthered research on the ancient writings. Apart from that in German the bulk of the work on the subject is in Italian.

An apology is needed for taking up this well-worn theme. My reason is that in discussions and in reading works on Greek literature I have often felt that Aristophanes' antipathy to Euripides is still as a rule too strongly stated, and his sympathy wholly or partly ignored. It is said that Aristophanes attacked Euripides mercilessly in the Frogs, or even throughout his career; that he condemns Euripides entirely, or counts him with Cleon and the sophists amongst his worst enemies. Others agree that he thought Euripides a great poet, and even felt a curious fascination in his poetry, but insist that from a moral standpoint he condemned Euripides' work uncompromisingly. I feel increasingly convinced that Aristophanes had a finer and more complete appreciation of Euripides' greatness. Professor Gilbert Murray gives a juster estimate of his feelings: Aristophanes, he says, loved Euripides with all his faults, and was inevitably drawn towards him. I should like to go a little further in the same direction, and try to show that in some important things Aristophanes must have been actively and strongly in sympathy with Euripides.

Let me say at once that I am still prepared to believe that Aristophanes preferred Aeschylus (I am not sure about Sophocles; Aristophanes no doubt loved and admired the man and his work, but perhaps his feelings were not so strongly aroused in either direction by Sophocles); and of course Aristophanes found many things great and small in the art of Euripides, in his morality and above all in his influence, which exasperated him beyond endurance and which he whole-heartedly condemned; he recognized the symptoms of great changes which he deplored, though he was by no means out of touch with the new spirit and perhaps not so completely out of sympathy.

It is now generally acknowledged that in the concluding chapters of the Agricola Tacitus is on several occasions guilty of distortion of the truth. The story told in 40. 2, for example, of the secret mission of one of Domitian's confidential freedmen with an offer of the governorship of Syria as a bribe to Agricola in case he should appear reluctant to obey the orders for his recall is obviously sheer fabrication, designed solely to intensify the picture of suspicion and distrust on the part of the Emperor that Tacitus is endeavouring to create. Again, though in 43. 2 Tacitus records the rumour that Agricola had been poisoned by Domitian (the rumour is repeated by Dio Cassius, lxvi. 20, as sober truth), he does so in such a way as to indicate that he himself did not believe this charge, though he hoped his readers would. There are, however, three points that have never been satisfactorily explained: the relations between Agricola and Domitian between A.d. 85 and 93, Agricola's refusal of the proconsulship of Asia, and the reason for his non-employment in the Danubian wars.

During the early archaic period, there was considerable interest in the heroic past and the acts of mythical ancestors, especially as embodied in epic. In particular, there are a number of archaic myths dealing with attempts to evade death and to gain immortality, mostly unsuccessful. All Greek heroes are descended from gods: having at least one god (or goddess) somewhere in the family tree is a prerequisite for achieving anything worthy of note. And in a few heroes, this sliver of divinity may be turned into full-blown immortality. It is a recurring theme in Greek myth, therefore, that there is a narrow window of possibility for a hero to escape his mortal status and not have to die. Behind such myths lies the fiction that, in a past age, immortality had been attainable; the heroes of the past might not have been immortalized often, but the chance had been there. This was contrasted with the present duller age, in which immortality was out of reach.

§ I. Augury

The legend that Aeschylus met his death when a bird of prey, possibly a lammergeyer, dropped a tortoise upon his bald head is apocryphal, but is at least as old as Sotades. It suggests that he was assoiciated with augry in popular belief. This view is supported by another statement in the Aìσχλoν βìоς, as well as by references in the extant plays and fragments.

According to the former the poet, while in Sicily, produced a play entitled αì Aìτναi or αi to mark the occasion of the foundation of Aìτνη by Hiero—oiωνi∊óμ∊νoς βìoν ἐγαθòν τoiς σu;νoiκí∊oνσi τὴν Πóλiν. It is very probable that oiωνi∊óμ∊νoς is employed here in a loose, non-technical sense, but it is also possible that the play included a description of the omens which were observed at the spot where the city was founded.

The Emperor Justinian, who succeeded his uncle Justin to the throne of Byzantium in A.d. 527, probably never intended to mark an epoch. Not, at least, the epoch which the modern historian must assign him. For his reign is in a sense a watershed; he was the last Roman emperor and the first Byzantine one. The reality of a Roman Empire embracing the whole Mediterranean had suffered a little before Justinian owing to circumstances. Among the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths in Spain, it was more fiction than fact, but it was a fiction which was still cherished, and not merely in Constantinople. After Justinian, the concept was not dead; but it was clearly losing force.

Σαῦλος ὁ καὶ Παῦ λος: or St. Paul and the Greek World. That is my subject, but before I come to it, I should like to say two words about myself—both by way of apology and to explain how I am dealing with it.

What did Athenians think about when they talked about ‘the poor’? The question is worth asking for two reasons: first, if we are to judge from our texts, the Athenians talked a good deal about ‘the poor’, and it will help our understanding of these texts to know something about the presuppositions which author and audience had about ‘the poor’; and second, since the way a society stereotypes its members tells us something about that society, a study of Athenian presuppositions about ‘the poor’ should provide a further insight into Athenian social relations. In what follows I do not mean to suggest that all Athenians shared these presuppositions, any more than we share the stereotypes of poverty common today. Whatever individual Athenians may have believed, however, the assumptions to be considered here were a part of the landscape of Athenian public discourse, as it were, and so had to be taken into account when Athenians talked about ‘the poor’. Finally by way of preface I should also add that the present study deals, as its title says, with only some Athenian presuppositions about ‘the poor’. In particular, I do not consider here the large group of texts which, making a virtue of necessity, praise the poor for not succumbing to the vices (especially hubris) typical of the rich.

Dr. Alington's golden darts are, as usual, exquisitely fashioned, but they are poor things in a desperate defence and ensure victory to the enemy all along the line.

A country probably gets the system of education it deserves. But lucky is that country where education is a natural growth and a tradition rather than the clean-cut system of an expert. Sparta very clearly followed a very ancient tradition—very ancient and very novel, as Xenophon says: παλαιοὶ ὄντες ἔτι καὶ νυ̃ν τοι̃ς ἄλλοις καινότατοί εἰσι—‘new ideals’ in education are usually the oldest.