How can these ideas be linked to the ancient sources? Focusing first of all on women's contribution to arable cultivation and arboriculture, we immediately face the first of many blanks. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any explicit evidence of ploughing by women in the Greco-Roman world. Only two lines from Hesiod's Works and Days seem to establish a connection between women and ploughing: according to Hesiod, a proper head of a household would need ‘first of all a house, and then a woman and oxen for ploughing – a slave woman, not a wife, to follow the oxen [or: to care for the oxen]’ (405 f.). In the fourth century B.C., however, the second line that specifies the status and the function of the desired woman was apparently not yet part of the received text, since Aristotle could still regard her as a free woman (Pol. 1252a llff). Not until the first century B.C. did Philodemos of Gadara quote and defend the reading that defined Hesiod's woman as a slave labourer. Even so, the wording does not make it clear whether this woman was meant to follow the harnessed oxen, that is, to do the ploughing, or to care for the oxen in the stable.

The network of associations of the word Amazon still plays a part in the shorthand of modern discourse. Its connotations may vary from a slightly comic praise of sporting excellence in women to underlying insinuations that Amazons are not quite feminine. When applied by politicians and journalists to the women in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common during the 1980s, for example, the epithet Amazon carried the implication that these women rejected men and had developed a society apart (therefore (sịc) they must be subversives, lesbians, communists, hippies – etc. etc.). Modern usage perhaps emphasizes the unusual or even threatening associations; Amazons are, for whatever reason, outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life-style and achievements. Ancient usage presupposed an additional element, Amazons as a subject for artistic and poetic interest. The reasons why this was so do much to explain how and why the image of the Amazons communicated certain associations and how these in turn relate to underlying assumptions about the framework of Greek society and its values.

Dining and drinking rituals in the ancient world have been the subject of much recent discussion, and the significance of these rituals, particularly for males, has been extensively studied. Scholars have often slighted the topic of women's part in the history of ancient Greek dining and drinking parties, however, and the broad generalization ‘Citizen women were never present at Greek symposia’ is not uncommon. Admittedly, women other than hetairai, slaves, hired entertainers, etc., are not conspicuous in the evidence from which we must draw our history of ancient Greek symposia. The evidence, however, both written and visual, was created and preserved predominantly by males. Also, the view that there was a fairly narrow participation of women often seems based largely on evidence taken from fifth and fourth century B.C. Athens. Yet the roles of women at Greek dining and drinking partieschanged over time and place. This paper provides a survey, with examples, of the variety of women's dining occasions from the Homeric through to the Hellenistic age. The aim of this survey is to emphasize the value of paying closer attention to the female side of wining and dining in our discussions of occasions of commensality in the ancient Greek world.

In a well-known article appearing in 1967, E. L. Harrison examines Plato's manipulation of Thrasymachos in the first book of the Republic. Harrison looks into certain peculiarities in the argument between Thrasymachos and Socrates and explores motives that may have led Plato to have Thrasymachos develop his doctrine in this particular fashion. Though Harrison's conclusions are widely discussed and frequently accepted, it strikes me as interesting that little scholarly attention has been focussed on equally striking features of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias. For I believe it can be shown that Plato's presentation of Callicles contains numerous peculiarities of its own, that the powerful, vigorously argued doctrine of immoralism enunciated by Callicles in a celebrated portion of the dialogue is actually infected with glaring weaknesses. I do not believe that these weaknesses have been satisfactorily accounted for, nor has the possibility been explored that Plato could have put them there intentionally. The purpose of this paper, then, is threefold: (a) to examine the nature of these flaws in Callicles' position; (b) to demonstrate their apparently odd and gratuitous character; and (c) to explore possible reasons Plato may have had for incorporating them into his presentation of Callicles in the Gorgias.

