The armed forces that Athens took into the Peloponnesian War had four distinct corps. The two that have been studied the most are the cavalry corps and the navy. The same level of focus is now paid to the hoplite corps. In contrast to these three branches, the archers continue to be largely unstudied. Indeed, the last dedicated study of this corps was published in 1913. This neglect of the archers by military historians is unjustified. The creation of the archer corps in the late 480s bc was a significant military innovation. For the rest of the fifth century, Athens constantly deployed archers in a wide range of important combat roles. In the late 430s the state spent as much on them as it did on the cavalry.

Critics have been fairly unanimous in their assessment of Menander's concerns. F. H. Sandbach asserts that ‘the authors of New Comedy shut their eyes, generally speaking, to politics as a whole’. He writes of Menander that ‘the politics of his time were far too grim and frustrated to make a suitable subject for an audience that wished to be entertained on a public holiday.… It is within domestic and private life that he found the subjects for his comedy’. T. B. L. Webster agrees that recent political events were ‘too painful to be remembered in comedy’. E. W. Handley believes that in Dyskolos Menander's ‘basic point is an ethical and not a political one’; considering the possibility that ‘the thought and moral tone are politically inspired’, he dismisses the idea that Menander was a propagandist. Michael Anderson recognizes that Dyskolos, as an ‘ethical’ comedy in Aristotelian terms, must relate the behaviour of individuals to society, but he does not go on to relate the play to the particular society for which Menander wrote.

Thucydides wrote his history after his return from exile in 404 b.c. (i. 22). It is not easy therefore to be sure to what extent his account of the great Sickness depends on notes made at the time, some twenty-five years before, and how much on memory—especially of his personal sufferings, from which it seems he recovered without any of the ‘signs’ which he implies ‘marked’ all survivors. He tells us that he has described only the general features of the Sickness (ii. 51), since the symptoms varied much from case to case; perhaps he realized how difficult it is for anyone, even an experienced physician, who has suffered from some severe and unusual illness (ii. 50) not to consider his own symptoms characteristic.

It is commonly held that Plato died in 348/7 b.c. during the archonship of Theophilus or in the first year of the 108th Olympiad. According to a widespread and almost universally accepted tradition, which has found a place in our current books on ‘The History of Greek Philosophy’, Aristotle departed from Athens soon after Plato's death, repairing to Atarneus (or Assos) in Asia Minor, where he stayed with Hermias. Thus, it would appear that the death of Plato was the prime if not sole reason for Aristotle's journey in 348/7 b.c. It has been conjectured, however, that Plato actually died in the spring of 347 b.c., probably in May. Though this is by no means certain, it properly requestions the causality of the Stagirite's flight.

In the opening lines of Philoctetes, Odysseus addresses his companion Neoptolemus as his famous father's son (3f.). This is the first indication of an important theme: phusis, in the sense of inherited human qualities or capacities. Although Achilles has died before the dramatic action begins, he hovers in the background of the play, and no one challenges his claim to the highest admiration. Neoptolemus is closely associated with his father, and is repeatedly addressed or referred to as his father's son. In one particularly striking passage of his deception speech he describes to Philoctetes his own reception at Troy, where the welcoming army swore that they saw the dead Achilles alive once more (356–8). These lines conjure up a vivid physical likeness between father and son, but it remains to be seen how deep the resemblance really lies. Neoptolemus has the potential, in virtue of his inherited phusis, to be as admirable as Achilles.3 But two questions remain to be answered in the course of the play: Will he prove to be his father's son in character as well as birth? If so, how will this excellence be manifested?

To assess the influence of one author on another and the extent of one's use of another is always difficult. When the authors assessed are poets who each give a highly individual stamp to material, it is doubly difficult. When they are separated by one and a half millennia and by a language difference, the assessment is open to pitfalls almost too enormous to bear contemplation. What follows, therefore, does not attempt to be a categorical statement that Shakespeare used Virgil solely or in part in any one particular instance or in any one particular way; it rather offers a juxtaposition of lines, images, or ideas which appear to be similar in both authors, in the hope that the comparisons may prove interesting in themselves and that the sum total of them may lead at least to some guarded and cautious conclusions about the use of classical authors and in particular of Virgil's poetry and thought by Shakespeare in Henry V.

In a recent number of Greece and Rome Dr. T. A. Dorey has criticized those scholars who call the concluding scenes of the Adelphoe ‘a masterpiece of dramatic construction’. Arguing that at the end of the play the treatment of Micio is unsatisfactory or at least unsatisfying, the change in attitude of Aeschinus and Demea insufficiently motivated, and the transition from comedy to satire unnatural and excessively abrupt, Dorey seeks to explain these alleged flaws by reference to two passages of Donatus' commentary on the play: the note on v. 938, ‘apud Menandrum senex de nuptiis non gravatur: ergo Terentius ερετικ⋯ς’, and part of the praefatio (iii. 5), where Donatus observes that Demea is the means whereby ‘multa in comoedia nova’ are introduced into the final scenes of the play. Dorey's interpretation of these passages leads him to suggest that ‘the last scenes of the play were not in the original comedy of Menander, but were invented by Terence himself.’

Simon Goldhill's Reading Greek Tragedy is a welcome publication – not for its originality but because it makes available an important and eclectic body of critical approaches to Greek texts. Goldhill gives no quarter to the idea that the Greekless reader cannot deal with complex theoretical arguments. The (post-)structuralist revolution in modern thought, associated with Derrida, Foucault, and above all Barthes, mediated for the most part through classical scholars such as J-P. Vernant, Froma Zeitlin, and Charles Segal, has here found its way into a book targeted at the undergraduate market. I welcome Goldhill's book as one which demonstrates, without mystification, both the complexity of Greek tragedy, and the contemporary relevance of the questions which Greek tragedy poses. At the same time, as one who teaches students of Drama, I cannot but feel frustration.

Beginning in the reign of Augustus or Tiberius, corpses of criminals condemned and executed by the state were exposed on the Scalae Gemoniae, a flight of stairs located in the northern corner of the Forum Romanum. As one modern commentator has observed, the ritual of execution in which these stairs played a critical role reflected more generally the suppression of popular participation in the judicial processes that accompanied the last century of the Republic and the emergence of the Principate. As has long been noted, however, the Stairs were also the site of well-attested instances of collective violence, in particular protests during Cn. Calpurnius Piso's trial in the senate in AD 20, violence surrounding the fall of Sejanus in AD 31, and the popular violence and warfare of AD 69.

Seneca has long been regarded as one of the supreme—one might say notorious—examples of the way in which the human personality can be divided and compartmentalized. To live in two entirely different worlds at the same time can never be easy: to combine the contrasts present in Seneca without outward sign of strain is almost miraculous. Seneca took a leading part in Nero's education and training, both before and after he became Emperor; he lived for eleven years during his reign and then committed suicide at his behest; he played a central role as chief counsellor in his administration. At the same time he wrote treatises on the perfectibility of the human race under the flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity, not as a vision of the future, but associating its realization with Nero himself; he discussed the moral duty of the philosopher in terms which were completely inconsistent with his own mode of life, and composed ten (or is it nine?) tragedies which have as one of their main themes the rule of moral chaos in human affairs, often under a tyrant. In these plays there is a vision much less pleasant, that of the coming disintegration of the world, expressed in terms like ‘In nos ultima aetas uenit?’

Like ‘crossing the T’, the diekplous can sometimes seem a manoeuvre ‘more honour'd in the breach than in the observance’, for there are, perhaps, only three battles in which it is said to have been successfully used – Lade (Herodotos 6.15.2), Chios (Polybios 16.4.14), and Side (Livy 37.24.2) – and mostly what we hear about are reasons why it was not or could not be used. Nevertheless, it seems to have been regarded as at least a potentially effective tactic from at least the fifth to the second century: Thucydides has Phormio declare (2.89.8), for example, that diekploi and anastrophai ‘are the marks of bettersailing ships’ (νɛν ἄμɛινον πλɛουσν ἔργα στν), and Polybios (1.51.9) refers to the diekplous as ‘the most effective manoeuvre in sea-fighting’ (ὅφɛρ ν τῷ ναυμαχɛîν στι πρακτικᾡτατον).

Of the twenty-nine series in the Plautine corpus, seven may legitimately be called senex amator – that is, an old man who for some reason contracts a passion for a young girl and who, in varying degrees, attempts to satisfy this passion. They are Demaenetus (Asinaria), Philoxenus and Nicobulus (Bacchides), Demipho (Cistellaria), Lysidamus (Casino), Demipho (Mercator), and Antipho (Stichus). Two others – Periplectomenos (Miles) and Daemones (Rudens) – still, perhaps, feel the sap rising, but they keep their instincts within acceptable limits, and both are regarded as senes lepidt, a description which usually denotes approval of a character.

During preparations for the ill-fated Sicilian expedition in 415 BC, Thucydides tells us, the Athenians woke up one morning to find that:

Of all the stone herms in the city of Athens (the square-cut type, which following local custom stand in great numbers in the doorways of private houses and shrines), most had their faces [προ´σωπα] mutilated during a single night. No one knew who the perpetrators were, but there was a search for them with large rewards out of public funds . . . They took the matter seriously; it looked like an omen for the voyage, and furthermore as though it had been done as part of a conspiracy for revolution and the overthrow of the democracy [δη´μου :kgr;αταλυ´σεωσ].

Some accused the flamboyant politician and general Alcibiades, ‘adducing as evidence the undemocratic licentiousness of his conduct in general’. Andocides emphasizes how seriously the matter was taken by the city authorities:

The boule, summoning the generals, ordered them to make an announcement that those of the Athenians who lived in the city should take their arms and go to the Agora, those within the Long Walls should go to the Theseion, those in Piraeus to the Hippodamian agora. As for the knights, a signal was to be given by trumpet before nightfall for them to go to the Anakeion; the boule was to go to the Acropolis and sleep there, the prytaneis in the Tholos.

Greek myths are so vivid that we think of the figures in them as real people and argue about their characters and what made them do what they did. We forget not only that the people never existed (or if some of them did, they were certainly very different from the refined and sophisticated representations of them about which we argue), but also that what we have is a number of often incompatible versions in literature and art dating over a period of a thousand years or more, whereas what we argue about is either a single late version or a very late amalgam of a number of versions made in a handbook of mythology.

Around 340 BC, Theomnestus, son of Deinias, from the deme Athmonon, prosecuted the alleged hetaira Neaira for living in marriage with Stephanus, from the deme Eroeadae, breaching the law that prohibited xenoi from feigning lawful marriage with Athenian citizens ([Dem.] 59). Under this law (59.16), foreigners who married an Athenian citizen were liable to enslavement and confiscation of property – the penalty for conviction for illegal exercise of citizen rights. Although Theomnestus is the formal prosecutor, most of the case is presented by his kinsman and supporting speaker Apollodorus, elder son of the well-known wealthy Athenian banker and former slave Pasion. It might seem incongruous that he, the son of a newly made citizen with foreign and servile origins, invoking the most sacred of Athenian laws, appeals to the Athenians to guard the purity of their citizen body. However, while Apollodorus undeniably had a hidden agenda in bringing a prosecution against Neaira, it is not surprising that false claim to and debasement of citizen status should be a source of resentment for new citizens such as he, who were anxious to protect their hard-earned privilege.

Sir William Tarn wrote that ‘the primary reason why Alexander invaded Persia was, no doubt, that he never thought of not doing it; it was his inheritance’. The invasion had been planned and begun by Philip. It was, in name, a Panhellenic enterprise, to exact retribution for the devastation wrought by Xerxes in Greece and to liberate the Greeks of Asia Minor. These aims Alexander faithfully fulfilled. From the spoils of the Granicus he dedicated three hundred Persian panoplies to Athens' tutelary goddess; he sent back to Athens the statues of Harmo-dius and Aristogiton which Xerxes had carried off to Susa; and he excused the burning of Persepolis as a reprisal for the sack of Athens. The Panhellenic war was then over, and Alexander sent the Greek contingents home (A. iii. 19. 5). In general he freed the Greek cities of Asia from the control of satraps; they were to pay no taxes, to receive no garrisons and to live under their own laws. By expelling tyrants or oligarchs and setting up democratic governments, he not only removed the partisans of Persia from power but did homage to the growing tendency in Greece to equate freedom with democracy. The gratitude of the liberated cities was long-enduring; it was here that his cult survived into Roman times. In reality of course they were as much subject to his will as less privileged subjects. And to Greek cities that opposed him he was less accommodating. Halicarnassus and Aspendus, which certainly counted as Greek, were subjected to his satraps. They could be treated as disloyal to the Panhellenic cause, like the captive mercenaries who fought against him at the Granicus and who were sent back in chains to forced labour in Macedon. But Alexander was not always so merciless. He spared the mercenaries who were holding out against him on an island in the harbour of Miletus, and enlisted them in his own army; it would not have been easy to take the island by force. Sentiment and principle gave way to his own interests, as they always did.

Scholars have long recognized that the story of Dido in the Aeneidis structured like a Greek tragedy and that several of Aristotle's concepts in the Poetics can profitably be applied to it. Here I return to an old question, to which no answer yet given has commanded general assent: if Dido is a tragic heroine, what, in Aristotelian terms, is her hamartia? I shall argue that Aristotle's model of tragedy provides a useful blueprint for gauging both Dido's moral responsibility for her downfall and the moral and emotional response to it which Virgil expects from his readers. These matters have indeed been very extensively discussed by very distinguished scholars, but in many areas of classical literature – and nowhere more than in the Aeneid – modern criticism has become so sophisticated and so attuned to the detection of subtleties such as irony, ambiguity, and ambivalence that it sometimes misses the significance of what is simple and obvious. Aristotle's model of tragedy, while not a refined critical tool, helps us to isolate some basic truths about the tragedy of Dido.

In the early Imperial Age, the steadily growing Christian movement was viewed with suspicion by both the authorities and the people of Rome; in the second century, the Roman rejection of Christian teachings, customs, and practices resulted in a most intriguing counter-movement. During this century, two types of negative response to the Christian faith had become established. The first encompasses the anti-Christian accusations circulating among the Roman population during most of the period, occasionally resulting in Christians being persecuted. At the end of the century, supplementary controversy arose from within the intellectual world. Those who engaged in this polemic were authors who had studied Christian customs, and who consequently targeted the substance of the Christian teachings.

The gods appear in nearly every passage of Aristophanic dialogue; it is hard to imagine more than five minutes passing in the comic theatre before hearing the name of an Olympian deity. This remarkable density is perhaps less telling than it might seem, for the vast majority of such references occur in oaths. Formally, an oath calls on one or more gods to witness (using the particles nē or ma) an assertion, a denial, or a promise. Less formally, simple oaths with nē or ma add colour and emphasis to colloquial language, somewhat like ‘swear words’ in English, and it is this usage which predominates in Aristophanes; to give just one example, the most popular oath ‘by Zeus’ occurs over 250 times in the eleven comedies. So common are these ‘oaths’ that they hardly seem worthy of the name; at most, they might seem to offer no more than insight into colloquial language at the profane level. Numerous instances, however, take issue with the institution of the oath itself and acquire considerable importance due to the integral role the oath played in Greek religion, especially given the state of that religion precisely during the period of Aristophanes' career, when traditional values were assaulted from numerous directions, and the forces of orthodoxy lashed back with a vengeance.