The question of the exact nature of the Pythia's expertise has been the subject of academic debate for a very long time. It would indeed not be an exaggeration to say that this has been, and continues to be, one of the most controversial questions in the study of ancient Greek religion. Modern scholars are sharply divided over whether any inspired female oracles, and especially the Pythia at Delphi, had the ability to prophesy in hexameter verse without male assistance. During the classical period the two most famous oracles were those of Zeus at Dodona in Epirus in north-western Greece and of Apollo at Delphi, which was located on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus. According to Plato (Phaedrus 244), the Delphic priestess, as well as the priestesses at Dodona, prophesied in a state of altered consciousness (which he calls mania), and were practitioners of ‘inspired prophecy’ (mantikē entheos).

The bronze statues of the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, by the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, set up in the Athenian Agora in 477 bc, were well known to Athenians throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods. In Thucydides’ account of the deed of the Tyrannicides, he defines the two as lovers (erastes and eromenos), which has led to the assumption that the depictions are in some way likenesses of the two men. I argue that Thucydides’ account has been the source of a misreading of the sculptures. Rather, the models for the figures are contemporary representations of the Gigantomachy – Aristogeiton being based on Apollo – and thus, through the allusion to myth, the sculptors created multivalent figures that were emblematic of something that transcended their deed.

Seneca's shortcomings as a tragedian are a commonplace of literary criticism. On the one hand, the style of Seneca's plays is condemned for being excessively rhetorical; long, undramatic speeches, full of mythological references, alternate with bombastic utterances; or, as J. W. Duff states, comparing Seneca with his Greek predecessors: ‘in the Latin plays one has entered a new world where genius has been replaced by cleverness, and an eminently classic directness of expression by rhetoric.’ On the other hand, Seneca's detractors claim that extravagance of style is matched by a propensity for gory detail, such as the notorious piecing together of Hippolytus at the end of Phaedra. Thus, according to F. L. Lucas:

if only to make up for the unreality of his ultra-academic drama [Seneca] tries to be vivid by being lurid, to stimulate the jaded imagination of his public by screaming atrocity. Seneca does indeed recall the man in Plato who had a morbid desire to view the corpses in the city ditch; long ashamed to yield to such an impulse, at last he ran to the edge and uncovered his eyes with the cry, ‘There, you wretches, take your fill’.

Ancient history and modern thought interact in multifarious ways. While modern concepts can help us to understand, or serve to obscure, ancient reality, the remote past can also be used as a point of reference for contemporary debates about political issues and strategies. In fact, pundits and politicians alike are used to invoking the lessons of (ancient) history in order to justify their recommendations and decisions. This is often done in a most arbitrary and selective way, without regard for the fact that the interpretation of history is too complex a task to yield uncontroversial and straightforward answers to contemporary problems. Nevertheless, it would be rash to dismiss this kind of analysis as unsuitable for academic research; for it should not be overlooked that it can help to broaden the understanding of structural patterns and give a sense of the variety of options available to decision-makers.

In 1969 on a riverside near the Lenyardi caves (about 5 kilometres from present-day Junnar, in the Indian state of Maharashtra), Dr Satish Deshmukh discovered an alabaster object in the form of half an egg (longitudinally cut) with a young male child lying inside it (with small traces of red paint on the right side of the object). This high-quality oval object (figures 1 and 2) measures about 5 cm × 3.4 cm and is usually interpreted as an item that was originally manufactured in the Mediterranean world before being brought to India, rather than a piece of artwork produced in India itself. One possible, and largely accepted, interpretation is that this figure represents the birth of the god Eros. However, identification of the figure within the egg-like structure is not easily made. While the figure does bear similarities to the putto-style representation of Eros in instances of Greek and Roman art, it does not possess any clear identifying features (such as the wings with which Eros is often depicted). The figure's resemblance to Eros in some of his other iconographic depictions and the egg-like structure around him suggest a possible identification of this infant with Eros and the myth of his birth from an egg. However, without evidence from other iconography of a more clearly identifiable Eros in similar contexts, the figure cannot be said to be him with any certainty. As Dhavalikar notes, this object ‘is the only one of its kind among the classical antiquities so far found in the Indian subcontinent and perhaps has no parallel in the classical world’. Thus the identification of this sculpture as a depiction of Eros in the egg is possible, but not certain.

In Boeotian Thebes, the simplest thirst for topographical detail will turn up a reference to Dirce. Whether depicted as a nymph, a spring, a river, or simply as flowing water, the name represents an integral, perhaps indispensable, part of the Theban landscape. But of course it is more than that. A narrative surrounds this watery place, telling of Theban kings and queens, of founding twins, and of odd and cruel tortures and torments. It is my goal in this article to understand these varying traditions surrounding Dirce by means of an examination of the interplay between mythic narratives and Theban topography. Narratives of Dirce grow and develop in relation to the physical landscape of the city, but this relationship is seldom reducible to a one-to-one correlation of story and place. The early Greek tradition has much to say about Dirce, some of it contradictory. But superficial contradiction is the norm in this realm, and some sense can be made of what we have with careful attention to the changing contexts surrounding appearances of Dirce as they are expressed and understood in early Greek literature, and to the changing ways the city of Thebes is described in the Greek mythic tradition.

