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.

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.

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.

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.