Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) made its first appearance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, partly as a result of the ongoing treatment of veterans from the Vietnam War. Although PTSD is not only or even primarily a disorder caused by combat, combat is a regular trigger and my chief concern in what follows. Therefore I will not be examining such evidence as exists for the psychological traumas of civilians in the ancient world who were exposed to violence, rape, enslavement, or the execution of family members in the context of conquest. My focus is on the soldier.

‘As writes our Virgil, concerned more with what made the best poetry than with complete accuracy, since his object was to delight his readers rather than to instruct farmers.’

Seneca passed this judgement on the Georgics after witnessing certain agricultural practices where he was staying (at Liternum on the north-west coast of Campania), which appeared to disagree with a statement of Virgil's (G. 2.58). He then proceeded to mention another Virgilian agricultural error (G. 1.215–16), selected from ‘all the others’ (alia omnia) that he says he could have discussed, in order to drive his point home.

In a recent article Christina Kraus shows how Livy, in the first decade, creates an overlap between the text that he is writing and the subject he is writing about: the city of Rome.1 ‘Like the city it describes and constitutes, then, the Ab urbe condita is a growing physical object through which the writer and the reader move together’ she observes. As a result the foundation and fall of the city, the two most dynamic moments of this space-entity, create parallel junctures both in the development of the city and in the development of the text. Kraus offers an apposite example. In book 5 of Ab urbecondita, Rome comes close to disaster not once but twice. The exordium of book 6, the beginning of the new pentad, refounds both the city and its history, creating a perfect analogy between the text and the city. Most importantly, by means of assimilation to other cities that have endured a similar fate, Livy is able to shape further the significance of the event. By construing the near fall of Rome in book 5 through the filter of the fall of Troy, Rome at the end of the first pentad symbolically moves beyond its Trojan past and refounds itself for good.

By 1994 no less than 2,500 years will have passed since Kleisthenes (in 507 B.C.) introduced democracy to Athens, and the anniversary will undoubtedly be celebrated by all nations that call themselves democracies, i.e., practically everywhere in the western world. But during the celebrations sceptics will probably ask at least two fundamental questions: first, how much do Athenian demokratia and modern democracy have in common and second, to what extent were modern democratic ideas and institutions shaped by looking back upon the ancient model? Was Athens the school not only of Hellas – as Perikles claimed in his funeral speach – but also of the political system and ideology that are universally accepted in the western world of today? Or, alternatively, is the Athenian example just one small piece in the great jigsaw puzzle that constitutes modern democracy and even a fairly unimportant piece, one of those elusive pieces that has nothing but sky or water on it and, accordingly, is almost impossible to place correctly?

The relationship between Tiberius and the senate as a corporate body has attracted frequent attention. That between Augustus and the senate, on the other hand, has suffered comparative neglect. Explanations of the contrast quickly suggest themselves. Not only did Tiberius prove the more willing of the two emperors to participate at sessions; his relationship with the senate is also much better documented, since it forms one of the principal themes of Tacitus' account of the reign in his Annals. But although the relationship which Tiberius determined to establish did have its own distinctive character from the outset, it is important to recognize that it was developed from a foundation painstakingly laid by Augustus. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to trace the nature and growth of Augustus' relationship with the senate, and to assess briefly the significance for the corporate body of Tiberius' different attitude.

Philo's famous account of anti-semitic rioting in Alexandria in A.D. 38, the InFlaccum, has frequently been exploited by scholars interested in the legal status of the Jewish community within the city and the issue of the constitution of Alexandria. This legalissue lies near the heart of the dispute which leads to some ancient and most modern accounts tracing the roots of the dispute to the Ptolemaic period. It is notable, however, that the first major attested outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling considerably post-date the Roman conquest, suggestingthat this is a problem of Roman Alexandria with its roots in the Roman administration of the city. Philo also places comparatively little emphasis on legality in the InFlaccum. The account of the persecution concentrates rather on the topography of the dispute. The centrality of spatial factors in the In Flaccum can be illustrated by comparing the persecution of the Jews and the fall of Flaccus. Flaccus was publicly humiliated through a show trial, through the sale of his property at public action, and on his journey into exile, by the crowds in Italy and Greece who flocked to watch him pass. He was excluded from public space, both from his city by decree of the emperor and from the urban spaces of his island exile, prompted in the latter case by his conscience. Finally, while in isolation, he was attacked and murdered. The Jews were robbed and driven from the streets of their city into exile and deprived of access to the theatre and market. Their leaders were humiliated in the most public places in the city and finally they were attacked in their own homes. Although the parallels are not exact, as can be seen in Table 1, they are explicit and thiselaborate structure demonstrates for Philo the justice of God in His persecution of the persecutors.

