Odysseus, with Herakles, was a favourite character in that mythological type of comedy which we know only in titles and fragments, though it was well liked in antiquity. The purpose of this article is to collect these stray pieces, to present Odysseus as he appears in this tradition, and to suggest reasons for his popularity on the comic stage.

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.

Calagurris, the modern Calahorra, is situated by the river Ebro about two hundred miles inland, in what in Roman times was the province of Hispania Citerior or Tarraconensis. Here Quintilian was born some time in the fourth decade of the Christian era. If it were not that his birthplace is recorded by later writers, we should be quite unaware of it. There is nothing in the Institutio Oratoria to suggest that its author was a Spaniard, and though there is no reason why he should have referred to his home country in a treatise on rhetorical education, his work includes just enough personal reminiscence to make it a little surprising that he did not. Moreover, on the rare occasions when he refers to Spain he gives no hint of any connexion with the country. It would be rash to assume that he was ashamed of his Spanish birth, but perhaps long residence in Rome had weakened his consciousness of provincial origin. At the same time we can perhaps see in him certain provincial qualities.

Herodotos in Book V tells us how in 499 b.c. came to Athens the smooth-talking political adventurer, Aristagoras, formerly tyrant of Miletus; he was seeking support from that city, under its democratic government now a mere decade old, for the revolt of the Ionian states against the rule of the Persian King. Aristagoras had it seems initiated the revolt (though its basic causes naturally had nothing to do with individuals), and it had in theory, if not in actual fighting, clearly broken out. The Milesian ex-tyrant explained to the Athenian demos, meeting in their sovereign assembly, the great economic advantages that would flow from this participation by subsequent exploitation of the rich domains of the king. He also, as is customary in these matters, belittled the military prowess of the Persians (despite the fact that they had in half a century overthrown all the great empires of the known world); also (what may have been slightly more effective) he appealed to national sentiment, since Miletus, and some of the other coastal settlements of Ionia, claimed to be colonial offshoots of Athens herself. With these and other (unspecified) inducements Aristagoras succeeded in getting a promise of support for the Confederates—which shows, observes Herodotos, how much easier it is to fool thirty thousand people than one man. The one man, of course, was Kleomenes king of Sparta, whom Aristagoras had narrowly failed (the story went) to induce to provide support from Sparta. That the story of Aristagoras at Sparta has many implausible features does not affect the situation. Athens sent help to Ionia, Sparta did not, and whatever the hidden policies concerned, Herodotos chose the occasion to make a criticism of direct democracy.

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323, his successors (diadochi) engaged in a series of internecine struggles to take control of the territory he had conquered. One of the most capable of these, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus (later to become Ptolemy I Soter), took control of Egypt, initially as satrap (323–306) and subsequently as king (306–283/282). Over several decades Ptolemy was able to seize Coele-Syria and parts of Asia Minor, and achieved leadership of the League of Islanders in the Aegean. The battles between the successors were fought with sizable infantry and cavalry forces. However, one of the most notable and highly valued components of these military forces were battle elephants.

It may seem strange to link the Roman Empire with a Himalayan kingdom which hardly gets a mention in most standard works on Roman history, but in fact during the second and early third centuries A. D. these two powers enjoyed a cordial and mutually profitable relationship which was of considerable economic importance to both. From the end of the first century A. D. to the middle of the third century the Kushans controlled what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, parts of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, and much of the Ganges plain. Their history has proved difficult to reconstruct, since they left no historical writing, and even the chronology of their kings is still disputed, but enough is now known for us to begin to piece together, though still somewhat tentatively, the strange and exotic relationship between this distant state and the Roman world, and perhaps in the process to contribute from Roman history to the problems of Kushan dating.

