Elite, Athenian, male – all three adjectives usually apply to our sources on the ancient world, and the study of ancient ethics (including even so-called ‘popular morality’) is no different in this respect. There are, however, a few exceptional sources that provide a window into a more diverse population and their hopes, desires, values, and insecurities. In the following, I wish to highlight one of these – the corpus of oracular lamellae from Dodona – and demonstrate how this body of evidence can shed new light on an old question. Specifically, I will consider what we can learn about techne (art, craft, profession) from these tablets; but in addition I hope readers with an interest in ancient ethics will see how promising this source is for further study on other topics. As I will show, alongside the better known peri technes literature – a group of texts from the fifth and fourth centuries bce that discuss medicine and other crafts from a theoretical standpoint – there is a small corpus of texts from Dodona that uses this same phrase and discusses the crafts from a far more practical perspective. The object of this article will be to show how these two corpora are mutually enlightening.

The study of Egyptian personal religiosity during the third century ad presents an interesting opportunity to explore the processes of cultural encounters between Egypt and the Roman Empire. The religious situation was more complicated and variegated than the textual evidence seems to suggest; sometimes one becomes aware of the existence of certain beliefs only through their iconographic record. For this reason, decorated stelae, coffins, and mummy wrappings are crucial materials for research into questions of religious exchange. This article presents the case of a third-century ad shroud from Memphis painted with a woman's portrait and funerary scenes, along with a representation of Isis navigans.

The many-sided and lively-minded writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902) attended St John's College, Cambridge, from 1854 to 1858. There he penned a brief account of College rowing in the manner of Herodotean ethnography. It was preserved by a friend and published posthumously.

Artefact collections are a key means for many people to interact with classical antiquity. The physicality of objects easily appeals to the imagination, evoking associations between the object and the viewer's experiences. Reception of artefacts is thus multilayered, even regarding what may seem to be very simple objects, such as ancient glass vessels uncovered and collected around the middle of the nineteenth century. Drawing on research into the Damon Collection (Canterbury Museum, New Zealand) this study explores Victorian reception of Roman glass, demonstrating the many and often complex ways in which objects of utilitarian origin in classical antiquity gained new meaning and surprising popularity among a broad public. Glass vessels were receptacles for ideas and the imagination, from adventure to questions of religion and empire. In particular, vessels identified as ‘lachrymatories’ became a very personal empathetic link to the classical past, with influence on popular imagination enduring to the present day.

One of Xenophon's chief aims in Memorabilia is to defend his beloved teacher from charges raised both during and after his trial. Some readers have thought that he has gone so far in whitewashing Socrates that the resulting portrait makes it impossible to explain the hostility he aroused: Socrates appears here merely as an innocuous friend offering good advice on all sorts of mundane subjects. But the apologetic strategies employed by Xenophon are more complex and subtle than that. The widespread view of him as a simple-minded defender of conventional attitudes blinds us to the places where he speaks with a different, more radical voice. We should not be surprised to find that the enthusiastic student of Socrates, one of the most radical and unconventional thinkers of ancient Greece, has some radical thoughts of his own.

‘An anonymous product of an impersonal craft’: that is how Rhys Carpenter characterized Greek sculpture in 1960, and it's an assessment that has long dominated the field. Carpenter was challenging the traditional workings of classical archaeology, not least its infatuation with individual ‘masters’. While responding to past precedent, however, his comments also looked forward in time, heralding a decidedly postmodern turn. From our perspective in 2020, six decades after his book was first published, Carpenter can be seen to anticipate what Roland Barthes would dub the ‘death of the author’: ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author’, as Barthes put it.

The emperor displayed his role as commander-in-chief through his actions as the soldiers' supreme benefactor, martial portraits on the coinage and imperial art, and speeches to particular army units. The fortunate survival of the text of Hadrian's speech at Lambaesis provides us with an exceptional record of how the emperor showed both an awareness of military techniques and empathy for the rigours of army life. In times of crisis, the emperor could address the soldiers directly, in order to ensure their continuing support for his rule. As a study on imperial witticisms has shown, what the emperor said was as important as what he did for the purpose of defining his role within the Principate.

