We were interested to read Dr. Bertha Tilly's recent article in Greeceand Rome. Such studies do much to infuse life into our ‘dead’ language, and help not only to bring reality to the student and throw light on Latin literature but to add interest to modern travel. We should like to add some further points on Terracina, which we recently visited. It provides a fascinating remnant of classical times, almost unaltered until this century, when the first truly successful draining of the Pomptine marshes took place.

This paper is concerned with some of the ‘dark’ aspects of the lives of Athenian women of the Archaic and Classical periods. Through a review of images of women with light in hand and of female activities that were illuminated by lamps and torches, the amount and significance of women's activities which required lighting devices may be traced. These may have taken place in private, inside the oikos – for which our knowledge is limited – or outside the oikos, where women enjoyed a restricted participation in certain socio-religious activities. The kind of females under discussion range from ‘respectable’ wives and daughters of Athenian citizens to hetairai, the professional female entertainers. On the basis of literary and iconographical evidence, I shall seek to identify the nature and timing of those female activities, and to assess whether the type of lighting device chosen for a particular action may possibly reveal other aspects of the life of Athenian women, notably age or social status.

On 19 December 2011, the death was announced of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. He was succeeded in power by his third son, Kim Jong-un. The BBC has called it a ‘choreographed Stalinist-style succession’ but, for students of the classical world, there is an uncanny resemblance to the death of Augustus in AD 14 and the accession of his adopted son and heir, Tiberius. A death is announced; there are allegations that it occurred earlier than is officially acknowledged, with announcement postponed so that all can be put in order for a smooth transfer of power. News of the death is received with public displays of grief, while the new autocrat is greeted with a pledge or oath of loyalty. The first necessity is to take control of the military, and military orders are issued by the successor before any formal power is conferred. There are omens. The state calls for its new leader to accept power. Money or food is distributed in the name of the head of state recently deceased. Much is made of coincidences (the date on which Augustus assumed the principate and died; the date on which Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un respectively became supreme commander). When it comes to the formal transfer of power, the written will of the dead leader is cited to legitimate his successor.

In the opening chapter of his Annals Tacitus gives us a potted history of Rome to the point at which his work begins. First, there were kings; then, with Lucius Junius Brutus, came liberty and the consulship (or, as we would say, the Republic); from time to time there were periods of one-man rule, most of them short-lived; and finally there was Augustus, who found the whole state exhausted by civil strife and therefore took it all into his own control and began what we call the Principate.

The role divination played in allocating, maintaining, and justifying the authority of the senatorial élite in the Republic has been well established. Attention has also been paid to the use made of unofficial forms of divination by ambitious members of the ruling élite in the later Republic, who sought (often successfully) to make themselves pre-eminent before their peers by claiming personal divine attention. What has received less attention in discussions of prophecy and authority is the role the general population of non-élites played in this ideological system which served the interests of the powerful rich, either collectively or individually, at the expense of the less powerful poor. The following seeks to begin to correct this oversight, as discussion of this factor is urgently needed if the observations just identified are to be considered sound. This is simply because authority, the expected reward of élite claims of divine favouritism, can be neither universally shared nor coerced. It must be willingly granted to an individual or segment of society by an authority-lacking majority. Where divination is concerned, the identification of an occurrence as a ‘real' divine message is subjective, and general concession to accept one person's (or one group's) claims about divination as true is a concession of real authority. In short, if élite claims of divine favouritism were made to impress the general population, the general population had to be impressed for the claims to be at all meaningful.

Few places in the world can possess more historical associations than the small stretch of country that reaches from Naples west-ward to the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is known as the ‘Campi Flegrei’, ‘the Burning Fields’, on account of the volcanic activity that has characterized it from the earliest times, and which the recent eruption of Vesuvius shows to be still a formidable feature of the neighbour-hood. In a space of some fifty square miles it contains names which have become the commonplaces of history and legend—Baia, Cuma, Pozzuoli, Averno—places associated for ever with a thousand famous and infamous men—Nero, Ovid, St. Paul, Hannibal, Augustus, Gregory the Great, Totila, Petrarch, Garibaldi. But for many it will be best remembered and most eagerly studied as the scene of the sixth book of the Aeneid; for the story of the Trojan hero's descent to the regions of the dead, while it is one of the greatest pieces of imaginative writing in existence, has a solid foundation in reality. Not only its atmosphere but also its topography can be recaptured to this day in the ‘Campi Flegrei’ a few miles from Naples.

