Historians' judgements about the evidential value of anecdotes have oscillated over the past decades. In the early part of this century authors of German textbooks on historical method warned students against using anecdotes on the grounds that their form was not fixed and their contents fluctuated since the narrators exercised their imaginations to improve stories with each telling. J. Vansina, an anthropologist studying the value of oral traditions for reconstructing African history, concluded in his more recent work that the anecdote is among the least reliable types of oral tradition. Nevertheless, recent scholarly works on Roman imperial history have utilized anecdotes for the sorts of social, economic, and administrative details which the available political narratives ignore. No systematic analysis has been undertaken to justify this use. I shall attempt to fill the gap by asking three basic questions: in what social contexts were anecdotes generated and transmitted; what changes in content were likely to occur during transmission; and what are the implications for the use of anecdotes as historical evidence?

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.

Euripides' Medea has penetrated to parts of modernity most mythical figures have not reached. Since she first rolled off the printing presses half a millennium ago, she has inspired hundreds of performances, plays, paintings, and operas. Medea has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West, and can today command huge audiences in the commercial theatre. Yet in Britain, at least, her popularity on the stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Medea has transcended history partly because she enacts a primal terror universal to human beings: that the motherfigure should intentionally destroy her own children. Yet this dimension of the ancient tragedy was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances. On the British stage it was not until 1907 that Euripides' Medea was performed, without alteration, in English translation.

On his recent retirement from the chair of classical archaeology in Cambridge University, Anthony Snodgrass reflected on the state of the subject, wondering whether a paradigm shift has occurred. Snodgrass assesses various matters, including, for our purposes, how archaeological approaches to ancient literary sources have changed. His comments deserve quotation in full:

…Classical archaeology is often stigmatized, by its many critics, as being ‘text-driven’ … [in] that the subject takes its orientation from, and adapts its whole narrative to, the lead given by the literary sources. Thus the archaeology of Roman Britain has been built around Tacitus' narrative of conquest; the study of Greek art around the text of the Elder Pliny; the archaeology of fifth-century Athens around the narratives supplied by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; that of Republican Rome similarly around those of Livy and Diodorus; that of Sicily again around Thucydides; and most notoriously, that of Aegean prehistory and protohistory around Homer…. But there is a deeper level still. Traditional Classical archaeology is stated…to have directed its energies at those aspects of the ancient world on which the written sources, taken as a whole, throw light. Thus, on urban but not on rural life; on public and civic, but not on domestic activity; on periods seen as historically important, but not on the obscurer ones; on the permanent physical manifestations of religion, but not on the temporary ones – sacrifice, patterns of dedication, ritual meals, pilgrimage; on the artefacts interred in burials, but not on burial itself; on the historically prominent states – in Greece, Athens and Sparta – but not on what has recently been called ‘the Third Greece’…

The political unification of the Mediterranean world in the last epoch of the Roman Republic doubtless provided the stimulus for the composition of world histories. One of these is the only universal history written in Latin, under the title Historiae Philippicae, by Pompeius Trogus in the time of Augustus. The original work is lost, but we have an Epitoma produced around the year A.D. 200 by Iustinus. The prologi, which contain summaries of the original work, have been preserved, but there is no indication of authorship.

Helen Waddell, in her charming Medieval Latin Lyrics, surely a book which inspired many a young person, trained in the classics, to become a ‘convert’ to the middle ages, described the collection of poems known as the Appendix Virgiliana, as coming ‘down through the Middle Ages bobbing at a painter's end in the mighty wash of the Aeneid’. This same description can, I think, be prettily applied to the Virgil scholia, the humble and often nameless attempts of innumerable scholars to elucidate the master's poems; notes and glosses sometimes wise and often banal, which exist, not like other literature as an end in themselves, but solely as a means towards a better understanding of Virgil.

My title is an ambitious one, and defines a field which is more suitable for a book than for a single lecture, and which has the added disadvantage that it crosses the boundaries between a number of disciplines: history, science, philosophy, and technology. Anyone who chooses such a theme is in danger of being told by those well-versed in the individual disciplines that his knowledge of each of them is inadequate; which may well be true, and is certainly true of me. But cross-disciplinary exploration is in itself a desirable activity; and if a few explorers perish in the process no great harm is done, and others may follow their example more successfully. I should not, however, in saying this, like it to be thought that I am claiming any great novelty for what I shall say to you today. Little of my material is new; all I can hope to do is to suggest to you a particular interpretation of it.

