The story of Gyges has come down to us in several versions. These include a summary of a version recorded by Nicholas of Damascus, which may descend ultimately from the Lydian historian Xanthos; a fragment of a dramatic version by an unknown Greek author; a brief description by Plutarch; Justin's summary of a version by Pompeius Trogus; and a version by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, summarized by Photius. But the most famous and oldest fully extant versions of the story are those told by Herodotus and Plato.

‘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.

Plato wrote two Utopian works, the Republic and the Laws. The second, written in the 350s and early 340s bc, describes a mythical city-state named Magnesia. It is often ignored as secondary, not only in terms of chronology, but also in quality – the work of the philosopher's declining years. Such a characterization is misplaced. The Laws may lack the optimism and brilliance of the Republic but it nonetheless reveals a still-powerful mind at work, sketching a more realistic societal project. Nor have its philosophic underpinnings changed: they are precisely those of the Republic. Instead of philosopher-kings, Plato now puts his trust in a code of virtually unchanging laws that cover every aspect of life in Magnesia – society, economy, politics, and family. It is this elaborate rule of law, in which the laws are the masters of those who rule and the latter in turn are the slaves of the laws (715d), which alone can produce a successful state and citizens that correspond to it.

Atticus: Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur, saepe a me lectus in Mario. Sin manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim est sane uetus.

Qvintus: Manet uero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. Sata est enim ingenio; nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae uersu seminari potest.

Atticus: Indeed I recognize that grove and this Arpinate oak, which I’ve often read about in the Marius. If that oak still stands, it must be this one; for old it certainly is.

Quintus: Of course it stands, my dear Atticus, and it will always stand, for it has been planted in the imagination. Indeed no farmer’s cultivation can produce a plant as long-lasting as that which is sown by the verse of a poet. De legibus 1.1

The image of the Marian oak begins De legibus with almost postmodern abruptness. This is in part due to the absence of an authorial preface, such as the long statement of purpose partially preserved in De re publica 1.1–14, which leaves De legibus without a chronological or situational frame of reference. The result is that the treatise begins in a particularly Platonic fashion, as the contemplation of an object in the natural landscape proceeds into a discussion of its symbolic meaning, setting up the dichotomy between perception and reality, ficta and vera, the past and its memory.

The interaction between Roman religion and Ovid’s ostensibly religious poem, Fasti, has only begun to be appreciated in the past twenty years or so. Before this time, scholars were typically either uncritical of Ovid’s poem – taking it at face value as a quarry from which to mine reliable gems of information on Roman religion – or far too critical, chastizing the poet for what they saw as errors from a man ignorant of his own national religion. From the mid 1980s, however, there has emerged a better understanding of the complex nature of Roman religion. Scholars now stress the fundamental role of exegesis (multiple interpretation) in a religion which has no underlying orthodoxy. As such, it is argued that Roman religion was not something concrete, tangible, and external, to which literature related faithfully or otherwise, but that literature had a central role in articulating the dynamics of the religious experience of the Romans.

One can now duly expect and appreciate, therefore, a variety of contrasting views on Roman religious activity presented in Fasti, without resorting to arguments about Ovidian ignorance or the apparently incomplete state of the poem itself.

This paper attempts to set out what is known about the places in the city of Rome used for detention and execution. It is not based on personal inspection of the sites, but only on the ancient evidence and modern discussion, and simply aims to meet the absence of a full up-to-date account in English of the history, location, character and function of these places, viz. the carcer, lautumiae, Saxum Tarpeium, Scalae Gemoniae, and the elusive robur. It does not deal with the wider question of what crimes merited the death penalty or called for its infliction in this or that manner, nor, apart from a few items, is it carried beyond the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Beginning in the reign of Augustus or Tiberius, corpses of criminals condemned and executed by the state were exposed on the Scalae Gemoniae, a flight of stairs located in the northern corner of the Forum Romanum. As one modern commentator has observed, the ritual of execution in which these stairs played a critical role reflected more generally the suppression of popular participation in the judicial processes that accompanied the last century of the Republic and the emergence of the Principate. As has long been noted, however, the Stairs were also the site of well-attested instances of collective violence, in particular protests during Cn. Calpurnius Piso's trial in the senate in AD 20, violence surrounding the fall of Sejanus in AD 31, and the popular violence and warfare of AD 69.

The anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus (25.1) introduces the emperor C. Julius Verus Maximinus (235–8 CE) for the first time as ‘Maximinus Thrax’. This is now a generally acceptable name for the emperor, despite the fact that it appears only once, here in the fourth century. So iconic is this geographical label, however, that the curious treatment of his origins by the most detailed sources, Herodian and the Historia Augusta, can be obscured. While both state that his birthplace was Thrace, they also point out that his origins were racially mixed. Herodian, a contemporary historian, calls Maximinus the son of mixobarbaroi, ‘mixed-barbarians’; a century and a half later, the Historia Augusta, in a long, largely fanciful biography, calls him a semibarbarus, a ‘half-barbarian’. His brief rule was therefore remembered as inaugurating a precedent that would come to plague the empire for decades: an emperor of dubious, even mongrel origins, elected by the troops, would bring cruelty and chaos to the state. This article considers how the Historia Augusta in particular used racial terms to highlight the difference between the legitimate rule of the senate and the illegitimate subversion of its authority by a half-barbarian from the periphery of the empire. This racial profile was fully formed only in the fourth century and is reflected in a range of other sources, demonstrating that contemporary political concerns brought to the fore debates on the dangers of racial mixing.

Introduction

The reign of Marcus Aurelius, although he was acclaimed by ancient and modern commentators as an exemplary ruler, saw many calamities. Marcus was preoccupied with wars for the better part of his reign; the pestilence brought back to Rome from the east by Verus and the Roman army remained endemic in the city for many years to come, and the German wars from the late 160s well into the next decade posed great danger to Rome and caused great anxiety. In addition, a coup was executed. The usurper, Avidius Cassius, was the ruler of the Roman East for three months, enjoying support amongst the local population. After Verus’ death, the emperor embarked on war against the German tribes, but not before summoning priests and magicians from all over the world to help him, many of whom came from provinces far and wide. This attentiveness of Marcus Aurelius to religious issues (the representation of religious themes on his coins and monuments and his religious policy as a whole) introduced some changes to the Roman imperial tradition. Moreover his adaptation of policies that reflected new beliefs and the abandonment of old ones, was indicative of the political, social, and cultural developments during his reign. The desperation of the emperor is made most visible in the pages of Lucian’s Alexander.

Although born in India, like others of his class and generation Rudyard Kipling was sent back to England for his schooling. From 1878 he attended the United Services College (USC) at Westward Ho! in North Devon, a school that had been recently established under the headmastership of a family friend, Cormell Price, to accommodate the children of Indian Army officers unable to afford the fees of institutions such as Wellington College, originally established to prepare boys for the military academies at Sandhurst and Woolwich. The school was later to provide the inspiration for Kipling's Stalky & Co., a collection of stories first assembled for publication in book form in 1899 and re-issued, with five further tales, in 1929. The reception of this work and the characters within it was not universally favourable, the school upon which it was based was in many ways atypical of the standard English public school (if ever such a thing existed), and, although unquestionably a ‘school story', it is not in line with the tradition fathered by Tom Brown.

Prelude (290–409): Ceyx, king of Trachis, just west of the Malian Gulf, was the son of Lucifer, the morning star, and he bore witness to his birth by the radiance of his face (271–2). He was a man of peace, unlike his brother, Daedalion, a fierce soldier, who, in a frenzy of grief at the murder of his daughter by Diana was pitied by Apollo and turned into a hawk (339–45). This was followed by another weird episode – the appearance of a monstrous wolf, which, after causing widespread destruction, was turned into a stone by Thetis (365–406). A (410–73): Worried by these strange events, Ceyx decides he must consult the oracle of Apollo. He cannot, however, go to Delphi, which is not far south, because it is being blockaded by Phorbas and the Phlegyans. So he prepares to go to Claros on the coast of Asia Minor. As the ship moves out to sea, Ceyx stands on the poop waving to his wife (A 465).

Alcyone waves back, even though she is prostrate on the ground – collapsaque corpore toto est (460).

Ovid gives a beautiful description of how first Ceyx himself ceases to be visible, then the hull moves out of sight and only the sails on the yard-arm can still be seen; finally, they, too, disappear over the horizon (A 466–71).

Scholars so far have commented only briefly on Tacitus' depiction, at Annals 14.60–4, of the execution (in ad 62) of Nero's young wife Octavia, passing lightly over the pathos and criticism of Nero there as straightforward and self-evident. In fact, there is a subtle and skilful build-up of sympathy for Octavia and an extensive and powerful attack on the emperor and his court (and the servile senate), all the stronger for the pity aroused for her. This combination of emotional impact and damning indictment merits and repays deeper analysis.