O tomb, O bridal chamber, O cavernous dwelling, eternal prison to which I am journeying to meet my own, those perished in their great numbers and received by Persephone amongst the dead. I am the latest of them, and my descent the worst by far, before my allotment of life has reached completion. Yet, as I go, I boldly feed on hopes of proving dear to my father when I reach him, and dear to you, mother, and to you, dear brother. For when you died, it was I with my own hands who washed you and adorned you, I who poured your tomb-libations. But now for tending your body, Polynices, this is my reward.

One feature of the ancient accounts of Achilles' early life in Thessaly is the consistently important part played by Chiron the wise and just centaur. Hesiod tells us that Chiron dwelt on Mount Pelion and taught a number of mythical figures like Achilles, Jason, Medeius, and Actaeon. Indeed Hesiod's interest in Chiron seems to have extended to his writing of a work on the subject of Chiron's teachings, of which there is some minimal fragmentary evidence (The Precepts of Chiron). There are various versions of his role in Achilles' early life, including one that Peleus entrusted his young son to the care of Chiron shortly after his separation from Thetis. This version is not entirely incompatible with what we find in Homer's Iliad(see below), and appears to be the subject of the earliest (fragmentary) iconographical evidence dating from the seventh century B.C. The general picture we get from the ancient sources is that Chiron essentially brings up the boy and gives him an education that includes music, medicine, horses, hunting, and martial arts. These skills prove to be invaluable in Achilles' heroic career including the war at Troy where he excels in virtually every aspect of his endeavours.

It is generally accepted that in classical Athens a widely proclaimed sexual morality expected citizen women not only to be chaste, confining sexual activity to marriage, but also to avoid any suspicion of improper contact with men. While some recent works still suggest that Athenian citizen women did conform to their society's expectations, and even that women lived in seclusion to promote chastity, others have long recognized that Athenian women showed a wider range of behaviour and, sometimes at least, had sexual liaisons with men other than their husbands. It is unfortunate that the most vigorous statement of the view that significant numbers of Athenian women did not in practice accept their society's constraints, an article by Richter in 1971, while containing much of value, weakens its own case by overstatement: few can accept, for instance, that in classical Athens ‘the young wives were as undisciplined a bevy of nymphs as Hellas ever reared’. Nonetheless it seems clear that Athenian women (and of course Athenian men) breached the sexual code commonly proclaimed in their society. It is the purpose of this paper to consider how widespread such breaches were, and in what spirit they were undertaken, whether purely as guilty acts or as behaviour that was at least condoned by an alternative morality.

The chronology of the Social War has for a long time been a source of dispute amongst historians of fourth-century Athens. The central problem has been the confusion that Diodoros, our main source for the period, got himself into. In the first of his two references to the Social War Diodoros refers to the outbreak of a ‘three-year war’ in the archonship of Cephisodotos (358/357). However, later on he refers to the closure of the war in the archonship of Elpines (356/355) after a ‘four-year war.’

Philo's famous account of anti-semitic rioting in Alexandria in A.D. 38, the InFlaccum, has frequently been exploited by scholars interested in the legal status of the Jewish community within the city and the issue of the constitution of Alexandria. This legalissue lies near the heart of the dispute which leads to some ancient and most modern accounts tracing the roots of the dispute to the Ptolemaic period. It is notable, however, that the first major attested outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling considerably post-date the Roman conquest, suggestingthat this is a problem of Roman Alexandria with its roots in the Roman administration of the city. Philo also places comparatively little emphasis on legality in the InFlaccum. The account of the persecution concentrates rather on the topography of the dispute. The centrality of spatial factors in the In Flaccum can be illustrated by comparing the persecution of the Jews and the fall of Flaccus. Flaccus was publicly humiliated through a show trial, through the sale of his property at public action, and on his journey into exile, by the crowds in Italy and Greece who flocked to watch him pass. He was excluded from public space, both from his city by decree of the emperor and from the urban spaces of his island exile, prompted in the latter case by his conscience. Finally, while in isolation, he was attacked and murdered. The Jews were robbed and driven from the streets of their city into exile and deprived of access to the theatre and market. Their leaders were humiliated in the most public places in the city and finally they were attacked in their own homes. Although the parallels are not exact, as can be seen in Table 1, they are explicit and thiselaborate structure demonstrates for Philo the justice of God in His persecution of the persecutors.

The idea of a collection of letters from a Roman senator to his equestrian friend might encourage the reader familiar with the Letters of Cicero to expect a certain kind of self-revelation. Seneca, like Cicero, was one of the most prominent men in Rome in his own time. We might expect his letters to tell us his views on the emperor Nero, for instance, or what his motives were for retiring from public life (as he had done by the time he came to write the Letters). But readers of Seneca's Letters, at least in modern times, have often felt disappointed at his failure to provide information about himself and the world he lives in.

Much has been written about the lengthy ecphrasis of the shield of Aeneas at the end of the eighth book of the Aeneid. It is less frequently remarked that the ecphrasis balances a shorter – but perhaps no less significant – description of Turnus’ arms at the end of the preceding book. If Aeneas’ shield is emblematic of the imperial destiny which rests upon his shoulders, a similarly symbolic value may also be attributed to the decoration on the armour of his opponent.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has not always been greeted with applause. On the fly-leaf to Volume IV of his copy, Gibbon's contemporary, the writer, antiquarian, and bibliophile, William Beckford gave vent to near apoplectic rage:

If you lived in Reading in 1821, you might be tempted by the advertisement in your local newspaper for forthcoming attractions at the neighbourhood's commercial theatre. Should your taste encompass Greco-Roman themes, you might want to see ‘Monsieur DECOUR, the renowned FRENCH HERCULES!! Who will perform… FEATS AND EVOLUTIONS…’. If you preferred oriental stunts, you would choose ‘The Chinese JUGGLERS from the Court of Pekin!!’ Such exhibitions are fairly typical of the popular entertainments enjoyed during the late Georgian era in any fast industrializing provincial town not too far from London. But what is surprising is that the same newspaper offers a review of a production in the town hall of Euripides’ little known tragedy Orestes.

There are many ways of classifying dreams. This paper is concerned with only one, perhapsthe most fundamental: one which also – we are told – captures the most important difference between modern and ancient dream-interpretation. Ancient audiences were primed to expect dreams to be prophetic, to come from outside and give knowledge, however ambiguously, of the future, or at least of the otherwise unknowable present. This sort of dream is hard to distinguish from the ‘night-time vision’, and indeed it is sometimes hard with dreams in ancient literature to tell whether the recipient is asleep or not. For moderns, especially but not only Freudians, dreams come from within, and are interesting for what they tell us about the current psychology of the dreamer: for Freudians, the aspects of the repressed unconscious which fight to the surface; for most or all of us, the way in which dreams re-sort our daytime preoccupations, hopes, and fears. This distinction between ancient and modern was set out and elaborated a few years ago by Simon Price; it was also drawn by Freud himself. At the risk of oversimplification, we could say the first approach assimilates dreams to divination, the second to fantasy - with all the illumination that, as we increasingly realize, fantasy affords into the everyday world, as it juggles the normal patterns of waking reality at the same time as challenging them by their difference.