The subject of this article is the appearance in archaic Greek literature of the two basic principles of aristocracy as a form of government—republicanism and noble rule—and how they were upheld, augmented, qualified, idealized, and justified against the alternatives of monarchy and the aspirations of non-nobles either to join or disestablish the nobility as the ruling class. When Greek states emerged from the Dark Ages into the clearer light of history in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c., monarchy had almost everywhere given way to aristocracy. More or less exclusive groups of noble families had learnt, in Aristotle's phrase, ‘to take turns in ruling and being ruled’. The formation of the first republics required no change in the ideological climate of the unquestioning acceptance of the noble monopoly of wealth and privilege which we find in Homer and Hesiod, and similarly no change in this climate was required before republican governments were likely to be challenged. The Homeric nobleman's primary obligation, simply expressed in Hippolochus' parting injunction to his son ‘always to be best’, runs contrary to the principle of equals taking turns in ruling and being ruled, and it would not be surprising if many a Greek aristocrat acquiesced in being equal best only because he lacked the opportunity to make himself single best. And where there were narrow aristocracies which by their exclusiveness made permanent political inferiors of noble families which were the socio-economic peers of the politically privileged, as in Corinth under the Bacchiads or Mytilene under the Penthilids, there was likely to be a greater incentive for an ambitious nobleman to usurp for his own family the corporate constitutional superiority of his privileged rivals; and there might be correspondingly less ideological opposition from noble republicans so far as other politically unprivileged nobles would be constitutionally no less deprived under a tyrant, and might have much to gain in power and wealth from supporting the overthrower of the exclusive regime. The disappearance of Dark Age kingship of the Homeric primus inter pares type is nowhere likely to have generated all at once an ideology which made monarchy an anathema. The Homeric king is not even distinguished from the other nobles by a title which is not also enjoyed by the heads of other great houses, and the lack of traditions about the disappearance of kingship suggests that it was undramatic. On the other hand, because tyranny (in the basic sense of an autocracy established in a state which had been a republic) necessarily meant permanent constitutional inferiority for social equals, acquiescence in even a benign and initially popular autocracy was likely to wane once the possibility of constitutional equality had been discovered (however narrow the ruling circle of equals had been).

It is now time to deal with the much-discussed and much-abused passage of Isidore, Orig. xviii. 60 ff. The account begins: ‘De Tabula. Alea, id est lusus tabulae, inventa a Graecis …; tabula luditur pyrgo, calculis tesserisque.’ After explaining the meaning of pyrgus (dice-box), calculi, and tesserae, Isidore continues with a section entitled De Figuris Aleae, a description of the board; then follow the names of the throws, remarks on the best way of throwing, and a description of the movement of pieces; the account ends with the statement that owing to its immoral tendencies the game was forbidden by law. Now, if this passage is read as a whole and without bias, it is clear that Isidore is giving a methodical account of one particular game, which he calls ‘Alea’ or ‘Tabula’.

Ten years after producing the Persians in 472 BC, in which Greeks and barbarians are locked in conflict with each other, Aeschylus in the Suppliants explores the inextricable intertwining of Greekness and barbarity. While even in the Persians Aeschylus recognizes the ultimate ‘kinship' between Greek and barbarian (the women of Atossa's dream – one wearing Persian robes, the other Dorian – are described as ‘sisters of one race': Aesch. Pers. 180–7), in the Suppliants the poet develops this theme and casts it in sharper relief. In this later play, now generally accepted (despite archaic or archaizing elements) to have been produced in the late 460s, Aeschylus is more actively interested in the ways in which kinship both intersects with and is complicated by cultural polarity, and at the same time undercuts and complicates ‘Otherness'.

