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 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.

Introduction

The search for a more powerful entity to provide some form of order to the chaotic nature of human existence is a phenomenon that can be seen throughout much of human history. For a Roman, the gods were everywhere, as powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life. Religion formed part of the broad-based homogeneity of the western provinces following the process of cultural transformation after conquest. Inscriptions, sculpture, and temple architecture all point to a similar material culture, and, although there is an apparent continuity in the names of the deities being worshipped from the pre-Roman to the Roman periods, their association with the traditional gods of Rome through syncretism negates the idea of direct continuity. However, religious changes are often overlooked in accounts of the Romanization of the western provinces, and we are left with the rather uncritical concept of ‘Romano-Celtic’ religion as a hybrid phenomenon. There is a danger of using the archaeological evidence of temples and inscriptions as diagnostic of change, rather than undertaking a more rigorous analysis in order to understand how religion and ritual formed part of this broad-based homogeneity, and the way in which the people of the provinces made sense of how to act and behave within a new social and political world.

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.

The Μελιταῖον κυνίδιον, as the very word κυνίδιον or its Latin equivalent, catulus, suggests, was a little lap-dog. It was so small that Aristotle compares it with an ἴκτις or marten and Aelian with the Indian Phattage. People commonly called it νανούδιον—a little dwarf. It was a well-proportioned, flat, long-haired dog with a bushy tail and a sharp nose of the type of the Spitz or Pomerian. We are also informed that it barked in a squeaky voice.

The Roman empress Eusebia, wife of the Christian emperor Constantius II (A.D. 337–361), owes what fame she enjoys amongst historians to her role in the life of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor (361–363); in the years 354–355 the empress emerged as the saviour and advocate of her (still in the closet) pagan in-law. However in this article I wish to focus exclusively on the treatment of the empress Eusebia in the history of Ammianus Marcellinus, the great historian of Late Antiquity and himself a devotee of Julian. This treatment merits attention not just for the undoubtedly interesting fact that Eusebia is one of the few female characters to surface in the history, but also because in the history the empress is cast in seemingly different personae. She is the kind and beautiful empress, akin to the image Julian himself created of her in his Speech of Thanks to Eusebia, written in commemoration of his salvation at her hands; but she is also a devious player, as we find too in Zosimus' treatment of the empress, though in Ammianus her deviousness is malevolent. It is this contradictory characterization aspect of the treatment that I wish to explore here. For whilst general attempts have been made to reconcile these images in the context of political history, the repercussions for our understanding of Ammianus have been little explored. How can the historian let these contrasting images co-exist? Has he merely assembled his history clumsily, or is there a more rewarding explanation for the impression of the empress's split personality?

Cadiz's main claim to fame in antiquity was its situation at thes end of the known world and its temple to Hercules which was visited by many famous personalities of antiquity; however, perhaps surprisingly, given Seneca and Pliny's insistence on the sobriety of the Spanish character, Cadiz had another well known attraction, its dancing girls, leading to Martial dubbing the town ‘Laughing Cadiz’, ‘Iocosae Gades’.

It was not until the time of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus that the Greeks took the initiative in studying botany from a scientific point of view, but naturally earlier Greek writers were interested in varying degrees and for various reasons in the plants which they saw around them, and therefore mention them in their works.

The present is the third of a series of articles, the first two of which have appeared in the Classical Review, ‘Trees and Plants in Homer’ (C.R., vol. 1, July 1936, pp. 97 ff.) and ‘Trees and Plants in Herodotus’ (ib., vol. lvi, July 1942, pp. 57 ff.). The present article deals with the references to trees and plants in the thirty-five extant plays and fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It is proposed first to tabulate the references to trees, shrubs, and plants in these authors and indicate the contexts in which they occur, and then to try to draw some conclusions as to the interest which these writers display in plant life and the attitude which they adopt towards it. Forty-three botanical names occur in the plays of the three dramatists, whereas in Homer there are fifty and in Herodotus fifty-seven. It will be clear, I think, that the dramatists took much less interest in plant-life than either Homer or Herodotus.

