Why is the shield of Achilles, instrument of war in a poem of war, covered with scenes of delightful peace, of agriculture, festival, song, and dance? I shall try to approach an answer to this question by looking at the scenes on the shield in relation to the rest of Homer, I mean the Iliad and Odyssey.

In the opening chapter of his Annals Tacitus gives us a potted history of Rome to the point at which his work begins. First, there were kings; then, with Lucius Junius Brutus, came liberty and the consulship (or, as we would say, the Republic); from time to time there were periods of one-man rule, most of them short-lived; and finally there was Augustus, who found the whole state exhausted by civil strife and therefore took it all into his own control and began what we call the Principate.

In the twentieth century the content of historiography has been expanded to envelop a very broad range of studies. But in a popular sense History retains familiar associations. Although theoretically its subject-matter can be as wide as the range of human activities and the life of all God's creatures, popular history deals mainly with the past of ruling groups: the weak are historically insignificant and touch upon History only by their contact with the great. The powerful make History: the weak endure and illustrate it. History appears as a retrospect on human activities organized around the theme of power—its origin, use, misuse, and consequences.

Among a number of short Latin poems by Walter Savage Landor, of which an interesting appreciation was published recently by Bruce Mackinnon, of British Columbia, is one particularly attractive pastiche of Catullan hendecasyllables. In many respects this poem could claim to reproduce the manner of Catullus himself. My own uneasiness was aroused by the rhythm of the opening line:

I was aware of no rule for the composition of this type of verse which was infringed here; but the run of the words appeared curiously prosaic. After some consideration, I identified the metrical feature in question as the opening of the verse with two disyllables: the former spondaic (no examples were to turn up, as it happened, with a trochaic or iambic word), the latter of necessity trochaic. It is a rhythm often employed by Landor in the fifty and more pages of hendecasyllables found in the 1847 edition of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (pp. 125–78), occurring for example in poems 3, 5, 9, 10, and three times in 12. A particularly striking example is found in 88.8, quaedam scripsit avunculus… which nobody would mistake for a production of Catullus.

M. Primus governed Macedonia, presumably for a year, between 25 and 23 B.C. On his return he was prosecuted for maiestas for attacking a friendly Thracian tribe, the Odrysae. In his defence he pleaded orders from Augustus, which Augustus denied when he came to the court and gave evidence without being summoned. It might be thought that either he told the truth or he did not. Certainly any order he gave must have been oral, not written, since a written order could have been produced in evidence. None was produced, and it is clear (as Dr. Levick has shown) that Primus' defence counsel Murena would not have compromised his case by failing to produce an order if he could have done so.

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??

Since antiquity the Aeneas—Dido episode has generally been recognized as the most powerful and memorable part of the Aeneid. During the past several decades there has been a considerable amount of argument as to whether it shows Aeneas' mission in a favourable or unfavourable light. Yet this problem has not been studied systematically. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate systematically that Vergil deliberately protrays Aeneas' mission as brutal and destructive.

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.

The purpose of this paper is an examination of the metaphors of life as warfare and life as a journey in the prose writings of the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The discussion will centre on the essays and letters; the tragedies will not be directly considered. The philosopher's use of these metaphors will be related to a review of the teachings of Seneca and of the Stoic school on death and on certain other central Stoic concepts.

The prominence of women in the spread of Christianity in the earliest period has long been a commonplace. It was recognized as such by the early Christians themselves. On the other hand, St. Paul's willingness to use women in setting up the organization of the early church seems to conflict with his opinion that they should stay in their subordinate place. Now Christian women of the early Empire do not usually fall into the scope of books on women in antiquity. But there is no obvious reason for this exclusion, especially when the role of women in the early Church figures prominently in the work of New Testament scholars. A closer look suggests that both sides have something to learn from the other and this paper sets out to examine from the point of view of classicists some of the large claims made in recent New Testament scholarship, which are indeed beingbrought into sharp focus by the current debate on the ordination of women. In particular, a recent book by John Gager6 has stressed Christianity's appeal to women as an important factor in its success, while an interesting article by W. Meeks relates the well-known prominence of women in the Acts of the Apostles to a supposed rising status of women in the contemporary Greek world and to a general questioning of male/ female roles which is said to have been taking place in the early Empire. It is obviously vital foranyone interested in the position of women in antiquity to consider these claims seriously.

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the significance, whether historical or historiographical, of the year 431 BC:historical, in that it saw the outbreak of a war which in its scope and consequences was to be unprecedented in the Greek world of its day; and historiographical, because a serious-minded young man in Athens realized the importance of what was happening and made up his mind to put it on record for posterity.

Historians' judgements about the evidential value of anecdotes have oscillated over the past decades. In the early part of this century authors of German textbooks on historical method warned students against using anecdotes on the grounds that their form was not fixed and their contents fluctuated since the narrators exercised their imaginations to improve stories with each telling. J. Vansina, an anthropologist studying the value of oral traditions for reconstructing African history, concluded in his more recent work that the anecdote is among the least reliable types of oral tradition. Nevertheless, recent scholarly works on Roman imperial history have utilized anecdotes for the sorts of social, economic, and administrative details which the available political narratives ignore. No systematic analysis has been undertaken to justify this use. I shall attempt to fill the gap by asking three basic questions: in what social contexts were anecdotes generated and transmitted; what changes in content were likely to occur during transmission; and what are the implications for the use of anecdotes as historical evidence?

Street-reciters were a feature of the ancient city (cf. Dio Chrys. Orat. 20.9 f.). Suetonius may include them (or their performances) under ‘triviales ex circo ludios’ (MS ludos), but they were certainly called circulatores (schol. on Pers. 1.134, quoted below; Jerome, Epist. 53.7; Augustine, contra Iul. op. imp. 5.15). This term may describe any huckster who attracts a street-crowd (circulus), and some hawkers of wares may have recited versicles as part of their routines to attract customers (cf. Satyricon 68.6 f.). In any case, as applied to a street-reciter, circulator aptly evokes the lowly circumstances and quality of his performances. And it was understandably galling to associate a poet or his works with such a figure. The slur of Vergil's Menalcas springs readily to mind (Eel. 3.26 f.): ‘non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas/stridenti miserum stipula disperdere carmen?’ Other references to the street-reciter, however, seem less well recognized.

Aeneid 2 is for the most part a book of action, telling the whole story of the rapid series of events that led to Troy's final destruction. Aeneas' narrative of these events is fast-paced, almost breathless; it has the flavour and emotional intensity of an eye-witness account rather than a retelling of a past experience. But it is noteworthy that Aeneas begins the story very slowly, by recounting in detail an exchange of speeches between Laocoon and Sinon (40—198). A quick summary of Trojan reactions to the horse might have sufficed for Aeneas' purposes. Virgil's model, Demodokos' song in Homer's Odyssey, treats the debate over the Trojan horse by simply summarizing the three positions taken (Od. 8. 499—513). When Odysseus asked the bard Demodokos to sing the story of the wooden horse (487 ff.), there is no suggestion, either in the wording of Odysseus' request or in the summary of Demodokos' response, of a pivotal debate between Laocoon and Sinon; in Homer's version of the story the major debate was internal to the Trojans and took place after the wooden horse was brought into the city. Why did Virgil have Aeneas linger over the exact words of Laocoön and Sinon? What, beyond a report of causes and events, is suggested by the speeches of Laocoön and Sinon? It would seem that the personalities and oratorical styles of these two men, not just their viewpoints in debate or their roles in the story, are important for the reader to understand.