In his early Byzantine Chronicle, Johannes Malalas fills out the figure of Cyrus, Croesus' silent antagonist in Herodotus. While Croesus is consulting the Delphic oracle, Cyrus enjoys a quite different divine audience:

And the prophet Daniel came to the King of the Persians, Cyrus. And Cyrus says to him: ‘Tell me, am I going to conquer Croesus King of the Lydians?’

When the Christian prophet hesitates, Cyrus throws him to the lions – only swiftly to repent. Daniel returns the favour by confirming that Cyrus will defeat Croesus because God breaks the ‘might of kings’. Malalas' version of divine counselling clearly draws on Christian moralizing traditions; but it also flags up the confrontation between the powerful king and the word of god in Herodotus' narrativisation of Croesus' downfall. At the same time, however, it offers a radically different interpretative model. Here we don't just have a Croesus consulting the oracle and failing to comprehend it; Cyrus is told what will happen – and why – by the prophet Daniel! From Croesus (mis)reading the oracle to Cyrus receiving instruction from God, narrative dynamics have undergone a fundamental shift. It's now the gospel…

Scholarship on Croesus testing Delphi, and on oracles more generally, has tended to focus on reconstructing the ‘original’ oracular texts and assessing Herodotus' role as a historian (in the modern sense of the word) in the light of how accurate his record is deemed to be. Notwithstanding the fact that such positivist approaches to historical writing have been challenged and that recent studies have been far more nuanced, the oracles themselves remain the focus of investigation. In tracing their ‘changing representations’ I want to look exclusively at how they function within Herodotus' narrative.

These two men – the statesman ruling Athens in her glory, and the philosopher of the man-measure dictum, the ‘first humanist’ as he has been called – are on anyone's reckoning two of the greatest of European history. They not only knew each other, but appear to have been friends. Ehrenberg managed to spin a whole book out of what he imagined was the friendly relationship between Pericles and Sophocles, even though there is no evidence that they liked each other, and indeed positive evidence that they did not. For the only two anecdotes relating any communication between them (both to do with Sophocles' fondness for young boys) suggest that Pericles rather resented having the playwright as a fellow general on the military expedition they made against Samos in 440.

This is not a paper about Christianity and the decline of theatre and amphitheatre: perhaps, like another transported Englishman, W. V. Harris, I should have learned to say ‘eye-glasses’, but, as it is, I would like to examine some of the problems that surround reading and writing at Rome. In a recent paper, R. J. Starr offers a useful survey of the material on lectores, 2 a term that can mean both one who reads a text (Hor. Ep. 1.19.35), and, like anagnostes, one who reads aloud to others as his principal activity. Starr's paper suggests, passim, an author aware that his topic could well have wider implications, as it most certainly does. The history of books, reading, writing, and research in antiquity is a fascinating topic, endlessly rich and complex in its ramifications, as witness the debate on W. V. Harris's Literacy and the work of Guglielmo Cavallo.

The Odyssey is principally the story of a return. A man has spent ten years fighting a war in a distant country and another ten years trying, against all sorts of obstacles and distractions, to get home to his wife and family. Will he make it?

The recent revival of interest in the Athenian Plague suggested to us that it would be worth while re-examining the evidence. The very fact that it has troubled so many scholars in the last hundred years lends it a certain distinction, but their conclusions are so contradictory and unsatisfactory that many have agreed with Poppo ‘eam rem diiudicare non grammaticorum atque interpretum est, sed medicorum’. Yet it is clear that the inquiry can hardly be effective without co-operation between classical and medical men.

Over the last thirty years, the development of disability studies as an academic discipline has in turn ensured that interest in disability in historical periods has steadily increased. Initially, scholars presented an overwhelmingly negative view of disability in antiquity, proceeding under the assumption that babies born displaying visible signs of deformity or disability were subjected either to infanticide or exposure, and that individuals who were subsequently identified as suffering from a deformity or disability, or developed either one later in life, were ostracized and unable to make any meaningful contribution to society. It is only over the last decade that this reductive approach has been gradually discredited, and the understanding of disability in antiquity has become increasingly nuanced. To date, one monograph has been published on deformity and disability in the Graeco-Roman world, one monograph on disability in the Greek world and one on disability in the Roman world, and one edited volume on disability in antiquity and another on disability in the Roman world. These have been complemented by investigations into disability in Judaism, Christianity and the Bible.

