The social and economic life of the ancient world was reared upon a substructure of slavery. The commercial greatness of Carthage, Tyre, and Babylon had depended on the same principle. Amid all the variety of notions and dominant ideas current in classical civilization there was one point of agreement. ‘It was universally assumed’, as Dr. A. N. Whitehead expresses it, ‘that a large slave population was required to perform services which were unworthy to engage the activities of a fully civilized man.’

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.

The Andromache of Euripides has not had a good press. Sandwiched between more immediately attractive plays such as Medea and Hippolytos and the more controversial dramas such as Elektra and Herakles, it has for the most part languished in obscurity with the other less appealing plays of the 420s (e.g. Herakleidai, Hekabe). More than one critic has been overtly hostile, and what interest has been shown has tended to focus on its odd tripartite structure, the elegiacs unique to tragedy in Andromache's lament (103–16), 1 the possibility of its production other than at Athens (Σ ad v. 445, evidence of a most doubtful kind), and the two well-known anti-Spartan diatribes (445–63, 595–604).

quotiens magni alicuius <viri> mors ab historicis narrata est, totiens fere consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio redditur. hoc, semel aut iterum a Thucydide factum, item in paucissimis personis usurpatum a Sallustio, T. Livius benignus omnibus magnis viris praestitit; sequentes historici multo id effusius fecerunt.

Peter Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus—his only painting with a mythological subject—has long been seen as an allegory: Charles de Tolnay has shown how Bruegel took the details which he found in Ovid and used them, contrary to the accepted tradition of his time, to contrast the futility of Icarus' venture with the solid worth of the peasant labourer's life. Ovid, like Bruegel's contemporaries (for the most part), emphasized the wonder and novelty of the flight: the people in his landscape stopped in the middle of their tasks to wonder at the god-like beings who flew so effortlessly above them:

hos aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator vidit et obstipuit, quique aethera carpere possent credidit esse deos.

M. Primus governed Macedonia, presumably for a year, between 25 and 23 B.C. On his return he was prosecuted for maiestas for attacking a friendly Thracian tribe, the Odrysae. In his defence he pleaded orders from Augustus, which Augustus denied when he came to the court and gave evidence without being summoned. It might be thought that either he told the truth or he did not. Certainly any order he gave must have been oral, not written, since a written order could have been produced in evidence. None was produced, and it is clear (as Dr. Levick has shown) that Primus' defence counsel Murena would not have compromised his case by failing to produce an order if he could have done so.

Some time early in 50 B.C. the two elder sons of M. Calpurnius Bibulus the Roman governor of Syria were killed in Egypt by milites Gabiniani, Roman soldiers left there by A. Gabinius – an earlier governor of Syria. What Bibulus' sons were doingin Egypt is a mystery, partly because we do not know how old they were; all we know about them is that they were outstandingly gifted or outstandingly beautiful, or both. The soldiers had been left in Egypt (basically as mercenaries) by Gabinius in 54 B.C. when hehad been bribed by Ptolemy XII Auletes to restore him to the throne from which he had been driven by his exasperated subjects. Why these particular troops took it into their heads to murder Bibulus' sons is another mystery, which we will touch upon, but our main concern here is the effect which the death of his sons had on Bibulus. Our contention is simply that the incident is part of a rarely documented example from the classical world of a clear mental breakdown in one prominent individual. In Bibulus' case it took the form of paralysing shock, followed by grief, depression, and a frenzy of sleepless activity in which he eventually wore himself to death. To understand how this operated in the way it did in this particular case, we need to understand Bibulus the man and his personal history.

καὶ μισθοὺς αἰτεῖτε, διδάσκαλοι. ‘You schoolmasters actually expect a salary as well! What an ungrateful lot you are!’ Well, I must allow there is something in Strato's jibe. It is a pleasant life, and after thirty years spent in teaching boys and undergraduates from thirteen to about twenty-two, I can say I have enjoyed it all; and certainly, like Solon, I continually learn new lessons as I grow older. I wish I could justify my reading this paper by claiming that I had something to offer that would fulfil that one of the objects of our Association that is described as ‘to improve the practice of classical teaching’. But I fear no such illumination is likely to reward my audience. Still, another of our Association's objects is ‘to create opportunities for intercourse among lovers of classical learning’, and that your kind invitation to me has provided.

