When Caesar was born, probably in 100 b.c., it is doubtful whether anyone at Rome would have expected a son of this secondary branch of the patrician Iulii Caesares to rise to great eminence in the state. The family, to be sure, was very old; it was said to have come to Rome from Alba Longa when King Tullus Hostilius destroyed the city, and the Iulii kept the tradition alive by maintaining associations with Alba and the Alban gods. But, in spite of the family's antiquity, the nobility of the Iulii, to paraphrase Cicero on another patrician, was better known to men of letters and to historians than it was to the voters. It was not even very well known to men of letters and historians, for the ten or eleven lulii who reached high office in the fifth and fourth centuries hardly average a line apiece in the six books that Livy devotes to their period—books crowded with vivid stories of patrician families like the Fabii, the Manlii, and the Valerii.

No army leader has become more famous in history than Alexander. He has been praised and admired as well as blamed and cursed. But even if blemishes can be found in his career and character, no one can deny his ‘daemonic’ strength of will and leadership, which alone are sufficient to mark him out as one of the greatest generals history has seen. Opinions may, however, differ as to whether he was more than that.

There can be no student of Roman history who has not, at one time or other, pondered the significance of the emperor Caligula's (A.D. 37–41) alleged command to his soldiers to gather seashells for transportation back to Rome as the spoils of war. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I dare to offer yet another interpretation of an event which, as we shall see, has not lacked commentators.

Until the end of the twentieth century, the study of Hellenistic Babylonia appealed mostly to researchers trained in Classics. When J. G. Droysen published Geschichte des Hellenismus between 1836 and 1843, Akkadian had in fact not yet been deciphered. Classical texts therefore provided the only way in which scholars could understand Babylonia. When Assyriology developed as a field on its own, researchers focused on Sumero-Akkadian culture; they considered the Hellenistic period to be a decadent time in which Greek culture had infiltrated the native one, to its detriment. With these two perspectives combined, the Hellenocentric understanding of Hellenistic Babylonia was strengthened. In the early 1990s, however, Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kuhrt vigorously upended this view. They focused on non-classical texts and documents and thereby stressed the vitality of Near Eastern cultural traditions. Their challenging work paved the way for intercultural reflection on Hellenistic Babylonia. In effect, the interactions between Babylon and Greece could therefore be developed, by a new generation of researchers, as cross-cultural, meaning that it is likely that mutual impact was felt in both cultures. Among them, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper offers, in the field of archaeology, a useful interpretative model which analyses cultural interactions in their diachronic and multi-directional dimensions. She assumes the existence of cultural mediators who stimulate interactions between people of two cultural backgrounds sharing a common space. Over time, the facilitation of exchange may affect the nature of social relationships, so much so that they no longer develop in accordance with cultural factors but rather with social class, age, gender, or profession. This implies numerous combinations which vary depending on the sociocultural background of each participant in a given social interaction.

‘You know, sir—you're absolutely right!’ This heartening remark, accompanied by the ingenuous smile of intellectual discovery (or was it just kindly encouragement?) came from a member of the Classical Sixth in response to a five-minute impromptu discourse of mine in which I had said something like this:

In the Fourth Form we show you, two or three times a week, how to set about translating a complex Latin period. We ask you, ‘What verb is introduced by ut?’ You say, ‘Esset’. We say, ‘Look again’; and you say, ‘Oh, no, esset is introduced by quod; ut goes with perciperent’. ‘Right; then what clause comes before the ut-clause?’ ‘An Ablative Absolute.’

The fourth Eclogue presents itself explicitly as a political poem, a loftier intervention in the humble world of pastoral poetry (4.1–3). This grander type of pastoral, moreover, is singled out as possessing a specifically Roman political significance: these ‘woods’ are to be ‘worthy of a consul’ (silvae sint consule dignae, 3), and the coming Golden Age is set within a precisely identifiable political context, the consulship of C. Asinius Pollio in 40 bc (te consule, 4.11). Beyond that, however, the details of the relationship between the miraculous child, whose growth to maturity will be accompanied by the fabulous portents of the new era, and the contemporary political setting at Rome are left tantalizingly, perhaps prudently, vague. It was no doubt with a view to promoting his own political interests that Pollio's son, ‘the rash and ambitious Asinius Gallus’, claimed to have been the original puer of Virgil's poem. If so, he was very far from being the last public figure to appropriate the resounding cadences of the fourth Eclogue to endorse his own position: it was not long before (in Harry Levin's words) ‘The Pollio eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign, as well as a device for balancing the moderns against the ancients.’ But even before the opportunistic assertions of Pollio's son, the poem's prophecies of a new age had already been re-appropriated to tie down the oracular generalities of the eclogue to a particular individual and a definite set of political circumstances, in a move that was to have significant repercussions for the later fortunes of Virgil's essay in pastoral panegyric.