In a previous article I argued that the most successful approach to the concept of hybris was through the definition of Aristotle, who placed the core of the concept in behaviour that was intended gratuitously to inflict dishonour and shame upon others; such an account, I argued, would be able adequately to explain the meaning and moral force of the term in authors from Homer to Aristotle, and was more precise than the account offered by D. M. MacDowell, who had defined hybris as self-indulgent misuse of energy or power. In a number of areas of Greek literature, however, different interpretations of hybris have been and still are widely held; I wish here to suggest briefly how my account will stand in these areas as well.

Have you ever stopped to think what life would be like without your alarm clock, without church bells ringing out the hour, without clocks in lecture rooms? How differently would you understand the world?

Our views on literary patronage in the Augustan Age may be dominated to such an extent by the personality of Maecenas that other, contemporary, patrons are forgotten or, worse still, seen as pale reflections of the ‘ideal’ patron, Maecenas, and so best disregarded. Professor Ronald Syme, for example, in his notable chapter on Augustus' ‘Organization of Opinion’, writes that ‘Augustus’ chief of cabinet, Maecenas, captured the most promising of the poets at an early stage and nursed them into the Principate. Augustus himself listened to recitations with patience and even with benevolence. He insisted, however, that his praises should be sung only in serious efforts and by the best poets. The Princeps succeeded: other patrons of literature were left far behind.’ This article looks briefly at the work of those poets who were closely associated with one of these ‘other patrons’, M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, and attempts to show that his patronage, and the poets' attitudes towards it, were essentially Republican in nature—a factor which should be kept in mind in making any comparison between Messalla's poets and those more directly concerned with the Princeps.

This paper is an investigation of the rise to power of P. Clodius in the last years of the Roman Republic. Its purpose is to form a judgement on Clodius' own policies and to estimate the political significance of his career. This involves many detailed historical problems. Though I shall suggest solutions to some of these, my main aim is to seek a general interpretation of Clodius' political persona.

The exact situation of this historic opening within the compass of the Elburz mountains has long been in dispute among travellers and scholars, so a fresh review of the evidence is not untimely.

The comparative infrequency of references to women in Thucydides' history has often been remarked upon, and explained as due in part to the choice of warfare as his theme, and in part to the success of the Greek republics in excluding women from the political arena. As Pericles says in his funeral speech, women ought to give their menfolk the least possible cause to have to take note of them (2.45.2). But the exclusion of women from the subject-matter of historical discourse is peculiarly Thucydidean. Powell's Lexicon tells us that Thucydides' contemporary Herodotus uses γ⋯νηs 373 times, while the number of references to women/wives, mothers, priestesses etc. in Thucydides is less than fifty. This does not mean of course that Thucydides has no interest in, or sympathy for, women: frequently he mentions them as the passive objects of military circumstances precisely in order to underline the tragic effects of warfare. But some of the references to women are decidedly curious. There is a clear example in the account of the unsuccessful Theban attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., with which active hostilities began. Thucydides tells us that some of the Thebans who were locked into the town escaped by breaking open a deserted gate without being noticed (2.4.4). Why does he gratuitously mention that it was a women – presumably a Plataean – who gave her enemies an axe: γυναικ⋯ς δο⋯σης π⋯λɛκυν Clearly, it is an overimplification to say that Thucydides ignores women.

When Endymion, king of the Moon, devised war upon Phaethon, king of the Sun, he decreed that a race of spiders as big as the Cyclades should weave a web between Venus and his lunar dominion, to serve as the battlefield for their regal rumble. And in that region of the heavens he arrayed his army: the king himself led his elite Hippo-vultures in the clouds on the right wing, 80,000 strong; his other cavalry, mounted on giant birds with wings like lettuce leaves, held the left. The Moon's stalwart infantry held the centre, posted on the spider web: Millet-launchers and Garlic-fighters, and his light-armed Flea-archers and Wind-runners, whose long tunics carried them about like sailboats in the fierce winds of the celestial realm. To Endymion's Hippo-vultures, Phaethon opposed the Sun's Hippo-ants (and near two hundred feet long were the insects that bore these cavalry). On the opposite flank of the solar array came the Air-mosquitoes and the formidable radish-flinging Air-dancers. The spears of Phaethon's phalanx, in the centre, were stalks of asparagus, and their round shields were mushrooms. Phaethon's allies, the Cloud-centaurs, expected at any moment from the Milky Way, had not arrived in time for battle.