To take trees and shrubs first, the oak, ρῠς (Quercus robor)—a word which, like the Sanskrit root dru, was originally a general term for ‘tree’ or ‘wood’, and hence is used for the ‘king of trees’—occurs frequently in the Greek tragedians, especially in Euripides.

The death of T. S. Eliot removed from the world of English letters a staunch and resolute advocate of the Greek tradition in our modern literature. The precise interaction between this tradition in which the poet believed so firmly and his own five verse dramas therefore deserves some consideration.

Looking back, as we do, from the films and television of the twentieth century, we are inclined to think of Greek theatregoers as very serious-minded people, who suffered hard stone seats for days on end to watch a succession of tragedies, each with a solid intellectual content, performed against an austere stage setting by actors who could achieve only a distant approach to realism. We are constantly reminded of the very severe treatment meted out to Euripides for his experimental innovations. He tried out the use of blasphemous expressions—the equivalent, in his dramatic setting, of the four-letter words in modern ‘realistic’ drama: but Hippolytus' cry, ⋯ γλ⋯σσ' ⋯μώμοχ', ⋯ δ⋯ φρ⋯ν ⋯νώμοτος, was parodied mercilessly by the comic poets for years afterwards. Another of his ‘gimmicks’ was the tragic hero in rags, a device which anticipates in some respects the recent trend of ‘kitchensink drama’.

The Περὶ Ἀλυπίας (‘On Consolation From Grief’, henceforward PA) of Galen, recently rediscovered in a fifteenth-century manuscript in a monastery in Thessalonica, contains a wealth of information for the scholar of Roman libraries and books. The work, a treatise on the avoidance of the grief contingent upon loss and suffering, begins by listing the losses suffered by Galen himself in the fire of AD 192. The fire destroyed the Templum Pacis, a series of warehouses and storerooms, and the libraries on the Palatine hill. As Galen had spent much effort copying books from these libraries, and had then deposited his copies in the warehouses that also burned, his work was lost beyond the possibility of recovery.

The verb βυσσο-δομεύω (Sc. 30 = Hes. Frg. 195.37 M.–W.), separated by Glenn Most in his translation as ‘planning in the depth’, appears to be composed of a noun βυσσός (‘depth’) and a verbal root *δέμ- (‘[to] construct’), thus literally meaning ‘(to) build in the deep’. There is no instance in our extant texts where this compound verb is employed literally in reference to an act of construction, and to the best of our knowledge it is exclusively used metaphorically in early epic diction to describe a mental process (see also Hom. Od. 4.676; 8.273; 9.316; 17.66, 465, 491; 20.184).

The trial (undoubtedly for maiestas) of Marcus Primus, former proconsul of Macedonia, is described only by Cassius Dio—and his account is unsatisfactory in more than one respect. According to Dio, Primus was accused of making war upon the Odrysae, a friendly Thracian tribe, during his governorship. His defence was that he had acted at the behest of Augustus, though sometimes he named Marcellus. When Augustus of his own accord came into court and, asked by the presiding praetor whether he had given the order, denied it, Primus' advocate Licinius Murena demanded what he was doing there and asked who had summoned him. Augustus' brief reply—‘the interest of the state’—won him the approval of people of good sense; but a considerable number of jurymen voted for Primus' acquittal all the same, and the trial was followed by the conspiracy of Fannius Caepio, in which Murena was alleged to be implicated.

Between the ‘home’ territory of the Roman people in the Italian peninsula and the tribes of Gaul and Germany lay two provinces – Cisalpine Gaul, most of whose population were actually already Roman citizens or in possession of Latin rights, and Transalpine Gaul, a province only since 121 B.C., but already in Caesar's time displaying a developed urban civilization based on the Greek model, under the influence of Massilia. By the end of the first century B.C. well-to-do Romans considered the schools of Massilia an acceptable alternative to those of Athens for their sons' higher studies (Strabo 4.1.5). On the fringes of the Province, however, and beyond in Gaul proper were the ‘long-haired’ Gauls (hence Gallia Comata) and beyond them the German tribes. Only occasionally had these presented any real and immediate threat to the security of the Italian peninsula. Nevertheless, they were present in Roman consciousness as a kind of bogeymen. In 44 B.C., the founding charter of Urso, a Julian colony in southern Spain, included a provision that certain minor public officials should be exempt from military service except tumultus Italici Gallicive causa (ILS 6087). Events of this nature were hardly likely to necessitate conscription in southern Spain, but this clause was clearly taken over from the standard charter of an Italian municipality, where these were seen as possible emergencies.