The creation of a political image based at best on a tenuous reality is a fragile and delicate process. None knew it better than Gaius Julius Caesar. Early in his career, he had fostered the belief that he was the heir of the ‘true’ Marian/popularis tradition with some credibility and lasting success. He presented himself as the great general in the Gallic commentaries and for good reasons this image too gained widespread popularity. There were other important but sometimes less convincing messages to follow. The commentarii on the civil war sought passionately to justify his part in the outbreak of hostilities: this was the published form of a process his intermediaries had begun in the first months of hostilities whereby they stressed his respect for peace and the traditional order, even when he himself was busy ignoring both. In an effort to reinforce this ‘constitutional’ regard, Caesar returned to Rome from Spain in 49 to establish a ‘properly elected’ government with himself and P. Servilius Isauricus as consuls; the correct number of praetors (all eligible to hold the office), aediles, and quaestors. The dictatorship was cast aside after a mere eleven days; Rome was to function as it always had. The uprising of Marcus Caelius Rufus and Titus Annius Milo in 48 B.C. ruined this admirable picture and brought home to Caesar the realities of attempting to dominate Rome by leaving the constitution in its traditional form and hoping for the best from the supporters he had entrusted with office. Moreover, the chaos of civil war and urban disorder combined to allow others to project their own policies and power struggles.

In her article, ‘Women's Commensality in the Ancient Greek World', which appeared in this journal in 1998, Joan Burton set out to correct scholars’ neglect of ‘the topic of women's part in the history of ancient Greek dining and drinking parties’. She argued that the proposition that citizen women never participated in symposia is a broad generalization. Based on classical Athenian evidence, it misses variation over time and in different places. Even in the case of classical Athens it is overstated, overlooking the male bias of our sources. Moreover, scholars' concentration on the symposium has led to the neglect of other occasions of commensality and so of the important role played by women in Greek commensality more broadly:

The shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 is the culmination of the poem's ‘propaganda', the political climax of the Aeneid. We can read the ecphrasis in optimistic mode, as Hardie and Binder did, for example; or like Gurval and Putnam we can try to cast a pessimistic light even on this passage that is so obviously encomiastic and ‘ideologically sound'. However, what I shall be concerned with in this paper is not so much the shield itself as what Vergil has to say on his own composition of the shield, on the motivation of the artist in writing this encomiastic passage, on his ‘inspiration', or (if you prefer) on the ‘constraints' which compel him to deliver the ecphrasis. In my view Vergil gives us not only the ‘propaganda' of the shield, its mannered distortion of history, its praise of those in power, together with the critical reactions to that ‘propaganda' made out by pessimistic critics; he gives us also some metapropagandistic reflections on his writing of the shield as a piece of ‘propaganda' and encomium, an illustration of the forces that drive an artist to write a piece of this sort (that is, his ‘inspiration'), and he gives us some thoughts on the nature of the distortion and repression that are in operation here.

In the 1855 edition of his guide to Pompeii, the French artist and archaeologist Ernest Breton begins a chapter on the city's houses and shops with a print showing tourists in a grand Pompeian residence (figure 1). At the rear of an atrium with an enormous impluvium, a man contemplates a raised garden while a well-dressed couple approaches from the right. Behind them, in the roofless remains of the house, the garden's ancient sculptural display remains in situ; animals and deities inhabit a landscape dominated by a shrine-like niche, a pool, and pillars painted with trees. Deep shadows and encroaching vegetation set a romantic, melancholic mood. This is the House of Marcus Lucretius (IX.3.5), excavated less than a decade prior and, at the time, one of the ancient city's most famous sights. As is typical of nineteenth-century illustrations of Pompeii, the size of the house is exaggerated: while the decorative scheme and arrangement of the rooms is accurate, the garden is too highly elevated and too large in proportion to the figures. The atrium's disproportionate impluvium is a complete fabrication, the actual impluvium having been dismantled in antiquity. Despite the artistic licence, Breton and his imagined tourists follow the same path as ancient visitors to the house, drawn toward the garden and its sculptures by the manipulation of space and decoration.

In Greece & Rome 37 (1987), 169–185, J. F. Lazenby and Ian Whiteheadhave made a most helpful contribution on the problems of advanced manoeuvres by ancient triremes — the diekplous and the periplous. They are surely right to reject the view that these manoeuvres involved a whole fleet moving in line ahead formation at the time of battle, even in the milder version which postulates several squadrons abreast – each in line ahead. Given the nature of the triremes' main instrument of aggression – the ram – such formations could not achieve what Nelson's breakthrough at Trafalgar did – with benefit of cannons: nor was encirclement the aim of the periplous, as Whitehead has well demonstrated.

