Very few critics have ever admired the structure of Euripides' Andromache. The enigmatic comment of Aristophanes' hypothesis, τò δε δρﾶµα τωv δεvτερωv has almost invariably been taken as meaning that the play is second rate, not that it came second in the trilogy or in the competition, and this is largely blamed on the structure. Most critics admire the first portion of the play dominated by Andromache, some are willing to tolerate the middle section concerned with Hermione, and many find the last portion, the sorrows of Peleus, effective, but almost no-one likes the combination of the three. It takes a rugged individualist like A. W. Verrall to say: ‘[The story is] in dexterous combination and moral interest one of the best among the extant remains of Attic tragedy.’

How can these ideas be linked to the ancient sources? Focusing first of all on women's contribution to arable cultivation and arboriculture, we immediately face the first of many blanks. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any explicit evidence of ploughing by women in the Greco-Roman world. Only two lines from Hesiod's Works and Days seem to establish a connection between women and ploughing: according to Hesiod, a proper head of a household would need ‘first of all a house, and then a woman and oxen for ploughing – a slave woman, not a wife, to follow the oxen [or: to care for the oxen]’ (405 f.). In the fourth century B.C., however, the second line that specifies the status and the function of the desired woman was apparently not yet part of the received text, since Aristotle could still regard her as a free woman (Pol. 1252a llff). Not until the first century B.C. did Philodemos of Gadara quote and defend the reading that defined Hesiod's woman as a slave labourer. Even so, the wording does not make it clear whether this woman was meant to follow the harnessed oxen, that is, to do the ploughing, or to care for the oxen in the stable.

The Greeks divided their world into a number of contrasting categories which cut across and dissected each other: Greek and barbarian, slave and free, friend and enemy, insider and outsider, us and them. This essentially bipartite view of the world (although the dualism changed according to circumstance) affected the way Greek society worked, and the way that the Greeks thought about themselves. In this pair of papers, Professor Rhodes and I will be concerned only with one of these oppositions, friends and enemies.

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?

Sophocles' Philoctetes contains many moments of high drama and of tension between conflicting protagonists. The prologue scene between Odysseus and Neoptolemus lays the foundations for the development of the dramatic crisis by portraying their fundamental disagreement as to the best means of bringing Philoctetes back to Troy, while the long first episode (219–675) depicts the evolution of the intense relationship between Philoctetes and the youthful Neoptolemus, who has in the prologue reluctantly agreed to implement Odysseus' plan to deceive Philoctetes. The first stage of this interaction is the mutual communication of past histories: Philoctetes describes his abandonment and life on Lemnos, and in return Neoptolemus tells how Odysseus fetched him to Troy from Scyros with the story that, since Achilles was now dead, his son was required to take the city.

I believe that studies by social anthropologists working in mainly rural communities located in present-day Greece may help to deepen our understanding of the Greeks of antiquity, and this is a belief that I have held for more than twenty years. It is a belief, moreover, which is steadily winning a general acceptance. To put it succinctly, ancient and modern Greeks can be shown to share values in common and, thus, one enables us to understand the other more clearly. But why should values have persisted, from Homer to the twentieth century? It is not, let me stress, because of ethnic continuity, but rather because both groups comprise small-scale subsistence agriculturists, working the land as a family unit; in other words, both groups represent what a social anthropologist would classify as peasant society, and communities of this type, however widely separated in time and in geographical situation, share common values and Mediterranean peasants perhaps to an especially great extent, though this is not a point I would wish to press. Greece, of course, has changed dramatically in recent years as the drift from countryside to city has intensified. But have the fundamentals of life also changed so very much? Not according to Renee Hirschon who speaks as follows of the preoccupations of those ‘heirs of the Greek catastrophe’, that is, Greeks expelled from Asia Minor in the early twenties and now settled in the Kokkinia district of the Piraeus: ‘In Kokkinia social live revolves around the division of the sexes and their complementray roles, while family reputation and prestige were principal concerns.

People wonder at this stone [the magnet]. Indeed it often makes a chain of rings hanging from itself. For you can sometimes see five or more rings hanging down one after another swaying in light breezes, when each hangs down from another, clinging underneath it, and each feels from the other the force and attraction of the stone; so much does its force penetrate and have its effect. … It also happens sometimes that the nature of iron withdraws from this stone, and will flee it and follow it in turn. I have even seen iron rings leap up, and at the same time iron filings seethe in bronze bowls when a magnet has been put underneath, so eager to escape the stone is iron seen to be.

Around the year 362 B.C., Iphikrates and Timotheos, two Athenian generals who had been bitter rivals for a decade, ended their feud in the best fashion of aristocratic dynasts: a marriage was arranged between Timotheos' daughter and Iphikrates' son ([Dem.] 49.66). Assumedly, the principal motive behind this strategic rapprochement was the mutual belief that it would be in the interests of both generals to concentrate their attentions elsewhere: that is, on the various enemies each had acquired over the years spent in office. This could best be achieved without each having to concern himself with the activities of the other vis-ὰ-vis the constant political infighting that characterized Athenian politics, and the stratēgia in particular.

Livy's celebrated account of the Bacchanalia has long been a magnet for students of Roman politics, social life, religion, and private law. Two recent surveys document this extensive range of scholarship. J-M. Pailler, the wellknown French archaeologist, has published a massive monograph of 850 pages, admirably documented and containing a chapter of sixty pages reviewing the bibliography of the past hundred years. Erich Gruen, in his collected papers entitled Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy, has contributed a long essay on the political aspects, again with a full bibliography. This paper has the more modest aim of reviewing Livy's account primarily from the literary aspect, concentrating in particular on the opening chapters which describe how the alleged coniuratio was detected.

Much recent work on the auxiliary units of the Roman army has concentrated on the cavalry, including their role and effectiveness in battle. Experimental archaeology has additionally illustrated how effective the cavalry could be with the Celtic style saddle, in spite of the lack of stirrups. As a result, the Roman cavalry is now seen by some modern commentators as something of an elite wing of the army. The auxiliary infantryman, on the other hand, is generally regarded as nothing better than foreign expendable ‘cannon-fodder’. This view, it seems, has its origin partly in Tacitus' famous commentary on the tactics of his father-in-law Agricola at Mons Graupius. There is, in fact, little other evidence to support this view, and Agricola probably had other reasons for his dispositions at the battle which his biographer does not mention. Rather than merely a piece of ‘cannon-fodder’, the auxiliary infantryman of the Principate should instead be seen as a competent fighting soldier who fulfilled an invaluable role in the Roman army.

The relationship between Constantine and the ancient cults of Roman civilization remains one of the most important and discussed features of late antique history. It is a relationship which has defied those who see in his victory over Maxentius a sudden, monolithic shift in the religious consciousness of the ancient world, because the sources stubbornly refuse to yield to such a tidy interpretation. In this paper I review a body of evidence that reveals Constantine to be a flesh-and-blood emperor, confronting the difficulties of transition and reining in his own passions, sometimes for narrow political reasons and sometimes for what might be taken as statesmanship. What follows is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It is an attempt to gauge the complexity of some of Constantine's problems and assess his skills in dealing with them.

‘The toga was a garment worthy of the masters of the world, flowing, solemn, eloquent but with over-complication in its arrangement and a little too much emphatic affectation in the self-conscious tumult of its folds.’