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.

Aeneid 2 is for the most part a book of action, telling the whole story of the rapid series of events that led to Troy's final destruction. Aeneas' narrative of these events is fast-paced, almost breathless; it has the flavour and emotional intensity of an eye-witness account rather than a retelling of a past experience. But it is noteworthy that Aeneas begins the story very slowly, by recounting in detail an exchange of speeches between Laocoon and Sinon (40—198). A quick summary of Trojan reactions to the horse might have sufficed for Aeneas' purposes. Virgil's model, Demodokos' song in Homer's Odyssey, treats the debate over the Trojan horse by simply summarizing the three positions taken (Od. 8. 499—513). When Odysseus asked the bard Demodokos to sing the story of the wooden horse (487 ff.), there is no suggestion, either in the wording of Odysseus' request or in the summary of Demodokos' response, of a pivotal debate between Laocoon and Sinon; in Homer's version of the story the major debate was internal to the Trojans and took place after the wooden horse was brought into the city. Why did Virgil have Aeneas linger over the exact words of Laocoön and Sinon? What, beyond a report of causes and events, is suggested by the speeches of Laocoön and Sinon? It would seem that the personalities and oratorical styles of these two men, not just their viewpoints in debate or their roles in the story, are important for the reader to understand.

It is a question worth the asking, at what season in his life a man comes to the writing of history, with what equipment for the task, and under what impulsion. Cornelius Tacitus did not discover his vocation until he had passed the age of forty. Was that late or early? Late, in the opinion of some scholars, late and almost anomalous. Gaston Boissier avowed his surprise on the first page of his Tacite, a book published just over fifty years ago, and held in merited esteem for its combination of elegance and judgement. And, more recently (in 1947), Ernst Kornemann, the last survivor of that notable company, the pupils of Theodor Mommsen, affirmed it as an axiom that Tacitus came late to history.

When we compare Virgil's Georgics with Varro's textbook of farming, we find that what is cast in the form of a book of instruction in the prose work is transformed into a series of pictures in the Georgics. Virgil is not content with teaching his readers how to farm, he also sets before their eyes a panorama of country life. An example of this procedure is provided by the lines on animal husbandry found in Book iii. Following the framework of Varro, by leaving out certain of Varro's categories, Virgil transforms a schematic textbook arrangement into a life story, and tells this life story with the sympathy of a poet.

In 87–86 BCE, the Roman army under L. Cornelius Sulla invaded Attica and, after a long siege, sacked Athens and the Piraeus. In both ancient and modern eyes, Sulla's sack has been seen as a key event, which marked not only the end of Athenian independence but also the beginning of an irreversible decline for its port, the Piraeus, in antiquity. Ancient literary testimonies in the decades following the Sullan sack portray the Piraeus as an urban wasteland, crammed with ruins but devoid of life. Strabo, writing in the Augustan age, notes that the town of his time endured, but had shrunk between the two harbours (the Kantharos and Zea); Pausanias, writing later in the second century CE, mentions a number of monuments but pays more attention to the old, ‘Classical’, town than to the contemporary ‘Roman’ Piraeus. Rescue excavations in the last few decades have provided corroboration for Strabo's remark. Building remains dating to the Classical period (mainly the fourth century BCE) extend over a larger area than those of Roman date, which tend to concentrate on the isthmus between the Kantharos and Zea harbours. Nevertheless, more recent finds and a reconsideration of the available archaeological evidence has shown that settlement clustering around the main harbour did not result from the destruction of the port by Sulla but had started in Hellenistic times and was intensified in the Roman period.

Before drama ever appeared in Rome, comedy in Greece had passed to its final stage of evolution; and it was this form of comedy—New Comedy—which was to provide the stimulus for Roman Comedy. It is necessary, therefore, very briefly to describe the various stages of Greek Comedy, especially New Comedy, before passing on to Plautus. This will raise at least two important issues: (i) the reason for Plautus' choice of New Comedy for his models, and (ii) his treatment of the originals.

The relationship between Constantine and the ancient cults of Roman civilization remains one of the most important and discussed features of late antique history. It is a relationship which has defied those who see in his victory over Maxentius a sudden, monolithic shift in the religious consciousness of the ancient world, because the sources stubbornly refuse to yield to such a tidy interpretation. In this paper I review a body of evidence that reveals Constantine to be a flesh-and-blood emperor, confronting the difficulties of transition and reining in his own passions, sometimes for narrow political reasons and sometimes for what might be taken as statesmanship. What follows is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It is an attempt to gauge the complexity of some of Constantine's problems and assess his skills in dealing with them.