On the eve of the Peloponnesian War Athens was a great urban agglomeration. It was almost invulnerable to an enemy. So in 431 B.C. the Athenians began to migrate from the countryside into the city on the advice of Pericles (Thuc. 2.14–16). This recalled to Thucydides the time of Theseus (Thuc. 2.15). S. Hornblower regards this migration as the long-postponed physical synoikism, or synoikism in its physical aspect. He insists on the difference between political and physical synoikism, the former being the political unification of the state and the latter mainly the migration into the city. But the Athenians did not migrate into the city for the first time in 431. At the time of Xerxes' invasion the inhabitants of Attica were to be moved into the city before being evacuated to Salamis and elsewhere, and the invasion made their vulnerability clear to the Athenians. They suffered two evacuations, the devastation of Attica and the substantial destruction of Athens. Through driving back the Persians Athens became the leader of the Delian League and acquired great naval power. The change of Athens' position in the Greek world and the damage caused by the Persians necessitated a major reconstruction of the town. The Athenians began with the town and harbour. They built the walls of the city and of the Piraeus first of all. Beforelong the Piraeus had been built on a large scale. In these years the Athenians remembered Theseus again, and he now gained honour and esteem among all the Athenians.

In a recent article on Menander, Professor Arnott acknowledges his debt to the conclusions of the late Armin Schäfer with regard to the construction of the Dyskolos. Schäfer's theory, briefly stated, is that Menander was faced in this play with the problem of combining two different themes—the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon. Menander comes near to a solution, argues Schäfer, but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action. In the following pages I shall try to show that the conflict between the two sides of the play is an imaginary one (created in our minds, perhaps, by our knowledge of the lines along which ‘comedy of intrigue’ and ‘comedy of manners’ subsequently developed), and that the carefully integrated plot reflects a unity of theme in the comedy as a whole.

The Romans knew that they had once been ruled by kings, and they believed, perhaps rightly, that the fall of the monarchy had taken place at what we would call the end of the sixth century B.C. The texts that tell us this – Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch, etc. – all depend on a historical tradition that can be traced back as far as the second half of the third century B.C., when the Roman literary genres of historical drama, historical epic, and prose historiography began. Before that, we do not know how the Romans conceived or recorded the memory of their own past.

Students of comparative religion have long been familiar with the evidence furnished by ancient Mediterranean myth and ritual pointing to the existence of a common fund of religious experience amongst the early civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Near East. In spite of wide divergences between the views of anthropologists of the extreme diffusionist and anti-diffusionist schools, there has in the last twenty-five years or so been a decided reaction in favour of the historical method in this field of study, and there appears to be general agreement that a common culture-pattern, embodied in a common fund of myth and ritual, existed in Egypt, Babylonia, and Palestine. This hypothesis of a common pattern is supported by an ever-increasing volume of archaeological evidence. Routes of migration of peoples and commercial and other cultural contacts indicate a complex interchange of ideas between the Near East and the Mediterranean region generally. Of cardinal importance for the understanding of these mutual relations in early times are the discoveries in Crete, where evidence of extensive cultural relations with the Orient and Egypt, as well as with the mainland of Greece, has come to light.

In 1941, E. S. Forster wrote a short article, published in this journal, which compiled all of the instances he could identify in the ancient source material that described dogs being used in a military capacity. G. B. A. Fletcher, who had identified a few obscure references that Forster had not cited, responded to Forster's paper later that same year. The purpose of both papers was simply the compiling of a list, a purpose that had been inspired by Forster's interest in the French army's recruitment of dogs on the outbreak of the Second World War. The result was a thorough catalogue of known examples, showing the ancient dog being used for a variety of purposes such as patrol work or observation duties, or being used as combatants or despatch couriers. The primary aim, according to Forster was to ‘make a comparison with modern practice’ – that is, the French practice he had read about; the only exception for which he could find no ancient evidence was what he called ‘Red Cross’ work.