There will never be a perfect translation of Aristophanes. There have been many translations, with many and diverse merits: one thinks of the poetical grace of F. L. Lucas, the deftness of Godley and Bailey, the easy naturalness of John and Patricia Easterling, the zest of B. B. Rogers, the modernity of Douglass Parker and his associates; but combine all these and you are still left a long way from a perfect translation—for there is much truth in the paradox that the only really perfect translation is the original. The Greek and Latin scholar is more aware of this than most people, and the lover of Aristophanes more still. Yet translations there must be—not only for the ‘general reader’, but increasingly nowadays for the student who wants to know more about ancient literature but is not yet (and in too many cases may never be) competent to study it in the language in which it was written; nor should we forget those who produce plays, and those who go to see them. And it matters a great deal whether the people who meet Aristophanes in these ways are brought to appreciate his qualities as comedian and dramatist. For Aristophanes' own contemporaries did, Plato among them; and if he was really boring or obscure or both (so the reader may argue), his contemporaries must have been so too.

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.

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.

The ancient Greeks believed that the oracle at Delphi went back to immemorial antiquity. But were they right? The history of the site has been traced through excavations that are among the greatest achievements of modern archaeology. The interest of the French school in Delphi goes back to 1861, but for political reasons systematic excavation could not begin till 1893; since 1902 the series of volumes of the Fouilles de Delphes has appeared regularly. Mycenaean Delphi has been shown to have amounted to very little; and the chief centre seems to have been not on the site of the great temple, but at Marmaria, near the temple of Athene Pronaia. A few clay figurines may pertain to a private, but hardly to a public cult; an isolated Minoan marble drinking-horn shaped like a lion's head proves little. By the beginning of the Dark Age the settlement seems to have been destroyed by fire; before its life resumes during the Protogeometric period, there seems to have been a complete break in continuity. Only when the Dark Age is over does Delphi become important.

This article takes up the subject of shared memory and its interaction with landscape, with specific reference to Troy, to Homer's Iliad, and to the tradition of ‘pilgrimage’ to Troy and its environs that evolved in the ancient world in response to the Trojan War story. Over the course of centuries this particular location on the Hellespont, a Bronze Age site, exercised a particular fascination, thanks to memories – no doubt gravely distorted – of a great siege by combined Greek forces eager to avenge, as legend tells it, the abduction of Helen. A few centuries later, the site became a destination for ‘pilgrims’ who were eager to see for themselves the landscape of Troy and the Troad and to experience for themselves, physically and emotionally, certain actions that were attributed to the heroes of the so-called Trojan War.

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.

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).

Controversy about the evaluation of Euripides' Electra still rages as fiercely as empty tigers or the roaring sea. ‘Euripides’ play is a singular instance of poetical – or rather unpoetical – obliquity … perhaps of all Euripides' extant plays the very vilest'; ‘as a drama of character, Electra is supreme … in its own genre, this is undoubtedly Euripides' masterpiece'; it contains ‘a power of sympathy and analysis unrivalled in ancient drama’; its characters are ‘involved in a persisting interpenetration of merit and status which accords some measure of tonal unity to this indifferent play.’ When a play earns judgements as contradictory and incompatible as these, one important stimulus to the verdicts is usually the critic's subjectively emotional response to a play whose views about society and society's values are provocative; more reliable (because less subjective) criteria of literary merit, such as the interplay of plot, character, structure, imagery, and ideas, are then subordinated or comparatively neglected as elements in the evaluation. Euripides' Electra is just such a play. It attacks, both openly and implicitly, some of the traditional values still held by many Athenians in 413 B.C., the probable date of the play's production, with a commitment that has engaged a great deal of scholarly attention. The techniques which Euripides deploys in his attack, however, have not been adequately studied. They provide the rationale, as well as the title, of this paper. Before the ‘double vision’ can be explained, however, it will be as well to outline briefly those traditional values subjected to the Euripidean vitriol.

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.

History as we know it (I mean historiography, the writing of history) may in a very real sense be said to have been invented by the Greeks, and it was a creation of the fifth century B.c. The earliest historian whose works we possess–indeed, the earliest of all historians in the proper sense–is Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who wrote during the third quarter of the fifth century; and the greatest of all Greek historians, Thucydides the Athenian, wrote in the next generation, roughly in the last thirty years of the fifth century.

It is a commonly held view that the basic issue in the Ithakan sequences of the Odysseyis the succession to Odysseus’ position as king. Thus J. V. Luce, for example, sees ‘the outline of a power struggle with kingship as the prize for the most powerful noble’. And M. I. Finley declares: ‘“The king is dead! The struggle for the throne is open!” That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the Odyssey can be summed up’. I should like to argue that this highly political perspective is unwarranted, that in fact there is no throne, no office of king, indeed no real Ithakan state, and therefore no succession struggle.