Anaxagoras was a man of one book; and that book, save for a few quotations in other authors and several summaries, is lost. A very potent and tantalizing book it must have been, to judge from all that we hear of it; the opinion of antiquity, preserved in Diogenes Laertius, was that its doctrines were expounded ‘in a pleasant and lofty style’, and the fragments which remain confirm this judgement. It was not merely a philosophical or scientific treatise; it was a work of art, in which the style rose and fell with the subject-matter.

The First Punic War is a record of a dismal wastage of human life and of strategic ineptitude. Briefly the Roman mistakes may be summed up as follows. First, the popular assembly which accepted the alliance with Messana seems to have failed to realize that the Carthaginians were bound to try to eject them from Sicily; to fight Carthage Rome needed a navy; she had none of her own and even in the treaty with Hiero asked for no naval assistance. Secondly, Rome made her struggle in Sicily much harder because she alienated all the Greeks by her ungenerous treaty with Hiero and by the massacre of non-combatants at Agrigentum. Thirdly, she was very slow to realize that the only way to get the Carthaginians out of Sicily was to strike at Africa; Agathocles in 310 had already pointed the way. Fourthly, Regulus failed to enlist willing Numidians in his cavalry, although a strong cavalry was essential on the plains of Africa. Fifthly, Regulus was left with far too small a force. Lastly, Rome continued to change the command and appoint inexperienced men, though few were quite so incompetent as Regulus who, when faced by the elephants and phalanx of Xanthippus, massed his legionaries, thus making them an easy prey to the Carthaginian battering ram.

Apollonius' Jason has been variously described by scholars as a ‘weak and insignificant hero’, a ‘tame and insipid’ character compared with that of Medea, ‘discreet, proper, quite weak, and somewhat colourless’, ‘never quite equal to the emergency, and can never rise above his immediate troubles’, ‘cold and selfish’, ‘uninteresting when he is not repellent’, an anti-hero, and a love-hero. But, with the exception of R. Hunter's view of Jason as a human being forced by necessity to carry out tasks which no Homeric hero was ever called upon to do, most scholars have erred in comparing the Hellenistic hero Jason with the archetypal hero of epic tradition.

Aman's character is judged not merely by his public services and his political views but also by his private life and individual interests. Similarly the history of a nation is to be read not only in its military exploits, its constitutional experiments, its art and literature, but also in the social habits and predominant interests of its citizens. Just as a garden mirrors the character of its owner, so the gardens of a nation reflect the character and the degree of advancement of the State. It is no coincidence that the popular garden of the Roman Republic was the simple kitchen garden, while under the Empire pretentious landscape gardens were the vogue. The vitalizing energy of the Republic found an outlet in the productive vegetable plot: the elaborate but sterile gardens of the Empire were symbolic of incipient decay.

Until the first century b.c. almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine-chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the Elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of a later date that in the past at Rome a garden was the poor man's estate: it was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in more northerly countries, for the diet of the Romans consisted, for the most part, of salads.

A Number of statues representing early national heroes, and presumably quite imaginary as portraits, were, according to the ancient sources, erected in Rome before the second century b.c. But our earliest reference to honorific portraits of contemporary, or near-contemporary, public persons relates to the year 158 b.c., when an order was issued, so the elder Pliny informs us, for the removal from the Forum of all statues of magistrates which had not been officially authorized— populi out senatus sententia statutae. What these second-century honorific statues of magistrates were like we do not know for certain, since none of them has survived. It would, however, be a fairly safe conjecture that they were the work, not of Romans or Italians, but of immigrant Hellenistic artists. We have no knowledge of any school of specifically Roman portrait-sculptors of this period; while from Greek lands, and particularly from Delos, comes abundant evidence that Greek portraitists, natives of Athens and of other east-Mediterranean centres, were carving portrait-statues of Roman officials and of other contemporary individuals precisely at this time. Some of these statues carried on the ‘baroque’ tradition of the idealized, heroized, or heaven-inspired Hellenistic ruler-portrait that began with Alexander's likenesses. Others, on the other hand, exemplify a new and highly realistic, one might almost say prosaic, development in Hellenistic iconography.

