This essay is part of a larger project concerned with determining how historians today can use the evidence of the Homeric epics in order to gain a better understanding of the evolution of early Greek society—but do so responsibly, that is, in ways that are adequate to the epics' nature as poetic and cultural documents surviving from a specific time and social context. Elsewhere I have discussed Homer and history, the role of the polis, warfare and military organisation, and political thought in Homer, as well as ‘Homeric society’ in general and the problem of its historicity. Here I want to take a close look at interstate relations (sections I and III) and the political sphere (section II). I choose as my point of departure some of the views which M.I. Finley expressed in The World of Odysseus—a book that is now more than forty years old, still illuminating and indispensable but partly outdated.

The ways of emotions are difficult to track, and yet positive affects, such as goodwill and affection, play an important part in both self-definition and social interactions. In western societies popular conception generally considers emotions to be universal spontaneous reactions, but in fact the nature of emotion is an issue debated by both psychologists and cultural theorists. In this paper I wish to investigate the role of positive affects (encapsulated to some degree in the Greek term , which could range in meaning from benevolence and goodwill to affection, and for which a more precise translation depends on context) in Greek interstate relations. I will argue that was a socially constructed emotion which was implicated in -relationships, and therefore that the terminology of contained the expectation of an affective content (whether or not any given -relation in reality contained any positive emotion).

During the classical period Athenian women gathered once a year to celebrate the Adonia. With ritualised lament they shared Aphrodite's grief over the death of Adonis, her youthful lover. This was not an official festival of the state or any of its political subdivisions; it was not publicly financed or regulated. It was celebrated informally by small, ad hoc groups of women (citizens and non-citizens, friends, relatives, neighbours) on the roofs of their houses. This unusual festival has long intrigued modern commentators, who have suggested a wide variety of interpretations regarding its nature and meaning—including one recently offered by this author. My purpose in this short article is to focus on one particular aspect of the Adonia—its date. Like almost everything else about this festival, its celebration-date has been the subject of scholarly controversy. Three seasons of the year have found advocates, winter being the lone discard.

The sovereignty of the people, its libertas, is the key concept in the civic and political vocabulary of republican Rome. One of the periods in which it was particularly emphasised was the last thirty or forty years of the second century B.C., to judge from the later comments made on the series of leges tabellariae passed in this period, and from the types and themes which appeared on coins issued by the relatives and descendants of those responsible for proposing the laws.

Studies of aspects of ‘the Roman family’ have developed so quickly and so prolifically in recent decades that it is already possible to write of work of the 1980s as the accepted orthodoxy and to have new, vigorous debates which are stimulating and questioning and deepening our understanding of the complexities of that central institution of Roman society. Other social histories of Rome are now taking account of this, in ways that go far beyond earlier histories' legalistic or political approach to Roman families. The role of children can now be studied against that nuanced and variegated background. There is already one full-length study (Wiedemann 1989) and I expect to have another ready soon.