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.

Since antiquity the Aeneas—Dido episode has generally been recognized as the most powerful and memorable part of the Aeneid. During the past several decades there has been a considerable amount of argument as to whether it shows Aeneas' mission in a favourable or unfavourable light. Yet this problem has not been studied systematically. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate systematically that Vergil deliberately protrays Aeneas' mission as brutal and destructive.

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 past thirty years have brought us much closer to the meaning of many puzzling terms employed by Aristotle in the Poetics. But there are still many whose meaning may never be established with any certainty, partly because of inconsistencies or deficiencies in the argument and partly because of our own ignorance of the dramatic and critical terminology of the fourth century. For example, it is reasonable to assume that the terms used by Aristotle to describe his three μ⋯ρη of tragedy—пεριп⋯τεια, ⋯ναγνώρισις, and п⋯θος—were all part of the technical vocabulary of the contemporary theatre, and that if only we were familiar with that vocabulary, we should not find Aristotle's vagueness and carelessness in explanation such a hindrance to understanding.

Where ought we to begin the story of the Trojan War? If we follow Homer, we shall begin with Paris and his mad folly or ate in abducting Helen (Iliad 24.28; cf. 3.100 and 6.356, and contrast 5.62–64 and 22.115–16). But the rape of Helen was a direct consequence of Paris awarding the prize for outstanding beauty to Aphrodite, when, while tending animals on Mount Ida, the prince was approached by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite and required to adjudicate between their conflicting claims to be thought the fairest.

(a) Origin and Development. The public games at Rome had their origin in religion. Thus the earliest games of which we have any account, those distinguished for the rape of the Sabine women, were in honour of the god Consus, and another very ancient festival, the Equirria, was in honour of Mars. That something of their religious character was felt even in the last days of the Republic is shown by a passage of Cicero: ‘An, si ludius consistit aut tibicen repente conticuit … aut si aedilis verbo aut simpulo aberravit, ludi sunt non rite facti?’ For Roman religion was marked by a love of formality and ritual: if, therefore, the slightest hitch occurred in the ceremonial procedure, the games were regarded as having failed to satisfy the gods, and it was necessary to start them afresh. So we meet in Livy such notices as ludi in unum diem or in biduum instaurati: sometimes the second performance was no more successful than the first, in which case we find ludi ter, quater, or even septies instaurati. Claudius, suspecting that these hitches were occasionally manufactured in order that the games might be prolonged, decreed that at the second performance chariotand horse-races should be finished in one day.

There are seventy-four catalogued examples of figured art painted on Pompeian façades, almost all of a religious or talismanic nature. This street art appeared near compital altars and entrances to shops and houses, and contributed to a vibrant street aesthetic. Exterior figured paintings have not received a great deal of scholarly attention, however, with studies tending to focus on iconography rather than considering how street art may have functioned in its original setting. The potential value of painted façades as evidence for religious, commercial, and civic values, for which there are scant literary sources, has consequently been overlooked.

This article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the particularities of specific tablets or groups of tablets. This article argues that, if human and object agency are taken into account, it is possible to explain both the discontinuities in the history of curse tablets and also the shape of their thousand-year history. Curse tablets emerge as a technology the affordances of which allowed it to be put to many uses in many different social locations formed by the complex and shifting cultural contours of antiquity.

The concept of intermediality arose in the theoretical discourse about the relations between different systems or products of meaning, such as the relations between music and art, or image and text. The word gained currency in the 1980s in German- and French-language studies of theatre performance, and in scholarship on opera, film, and music, in order to capture the notion of the interconnections between different art forms. For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art. The term has entered the field of classics especially via the study of the relations between the narrative and inscriptional modes in literary epigram.

This article is about a young man of whom we know almost nothing. He never said or did anything that was recorded, we do not know for certain what he looked like, and his personality is entirely lost to us. He was killed at the age of seventeen, but even that event is passed over in fleeting comment. However, the very mention of his demise tells us something: that despite our almost total ignorance about the youth himself he was not without some importance. He was at least in name a king, though it can hardly be said that he ever ruled. Yet his birth and death were equally planned, and from his birth onwards he was someone who figured in the plans and dreams of mighty people. Those plans and dreams shifted with the politics of the day, and he was always a pawn on the chessboard of life. What follows here examines how the personalities of the great people around him and their changing fortunes governed how he was seen, and the uses to which he was put.