Recently there has been considerable debate about the nature of popular politics in the Roman Republic. This debate has demonstrated that the Roman citizen was actively involved in voting, and made conscious decisions about which candidate he should vote for at elections, and whether to vote for or against a bill at the meetings of the comitia. The results of elections and voting assemblies would seem to have been dependent upon the attendance and voting behaviour of Roman citizens. These two factors would vary according to the views and opinions of the individual citizen. This paper addresses the issue of how these views and opinions were formulated, with particular reference to the participation of Roman citizens in popular politics.

Long before his obsessional wish was finally fulfilled in 146 B.C, the elder Cato had yet other concerns than Carthaginem delendam esse. In his manual for the farmer, De agricultura 143, he gives ample prescriptions concerning the way the wife of the bailiff (the vilica) of an estate should behave:

‘She must visit the neighbouring and other women very seldom, and not have them either in the house or in her part of it. She must not go out to meals or be a gad-about. She must not engage in religious worship herself or get others to engage in it for her without the orders of the master or the mistress; let her remember that the master attends to the devotions for the whole household.’ (translation: W. D. Hooper & H. B. Ash. Loeb)

In an ideal Roman cremation, the body was carried in procession from the house of the deceased to a place outside the city, where it was burnt on a pyre until it was reduced to bones and ashes (cineres or favilla). The pyre should be built specifically for the deceased; having to use someone else's pyre was a sign of poverty, or an emergency procedure. The cremated remains might be buried where they had been burnt, usually in a ditch which was filled in and covered or marked; in this case the tomb was called a bustum. More usually, the cremation was carried out somewhere other than the final resting place, at a spot designated ustrina in Latin literature. This might be within the same tomb-precinct or columbarium, as in many tombs at Ostia, or at a separate public site. The bones and ashes therefore had to be collected up and placed in a container, preferably a specially made and ornamented one (cinerarium, oss(u)arium, olla, urna), to be placed in the tomb. The force of the fire, the raking and collapse of the pyre during burning, and eventual quenching with cold liquid would together normally be sufficient to reduce the bones to small fragments which would fit easily into the container. This sort of burial of the remains is assumed in such wishes for the dead as:

I pray that you rest quiet and safe in the urn, bones,

And that the earth is not burdensome to your ashes.

Ekphrasis is a slippery topic. Although included in this volume as a rhetorical figure (or figure of speech), its uses and functions far exceed this single classification. Whether defined as a rhetorical exercise, a literary genre (or mode), a narrative digression, a species of description, or a poetic (even metapoetic or meta-representational) technique, the properties associated with ancient ekphrasis are not in doubt. First and foremost are the qualities of enargeia (vividness), sapheneia (clarity), and phantasia (mental image), which, taken together, aim to turn listeners (or readers) into viewers and to evoke an emotional response through an appeal to the immediacy of an imagined presence. Yet, beyond this brief definition, the word ‘ekphrasis’ immediately ushers us into a whole set of questions regarding its intermedial status in a potential contest between verbal and visual representations, the uses of mimesis with regard to verisimilitude (reality–illusion; truth–fiction), and its cognitive, psychological, and mnemonic values in the cultural expectations of its era. It would not be hyperbole to suggest that no other rhetorical term has aroused such interest in recent years among classicists and non-classicists alike, involving aesthetic considerations, theories of vision, modes of viewing, mental impressions, and the complex relationships between word and image.

Heracles was the greatest and the strangest of all the Greek heroes. A long list of superhuman acts of strength and courage stood to his name, and above all else the famous twelve labours, which began with the killing of the Nemean lion and.ended in the capture of the monstrous watchdog Cerberus in Hades. He was a great slayer of monsters, also a great civilizer, founding cities, warm springs, and (as Pindar was fond of reminding his audiences) the Olympic festival. He suffered prodigiously, and he maintained prodigious appetites, for food, drink, and women. He may have had friends, but none close (as, say, Patroclus and Achilles were close), but he did have one implacable and jealous enemy, the goddess Hera. He had two marriages: the first set of wife and children he killed in a fit of madness; the second brought about his own death. He was the son of a mortal woman, Alcmena, and the god Zeus, with Amphitryon as a second, mortal, father; and after his death (by most accounts) he became a god himself and lived on Olympus.

