There is some ancient evidence, and much more modern conjecture, about the existence of Medizers in Athens during the period 508–480 B.c. The present article attempts to take further the clarification of the term Medism which was begun by A. W. Gomme, and to suggest that there has been too uncritical an acceptance of the label in many, if not most, of the cases to which it has been applied.

One of the most abhorrent events of Nero's reign, as viewed at the time and by commentators thereafter, was the premeditated murder of the emperor's mother Agrippina in March AD 59, which some have felt marked the end of the ‘five good years’ of Nero's reign, the quinquennium Neronis. The murder took place, not in Rome as many others that disfigured the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but on the Bay of Naples, more particularly on the Gulf of Pozzuoli at or near the resort of Baiae, modern Baia.

Various attempts have been made, over the years, to assess the character of Dido, and explain her presence in, and extraordinary influence on, the Aeneid. Some critics have seen her as the heroine of an Aristotelian tragedy; others believe that Virgil emulated Pygmalion, and fell in love with his own creation; the most perverse of all call her a digression, a fatal flaw in the construction of the poem, and one which irretrievably weakens our view of Aeneas himself.

While modern ethical philosophy has tended to proceed in an impersonal manner by addressing moral problems from a deontological or consequentialist (or broadly utilitarian) standpoint, ancient ethics was based on character and the development of a virtuous disposition. For Plato at Republic 441d-444e, for example, the ideal was a psuche that balanced the three functions of reason, thumos, and appetite and from which virtuous actions would flow automatically, while for Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (e.g. 2.1, 6.2, 6.5, 6.13) the object was to develop, in part through the exercise of practical intelligence (phronesis), an increasingly refined disposition (hexis) to perform virtuous acts. The focus was on the virtuous intention rather than on the moral quality of the result - a point brought out with striking clarity in the Stoic idea that virtue consisted as it were in the correct aim, whereas the actual hitting of the target was morally irrelevant.

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.

This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

The true site of the oracle of Dodona was discovered only in comparatively recent years. Christopher Wordsworth was the first to identify it, and the Greek archaeologist Carapanos the first to explore it. It lies to the south-west of Ioannina, at a spot most easily accessible from the coast of Thesprotiaby way of the valley of the Thyamis (Fig. 1). It is reached today by a branch road some ten miles to the south of loannina. The long, narrow valley in which it stands is completely dominated on its western side, and for much of the day overshadowed, by the almost precipitous mountain Tomaros (Olitzika), which rises to a height of 6,500 feet. This mountain bears a chain of craggy peaks, and its flank is scarred with gorges and torrents, fed by the snow which lasts some four months of the year on the upper slopes. The climate of the district is severe and well substantiates Homer's description of Δωδώνη δυσχωί-μερος. The valley is remarkable for its violent thunderstorms, which bring torrential rain to fill the mountain cataracts in the summer, and its soil is thus unusually swampy. The foothills of Tomaros are covered with pine trees, while in the plain below a few rather ragged oaks are still to be seen. The rivers of the district are the Acheron and the Kokytos, both associated with the underworld; and not far away is the Acheloos which makes its way down into Akarnania. (See Pl. VI.)

Aristophanes' Lysistrata opens with Lysistrata herself waiting in front of the entrance to the Acropolis for the women whom she has summoned. Calonice arrives from the city, and later others from Anagyrus (Attica), Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. Lysistrata expounds to them her plan: wives are to refuse intercourse with their husbands until peace is made. She has also, she says, arranged for the Acropolis to be attacked. Later again, after the women have been won over and sworn an oath of loyalty, a noise is heard (240): it is the Acropolis being captured. This forms the climax, so to speak, of the Prologue. Lampito, the Spartan, returns home, and from now on it is the Acropolis that constitutes the place of interest in the play and the women's occupation of it the central theme. But what is the relation of this plan (Plan B) to the other (Plan A)? And what does Plan B really involve? These questions are never satisfactorily resolved.

In his introduction to the Loeb translation of Suetonius, J. C. Rolfe suggests that Suetonius' unknown birthplace may be Rome, adding: ‘There is no prominent writer of whom this [being born in Rome] can be asserted positively; it seems probable in the case of Caesar and Lucretius.’ One wonders, then, just where the writers in the Latin language were born, and what effect, if any, this had on the literature, especially that now extant. I have investigated the birthplaces of the major authors up to a.d. 200, and propose here to summarize my results and offer a few comments.