In the Agricola … Tacitus amalgamates biography and historical monograph. But the success of the combination is questionable. He gives roughly two thirds of the work to Agricola's governorship of Britain, and treats the climax of Agricola's campaigns at length, providing direct speeches for the two leaders, almost as if he were experimenting with full-scale history. Such extensive development of a part, albeit an important part, unbalances the whole. Again, most of what he tells us about Agricola's personality is conventional and unrevealing.… Some contend that Tacitus exaggerated Agricola's achievements and wilfully misconstrued his relations with Domitian. We cannot be sure, but certainly many matters in the Agricola are unclear or, like the insinuation of poisoning against Domitian, ill substantiated. There is, however, a case for the defence. Tacitus probably found little else worth relating about Agricola except the governorship, and hence made the most of it. In thus concentrating on military and administrative achievements, he followed a hallowed Republican tradition.… A Roman aristocrat should possess and display virtus, above all in warfare: to this pattern Agricola conformed. Thus one old-fashioned attitude underlies a work somewhat novel in conception.

The sixth book is the focal point of the Aeneid; it completes and concludes what has gone before, and it provides a new impetus for the second half of the poem. It is not an isolated piece of theology; it has its work to do within the design of the poem. It is of vital importance in the development of the main themes of the Aeneid, and it is on three of these that I want to concentrate as we accompany Aeneas on his journey from the cave at Avernus to the Gates of Ivory. We shall be concerned firstly with how a memorable picture—or perhaps two memorable pictures—of the world after death is built up from the rich and tangled heritage of poetry, folk-lore, philosophy, and religion. In the words of T. R. Glover—to whose warm and sensitive appreciation of the poet Virgilian studies are deeply indebted—‘we find here as elsewhere that Virgil tries to sum up all that is of value in the traditions, the philosophies, and the fancies of the past’. It is in the later part of Book vi that Virgil comes nearest to a solution of the problem of human suffering with which the whole poem is so preoccupied, as he gropes towards a conception of the life after death in which sin is purified away and virtue rewarded. Secondly, the golden hopes for the future of Rome and the Roman world are in this book expressed with a patriotic pride more complete than anywhere else; the vision of the temporal destiny of the world follows upon the vision of the spiritual after-life. Thirdly, and this is the aspect which I shall stress most because it is not generally stressed enough, this book (like the rest of the Aeneid) is above all about Aeneas himself, his character and resolution, his experiences, past, present, and future. We must always remember that the aim of the book is not primarily philosophical or theological—and in this it differs from the myths of Plato to which it owes so much; the aim is to present a poetic vision which has special reference to Aeneas and Rome within the design and framework of the total epic poem.

In the eighth and ninth books of the Republic Plato describes the four inferior or corrupt types of government – timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny – and the four related types of human personality – the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical man (544dff.). Closest to the ideal, and first therefore in sequence of decline, is the timocratic state, the term timocracy being employed not in the Aristotelian sense of a polity demanding a property qualification of its ruling class but with ‘the peculiar meaning of government by the principle of honour (τιμ). The timocratic state, it is claimed (545cff.), develops when its members no longer live in harmony but come into conflict as the guardians join brides and bridegrooms ‘inopportunely’ (παρ καιρν, 546d), so that their offspring are neither well-born nor blessed by fortune. The result is a form of government which retains some of the features of its good predecessor, anticipates some of the features of its worse successor, and also boasts some features unique to itself, such as a preference for the ‘spirited’, men better suited for war than for peace. Above all else such a state will be distinguished by a cultivation of competition and a passion for honour: διαϕανστατον δ’ ναὐστν τι μνον… ϕιλονκαι κα ϕιλοτμαι (548c).