There can be no student of Roman history who has not, at one time or other, pondered the significance of the emperor Caligula's (A.D. 37–41) alleged command to his soldiers to gather seashells for transportation back to Rome as the spoils of war. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I dare to offer yet another interpretation of an event which, as we shall see, has not lacked commentators.

Until the end of the twentieth century, the study of Hellenistic Babylonia appealed mostly to researchers trained in Classics. When J. G. Droysen published Geschichte des Hellenismus between 1836 and 1843, Akkadian had in fact not yet been deciphered. Classical texts therefore provided the only way in which scholars could understand Babylonia. When Assyriology developed as a field on its own, researchers focused on Sumero-Akkadian culture; they considered the Hellenistic period to be a decadent time in which Greek culture had infiltrated the native one, to its detriment. With these two perspectives combined, the Hellenocentric understanding of Hellenistic Babylonia was strengthened. In the early 1990s, however, Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kuhrt vigorously upended this view. They focused on non-classical texts and documents and thereby stressed the vitality of Near Eastern cultural traditions. Their challenging work paved the way for intercultural reflection on Hellenistic Babylonia. In effect, the interactions between Babylon and Greece could therefore be developed, by a new generation of researchers, as cross-cultural, meaning that it is likely that mutual impact was felt in both cultures. Among them, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper offers, in the field of archaeology, a useful interpretative model which analyses cultural interactions in their diachronic and multi-directional dimensions. She assumes the existence of cultural mediators who stimulate interactions between people of two cultural backgrounds sharing a common space. Over time, the facilitation of exchange may affect the nature of social relationships, so much so that they no longer develop in accordance with cultural factors but rather with social class, age, gender, or profession. This implies numerous combinations which vary depending on the sociocultural background of each participant in a given social interaction.

In September ad 1, on the occasion of his birthday, Augustus wrote to Gaius, his adopted son and grandson by Julia and Agrippa, complaining about his age, stating that he had

The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.

In the first months of 44 ce, the Roman emperor Claudius, after spending as few as sixteen days in Britain, returned to Rome to celebrate his triumph. On his journey back to Rome, he stopped near the mouth of the Po river to take a cruise, as Pliny the Elder describes:

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.

Olympus as an idea pervades Greek literature: Olympus as a mountain of earth and stone seems to have been little considered. Unlike Delphi, it was neither a Mecca to which pilgrims travelled nor a Jerusalem for which they would wage a Holy War. Apparently it did not occur to Greeks to climb mountains unless they wanted to get to the other side. Pausanias in his comprehensive wanderings mentions Olympus only to say that lions from Thrace used to roam there, and that an athlete once unarmed slew a lion, a great and mighty beast, on the mountain. The successor of Pausanias, Herr Baedeker, omits Olympus entirely: Le Guide Bleu to Greece informs us that ‘l'exploration méthodique de l'Olympe ne remonte pas au delà de la fin du XVIIIe siècle et début du XIXe’, and recommends Marcel Kurz, Le Mont Olympe, as the best book on the subject.

The Corpus of Attic Orators is one of the richest legacies which has come down to us from antiquity. It is invaluable from many points of view. It provides us with unique material for tracing the evolution of Greek prose style; it illustrates the administration of public and private law at Athens; it supplies important evidence for Greek history; and, since the private orations deal with the personal affairs of ordinary citizens, it throws a flood of light on everyday life at Athens. It is with the last point that I shall attempt to deal.

The private orations were composed by professional speech-writers for delivery by clients who were obliged by law to plead their own causes in the courts. Being concerned with real or alleged crimes, they naturally do not show human nature at its best.

I propose to take as examples two speeches dealing with murders, one with an accusation of falsely claiming a dole, and one with a charge of assault and battery.

Two Murder Cases.

Antiphon, the earliest of the Attic Orators, who was also well known as a politician and took a prominent part in the establishment of the Four Hundred in 411 B.C., was head of a school of rhetoric which was attended by Thucydides. Fifteen of his speeches have survived, all of which deal with murder cases, three having been written for actual delivery and the rest as specimen speeches on fictitious themes.

