For a class of robustly transitive diffeomorphisms on ${\mathbb T}^4$ introduced by Shub [Topologically transitive diffeomorphisms of $T^4$. Proceedings of the Symposium on Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems (Lecture notes in Mathematics, 206). Ed. D. Chillingworth. Springer, Berlin, 1971, pp. 39–40], satisfying an additional bunching condition, we show that there exists a $C^2$ open and $C^r$ dense subset ${\mathcal U}^r$, $2\leq r\leq \infty $, such that any two hyperbolic points of $g\in {\mathcal U}^r$ with stable index $2$ are homoclinically related. As a consequence, every $g\in {\mathcal U}^r$ admits a unique homoclinic class associated to the hyperbolic periodic points with index $2$, and this homoclinic class coincides with the whole ambient manifold. Moreover, every $g\in {\mathcal U}^r$ admits at most one measure of maximal entropy, and every $g\in {\mathcal U}^{\infty }$ admits a unique measure of maximal entropy.

We begin by defining a homoclinic class for homeomorphisms. Then we prove that if a topological homoclinic class Λ associated with an area-preserving homeomorphism f on a surface M is topologically hyperbolic (i.e. has the shadowing and expansiveness properties), then Λ = M and f is an Anosov homeomorphism.

Let ${\it\gamma}$ be a hyperbolic closed orbit of a $C^{1}$ vector field $X$ on a compact $C^{\infty }$ manifold $M$ and let $H_{X}({\it\gamma})$ be the homoclinic class of $X$ containing ${\it\gamma}$. In this paper, we prove that if a $C^{1}$-persistently expansive homoclinic class $H_{X}({\it\gamma})$ has the shadowing property, then $H_{X}({\it\gamma})$ is hyperbolic.