Many without direct access to detailed information are by now quite firmly convinced that the numbers of students studying Classics at British Universities have been declining and are continuing to decline. To some this is a matter of regret, to others it is a matter of indifference, and to others again it is something positively to be welcomed. From time to time those with a committed belief in the value of classical studies tend to see hopeful signs of a recovery, while the enemies of Classics can hardly wait for the final demise of an outmoded and irrelevant discipline. But whatever the attitude adopted towards the decline, the fact that there is such a decline is normally not regarded as a matter that can be disputed. Indeed anyone who demurs about the facts tends to be ignored or dismissed, as if he were not only an interested party but a dishonest one as well. The present article is an attempt to consider the actual position in greater detail and it is hoped with greater objectivity than is to be found in many of the statements frequently put forward in the course of discussion.

It was just over half a century ago, in 1892, that Gaston Boissier published a discussion of the Stoic ‘martyrs’ under Nero in the second chapter of his well-known work L'Opposition sous les Cèsars. Since then two especially noteworthy studies of the ‘philosophic opposition’ in the first century A.D. have appeared in English, that of M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), pp. 108 ff., and, more recently, that of D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism (1937), pp. 125 ff. The story of men who maintained a critical or, at the least, independent attitude in the face of a totalitarian règime is obviously of great significance for us to-day. Theoretically, of course, the term ‘autocracy’, in its strict sense of ‘unaccountability’ of government, cannot be applied to the imperial system of the early Empire. On paper the ‘tyrants’, Tiberius, Gaius, Nero, and Domitian, no less than the ‘enlightened monarchs’, Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, were delegates senatus populique Romani, chief magistrates and servants of the state. But in practice the ever-expanding range of the imperial provincia, coupled with the unceasing growth of the ‘mystical’ auctoritas bequeathed by the first Princeps to his successors, had produced an effective absolutism comparable, in many respects, to that of the autocrats or ‘dictators’ of modern authoritarian states. How did political thought and action in the Roman Empire respond to this de facto autocracy? How, above all, did they respond to its abuse? For us these are no merely academic questions. The parallelism, such as it is, between the ancient and the modern situations must serve as an excuse for presuming to rehandle a familiar theme.

I

We are often told nowadays that the whole business of war, especially command and administration, is becoming increasingly difficult and complicated as more and more different weapons, each more highly specialized than the last, are brought into service. But the undoubted truth of this contention must not lead us into the error of supposing that ancient warfare was a simple matter between forces composed of nothing but infantry and cavalry. Many of the battles of antiquity, indeed, are made more interesting by the presence of unusual and intriguing armaments; and though some of these may now seem largely obsolete, it does not do to be too sure—was not the Home Guard armed with pikes in its early infancy?

Let us consider, then, the parade state of Antiochus’ army at the battle of Magnesia. After his defeat at Thermopylae in April 191, it will be remembered, he had fled to Ephesus, and by the end of the following year he was ready for the Scipios with an army of 70,000 men. ‘Most of the peoples of the Empire were represented, from Dahae horse-archers of the Caspian to Arabs mounted on dromedaries. It was strong in cavalry—at least 12,000 horse, light or “cataphract”—in light-armed infantry … archers, slingers and javelin men; it included, besides 54 elephants, that engine of war dear to the Ancient East, the dreaded scythed-chariots.’

Here, surely, is a sufficiently varied assortment of nationalities and armaments to show that manifold alliances and specialized equipments are not peculiar to the twentieth century.