The speech On the Murder of Herodes was composed for a certain Euxitheus and is concerned with an incident which took place on the island of Lesbos off the coast of Asia Minor.

The Olympian faith was the religion of the poetry of Hesiod and J. Homer, including the Homeric Hymns, and upon this poetry the thought of all Greeks in the archaic and early classical ages was founded: ‘All men begin their learning with Homer,’ says Xenophanes. Herodotus makes it clear that any Greek of his own day considered Homer and Hesiod canonical:

Whence each of the gods arose, whether all always were, what their individual forms are, the Greeks did not know until the day before yesterday, so to speak. For I think that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years older than me and no more. And they are the ones who constructed divine genealogies for the Greeks, gave the gods their epithets, determined their spheres and functions, and indicated their forms (ii. 53).

There can be little doubt that the extant remains of Persius form the whole of his writings. In his boyhood he had indulged in the literary exercises of the classroom, and these immature efforts included a tragedy, a book of travels, and some lines on the elder Arria, whose Non dolet1 was an appropriate subject for a young Stoic to commemorate. These experiments had little merit, otherwise they would not have been destroyed on the advice of Cornutus, his friend and teacher and literary executor.

Definition of the class of poem which modern scholarship has agreed to describe by the convenient, if unauthorized, title of epyllion has never proved altogether successful. The claim has commonly been made that Catullus' sixty-fourth poem may be accepted as the type and that all or most of the features revealed in it may be assumed to exist more or less completely realized in earlier examples from the Alexandrian period: in particular, that the epyllion always possesses a secondary story enclosed within the primary one.

The physical shape of Attica has not altered appreciably since ancient times; Attica is far too well founded for that in the remote geological structure of the Aegean. But Attica is a promontory, an akté, plunged in the sea at the far end of the main watershed of peninsular Greece; and filled also with abrupt and lofty mountains, which prevent it from being ‘easy to oversee’ (eusynoptos) in the sense prescribed by Aristotle for his ideal city-state. Consequently the ground-plan, the ‘shape’ of Attica on a map of Greece, has been differently interpreted by different observers.

On the modern map, based on ‘trigonometrical’ measurement of angles subtended by bases of exactly measured length, Attica appears as a wedge-shaped promontory, one side of which lies between Piraeus and C. Sunium, the other between Sunium and the bend of the coast south of Rhamnus. The angle between these two coasts is about 45 °, or half of a right angle. West of Piraeus, the island of Salamis, seen from the sea, not only looks like part of Attica, but conceals the great ingression of the Saronic Gulf into the Bay of Eleusis. And north of Rhamnus, even on the modern map, few people realize that the coast runs much more nearly west than north—bearing about 300° from Rhamnus to the Euripus Strait; so completely does Euboea insist on its immemorial connexion with Attica, and disguise the fact that from Parnassus east-ward into Attica the Greek mainland is an isthmus, lying nearly east and west, and only about 24 miles broad between the bays of Livadostro (anc. Creüsa) on the Corinthian Gulf, and Skroponeri on the Euboean channel, on the border between Boeotia and Locris.

Callias, son of Hipponicus, inherited the greatest fortune of his day, lived throughout the latter half of the fifth century and the first thirty years of the fourth century, spent his money lavishly, and died poor, or at least a good deal poorer. He must have been a prominent personage in Athens, yet owing to his lack of interest in politics and war, one hears little of him in history books. He presents a small problem to the biographer: there are two sources of information about him, one friendly, one hostile, and the fitting together of the two into a portrait is an entertaining occupation.

In an essay published in a recent issue of Greece & Rome, P.G. Walsh examines the views of the American scholars Gilbert Highet, Helen Bacon, and William Arrowsmith and comes to the very sensible conclusion that they are wrong in believing that Petronius Arbiter had any moral purpose in writing the Satyricon. While ultimately it may prove impossible for one side in this debate to convince the other, Walsh's arguments, and the way he goes about propounding them, can provide us with some illuminating hints as to why the Petronius controversy arose in the first place. And there are unexplored aspects to the terms on which the argument is being conducted which, when examined and carefully considered, may point the way toward a possible resolution.