‘All political lives…end in failure’, as Enoch Powell said; and Themistocles son of Neocles died twice. His first life ended with his ostracism in the late 470 s, after which he was dead to an Athens enthralled by Cimon; but he would not lie down. This article considers his two afterlives: one which ended about 459 in Magnesia on the Maeander, and the other which commenced in the fifth century but continues to resonate today. The examination, however, will be in reverse order, considering first the Themistocles who at Athens was written into what Tim Whitmarsh would call ‘the archive’, then drawing inferences from that literary afterlife to comment on Athenian politics in Themistocles’ years of ostracism, then exile.

In most branches of classical study, in the interpretation of history, in criticism, whether textual or literary, and most noticeably in archaeology, the present generation knows more than its parents did; that a similar advance has not been made in the strictly linguistic studies is perhaps due partly to an unexpressed assumption that we already know all that we are likely to know about the classical languages, but is certainly due even more to a love of tradition for its ownsake; what was good enough for Kennedy is good enough for us.

It was a natural and well-established usage in antiquity that works of literature might readily be referred to by their opening words. Aristophanes accidentally lends the ‘Παλλάδα περсέέολιν δεινάν …. ’ ‘Pallas the awful city-sacker …’ of a certain Lamprocles or maybe of Stesichorus and the ‘Τηλέπορον τι βόαμα …’, ‘Some far-reaching shriek …’ of one ‘Kydidas’ a pale and partial immortality this way (Nub.967), and in the imaginary world of Theocritus an imaginary poem the ‘τὸν ἐμὸν Λύκον….’ ‘Lycus my lover…’ by an imaginary ‘Larisaean fellow’ is thus evoked (Id. 14.30). Cicero refers to Ennius' Medea as the ‘Vtinam ne in nemore….’ (Fin. 1.5), and we even find him casually referring to an evidently near-definitive draft of his Cato maior de senectute which he had sent to Atticus as the ‘O Tite si quid …’ (Att.16.3.1) and ‘O Tite …’ 9 Att. 16.11.3): here an opening citation of a citation (of Ennius) is identifying the book, clearly doubly unsuitable as an official title; as if for Atticus the publisher and his clerks in the scriptorium this was a normal practice, mechanically applicable regardless of appositeness. In one of the less gloomy passages in Tristia (2.261) Ovid has a girl broaching Lucretius in not quite the right spirit: sumpserit ‘Aeneadum genetrix …’ ubi pritna, requiret Aeneadum genetrix unde sit alma Venus, and further on (2.534) alludes to the Aeneid in the same way: contulit in Tyrios arma uirumque toros; cf. Persius 1.96 ‘arma uirum’, nonne hoc spumosum etcorticepingui utramale uetus uegrandi subere coctum?, Martial 14.185 accipe facundi Culicem, studiose, Maronis, ne nucibus positis arma uirumque legas. Virgil himself had alluded in the closing signature to the Georgics to his own Bucolica with Tityre, tepatulae cecini sub tegmine fagi (G. 4.566); Ovid elaborates on that at Amores 1.15.25 Tityrus etfruges Aeneiaque arma, though without wanting just mechanically to insist specifically on first line allusions; after all, he could have written segetes instead of fruges in recollection of Ge orgies 1.1. Lastly in this little survey, which is merely illustrative, there is the point that it seems to have been standard Alexandrian practice in cataloguing works to refer, e.g., to ‘The Brothers of X of which the first line is …’, ‘The Phoenissae of Y, the first line of which is …’, presumably to resolve potential ambiguities within and between the canons of particular authors.

The following text and translation is extracted from Joseph Addison's Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 (lines 96–132 and 167–end). The poem celebrates the peace of Ryswick in which William III and his continental allies had halted the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and France had recognized William as King of England. The poem describes, in general terms, William's unification of the allied forces against France, the siege warfare which distinguished the campaigns, and the coming again of agricultural prosperity to war-ravaged Europe. The first extract begins with William's return to England. The omitted lines describe the young William, Dukeof Gloucester, the eldest son of the future Queen Anne, and a firework display in London. The Duke of Gloucester shortly died, and the death of the King himself in 1702 coincided with the outbreak of even fiercer war to prevent the potential unification of the thrones of France and Spain (the War of the Spanish Succession) in which Louis XIV returnedto the support of Jacobite claims to the English crown.

J. L. Styan in his book The Dark Comedy quotes a comment of Federico Garcia Lorca, ‘If in certain scenes the audience doesn't know what to do, whether to laugh or cry, that will be a success for me'. A friend and colleague suggested in a conversation after witnessing my production of the Amphitryo in Perth in 1991 that he found that play similarly fascinating, because at times it made certain parts of the audience feel so uncomfortable, even as it was making them laugh. Riotously funny the Amphitryo undoubtedly is from time to time, but there is often a savage bite to the humour and a feeling evoked by the action which is not dissimilar to the effect of tragedy, especially when the unwitting humans have their lives and fortunes distorted by the amoral antics of the immortals. In short, the play shows signs of being of mixed genre, a fact which is acknowledged by the famous statement of Mercury in the prologue: