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.

Of the many reasons, religious, aesthetic, and technical, generally adduced to explain the apparent reluctance of Greek tragedians to represent the moment of death on the stage, none seems to me to give sufficient weight to certain dramatic exigencies internal to the context of the plays themselves in which such deaths occur. The issue has too often been obscured by tenuous assumptions about the scarcity of professional actors (as if the total pool of professionals which the dramatist could draw upon was restricted to three), religious taboos associated with the celebration of the Great Dionysia and other festivals, the squeamishness of Greek theatre audiences, or the practical difficulties of stage management. It is not my intention to discuss these assumptions in detail. Some of them have already been effectively refuted, others may in fact have influenced consciously or unconsciously the presentation of particular death scenes. For no one denies that there are many problems connected with the presentation of death on the stage, and even the modern playwright, in spite of all the illusionist resources of the modern theatre, may well boggle at the attempt. Further, the passage from life to death must seem at a certain level a trivial activity in comparison with the tremendous impact it has on the dead person's immediate circle of friends and relations. Violent death and its gory accompaniments may well appeal to sensational melodrama but the Greek dramatist could justly have considered its representation per se as μιαρόν and ἀτεχνότατον τῆς ποιητικῆς. However, the real point at issue is whether the Greek tragedian went out of his way to get round the presentation of the moment of death for reasons external to the dramatic context. I shall try to show in this paper that whenever a character is apparently hustled out of sight for the purpose of being killed, some internal dramatic consideration was in fact uppermost in the playwright's mind.

This paper is concerned with reassessing the importance of the destruction of the house of Cicero in the light of recent investigations into housing in the Roman world. In recent years, the quantity and quality of such investigations have intensified but Cicero's house remains somewhat unpopular – despite excavations on the Palatine slopes which have revealed more details of the houses occupied by Cicero and his Late Republican neighbours.3 The saga of Cicero and his house had not been dealt with for several decades until the presidential address of Susan Treggiari in the 1998 Transactions of the American Philological Association. Her paper, however, is not so much concerned with the actual relationship between private and public in the house of Cicero as Cicero's private and public attempts to come to terms with his grief over the death of his daughter Tullia.

‘These teachings are, therefore, no novelties, no inventions of today, but long since stated, if not stressed; our doctrine here is the explanation of an earlier, and can show the antiquity of these opinions on the testimony of Plato himself.’ This quotation, from Enn. V 1.8, where Plotinus is actually presenting his doctrine of the three hypostases – a metaphysical elaboration never envisaged by Plato – encapsulates the interesting relationship which links this great original mind to the other great original mind whom he wished to claim as his master. There is, of course, nothing strange, in the intellectual world of late antiquity, in this desire to base one's doctrine on some time-honoured authority; what is unusual is the degree of originality of the man who is doing this.

Introduction

The reign of Marcus Aurelius, although he was acclaimed by ancient and modern commentators as an exemplary ruler, saw many calamities. Marcus was preoccupied with wars for the better part of his reign; the pestilence brought back to Rome from the east by Verus and the Roman army remained endemic in the city for many years to come, and the German wars from the late 160s well into the next decade posed great danger to Rome and caused great anxiety. In addition, a coup was executed. The usurper, Avidius Cassius, was the ruler of the Roman East for three months, enjoying support amongst the local population. After Verus’ death, the emperor embarked on war against the German tribes, but not before summoning priests and magicians from all over the world to help him, many of whom came from provinces far and wide. This attentiveness of Marcus Aurelius to religious issues (the representation of religious themes on his coins and monuments and his religious policy as a whole) introduced some changes to the Roman imperial tradition. Moreover his adaptation of policies that reflected new beliefs and the abandonment of old ones, was indicative of the political, social, and cultural developments during his reign. The desperation of the emperor is made most visible in the pages of Lucian’s Alexander.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Barbary corsairs were finally laid low, a great impetus was given to North African research, and numerous scholars visited and wrote about Carthage. Valiant efforts were made at that time to correlate the statements of ancient authors, chiefly Appian, Diodorus, Justin, Polybius, and Strabo, both with each other and with the existing topography of the peninsula, but the theories propounded had usually little virtue save that of originality and imagination. If excavation was undertaken at all (as it was by Davis, for instance, and Beulé), Roman buildings were often mistaken for Punic, so that elaborate plans of Carthage like Davis's2—to mention but one—are no longer of much consequence.

How significant are the Attic orators as sources for Athenian history? Their intrinsic importance is certainly very great, greater perhaps than that of any other comparable category of material. On the other hand, they have received surprisingly little direct and systematic attention from ancient historians. This is something of a paradox, and like many paradoxes it is worth examining in some detail: in this case, it has significant implications for the ways in which the orators have been and ought to be studied.

The description of a seismic sea-wave has a long history, but the understanding of it a short one. Although the ancient Greeks did not have a name for it, until recently the moderns used a misnomer: tidal wave. Now that the phenomenon is correctly understood it has acquired a Japanese name: tsunami (soo-NAH-me), but misnomers often persist even among those who know better.

In the Aeneid there is a tendency to dissociate action from emotion. Action is often dictated by a strong sense of duty, while emotion, instead of being a motivating power, becomes an idle accompaniment that contradicts the meaning of the act. This is most clearly observed in the person of Aeneas, particularly in those Odyssean books when he schools himself in a ‘new heroism’ whose very basis seems to depend on such a dissociation. Thus, in the midst of Troy's destruction, his natural desire is to die fighting for his city. If he had acted out this desire (as he begins to do) he would have been conforming to the standards of the old, Homeric, heroism. But he is caught in the complicated fabric of Rome's future, and the old, simple heroism, founded on a natural and impulsive nobility, is not for him. He must go against his natural desire and, as a runaway, escape the doomed city to refound it elsewhere. And yet his heart is set on the city he has lost, not on the city he must build, as becomes clear in the succeeding books. In Book iii he envies the miniature Troy which Helenus and Andromache have built in Epirus, while in Book iv he longs to stay with Dido and share in her city. The division he so frequently evinces in these early books between what he has to do and what he wants to do can be considered as part of a training in pietas, in devotion to his highest duty, which is consummated in the underworld encounter with his father Anchises in Book vi.

In the brief introduction to this speech in his recent commentary, S. Usher observes: ‘Little logical order can be discerned, though the speech has a clearly-defined prooemium in which the main ingredients of the speech are already present.’ There is an element of overstatement in this assessment. The organization of the speech as a whole follows the habitual practice of Lysias, who favours a neat division between sections. Thus we have prooemium (§§1–3), prothesis (§§4–5), proofs (§§5–20; τὴν μὲν οὖν in §5 should begin a new paragraph, since there is a clear break as the speaker moves from a summary of the factual case against him to the first point in his refutation), epilogos (§§21–27). There is naturally no narrative section, since the hearing is concerned with status, not events. Within the proof section the speaker tackles each of the allegations against him separately, wealth (§§5ff.), health (§§10ff.), and bad character (§§15ff.).2 Nonetheless, Usher's description of the speech is true to the extent that the progress of thought in the proof section is. often rambling and disjointed. However, a closer examination of the speech shows that this seemingly undisciplined and unstructured movement is the product of a logical ordering principle, which has its origin in the nature of the speaker's case. To appreciate the rationale behind this structure it will be necessary to preface our discussion with an assessment of the strength of the case.

Of all Greek heroes, Theseus, few would deny, has the greatest claim to enshrine all the best qualities of the Athenian citizen, not least in his championship of the demos, celebrated by poets and painters alike of the classical period. It might seem at first sight contradictory to find in the same period in Athenian history an equally flourishing tradition concerning Theseus the heroic-age king. This ‘contradiction', however, as it might be perceived in abstract terms by a modern constitutional historian, would not have been felt so acutely, if at all, by a fifth-century Greek, for whom the ideas of monarchic rule and the heroic age were fundamentally connected. Our response to this type of problem owes more to the analytical method of such later works as Aristotle's Politics, with its thorough categorization of constitutions, and there is always the danger that we may impose on the Greek mythological imagination of the fifth century an unwarranted rigidity that fails to reflect the greater plasticity of the classical Greek mind. A review of the Theseus legend in fifth-century Athens reveals the extent to which such flexibility of attitude existed and throws some light on the classical attitude to one-man rule.

The question of what actually happened on the Ides of March, 44 B.c. is merely incidental to most ancient historians, concerned as they are with Caesar's intentions and the assassins' motives. On the Ides more varied and abundant information survives, I believe, than on any other day in Roman or Greek history. But this evidence is full of obscurities and inconsistencies, largely unexplored; nor has it been examined specifically for the light it sheds on the public life of the late Republic. The outline of the day's events is easily discovered; in this paper I shall examine some of the details, with the aim of showing, above all, why the conspirators settled on the Ides of March and the Curia Pompei as the time and place for their deed.

‘Perhaps you can draw a cypress’, says Horace (A.P. 19), a remark which many Latin poets seem to have interpreted as a challenge. Not that the poets, with the exception of Ovid, wasted many words on the cypress itself, although all are very careful to mention it. Usually it is accompanied by some gloomy epithet, feralis (Ovid, Trist. 3. 13. 21; Virg. Aen. 6. 216) or funebris, or has some remote allusion to the funeral pyre (e.g. Lucan 3. 442; Stat. Theb. 4. 464). Homer, on the contrary, preferred a more cheerful epithet ε??ώ??ης.

But the cypress is by no means the only tree in the forest, and the poets take good care to let the reader know it. The Romans thought that there were some parts of poetry, and particularly epic poetry, in which they could improve on the Greeks, and word-painting was one of these. Where the Greeks usually contented themselves with a terse epithet, the Romans loved to dip their brush in bright colours and lay them on thick. Such descriptive passages have their place in poetry, but their employment needs to be regulated carefully in accordance with the requirements of the subject. In epic particularly they should not delay the course of the action, but, as it were, provide a pleasant oasis wherein the reader can rest after perusing the account of some more strenuous activity. The forests we find in Latin verse usually contain far more trees than are generally found on an oasis, but they do provide a convenient resting-point in the action, and at the same time give the poet an opportunity of displaying his powers of word-painting.

Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, is subtitled ‘Aspects of working–class life with special reference to publications and entertainments’. He writes of industrial west Yorkshire before and after the last war. If we look for progress on similar topics elsewhere, in Italy Armando Petrucci – whose stimulus I gratefully acknowledge – has undertaken notably stimulating analyses of popular publications and low-level education, for instance in his exhibition catalogue ‘Scrittura e popolo nella Roma barocca’. For the Roman Empire – where some at least of the necessary evidence does exist – not only very little progress, but, I suspect, several steps in the wrong direction.

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.

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.

Judging from its history of effect, the Wedding Cento produced by the fourth-century poet Ausonius is in fact not a poem about a wedding at all. It is a work about the ethics of textual recycling; about the impact of political power and patronage on literary production; about smut, or rather about where the responsibility lies when a reader sees smut when none was intended. It is also a poem about sexual violence, but this aspect of the text has been largely missing in its scholarly reception. Such an absence is perhaps to be expected. Sexual assault is a notoriously under-reported offence, and its invisibility tends to extend into the realm of artistic representation and its scholarly treatment. During the last couple of decades, for instance, film scholars have addressed the need to re-read cinematic portrayals of rape in order to unearth it from ‘metaphor and euphemism, naturalized plot device and logical consequence…restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring that is, the violence – the physical, sexual violation’. This issue must be addressed here, but first a few words about the Cento and the most prominent trends in its reception.

In the early fourth century bc, a slave of possibly Phoenician origin, called Pasion, was owned by the Athenian bankers Antisthenes and Archestratos (Dem. 36.43). During the course of his slavery, Pasion quickly rose to become the trusted manager of his owners' money-changing and banking firm in Piraeus. After having been manumitted (Dem. 36.48), he took over the running of this bank (Isocr. 17, passim), became a very successful banker, and established a shield factory. His businesses prospered to the extent that by the time of his death in 370/369 he had assembled a fortune estimated at around 70 talents. With this money, Pasion made a number of generous benefactions to the Athenians, as a reward for which the Athenians passed a decree in his favour granting him a gold crown and the right of citizenship to him and his descendants ([Dem.] 59.2). As soon as he received his grant of citizenship, Pasion started to make use of his citizen rights and invested in real property. Although he was probably never actively involved in politics, he is known to have been a close friend of several members of the political elite, such as Agyrrhius of Collyte (Isocr. 17.31) and Callistratus of Aphnida (Dem. 49.47). Moreover, he had dealings with important public figures, such as Timotheus, son of Conon (Dem. 49, passim).

We are told by an ancient life of Virgil that the poet had a ready reply for those who chided his extensive borrowing from Homer: ‘Cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent? verum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere’ (Vita Donati, 46). To recapture a Homeric figure, however briefly, was indeed a demanding challenge, but Virgil's task was unusually difficult in the case of Polyphemus. If he followed his model too slavishly the outcome would undoubtedly be disappointing. In going beyond Homer, however, he would immediately find himself on treacherous ground. The danger here was that the intervening centuries between the Odyssey and the Aeneid had overlaid the Cyclops completely with comic and pastoral associations. Most scholars have thought of Virgil as going back directly to Homer for his portrait of Polyphemus at Aen. iii. 588 ff., and I have no doubt that they are correct. In 1959, however, C. S. Floratos attempted at some length to establish that the Polyphemus of the Aeneid has been greatly influenced by the Hellenistic treatments of this figure. No one has replied to his arguments, and, in fact, K. Quinn recently has inclined toward a similar position. It seems, then, that this question deserves closer attention.

When Calpurnius’ old Roman tells Corydon, the country-boy fresh in town, that nothing that one has seen before can prepare one adequately for Nero's Roman spectacle (probably the games of 57 CE), it is almost impossible not to recall the magnificent loathing that Suetonius (Nero 12.1-2) and Tacitus (Annals 13.31) express for the new emperor's extravaganzas. Eleanor Leach comments that: ‘The builder of the amphitheatre [Nero] has combed the world for his marvels, creating a new cosmos within his gilded wooden oval.’ This spectacular new cosmos maps out a world in which pastoral can no longer exist because Nero has distorted the notion of rus in urbe to such an extent that Calpurnius’ only recourse is obituary. Here, Calpurnius’ eclogue functions not just as an elegy for pastoral, but as a poem which opens up a dialogue with Lucan's civil war landscape; in this world, metaphorical and real species of ruin take on an ever greater cultural urgency as means of interpreting the dramatic artifice of Rome's present.