It is a commonplace that Roman religion was less concerned with the spiritual well-being than with the political success of the nobiles. The gods were the symbols and guarantors of varying, aspects of Roman power; keeping them content was of paramount importance, and it was the nobiles who were in general credited with the ability to ensure the continuation of this state of affairs.

In spite of the high reputation which Solon enjoyed in ancient times as a conciliator, the record shows the collapse of his plans for social stability in his own lifetime. This collapse was perhaps caused by events beyond his control or influence, and if it was social and economic change in Attica subsequent to his reforms that brought about a new revolutionary situation, and opened the way for the tyranny, the question is, What changes of such a nature took place in this period? In this connexion it would be well to review very briefly what evidence we have about Peisistratos' following in Attica.

The casual reader, on seeing these lines, might be forgiven for the thought that Lord Byron had the crossword puzzle in mind when he wrote them. In an uncertain world nothing is more certain than that this was not the case. Byron died in 1824. The crossword puzzle was born, at least in its popular modern shape, almost precisely a century later. Its history begins suddenly. Neither in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1921, nor in the twelfth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1922, does the crossword appear at all. But from the year 1923 references to it become increasingly frequent. In 1924 a popular work entitled The Crossword Puzzle Book was published. In 1925 there was a reference to crosswords in Punch. In 1926 the thirteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica had a short article on it. In 1928 the crossword puzzle was mentioned in Galsworthy's Swan Song. From that time every good standard dictionary or work of reference has included it. These facts document its emergence as a literary phenomenon in Great Britain. The history of the crossword in the United States is very similar, except that it would appear to have achieved stardom in the popular firmament a few months earlier in that country than in this.

Those of us who grope around in the mists of classical antiquity often come upon objects that remind us of the world we live in. There are analogies, always dangerous. There are many of the same words, or so it seems: arts, science, rhetoric, thesis, history, encyclopaedia. But they do not mean what we are used to. There are even historical continuities, but these also tend to be illusory.

In the twentieth century the content of historiography has been expanded to envelop a very broad range of studies. But in a popular sense History retains familiar associations. Although theoretically its subject-matter can be as wide as the range of human activities and the life of all God's creatures, popular history deals mainly with the past of ruling groups: the weak are historically insignificant and touch upon History only by their contact with the great. The powerful make History: the weak endure and illustrate it. History appears as a retrospect on human activities organized around the theme of power—its origin, use, misuse, and consequences.

Although most authorities now agree in identifying Priam's Troy with level VIIa at Hissarlik, arguments are still advanced from time to time for reverting to the earlier identification with VI [h?]. Since it is accepted that VI was destroyed by an earthquake and not (or not primarily) by armed force, this means proposing theories to account for the discrepancy with Greek tradition. Either the Greeks never took Troy at all, and simply invented the legend that they did—in which case there seems little point in trying to identify Priam's Troy; or else the earthquake is symbolized by the Wooden Horse, under cover of which the Greeks finally entered Troy.

On the coast of southern Italy, just before the coastline changes its direction from south-west to south-east, there was in ancient times a place where the high mountain range stood back a little, and in front of these mountains a series of semicircular terraces formed a kind of giant's amphitheatre looking out to sea on to the Gulf of Tarentum. At this spot two rivers flowed close together into the sea; their alluvial deposit had built up a small fertile plain, and the route taken by the larger of them down from the mountains pointed to a short cut to the sea on the other side, the Etruscan Sea. Here, in the latter half of the eighth century b.c., a band of settlers from Achaea built a town between the two rivers, which they named, as colonists tend to do, after a river and a spring in their home-land: the larger river they called Krathis, ‘the Mixer’, and the smaller Sybaris, ‘the Gusher’. The newly-built town took its name from the Sybaris. Both these rivers are there to-day; the Krathis is still called the Crati, and the Sybaris, which now flows into the Krathis, is called Coscile.