Why is the shield of Achilles, instrument of war in a poem of war, covered with scenes of delightful peace, of agriculture, festival, song, and dance? I shall try to approach an answer to this question by looking at the scenes on the shield in relation to the rest of Homer, I mean the Iliad and Odyssey.

In the twentieth century the content of historiography has been expanded to envelop a very broad range of studies. But in a popular sense History retains familiar associations. Although theoretically its subject-matter can be as wide as the range of human activities and the life of all God's creatures, popular history deals mainly with the past of ruling groups: the weak are historically insignificant and touch upon History only by their contact with the great. The powerful make History: the weak endure and illustrate it. History appears as a retrospect on human activities organized around the theme of power—its origin, use, misuse, and consequences.

M. Primus governed Macedonia, presumably for a year, between 25 and 23 B.C. On his return he was prosecuted for maiestas for attacking a friendly Thracian tribe, the Odrysae. In his defence he pleaded orders from Augustus, which Augustus denied when he came to the court and gave evidence without being summoned. It might be thought that either he told the truth or he did not. Certainly any order he gave must have been oral, not written, since a written order could have been produced in evidence. None was produced, and it is clear (as Dr. Levick has shown) that Primus' defence counsel Murena would not have compromised his case by failing to produce an order if he could have done so.

Since antiquity the Aeneas—Dido episode has generally been recognized as the most powerful and memorable part of the Aeneid. During the past several decades there has been a considerable amount of argument as to whether it shows Aeneas' mission in a favourable or unfavourable light. Yet this problem has not been studied systematically. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate systematically that Vergil deliberately protrays Aeneas' mission as brutal and destructive.

The following text and translation is extracted from Joseph Addison's Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 (lines 96–132 and 167–end). The poem celebrates the peace of Ryswick in which William III and his continental allies had halted the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and France had recognized William as King of England. The poem describes, in general terms, William's unification of the allied forces against France, the siege warfare which distinguished the campaigns, and the coming again of agricultural prosperity to war-ravaged Europe. The first extract begins with William's return to England. The omitted lines describe the young William, Dukeof Gloucester, the eldest son of the future Queen Anne, and a firework display in London. The Duke of Gloucester shortly died, and the death of the King himself in 1702 coincided with the outbreak of even fiercer war to prevent the potential unification of the thrones of France and Spain (the War of the Spanish Succession) in which Louis XIV returnedto the support of Jacobite claims to the English crown.

The prominence of women in the spread of Christianity in the earliest period has long been a commonplace. It was recognized as such by the early Christians themselves. On the other hand, St. Paul's willingness to use women in setting up the organization of the early church seems to conflict with his opinion that they should stay in their subordinate place. Now Christian women of the early Empire do not usually fall into the scope of books on women in antiquity. But there is no obvious reason for this exclusion, especially when the role of women in the early Church figures prominently in the work of New Testament scholars. A closer look suggests that both sides have something to learn from the other and this paper sets out to examine from the point of view of classicists some of the large claims made in recent New Testament scholarship, which are indeed beingbrought into sharp focus by the current debate on the ordination of women. In particular, a recent book by John Gager6 has stressed Christianity's appeal to women as an important factor in its success, while an interesting article by W. Meeks relates the well-known prominence of women in the Acts of the Apostles to a supposed rising status of women in the contemporary Greek world and to a general questioning of male/ female roles which is said to have been taking place in the early Empire. It is obviously vital foranyone interested in the position of women in antiquity to consider these claims seriously.

Historians' judgements about the evidential value of anecdotes have oscillated over the past decades. In the early part of this century authors of German textbooks on historical method warned students against using anecdotes on the grounds that their form was not fixed and their contents fluctuated since the narrators exercised their imaginations to improve stories with each telling. J. Vansina, an anthropologist studying the value of oral traditions for reconstructing African history, concluded in his more recent work that the anecdote is among the least reliable types of oral tradition. Nevertheless, recent scholarly works on Roman imperial history have utilized anecdotes for the sorts of social, economic, and administrative details which the available political narratives ignore. No systematic analysis has been undertaken to justify this use. I shall attempt to fill the gap by asking three basic questions: in what social contexts were anecdotes generated and transmitted; what changes in content were likely to occur during transmission; and what are the implications for the use of anecdotes as historical evidence?