I take the question in my title from a memorably worded passage in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes 26, where Plutarch is describing Demosthenes' exile in 323 B.C. Demosthenes was now 60 and after more than 30 years of active participation in Athenian political life, he had been condemned by an Athenian court for taking bribes from Harpalus, the late treasurer of Alexander the Great, who had fled to Athens with 700 talents. Demosthenes had been fined 50 talents by the court, and had been put in prison when unable to pay. But he had escaped from prison and now went into voluntary exile. North' Plutarch goes on:

Perhaps the one feature that makes the Iliad and Odyssey most characteristically Homeric—not Virgilian, nor Apollonian—is the similes. They allow Homer to turn from the material at hand for a brief moment to look at some other scene, and the intensity with which he looks at the new scene gives a heightened awareness to the original subject, the thing, person, or event which suggested the simile in the first place and was the simile's point of departure. It is well known that the poet's interest in this new subject occasionally goes beyond the strict needs of the poetic context; he often seems absorbed in and even distracted by the other scene, and so the poetic device to which he has lent his name is frequently understood to mean nothing more than an extended comparison whose development and details are thought to be somehow irrelevant. What I wish to do here is look closely at several of these similes in the Odyssey, not from a statistical point of view or to compare them with those of the Iliad, but rather to consider them as poetic devices which Homer uses in an expert way to achieve just the effect he intends; often, as I hope to show, the subtlety of the effect achieved is surprising.

The prime dramatic character of Greek tragedy is agonistic. Its myths for the most part show men struggling toward some goal, in conflict with one another, or against some force of circumstance or destiny, which is often personified in a god. Tragedy is at the same time a dramatic form restricted severely by theatrical conditions. The number of its speaking actors is held to three. It avoids the staging of any physical action like an assault or battle, let alone catastrophe, or death—for whatever reasons of narrative tradition, aesthetic convention, or simple impracticability. Despite certain ritual or symbolic aids to representation such as music, dance, and gesture, it is in consequence a drama of extreme, sometimes exclusive, verbal concentration. Exposition, development, climax, resolution, action and reaction—all movement occurs in the narrow room of at most three stage persons at any one time debating to confirm or change their attitudes or intentions—often, with a single character so placed debating within himself, in monologue or soliloquy, or in relief or opposition to another voice. My subject here is this last mise-en-scène: the deliberate working up of the ordinary exchange between characters into the opposition of one character to one or two others in a formal debate.

It has been argued, above all by Bruno Snell, that there is lacking in the Homeric poems any notion of the ‘self as an integrated whole; the individual is regarded rather as an assembly of more or less independent psychic forces. There can thus, it is argued, be no making of decisions by individuals in the Homeric poems, because there is no such thing as a psychic whole which could decide; in his Scenes from Greek Drama, Snell argues not only that Homer in the Iliad does not explicitly present Achilles as deciding to avenge Patroclus and die young, but also that there are differences in outlook between Homer and Aeschylus which mean that Homer could not portray such a decision, whereas Aeschylus could.

Over the past two decades, the study of deformity and disability in the ancient world has stimulated intense scholarly debate. Recognizing a relatively unexplored body of ancient evidence, scholars have sought to reintegrate the anomalous human body (placed rather unceremoniously under the broad category of ‘Other’) into the (art-) historical record, classical scholarly consciousness, and our understanding of ancient representation more broadly. This article works towards that end, considering the representation of deformity as documented in extant literary sources of the Roman world. It will employ the hunchback as linchpin, since the figure of the hunchback has remained essentially outside this (albeit still developing) field of research.