Before Vespasian returned to Rome to take up the reins of imperial government, he reportedly had a vision in the Serapeum of Alexandria and, as the New Serapis, healed two men. These wonders came to define Vespasian's time in Egypt and yet, for modern readers, their prominence in the story of the emperor's rise to power creates an apparent inconsistency. The same man who on his deathbed joked about his impending divinization also apparently played the part of a god at the beginning of his reign. Such contradictions are to be expected in the colourful accounts of emperors' lives, but this particular one invites further investigation because of its significance to the historical development of the conception of the emperor's divinity. Through detailed consideration of the prospects for reception of these wonders both during and after the Flavian dynasty, this article seeks to demonstrate the predominance of Domitianic influence on the story of Vespasian's wonders. Domitian's reign saw a new emphasis on the living emperor's divinity, which diminished again under Trajan. Nevertheless, wonders were a means through which the charisma of the emperor was manifested in Flavian Rome and later.

The belief in a golden age is not confined to any one age or civilization. In every civilized community there tends to grow up a nostalgia for the simpler life of bygone days; and other races besides the Greeks (particularly the Chinese) have shown the same desire to exalt their origins and ancestry; But there are peculiar factors which for the Greeks make this belief more real. Their civilization was, they believed, a new one without a forerunner; immediately previous to it lay the period of barbarity in which the idealized naturalism of the age of Cronos was supposed to have flourished. At the same time the subconscious memory of the glories of the Aegean civilization and, perhaps, of the peaceful civilizations such as that of the Indus valley, furnished material to embellish the legend of the Golden Age.

The scope of this article is somewhat diffuse, and a brief mention of the points which are discussed in it will help to make the oudine more clear. First I shall recapitulate the main characteristics of the Golden Age as it is portrayed in classical literature; next I shall discuss the significant fact that it is only used by some writers, while others adhere to the competing theory of ascendant evolution. Then I shall attempt to settle the position, first of the writings of Lucretius, secondly of the Prometheus legend with reference to these competing theories of degeneracy and evolution. Finally, after a brief outline of the causes which lead to a belief in a cyclical theory, a comparison will be made between the views of Hesiod (in Works and Days, 109 ff.) and Plato (Politicus, 269 ff.).

In this paper I propose to deal with some difficulties in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, of which some have been noticed before, others I think have not. I am going to propose an unorthodox explanation, not through any love of unorthodoxy, but in the spirit of Oedipus himself, who when faced with a puzzle could not resist following a fact to its logical conclusion. The Sphinx's riddle was not, after all, a very hard one; and Oedipus doubtless grew tired of being praised for ingenuity. My thesis too disclaims that dubious quality. Ingenuity is what many of us have been using all our lives to explain difficulties in this play which may after all be insoluble.

In the Republic (519 E ff.), having finished his account of the education of the philosopher king, and having described the ideal life of pure contemplation in the Simile of the Cave, Plato makes Socrates say:

Then it will be our function as founders, I said, to compel the best natures to undertake the study which we previously declared to be the highest, to observe the good, and to make that ascent we mentioned, and when they have done so and looked their fill, then we must not allow them that freedom which they now possess.

Saul bellow's book Mr. Sammler's Planet documents contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster of homo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.

‘M. Tvllivs … etiam in hoc opere [i.e. philosophia] Platonis aemulus exstitit.’ There is a fallacy underlying Quintilian's judgement here—he is not by any means at his best in this famous chapter—which is interesting in that, with very different consequences, it also underlies the almost total neglect of Cicero's philosophical works prevalent in this country in our own day. (That Cicero's philosophical works were once popular everyone knows; but many would, I fancy, be surprised to learn how much serious and scholarly attention they are still receiving in America, France, and Germany.) The fallacy which is the common basis of Quintilian's approbation and our neglect is the belief, explicit or implicit in much modern criticism, that Roman literature is to be assessed by comparison, man for man and genre for genre, with Greek. Some such comparisons can be made, and with profit for those who do not prejudge the issue of the investigation and, since the Roman writers often seem deliberately to invite such comparisons, for those who are equipped with the necessary understanding of what ‘imitation’ means in the context of ancient literature. But these comparisons are silly and fruitless when conducted with the kind of naïveté which can see in Cicero's philosophical writings only a ‘poor man's Plato’. To compare Cicero and Plato in this field is to compare incomparables. This becomes clear if we forget our presuppositions and ask, as I propose to do, (1) what was Cicero in his philosophical writings trying to do and was it worth doing, and (2) how did he set about his task, and were his methods the right ones ? Only then can we attempt, as I shall do briefly in concluding, an estimate of his achievement.

When Xerxes was marching through Asia to invade Greece, says Herodotus, he had to pass through the town of Kallatebos, not far from the crossing of the river Maeander. At this place (where, by the way, men make their living by preparing honey from tamarisk and wheatmeal) the king saw by the roadside a magnificent plane-tree, which on account of its beauty he presented with golden ornaments, and arranged that a man should stay there as its keeper or guardian for ever after. He then proceeded to Sardis.

