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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Discussions of otium in Catullus concentrate, naturally enough, on poem 51. The role of otium in poem 50 has, in consequence, been neglected. It is the point of this paper to show that 50 is far more than an amusing Gelegenheitsgedicht and that 50 and 51, whether or not intended by Catullus to stand in this order, shed light on one another through a complementary conception of otium.

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.

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.

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.

Plato wrote two Utopian works, the Republic and the Laws. The second, written in the 350s and early 340s bc, describes a mythical city-state named Magnesia. It is often ignored as secondary, not only in terms of chronology, but also in quality – the work of the philosopher's declining years. Such a characterization is misplaced. The Laws may lack the optimism and brilliance of the Republic but it nonetheless reveals a still-powerful mind at work, sketching a more realistic societal project. Nor have its philosophic underpinnings changed: they are precisely those of the Republic. Instead of philosopher-kings, Plato now puts his trust in a code of virtually unchanging laws that cover every aspect of life in Magnesia – society, economy, politics, and family. It is this elaborate rule of law, in which the laws are the masters of those who rule and the latter in turn are the slaves of the laws (715d), which alone can produce a successful state and citizens that correspond to it.

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.

In letter 4.14, Pliny the Younger remarks that he doesn't worry too much about criticism of his poetry since he's not planning to give up the day job (§10):

nam si hoc opusculum nostrum aut potissimum esset aut solum, fortasse posset durum uideri dicere ‘quaere quod agas’: molle et humanum est ‘habes quod agas’.

For if this little work were my chief or sole effort it might possibly seem unkind to tell me to ‘find something else to do’: but there is nothing unkind in the gentle reminder that I ‘have something else to do’.

Tacitus' Historiae begin in the middle of a series of civil wars: initium mihi operis Servius Galba iterum Titus Vinius consules erunt. This point of time leaves the revolts of Vindex and Galba behind and the revolts of Otho and Vitellius just about to begin. Such a plunge in medias res, more suitable for the novelist than the historian, was at one time sharply criticized. It would have been more logical, it was argued, to begin with the proclamation of Galba at the beginning of April A.d. 68, with the death of Nero on 9 June following, or with the death of Galba himself on 15 January A.d. 69. These points, or others even earlier or later, are better ‘natural breaks’ in the story, and consequently more satisfactory from the literary point of view than the arbitrary breaks of the calendar. On behalf of Tacitus it was maintained that in Roman historiography the annalistic method had the force of law (but what then of the starting-point of the Annales—ab excessu divi Augusti?), or that Tacitus took up the tale where some other historian, Cluvius Rufus perhaps or Fabius Rusticus, had left off (why then the long introduction extending to ch. II? Xenophon, for example, felt no such need for the Hellenica). Tacitus himself does not attempt to justify his choice of starting-point. In fact the use of the future tense (erunt) may be thought to imply that the matter is scarcely worth discussing at all. That was likely, I think, to have been Tacitus' hope and intention. If it was so, it has been realized in the most recent scholarship, which, having failed to make out a conclusive case for or against any other date, has fallen back on the belief that 1 January A.d. 69 was, faute de mieux, inevitable.

In our present-day secular society, which regards religion as an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing, it is trumpeted as a great discovery that, in classical Greece, religion was not an optional extra detached from the rest of society's working but was ‘embedded’ in the various workings of society. It is of course our society that is exceptional: religion has been embedded in most societies through most of human history. Christianity was far more effectively embedded in western societies in the past than it is now; there are still some links in England between the Church of England and the state, and there are rather stronger links in Norway between the Lutheran church and the state; some Christian festivals are still widely observed as public holidays; and, in other parts of the world (for instance, many countries in which Islam is the predominant religion), the links between religion and state are still much stronger.