Suetonius tells us that Nero's dying words were ‘Qualis artifex pereo’, and amongst English-speaking peoples he is generally known as ‘the man who fiddled while Rome burned’. Even if the ‘famous last words’ are legendary, there is a basis for the second story in Suetonius' account that during the fire of 64 Nero sang ‘the destruction of Troy’ in his stage costume. Yet despite the picture of Nero the performer which emerges from all our ancient sources, it is only in comparatively recent times that historians have given serious consideration to Nero's artistic pretensions. History it would seem is the propaganda of the victors, and that most hurtful remark of Vindex, that he was a bad lyre-player, has often been regarded as the appropriate verdict upon Nero.

It is generally accepted that in classical Athens a widely proclaimed sexual morality expected citizen women not only to be chaste, confining sexual activity to marriage, but also to avoid any suspicion of improper contact with men. While some recent works still suggest that Athenian citizen women did conform to their society's expectations, and even that women lived in seclusion to promote chastity, others have long recognized that Athenian women showed a wider range of behaviour and, sometimes at least, had sexual liaisons with men other than their husbands. It is unfortunate that the most vigorous statement of the view that significant numbers of Athenian women did not in practice accept their society's constraints, an article by Richter in 1971, while containing much of value, weakens its own case by overstatement: few can accept, for instance, that in classical Athens ‘the young wives were as undisciplined a bevy of nymphs as Hellas ever reared’. Nonetheless it seems clear that Athenian women (and of course Athenian men) breached the sexual code commonly proclaimed in their society. It is the purpose of this paper to consider how widespread such breaches were, and in what spirit they were undertaken, whether purely as guilty acts or as behaviour that was at least condoned by an alternative morality.

Fred Astaire once remarked of performing in London that he knew when the end of a play's run was approaching when he saw the first black tie in the audience. Perhaps this is an American's ironic representation of the snobbishness of pre-War London (though he was the American who sang the top-hat, white tie and tails into a part of his personal image). Perhaps it is merely an accurate (or nostalgic) picture of the dress code of the audiences of the period. The very appeal to such a dress code, however – in whatever way we choose to read the anecdote – inevitably relies on a whole network of cultural ideas and norms to make its point. It implies tacitly what is easily recoverable from other sources about the theatre of the period: the expected class of the audience; the sense of ‘an evening's entertainment’ – attending the fashionable play of the season, with all the implications of the theatre as a place not merely for seeing but also for being seen; the range of subjects and characters portrayed on the London stage of the period; the role of London as a European capital of a world empire (with a particular self-awareness of itself as a capital); the expected types of narrative, events, and language, that for many modern readers could be evoked with the phrase ‘a Fred Astaire story’. If we want to understand the impact of the plays of Ibsen or Brecht or Osborne or Beckett, it cannot be merely through ‘dramatic techniques’, but must also take into account the social performance that is theatre. Ibsen's commitment to a realist aesthetic is no doubt instrumental to the impact of his plays, but it is because his (socially committed) dramas challenged the proprieties of the social event of theatre that his first reviewers were so hostile.

Intertextuality in Classical Literature can operate on different scales. Even a single distinctive word or string of words may briefly conjure up an isolated phrase from another author. For example, when Tacitus says at Histories 2.12.2 that the Othonians approached northern Italy and ‘tamquam externa litora et urbes hostium urere vastare rapere’, ‘burned, devastated, and plundered as if they were attacking foreign shores and enemy cities’, the text may momentarily recall a fragment from Naevius’ epic, the Bellum Punicum: ‘transit Melitam exercitus Romanus. insulam integram urit populatur vastat’ ‘The Roman army crossed to Malta. It burned, ravaged, and devastated the whole island.’ If the Bellum Punicum had not been reduced to such a fragmentary state, then it doubtless would have been possible to detect further evocative Naevian phrasing in Tacitus and other authors. Alternatively, intertextuality can be more cohesive and sustained, as when Tacitus at Histories 3.84 invests his description of the capture of Rome by the Flavians with echoes from Virgil's account of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2. Of course this was not the end of the chain: Virgil himself probably describes the fall of Troy in terms which evoked Ennius’ account of the fall of Alba Longa in the Annales.

O tomb, O bridal chamber, O cavernous dwelling, eternal prison to which I am journeying to meet my own, those perished in their great numbers and received by Persephone amongst the dead. I am the latest of them, and my descent the worst by far, before my allotment of life has reached completion. Yet, as I go, I boldly feed on hopes of proving dear to my father when I reach him, and dear to you, mother, and to you, dear brother. For when you died, it was I with my own hands who washed you and adorned you, I who poured your tomb-libations. But now for tending your body, Polynices, this is my reward.

The naval tactic, the periplous, referred to by both Thucydides and Xenophon has yet to be convincingly identified by any scholar. πɛρπλους and πɛριπλω are widely used in their non-tactical sense to mean ‘a voyage round a stretch of coast’, and ‘to sail round’. The only passages in which we can be certain that Thucydides and Xenophon are writing about the naval tactic are not accounts of battles but passages setting the scene for naval battles, theorizing about sea warfare. The problem then is to separate and identify the tactical from the normal usage. If we study the nature of the theoretical periplous referred to by Thucydides and Xenophon, and then look for a battle manoeuvre of a similar nature, we may be able to make that distinction.