TheAb Vrbe Condita of Livy has been on many counts justly criticized as defective. The inaccuracy of his battle accounts, the vagueness of his geography, the occasional confusion caused by his failure to reconcile divergent accounts in his sources, the distortion of history through the excessive partiality shown to one or other of his ‘heroes’, and in general the highly rhetorical nature not only of his speeches but also of his dramatic narrations, which inevitably causes distortion—all these are formidable and justifiable criticisms. Some of these faults are, of course, attributable to the conventions of rhetorical history initiated by Isocrates, which dominated Roman historiography. Others have their cause in the fact that Livy was a book-scholar pure and simple; he seems not to have understood fully the tactics employed on the battlefield or the manifold devices used in sieges, nor to have visited many of the sites he describes. Now it is essential to expose these limitations, but in a sense it is unfair to condemn Livy for them, since they arise from human defects which would have required a heroic determination to repair.

Suppose a class set to put into Latin ‘I think I have said enough to show why this war is necessary’. How many teachers would accept esset in the subordinate clause? Not, I venture to affirm, one in a hundred. Yet that is what was written by Cicero, who had of course the advantage of not knowing the above ‘rule’, in the De Imperio Cn. Pompei, 10. 27: ‘satis mihi multa verba fecisse videor, quare esset hoc bellum … necessarium; … restat ut de imperatore … dicendum esse videatur.’ He uses the same construction later in the speech (19.57): ‘quo mihi etiam indignius videtur obtrectatum esse adhuc, Gabinio dicam anne Pompeio an utrique, id quod est verius, ne legaretur A. Gabinius Cn. Pompeio expetenti ac postulanti’ And a fairly careful reading of the speeches against Catiline gives eleven examples of historic sequence after a pure perfect against six of primary. I quote some of them: ii. 4. 6, ‘quod exspectavi, iam sum adsecutus, ut vos omnes factam esse aperte coniurationem contra rem publicam esse videretis’; 12. 26, ‘vos … vestra tecta … defendite; mihi ut urbi … satis esset praesidii consultum atque provisum est’; iii. 12. 27, ‘mentes hominum audacissimorum sceleratae … ne vobis nocere possent ego providi; ne mihi noceant vestrum est providere’; iv. 1. 1, ‘mihi si haec condicio consulatus data est ut omnes acerbitates … perferrem, feram non solum fortiter verum etiam lubenter’; 2, ‘si hunc exitum consulatus mei di immortales esse voluerunt ut vos … ex caede … eriperem, quaecunque mihi uni proponetur fortuna, subeatur’; 5. 9, ‘habemus a Caesare … sententiam.… intellectum est quid interesset inter levitatem contionatorum et animum vere popularem’; 7. 14, ‘causa est … haec inventa sola in qua omnes sentirent unum atque idem’; 9. 19, ‘atque haec non ut vos … excitarem locutus sum’.

This article argues that Aelius Aristides adapts the word atopos (‘strange’, ‘out of place’) as figured speech in his Embassy Speech to Achilles, meaning something that is either illogical according to rhetorical topoi or inconsistent with the text of Homer's Iliad. By doing so, he not only expands the semantic range of atopos but also comments on the rhetorical, intertextual, and pedagogical relationship between oratory and the Homeric tradition.

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.

As a contribution to the study of ‘Latin in use’, we focus in this article on the ways a writer indicates what s/he wants to emphasize within the sentence; the specific linguistic signs s/he uses to that end; and the range of effects that these may have for an alert reader. We have used, on the one hand, recent developments in the study of narrative, discourse and general linguistics and, on the other, the work of earlier pioneers in the field of word order in Latin.

Since Herodotus, historians have found anecdotes indispensable and notoriously unreliable. Although the historicity of an anecdote may be elusive, its use by posterity can be illuminating. Whether or not Canute commanded the incoming tide to halt cannot be proven, because the episode was not reported until a century later by a moralistic chronicler, Henry of Huntingdoa According to Henry, the king staged the scene to demonstrate to sycophantic courtiers his impotence before the forces of nature and their creator. However, later generations forgot his pious motive, and Canute survives in the popular imagination as an examplar of executive folly, like Xerxes who had the Hellspont scourged. Whatever the facts, posterity has its own uses for anecdotes.

It is probably still true to say that the satires of Juvenal's last two books, apart from the tenth, continue to suffer an undeserved popular neglect (using that phrase in a somewhat special sense by virtue of which it may permissible to suggest that, say, the Odes of Horace or the Amoves of Ovid do not suffer ‘popular neglect'). Certainly, one recent critical work on Roman satire contains no analysis of any of the Juvenal satires later than the sixth. Satires 11–15, and obviously not 16, do not generally receive the supreme accolade of being ‘set’ by the examiners for the Advanced level of the G.C.E.; they occasionally do not feature even in university examinations. There has indeed been no lack of recent scholarly interest in the later satires, but it would be optimistic to believe that that interest is good evidence for the poems’ actually being more generally, or more attentively, read.