In 424 B. C. or thereabouts, an oligarchically-minded critic of the Athenian democracy observed:

And if account is to be taken of more minor matters, it is as a result of their mastery of the sea that the Athenians have mixed with various peoples in different areas and discovered a range of festive practices. In consequence, what is sweet in Sicily, Italy, Cyprus, Egypt, Lydia, Pontus, the Peloponnese or elsewhere has all been brought together in one place because of [sc.the Athenians'] mastery of the sea. (The Old Oligarch, 2.7)

Though critical of the democracy in principle, the Old Oligarch is strikingly positive here in one sense. This is no denunciation of the baleful and corrupting influence of luxuries imported from overseas. Rather, it is an explicit statement of an advantage of sea-power to the Athenians. A minor advantage, on this assessment, but evidently considered worthy of attention. Moreover, here as throughout his work, the Old Oligarch has in mind not a narrow elite, but the Athenian demos at large, the masses. On his analysis, the demos, through its sea-power, rules Athens and its empire effectively and in its own interest, which includes the acquisition and enjoyment of the best produce of the Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds. Under the democracy, it is claimed, the masses enjoy what may be termed luxury-goods.

This paper attempts to set out what is known about the places in the city of Rome used for detention and execution. It is not based on personal inspection of the sites, but only on the ancient evidence and modern discussion, and simply aims to meet the absence of a full up-to-date account in English of the history, location, character and function of these places, viz. the carcer, lautumiae, Saxum Tarpeium, Scalae Gemoniae, and the elusive robur. It does not deal with the wider question of what crimes merited the death penalty or called for its infliction in this or that manner, nor, apart from a few items, is it carried beyond the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

When Xerxes' fleet encountered a violent storm and was shattered against the seaward flank of Mount Pelion, much of the treasure that had been lost in the wreckage was recovered by Scyllias of Scione, the best diver of his day. He and many of his fellow citizens had been impressed into service as the Persian armada came by the Chalcidic peninsula, but he later escaped to the Greeks waiting at Artemisium. By the time of Herodotus, a half-century or so later, it was being claimed that he had dived into the sea at Aphetae and not come up until he had reached Artemisium eight miles away. ‘Many other tales are told of this man, some lies, some true,’ said Herodotus (viii. 8), ‘but in my opinion, he came by boat.’

This article is chiefly concerned with a well-known passage of that extraordinary miscellany, the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, in which the author follows his usual habit of illustrating a thesis by quoting from comedy. In the pages considered here (vi. 267e–270a) he draws his examples from a series of plays now lost—the Plutuses of Cratinus, the Beasts of Crates, the Amphictyons of Telecleides, the Miners and Persians attributed to Pherecrates, the Sirens of Nicophon, and the Thurio-Persians of Metagenes. This string of quotations, full of cookery-book vocabulary, constitutes our main evidence about the comic poets' treatment of the theme of the land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, the idler's or glutton's paradise. On the basis of this evidence many sweeping generalizations on this subject have been made, some of them so wide of the mark that it may perhaps be worth while to attempt one more review of a passage already often discussed, in the hope of arriving at a fresh assessment of its true significance.

Discussion of such a passage usually involves study of the extracts cited, and leads on to the hazardous business of trying to form some conception of the plays from which they are drawn. But before one follows this well-trodden path there is a more general question to be considered, the answer to which may give some guidance on the way. What is it that Athenaeus' quotations illustrate? The speaker in this part of the symposium, the philosopher Democritus of Nicomedia, has been discoursing about servants, and has already cited the Savages of Pherecrates to show that there was a time when people had no slaves, but did all their own work (263 b).

‘Classical’ Greece? The very term exudes stability, permanence, confidence, authority, excellence, perfection (in a teleological sense), even possibly glory – as in ‘The Glory that was Greece’. Consider, for instance, the following paean of eulogy pronounced in 1914: ‘The Greeks were explorers in every field of knowledge and art, where they showed in the highest degree the desire for truth and the love of the beautiful’. All of them, always? In any case, to quote that well-known philosopher Pontius Pilate (John 18. 37–8), what is Truth, and is not Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Before the Persian Wars the Greeks did not rely on public finance to fight each other. Their hoplites armed and fed themselves. But in the confrontation with Persia this private funding of war proved to be inadequate. The liberation of the Greek states beyond the Balkans required the destruction of Persia's sea power. In 478 bc Athens agreed to lead an alliance to do just this. It already had Greece's largest fleet. But each campaign of this ongoing war would need tens of thousands of sailors and would go on for months. No single Greek city-state could pay for such campaigns. The alliance thus agreed to adopt the Persian method for funding war: its members would pay a fixed amount of tribute annually. This enabled Athens to force Persia out of the Dardanelles and Ionia. But the Athenians also realized that their military power depended on tribute, and so they tightened their control of its payers. In so doing they turned the alliance into an empire.