Old warriors of the New Guinea highlands used to regale the anthropologist Margaret Mead with tales of battles they once fought. Their stories ran

something like this: ‘We met on the mountainside near Wihun. A man of our side, named Maigi, threw a spear at a man of their side, named Wea. He missed. Then a man of their side threw a spear and hit my cross-cousin from Ahalaseimihi. Then I was angry and threw a spear at Wena, a big man of their side, and missed…’, and so on.

Even more than the noise and the clouds of dust raised by men and horses, the flashing of bronze armour and weapons is characteristic of Homeric panoramas of battle. When the Greeks armed themselves with helmets, shields, corslets and spears, the brightness lit up the sky, and all around the earth beamed in the shine of bronze (19.359–63). It blinded eyes, the glare of bronze from shining helmets, newly-polished corslets and bright shields, as they advanced in their masses (14.340–3).

I began the oral version of this paper by remarking that it was a great honour and pleasure to have been invited to visit the place in which it was delivered and to address my audience – and asking my audience to remember that I had said that.

In a recent edition of this journal, G. M. Sifakis looked at possible Homeric echoes in modern Greek folksong. This paper may be regarded as a coda to that article. Like a satyr play coming after the major dramas it is not entirely serious, but it is not entirely flippant either. My aim is to offer some comparisons between the Homeric tradition and that of the blues singers of the (originally, southern) United States.

Like many features of democratic Athens, the legal system is both strikingly familiar and disturbingly alien to the modern reader. The principle of trial by a jury of laymen is one which, though intermittently criticized, remains the basis of the decision-making process in modern Britain. At the same time, the size of the jury panels, their powers, the reliance on volunteer prosecutors, the use of an exchange of speeches as the method of presentation, these and other features diverge significantly from accepted practice in our own courts. My concern in this paper is with one striking divergence, the way in which the relationship between the legal system and society at large is conceptualized, and with the problems it raises. In modern developed societies the law and the lawcourts are fenced around with procedural, psychological, and in some cases constitutional barriers. The law itself is a self-contained system, distinct from other coercive forces, and perceived as separate from the political life of the community. Procedures and participants in the courts are given a degree of protection from constraints which apply elsewhere, in order to ensure that all relevant information is disclosed and that a verdict is given on the facts of the case, taken as far as possible in isolation from the rest of the lives of the participants and the community. All these barriers are absent in the context of classical Athens. In practice and in conception the law and its administration are in some important respects indistinguishable from the life of the community in general.

I think we have to accept that the term intertextuality serves a purpose. One of the terms it allows us to dispense with, allusion, has its disadvantages.

Up until recently I was happy with ‘allusion’: Vergil ‘alludes’ to Homer. The term was time-honoured, and, surely, unproblematical. Unproblematical, and not, so far as it went, and in the right hands, unsubtle. One meant that Vergil was not just using his source text (or his significant source text) as raw material. The source text became part of the new text, its characters and context were relevant to the new text. Thus, when in his opening speech Aeneas ‘quotes’ Homer's Odysseus, we sense that Vergil is casting Aeneas as a new Odysseus, comparing him and contrasting him with Odysseus, in a new Odyssey. And so the Aeneid proceeds: an allusive text, constantly alluding to Homer, re-forming Homer, remaking the Homeric characters, re-forming other texts in the same significant way … What texts? What texts does it not significantly re-form?

In the eighth book of Statius' Thebaid the Argives meet to appoint a successor to the dead seer Amphiaraus (275 ff.). Their choice falls on Thiodamas son of Melampus (277–9); he, however, is overwhelmed by the prospect, which he regards with a mixture of joy and apprehension (281–5). There follows an eight-line simile which David Vessey rightly describes as ‘unique in the Thebaid’ Thiodamas is compared to a young Parthian king who succeeds to the throne following his father's death (286–93):

sicut Achaemenius solium gentisque paternas

excepit si forte puer, cui vivere patrem

tutius, incerta formidine gaudia librat,

an fidi proceres, ne pugnet vulgus habenis,

cui latus Euphratae, cui Caspia limina mandet.

sumere tune arcus ipsumque onerare veretur

patris equum, visusque sibi nee sceptra capaci

sustentare manu nee adhuc implere tiaram.

We know very little for certain about the staging of plays in the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens in the fifth century B.C. The evidence of archaeological remains and contemporary vase painting is difficult to interpret with confidence, the reliability of ancient post-classical commentators is questionable, and the texts of the surviving plays, our chief source of evidence, often raise more problems than they solve. Among the plays which have occasioned most controversy in modern scholarship is the Prometheus Vinctus. What was the ‘rock’ to which the hero was bound? In what part of the theatre space was it positioned? How and where did the chorus of Oceanids make their entry? How was the ending of the play staged? Questions such as these continue to perplex students of the play who also have to face the vexed question of its date and indeed authorship.

In 424 B. C. or thereabouts, an oligarchically-minded critic of the Athenian democracy observed:

And if account is to be taken of more minor matters, it is as a result of their mastery of the sea that the Athenians have mixed with various peoples in different areas and discovered a range of festive practices. In consequence, what is sweet in Sicily, Italy, Cyprus, Egypt, Lydia, Pontus, the Peloponnese or elsewhere has all been brought together in one place because of [sc.the Athenians'] mastery of the sea. (The Old Oligarch, 2.7)

Though critical of the democracy in principle, the Old Oligarch is strikingly positive here in one sense. This is no denunciation of the baleful and corrupting influence of luxuries imported from overseas. Rather, it is an explicit statement of an advantage of sea-power to the Athenians. A minor advantage, on this assessment, but evidently considered worthy of attention. Moreover, here as throughout his work, the Old Oligarch has in mind not a narrow elite, but the Athenian demos at large, the masses. On his analysis, the demos, through its sea-power, rules Athens and its empire effectively and in its own interest, which includes the acquisition and enjoyment of the best produce of the Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds. Under the democracy, it is claimed, the masses enjoy what may be termed luxury-goods.

In the Gorgias (463aff.) Plato makes Socrates say to Polus that rhetoric is not a skilled art (technê) at all, but one of a number of occupations collectively described as ‘flattery’ (kolakeia) and said to be based on experience. The other examples given are sophistry, cosmetics, and cookery. These practices have no understanding of what they do, or as Plato puts it they can give no account of it (465 a).

Aeneas is leading the shattered remnants of the Trojans to their new home in Italy. He calls at Actium, the scene of the battle which in 31 B.C. made his descendant Augustus master of the Mediterranean world. How does Virgil seize this opportunity to praise his patron Augustus?

Recently there has been considerable debate about the nature of popular politics in the Roman Republic. This debate has demonstrated that the Roman citizen was actively involved in voting, and made conscious decisions about which candidate he should vote for at elections, and whether to vote for or against a bill at the meetings of the comitia. The results of elections and voting assemblies would seem to have been dependent upon the attendance and voting behaviour of Roman citizens. These two factors would vary according to the views and opinions of the individual citizen. This paper addresses the issue of how these views and opinions were formulated, with particular reference to the participation of Roman citizens in popular politics.