The story became famous, and later centuries thought it rather silly. Aelian in particular declares that Xerxes, who ‘thought nothing of the works of God's hands, but must go and build himself newfangled roads and unusual ship-canals’—so he sneers at the eminent engineering feats of the Hellespont Bridge and the Athos Canal—made himself ridiculous (γɛλoīoς) by falling in love with a plane-tree, and decking it with golden necklets and bangles, and setting a guard over it, as he might set a slave to keep an eye on his harem. ‘What good did it all do the tree?’ Aelian rhetorically asks. ‘The apposititious ornament nothing suiting with it, hung there in vain… For to the beauty of a tree are requisite fair branches, leaves thick, a body strong, roots deep,… wideness of shadow, the successive seasons of the year, the nourishment of water by channels and rain.’ The criticism is rational. But Aelian, who though he wrote in Greek is recorded never to have left his native Italy, could hardly appreciate the feelings of admiration and delight, even of religious awe, shown by the dwellers on the arid plateaux of Asia for large and shady trees, feelings shared by the Greeks, and by any modern traveller in Greece who on a dusty summer's day has spied far-off a whitewashed chapel with trees at hand, and known that there he would also find a spring of cold dear water and rest from the road.

Modern scholarship has devoted much time and ingenuity to the problem of the sources from which the Greek tragic poets drew the plots of their plays. It has been commonly assumed that somewhere in that largely unknown area of literature which lies between Homer and the fifth century b.c. most legends had already crystallized into more or less the shape in which we know them from drama; and that the Attic playwrights (with the possible exception of Euripides) made little more than minor alterations in tales already familiar to their audience. But there is little evidence to support this assumption, either in the scanty remains of Cyclic epic and choral lyric, or in the occasional remarks on the subject by ancient commentators. In this article I attempt to illustrate by a single example a different point of view: the belief that in dealing with this aspect of tragedy we should put the same emphasis on the creative artistry of the dramatists themselves which it has received from Kitto and others in discussing other sides of their work; and that where (as in most cases) the source of their version is unknown, the very fact that it is moulded to suit a dramatic purpose should lead us to give the author, rather than a hypothetical and perhaps imaginary tradition, the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps no Roman, except Julius Caesar, attracted the interest of ancient writers who specialized in religious affairs as much as Numa. His reign was considered to have been a period of unbroken peace, when the civilizing influences of religious laws tempered the savagery of the Romulean era. The Romans ascribed to Numa the organization of much of their state ritual, although they did admit that some of it was derived from the Etruscans and the Greeks. Numa's successor, Tullus Hostilius, failed to observe his instructions relating to the worship of Jupiter Elicius, a god usually associated by the ancients with lightning, to whom Numa had dedicated an altar on the Aventine. The result was that Tullus met his death when a thunderbolt struck his house. In contrast, Ancus Marcius, traditionally Numa's grandson, regarded Numa as his model and caused the instructions for state ritual contained in Numa's Commentarii to be transcribed on to tablets and displayed in the Forum. This king had a successful reign. Such is the spirit of those whose accounts of the Roman kings are still extant, all writers who lived during the late Republic and early Empire. It is clear from the way in which they make Numa the author of complete institutions which could not have received their final form until later times, that every change and every new practice in religious performance needed at least to conform in appearance to the doctrines of Numa. Fondness for apposite etymology led some to associate his very name with the Greek νόμος, a law.

Our sources present us with three different versions of Themistocles' death. The purpose of this article is to examine these different versions, explain how and why they developed in the form they did, and show which version is most likely to be correct.

In his sprightly volume The Homeric Odyssey (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955; originally the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), Professor Denys Page favoured the public with what he terms (p. 149) a few points of interest from his notes on the vocabularies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listing words and phrases found in the Iliad but rarely or never in the Odyssey, and vice versa, he concludes (p. 157) ‘that the two poems were composed and transmitted in separate regions of Hellas’.

On 14 December 1968 the following report from New York appeared on the front page of the Guardian: ‘An American-Italian team of archaeologists has found the long-lost site of Sybaris, known throughout the ancient world for its wealth and the luxurious life of its citizens. The discovery of the city was announced last night at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. F. G. Rainey, director of the University's museum, and Professor Giuseppe Foti, superintendent of antiquities at Calabria, said that the city, which disappeared around 510 B.c. after a civil war, had been found “beyond reasonable doubt”…’ When the excavation of Sybaris starts in earnest, it is expected to produce material of the first importance for the study of Greek colonial history in the archaic period. In view of the general interest that the excavation will arouse, it is worth summarizing what is known about Sybaris, to explain both the considerable efforts that have been made to find the site of the city, and the potential importance of its discovery.