Dio Chrysostom's First Tarsian Oration (Or. 33) is arguably one of his most entertaining works; it is certainly one of the most peculiar. The speech, which some scholars date to the reign of Vespasian (69–79 ce) and others to that of Trajan (98–112 ce), is addressed to the citizens of Tarsus, a prosperous city in the province of Cilicia in south-eastern Asia Minor. In terms of content and structure, the First Tarsian bears less resemblance to the more ‘political’ Second Tarsian (Or. 34) than to two of Dio's better-known speeches, the Rhodian (Or. 31) and the Alexandrian (Or. 32). In these, as in the First Tarsian, Dio severely criticizes his putative addressees – the given city's inhabitants – for practising an activity that he finds reprehensible and symptomatic of deeper moral failings. For the Alexandrians it is their uncontrolled and wanton behaviour at public performances; for the Rhodians their economically profitable but ethically suspect habit of re-dedicating statues by changing their labels. The First Tarsian's similarities with the Alexandrian are particularly striking: both feature a long exordium in which Dio explains why he has decided to blame and chastise, rather than praise, his listeners, followed by a sustained attack on the vice in question that employs a battery of remarkably parallel mythological allusions, rhetorical analogies, and anecdotes.

Scholars have always tried to find plausible explanations why certain sorts of error have occurred in manuscripts, and much progress has recently been made in trying to analyse such sources of corruption. However, it is not always remembered that scribes were usually monks and that their minds may often have been on higher things than copying Livy's history for the umpteenth time. Over the last few years I have been collating the primary manuscripts of the first five books of Livy and so large a number of revealing corruptions came to light that it seemed valuable to collect them together as evidence of subconscious or unconscious preoccupations of scribes. The result is important, because it means that editors must not be over-mechanical in their approach to the transmission of texts.

Legend informs us that the Amazons were women, that they were not only warlike but successful above average as warriors, and that they had no breasts. The masculinity of the second and third characteristics ought to make us highly suspicious of the accuracy of the first, and the explanations provided by the ancient Greeks do not bear any very close examination.

In 59 bc, in the second half of Caesar's tumultuous year as consul, a certain Decimus Laelius brought a charge of extortion against the former praetor and ally of Cicero – L. Valerius Flaccus. Flaccus had proven instrumental in the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy four years earlier. From the beginning of his speech pro Flacco, the orator frames the case in terms of contemporary politics. Though ostensibly about the defendant's alleged misconduct as Governor of Asia, Cicero makes the contest a ‘trial of character’ and argues that the impetus for the prosecution was actually Flaccus’ role in foiling the Catilinarian plot. In contrast with his own heroism as consul and that of his client in preserving the Republic, Cicero portrays the prosecution and its backers as in league with the remnants of Catiline's ill-fated putsch.

In the first months of 44 ce, the Roman emperor Claudius, after spending as few as sixteen days in Britain, returned to Rome to celebrate his triumph. On his journey back to Rome, he stopped near the mouth of the Po river to take a cruise, as Pliny the Elder describes:

In a recent contribution to Greece & Rome, Thomas Harrison illustrated how the conceit of the United States as the ‘New Rome’ colours our knowledge of both the ancient world and our own. His deceptively light-hearted approach and examples illustrated that the transhistorical approach is certainly one that can be used for fun; however, at its core, the article poses a much more serious question – can the transhistorical approach to imperialism be used for profit? Or, as Harrison posed the question, ‘Can an understanding of ancient imperialisms cast light on contemporary experience?’ Acutely, Harrison points to the symbiosis between interpretations of the past and the present, illustrating the abundance of what might be termed ‘palimpsestic’ readings of modern empires, which are generated by writing through the history of past empires.

The Trojan cycle has been retold and re-envisioned many times from antiquity to modern times. The themes covered by these myths, especially the Homeric poems, have captivated the minds and hearts of poets, historians, authors, and others. Homer's Iliad extoled the grandeur as well as exposed the ugliness and folly of war. These humanistic virtues resonated with various cultures around the world. In this article we examine the reception of the Trojan cycle, especially the Iliad, on the noted manga artist Tezuka Osamu (1928–89). Recent reception theories focus on the creation of a new composition or artefact as part of the reception process; we shall thus discuss the Phoenix: Early Works manga as an example of such reception.

The patera (‘drinking-bowl’) of King Pterelas that Amphitruo brings back as a trophy of his victory over the Teleboeans plays a central role in Plautus' Amphitruo. Amphitruo and Sosia plan to show it off to Alcumena to impress her and to aggrandize their triumph, and this military bragging characterizes Amphitruo as a modified miles gloriosus (‘braggart soldier’). Jupiter steals it and, in disguise as Amphitruo, gives it to Alcumena, wooing her and further solidifying her belief that she has just spent the night with her husband. After Amphitruo accuses his wife of lying when she states that she has slept only with him and that he gave her the drinking-bowl, he commands Sosia to open their box containing it to prove otherwise; of course, it has vanished, and its disappearance leads to more confusion and accusations. The drinking-bowl thus also serves as a physical token that might establish a character's identity, just like the cistella (‘box’) of Plautus' Cistellaria or Rudens, but with the twist that Jupiter's manipulation of the token intensifies misunderstanding rather than dispels it, per the usual model of comic anagnorisis. In short, this prop contributes greatly to Amphitruo's characterization, narrative development, and metatheatrical play.

Satyric drama introduced athletics much more regularly as an activity than either comedy or tragedy. Many of its villains defeated hapless travellers in a boxing or wrestling bout before murdering them. Satyr-plays were often set at athletic contests where the satyrs of the chorus encountered athletes or tried to be competitors themselves. In one of his plays Euripides provided the most detailed critique of athletes in any genre of classical Athenian literature.