The large harvest of editions and monographs devoted to Seneca's Phaedra in recent years have done full justice to the influence on Seneca's play of the Greek tragic precedents, even exploiting the Latin play as a quarry for their recovery and restoration; at the level of individual motifs of dialogue, Seneca's debt to Ovid's fourth letter of the Heroides has been confirmed and detailed. But concern with the adaptation of the myth, and the obvious verbal resemblances to Ovid, have combined to distract students from the influence of another Latin work—the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid. The theme of Virgil's book, the quality of Virgil's portrayal of Dido and her passion, with its truly dramatic greatness (of which a distinguished editor has written ‘if Virgil had written nothing else … it would have established his right to stand beside the greatest of the Greek tragedians’), the acknowledged supremacy of Virgil's reputation as a poet in Seneca's generation, and Seneca's own fondness for quoting the Aeneid, are all strong arguments for expecting some reminiscence of Virgil's great queen in Seneca's delineation of Phaedra and her doomed passion for Hippolytus. Before Virgil only Catullus' Ariadne had approached the insight and sympathetic analysis which was achieved in Dido. After Virgil the lovesick heroines of Ovid's Heroides are rhetorically versatile but without the moral stature to give value to their sufferings, while their static portraits cannot offer the development of either action or emotion which is essential to drama. Unfortunately, because Ovid both in Heroides and Metamorphoses borrowed so much detail and imagery from Virgil, his dependence on the greater poet complicates and often frustrates attempts to distinguish the relationship of Senecan poetry to that of the two predecessors whom he admired.

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.

The political unification of the Mediterranean world in the last epoch of the Roman Republic doubtless provided the stimulus for the composition of world histories. One of these is the only universal history written in Latin, under the title Historiae Philippicae, by Pompeius Trogus in the time of Augustus. The original work is lost, but we have an Epitoma produced around the year A.D. 200 by Iustinus. The prologi, which contain summaries of the original work, have been preserved, but there is no indication of authorship.

On his recent retirement from the chair of classical archaeology in Cambridge University, Anthony Snodgrass reflected on the state of the subject, wondering whether a paradigm shift has occurred. Snodgrass assesses various matters, including, for our purposes, how archaeological approaches to ancient literary sources have changed. His comments deserve quotation in full:

…Classical archaeology is often stigmatized, by its many critics, as being ‘text-driven’ … [in] that the subject takes its orientation from, and adapts its whole narrative to, the lead given by the literary sources. Thus the archaeology of Roman Britain has been built around Tacitus' narrative of conquest; the study of Greek art around the text of the Elder Pliny; the archaeology of fifth-century Athens around the narratives supplied by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; that of Republican Rome similarly around those of Livy and Diodorus; that of Sicily again around Thucydides; and most notoriously, that of Aegean prehistory and protohistory around Homer…. But there is a deeper level still. Traditional Classical archaeology is stated…to have directed its energies at those aspects of the ancient world on which the written sources, taken as a whole, throw light. Thus, on urban but not on rural life; on public and civic, but not on domestic activity; on periods seen as historically important, but not on the obscurer ones; on the permanent physical manifestations of religion, but not on the temporary ones – sacrifice, patterns of dedication, ritual meals, pilgrimage; on the artefacts interred in burials, but not on burial itself; on the historically prominent states – in Greece, Athens and Sparta – but not on what has recently been called ‘the Third Greece’…

Euripides' Medea has penetrated to parts of modernity most mythical figures have not reached. Since she first rolled off the printing presses half a millennium ago, she has inspired hundreds of performances, plays, paintings, and operas. Medea has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West, and can today command huge audiences in the commercial theatre. Yet in Britain, at least, her popularity on the stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Medea has transcended history partly because she enacts a primal terror universal to human beings: that the motherfigure should intentionally destroy her own children. Yet this dimension of the ancient tragedy was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances. On the British stage it was not until 1907 that Euripides' Medea was performed, without alteration, in English translation.