There are certain puzzling features about Sophocles' Philoctetes, notably concerning the oracle of Helenus that is the mainspring of the whole action. What were the exact terms of Helenus' prophecy? Did he state simply that Troy was to fall to Neoptolemus and the bow of Heracles; or did he also stipulate that the bow was to be used by its present owner, Philoctetes, that Philoctetes was to come willingly to-Troy, and that his wound was to be healed there? By the end of the play, we may well think that the prophecy made these further stipulations; but the references to the prophecy earlier in the play (and the actions of Odysseus, who should be familiar with its conditions) do little to make this plain. It is also difficult to determine exactly how much Neoptolemus knows about the prophecy. In the opening dialogue with Odysseus, he seems to know nothing about the oracle, not even the role of the bow in the capture of Troy (112 ff.). But, as the play proceeds, he gives an increasingly precise account of its conditions; although the source of his expanding knowledge is by no means clear. A further problem is posed by the epiphany of Heracles that concludes the play. Why has Sophocles constructed his play in such a way that the natural conclusion of the human characters' interaction is in direct contradiction both to the divine plan and the traditional myth, and needs (as it may seem) to be awkwardly reversed by a deus ex machina??

Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate – even a woman undergraduate – reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear (Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denunciation of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement – a decade late – got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholarship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask. What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race?

Historians, we are told on all sides, have signally failed to clarify the terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, though they employ them all the time. The man in the street, curiously enough, sees no great problem, and I shall argue that he is right. Much of the trouble in the professional literature stems from a elementary confusion between a definition and a typology. It would not be a useful definition of empire, for example, that excluded either the Athenian or the Persian empire because Athens was a democratic city-state or Persia an autocratic monarchy; whereas that distinction might be important in both a typology and an analysis.

What is truth and what are lies in the Odyssey? Odysseus in his lying story to Eumaios (14.192ff.), just as the sea-nymph Eidothea in her true advice to the weather-bound Menelaos (4.383ff.), claims to be speaking μαλ' ἀτρɛκέως, ‘quite precisely’. As all politicians are aware, if you wish to stand a chance of being believed it helps to emphasize the accuracy of what you are saying; this introductory line was as much a formula for Homer as it is today.

The later books of the Annals exhibit a sharp divergence in structure and emphasis from the first hexad. Following upon Seianus and the sombre aftermath of Seianus in Book 6, the new epoch gave Tacitus welcome relief, with scope for colour and variety — and for dramatic effects of a different kind. The women of the Palace are on high show; and episodes like the follies and the fall of Messallina and the end of Nero's mother are accorded a treatment which some critics find lavish and disproportionate.

‘For him the streets of the great city of learning which we wished to build lay all clearly laid out before his mind’. These words describe the first Rathbone Professor, the imposing John Macdonald Mackay – who arrived in Liverpool, after a spell in St Andrews, at the precocious age of twenty-eight. Mackay was always portrayed in the image of the modern-day prophet. This was not only a matter of his posture, seen in a famous Liverpool picture in which he is represented pointing the so-called New Testament group of his fellow university progressives to the Promised Land (Figure 1), but also of his rambling style of speech (his lectures lasted nearly two hours) and in the characteristic pause, as the archaeologist John Garstang observed, after you addressed a question to him: ‘an interval during which his eyes roamed among things unseen’. Lytton Strachey, briefly a pupil, put it more brutally: ‘Professor Mackay is very weird and somewhat casual’. But with all this, as my opening quotation suggests, Mackay was one of the chief architects of the faculty and university; discoursing passionately, for example, on the need for Liverpool to maintain its distance from the ‘repellent American type’ (of which he evidently knew very little). By comparison with the great Mackay, and still more with my immediate predecessors, I feel I must begin by lowering expectations.

In his book, The Roman Empire (Fontana History of the Ancient World Series), Colin Wells mentions incomes and the cost of living in first-century Italy. He concludes that a wage of 4 sesterces a day was an ‘absolute maximum’ and goes on to comment that ‘it is hard to tell whether the discrepancy between the really rich and the labouring poor was greater in some third-world countries today, or in Victorian England… To prove his point Wells gives £300,000 per annum for the Marquess of Bute as an example of an enormous income in the nineteenth century, though he does not tell us what the poor would have earned then.