The music of the ancient Greeks, apart from a dozen or so fragments from the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman period, is lost to us. It is unlikely that we shall ever be in a position to appreciate it as we can appreciate their architecture, sculpture, and literature. We can only conjecture as to the extent of our loss from the high regard in which it was held by the Greeks themselves. From Homer onwards Greek authors give an honourable place to it. In lyric poetry, drama, and dithyramb it was a vital element, and Plato and Aristotle were deeply concerned about its use in education and its effect on character. The music teacher (κιθαριστ⋯ς) provided an important part of every boy's education. In some states musical education was compulsory (e.g. in Arcadia up to the age of thirty and in Crete). Without a knowledge of music the Greek was considered uneducated.

The definitive study of the Delphic Oracle by H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell published over thirty years ago assembled all the information then known about it and discussed the various theories both ancient and modern about its operation where reliable information was lacking. In the presentation and evaluation of these theories, however, Parke and Wormell take no account of the methods and practices of state oracles in other cultures, even though such oracles may still be functioning today at the end of the twentieth century and so be able to provide contemporary and authenticated evidence of their workings, power and credibility. In Tibet, for instance, the State Oracle has a history going back over 800 years. It was originally sited at the monastery of Nechung (‘Small Place’) some four miles west of Lhasa, operating there until the Chinese annexation of Tibet in the 1950's, when the monk who acted as the mouthpiece of the oracle followed the Dalai Lama in his flight to northern India. The Tibetan State Oracle now functions in exile at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh some 250 miles north of Delhi. Its operations show some striking similarities to those attested for Delphi, and although the distances in time and space (not to mention the differences in cultural and religious background) obviously preclude any links between Nechung and Delphi other than those of common human experience and psychology, the parallels may at times help to shed some illumination on a few darker or confused areas in our knowledge of Delphic practice. Analogy admittedly is not argument, and the individual reader must judge for himself the applicability of the evidence.

Though not the earliest excavator, Schliemann is surely one of the best known, and though he is perhaps most famous as the excavator of Troy his work at Mycenae was equally spectacular in its results and ultimately of greater importance for the study of Aegean prehistory. It seems appropriate, in the centenary year of his excavation of the Shaft Graves in 1876, to present an up-to-date assessment of their significance and of Schliemann himself. This study has developed from the chance discovery that in a letter to Max Müller at Oxford Schliemann reported a detail of the excavation that is not in the published account; in an ensuing hunt for other documents contemporary with the actual excavation, I learned much about Schliemann that seemed to me of considerable interest, as I hope it will be to others outside the small circle of Aegean specialists.

The world of Aristophanes’ comedies is mainly one of fantasy, where free men carry private peaces in wineskins or fly to Zeus on a dungbeetle, women introduce sex-strikes or take control of the state, and a slave rides down to Hades on a donkey. A fantastic idea is the wellspring of his plots, and its successful realization leads to equally fantastic after-effects. Yet embedded in his extant plays from the Acharnians at least to the Ecclesiazusae is a series of passages where the focus appears to be on the real world of contemporary politics, history, belief, and the arts, while advice on authentic issues is offered to the mass audiences in the theatre of Dionysus. Is that advice seriously intended, or is it as fantastic as Aristophanes’ comic plots?

The late Professor H. A. Harris, who made many contributions to this journal, has added much to our knowledge of Greek and Roman athletics. Like Gardiner before him, he valued highly the opinions of modern athletes and was proud to be considered in their ranks; but it is difficult for a scholar (even when athlete) fully to understand all the intricate fields of sporting endeavour. Harris is so clearly right in his discussions of many fields of athletics that one is reluctant to take issue with his interpretations in a few areas, but he was unfortunately not fully versed in some of the ‘heavy’ events, as discus throwers have seen. In the case of weightlifting Harris discounts many of the ancient achievements without an adequate discussion of their feasibility. Since it has become almost fashionable for modern scholars not to take seriously these recorded feats, it is worth while to review them in the light of modern weightlifting—a comparison which has not been closely examined before—and to discuss the various lifts and training techniques of the ancients.