That Virgil was well acquainted with this district is beyond doubt, even without the evidence of the sixth book of the Aeneid. The Georgics were written at Naples; and the poet, as friend and admirer of Augustus, must have spent many days among the emperor’s favourite haunts, examinig the famous landmarks and whatching the progress of the great engineering programmes that were being carried out in the Gulf of Pozzuoli.

A generally recognized achievement of Horace is his working into Latin lyric poetry the moral teachings of Greek philosophy. But it is still worth while to ask how deeply he absorbed, and how significantly he shaped them. This question demands not a sweeping answer based on a mere set of references, but patient examination of individual odes; for as a poet, Horace naturally couches his thought in poems, which are, as it happens, highly elaborate works of art. This paper takes two pieces for such consideration and suggests that the coherence of their argument and the particulars of their diction may be better appreciated if they are read in relation to Epicurean ethics. My method is tentative and cumulative: there is no reason to presuppose the justice of such a reading, and it is justified only if it illumines the whole poem in detail (as it surely does 3.29). The purpose of this paper, then, is not to attach a scholastic label to Odes 1.20 and 2.3, but to bring out their meaning and coherence.

On a day without precise date some time in Judaea in the first century of the common era, an interview of exceptional historical importance took place between a representative of Roman power and a Jewish prophet. What passed between them has left an indelible imprint on history, although religious believers, historians, and theologians have struggled for almost two thousand years to comprehend the legacy. The Roman was Titus Flavius Vespasianus, general of a vast army on its way to Jerusalem, and the Jewish prophet, priest and pharisee was Yosef ben Matthityahu.

The year was AD 67. In the summer of the previous year, the priests of the great temple of the Jewish God in Jerusalem had suspended the sacrifices which had been held twice a day for more than two generations in honour of the emperors of Rome. The suspension marked the formal beginning of a disastrous revolt mounted by the Jews against the empire of Rome in the East. Josephus had been appointed as a commander as soon as the revolt broke out and he had been sent to Galilee, some 50 miles north of Jerusalem, to organize resistance there. After initial success, he had been besieged by Roman forces at Jotapata, 10 miles from Nazareth. And when it became clear to the rebels that they were likely to fall into Roman hands he alleges that they carried out an elaborate mass-suicide, killing their comrades, starting at the lowest levels in the command and working up.

The anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus (25.1) introduces the emperor C. Julius Verus Maximinus (235–8 CE) for the first time as ‘Maximinus Thrax’. This is now a generally acceptable name for the emperor, despite the fact that it appears only once, here in the fourth century. So iconic is this geographical label, however, that the curious treatment of his origins by the most detailed sources, Herodian and the Historia Augusta, can be obscured. While both state that his birthplace was Thrace, they also point out that his origins were racially mixed. Herodian, a contemporary historian, calls Maximinus the son of mixobarbaroi, ‘mixed-barbarians’; a century and a half later, the Historia Augusta, in a long, largely fanciful biography, calls him a semibarbarus, a ‘half-barbarian’. His brief rule was therefore remembered as inaugurating a precedent that would come to plague the empire for decades: an emperor of dubious, even mongrel origins, elected by the troops, would bring cruelty and chaos to the state. This article considers how the Historia Augusta in particular used racial terms to highlight the difference between the legitimate rule of the senate and the illegitimate subversion of its authority by a half-barbarian from the periphery of the empire. This racial profile was fully formed only in the fourth century and is reflected in a range of other sources, demonstrating that contemporary political concerns brought to the fore debates on the dangers of racial mixing.

Europa was the daughter of Phoinix or Agenor, king of Phoenice, and Telephassa; her brother was Cadmos. Zeus came in the form of a bull and carried her away to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos, also Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon the elder. Afterwards she married Asterios (or Asterion), who reared her children.