In his journal for December 31st, 1851, Thomas Babington Macaulay recorded an encounter with Thomas Love Peacock: ‘I met Peacock; a clever fellow and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other's quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices: Aeschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit’ (Life II, 556). This encounter is an illustration of the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain the close study of the Greek and Latin languages was far from being the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and teachers of the classics. Macaulay once wrote that he read Greek ‘like a man of the world’ (Letters III, 111), that is, as someone actively involved in public life, not cloistered in a university or a school. This applied to Peacock as much as it did to Macaulay. By 1851 Peacock had already published six of the seven novels for which he is best known today, but he had also spent about thirty years in the service of the East India Company, during which he had risen to the rank of Examiner: he was in effect a very senior civil servant. His formal schooling had ended when he was twelve, so that he was largely self-taught as a classicist. It was perhaps characteristic of such an autodidact that ‘he delighted to ask an Oxford first-class man who Nonnus was, and to find he could get no information’, and that he should pepper his novels with recondite classical quotations.

It is a well-known and often lamented fact that we know very little about the actual staging of plays in the theatre of Dionysus in the Fifth Century b.c. What snippets of information we do have date from later centuries and may reflect contemporary conditions of performance, or may be mere inference based on fifth-century texts. Even though we can derive considerable comfort from Oliver Taplin's dictum that ‘the Greek tragedians signalled all their significant stage directions in the words’, 2 much that would enhance our knowledge of a fifth-century production remains a mystery.

It is essential for us to question our own views and those of our predecessors on the status of women in ancient Athens. With few exceptions these views display a kernel of prejudice and a pulp of misunderstanding, skinned over with the bloom of evasiveness. It is, indeed, odd to observe how inquirers into the social framework of Greek society have been misled, and how few classical scholars have attempted to give the lie to the extravagances spread abroad concerning the alleged attitude of Athenians to their womenfolk. Temptation to write up a violent contrast between the daily lives of Spartan and Athenian women was great, and in the last century other half-conscious feelings helped a false presentation. Again and again it has been said or implied that Athenian married women lived in an almost oriental seclusion, and that they were looked on with indifference approaching sometimes to contempt. Quite recently it was alleged in a broadcast that the Athenian social system relegated women to the condition of squaws, the matron being little more than a domestic servant. ‘As wives and mothers’, said the speaker, ‘Athenian women were despised.’ Literary passages have in the past been torn from their context as evidence for this, and the inferior legal status of women has been stressed. There are, however, important exceptions among scholars, of especial value being an essay by Professor A. W. Gomme, and a long section in The Greeks by Professor H. D. F. Kitto, whose remarks on truncated quotations from Aristophanes and Xenophon are very illuminating. Anyone interested in the question is advised to read again pages 219–36 in that little volume, as most of what follows simply strengthens what Kitto has written. In a variety of religious festivals women took conspicuous parts, and with the festivals we may put the theatre, because Athenian women formed a part of the audience, as is admitted in the last edition of Haigh's great work.

This paper deals with issues of ethnic representation; it aims at highlighting how Roman authors tend to portray the Etruscans as ‘others’, whose cultural models deeply differ from those proposed by Rome. Several studies, conducted from different disciplinary and methodological positions, have highlighted the existence, in the Greek world, of complex representations of ‘other peoples’, representations that served political, cultural, and economic purposes. Whether the study of alterity is to be set in the context of a Greek response to the Persian wars (as P. Cartledge and others have pointed out, the creation of the barbarian seems to be primarily a Greek ideology opposing the Greeks to all other peoples), or not, it seems clear from scholarly studies that the Romans often drew upon and reworked Greek characterizations, and created specific representations of other peoples. Latin literature, which (as T. N. Habinek has noted), served the interests of Roman power, abounds with examples of ethnographic and literary descriptions of foreign peoples consciously aimed at defining and marginalizing ‘the other’ in relation to Roman founding cultural values, and functional to evolving Roman interests. Outstanding examples are Caesar's Commentarii and Tacitus' ideological and idealized representation of the Germans as an uncorrupted, warlike people in the Germania. In several cases there is evidence of layering in the representation of foreign peoples, since Roman authors often re-craft Greek representations: thus, the biased Roman portrayal of the Near East or of the Sardinians largely draws on Greek representations; in portraying the Samnites, Latin authors reshaped elements already elaborated by the Tarentines.

The past sleeps lightly at Olympia. Recall the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film, Olympia. In a misty landscape of ruined buildings, broken columns, and weeds run wild, a Greek temple stands amid the wreckage. Statues appear and then waken to life; a naked athlete throws a discus, another a javelin – this heads towards a bowl of fire. Another naked youth lights the Olympic torch and holds it high. It is carried from hand to hand in a relay and then reaches the stadium in Berlin, home of the 1936 Olympic Games, which the film is meant to celebrate. Adolf Hitler salutes the spectators, 100,000 strong.