The historical landscape of the Greeks was bounded to the north by the Scythians, a fierce race renowned for milking mares (Hesiod Fr. 55 Rzach), for drinking wine without water (Hdt. vi. 84; Athenaeus 427 a–c), and for living not in fixed houses but in house-wagons, the Mongol yurt (Aeschylus, Prom. Vinct. 709 sq.; Hdt. iv. 46). Plato mentions them along with the Thracians as representatives of those in whom the spirited part of the soul predominates, meaning that they acted with indomitable energy but without their actions being guided by reason (Rep. 435b). The Athenians, quick to espy anyone's good points, employed them as policemen (Aristoph. Thesm. 1017, Lys. 451).

To collect something or another, stamps, coins or butterflies, is a universal pastime, and it needs no explanation or excuse save the satisfaction which it brings. One may play the same game in another way, by collecting information; but the facts which one accumulates must be remote from one's duty and avocation. An old scholar taught me the game more than fifty years ago and I have never stopped playing it; it is such an easy and so engrossing a game. You choose some subject or other which takes your fancy; you buy a note-book and label it with the title of your theme; and you keep jotting down therein whatsoever bears upon the subject, as it comes your way, in all your reading, observation and reflection. I have had many such note-books, and some I have soon grown tired of; but others have lasted long and served me well. One of these is called De Ludis Antiquorum; it is grown old and shabby, for I played with it during many years. Your subject opens out wonderfully as time goes on; it tempts you into by-ways, it carries you afield; if you play the game aright it never comes to an end. It grows in interest continually, for things are interesting only in so far as they relate themselves to other things; only then can you put two and two together and tell stories about them. Such is science itself and such is all the knowledge that interests mankind.

The present paper is an attempt to show the far-reaching effect on history of a single economic factor, namely, the gold supply.

Judges, and tabloid newspapers, have a habit of saying that violent criminals ‘behaved like animals’. After all those years of David Attenborough they ought to know better: very few other species behave as badly as humans. But they are invoking the ancient belief that animals have neither reason nor justice. Consequently, ‘animal passion’ is fierce and overpowering. Animals are beasts. They are savage and unsocial. They cannot control their passions by reason and are unrestrained by respect for others, by a sense of fairness or by social order.

Optimates and Populares, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Whigs and Tories, Cowboys and Indians: the neat antitheses polarize views and enlist sympathies. Nor are they all misleading. What of ‘Julians and Claudians’? These labels were invented to distinguish ‘factions’ or ‘parties’ within the family of Augustus; the issue between them was the succession and the struggle continued until the end of the principate of Augustus' heir Tiberius. Thus comprehensible order is brought to the confused mass of information and opinion that the sources offer us. Moreover, the labels have a respectable pedigree in modern writing. They are constantly employed by F. B. Marsh in his authoritative work and survive as valid and useful in articles more recently published; where historians have trodden so boldly literary critics have not hesitated to follow. My purpose, at the cost of destroying neat and treasured theory, is to show that these terms are inapplicable to the two groups to which they have been applied, and therefore misleading. They are an impediment to serious inquiry into. complex and changing situations.

Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.

‘A prodigious memory, a facile talent for versification, a cheerful and kindly optimism, and an avoidance of all that was serious or profound or disquieting’ – so Professor Robert Browning not unjustly sums up the poetic character of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. He was a professor of Latin, and it shows in his work. That is not surprising, since it was on his professional and professorial skill as teacher and rhetorician that his whole career was founded. It was by displaying proficiency in Latin Prose and Verse Composition that he rose to provincial governorships and to the consulate, and to the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian. It is to this last circumstance that we owe his best poem, the Mosella, a celebration of the beauties of the river Moselle. In A.d. 367 the Imperial court had been established at Trier in Gaul; and Ausonius was required to accompany the Emperor Valentinian, with his pupil, on his German campaigns. These, continuing a policy inaugurated by Valentinian's predecessors, were directed towards the consolidation of a Roman presence on the German bank of the Rhine, with the ultimate object of incorporating the Germans in the Empire and setting up a bulwark against further barbarian encroachments. It is against this political and military background that the Mosella must be read. It was clearly intended as propaganda. ‘The purpose of the poem was to inspire the Gauls with confidence in the renewed peace and security.’ They stood in need of such reassurance, for the recent past in Gaul had been far from secure.