‘War with its strenuous exertions is the direct opposite of love with its languid sentimentality: nevertheless, that truism challenged ingenuity to invent reasons why they should not rather be considered as similar.’ This statement may serve as a basis for a survey of the use of the military metaphor in love poetry, in particular in Ovid's Amores, which illustrate the image in its most highly developed and perfected form.

The Greeks divided their world into a number of contrasting categories which cut across and dissected each other: Greek and barbarian, slave and free, friend and enemy, insider and outsider, us and them. This essentially bipartite view of the world (although the dualism changed according to circumstance) affected the way Greek society worked, and the way that the Greeks thought about themselves. In this pair of papers, Professor Rhodes and I will be concerned only with one of these oppositions, friends and enemies.

The recently published senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre provides the opportunity not only to explore afresh an episode in Tiberius' reign recounted by Tacitus, but also to reassess several aspects of political life during the early Principate. This decree outlines the Senate's judgement of the conduct of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso who had been accused of maiestas for seditious activities in the East, but had committed suicide before the conclusion of his trial. The document adds a considerable number of details to those recorded by Tacitus. Quite apart from its main theme, the text has shed light on such thorny problems as the definition of imperium maius, and the relationship between the fiscus and aerarium The aim of this article, however, is not to investigate such matters, but to consider the rhetorical language with which the Senate treats the whole affair.

None of these three passages from the Iliad would be classified as anything other than an extended simile, but the differences between them in subject matter and what is compared make clear how difficult it is to make any simple summary of the nature and functions of the extended simile in Homer that would gain general assent. As the immense quantity of scholarship on these similes would indicate, it is impossible either to argue convincingly that they can have only one or two main functions in the narrative, or categorically to prove or deny that a particular simile has a certain effect or significance for the narrative. To give one brief example, Stephen Nimis usefully distinguishes six major trends in interpretation among earlier scholars' views on the function of similes in Homer: (1) the presentation of the generic alongside the individual, (2) creation of atmosphere, (3) imagistic continuity, (4) characterization and foreshadowing, (5) incorporating the past into the present, and (6) allusion to antecedent literary traditions. Not all of the three similes quoted above perform all of these functions at once, but they certainly perform more than one of them. The only definition that would probably be generally accepted is the rather dry and unhelpful one that a simile functions by briefly interrupting the narrative in order to compare one element in the narrative with another, in order to illuminate something about the original element in the narrative. Moreover, an extended simile begins from an original main point of comparison, but it compares the likeness of two things that are actually not alike in many other respects.

The Trojan War has been perennially interesting, whether study centres on works of imaginative literature such as the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, the historical situation which provided the subject for those poems, the Bronze Age world of Troy and Mycenae which formed a background to the war, or the post-classical reworking of the material in the medieval Troy romances, Shakespeare, or Giraudoux. As well as supplying writers with incidents and episodes, the story of the war has given to artists a seemingly inexhaustible supply of themes on which their fancy feeds. A great proportion of Greek and Roman art can be connected with legends that stem from the Trojan War, and the whole complex of myths and history has proved a potent source for later artists. The theme chosen here is that of the Trojan Horse, and we shall look at some ways in which artists in antiquity viewed the incident.

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

The New York Daily Tribune for 20 December 1859 reported a pro-slavery meeting held the day before under the banner of ‘Justice for the South’ (the Civil War was less than eighteen months away). A lawyer named O'Connor spoke as follows:

Now, Gentlemen, to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature…. He has strength, and he has the power to labour; but the Nature which created that power has denied him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to work. (Applause)…. And that Nature which denied him the will to labour gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make him a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living useful for himself and for the master who governs him…. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him…nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labour in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labour and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and to the society.

That thoroughly Aristotelian defence of black slavery was identified as such by Karl Marx, reprinted in Kapital as a modern commentary on Aristotle's thinking on the role of the slave-owner.

Ancient writers ascribed Rome's political difficulties during the last century of theRepublic to failures of character, specifically to ambitio, avaritia, luxuria, and libido. Sallust gives the clearest and best known account in the introductions to his monographs on Catiline and Jugurtha. The danger of decline had already been noticed by Polybius, and he indicated one point for the beginning of the process: the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. (6.57; 38.21 f.). No longer confronted by the external threat, Romans could relax and give themselves up instead to greed, luxury, and personal ambition. Livy seems to have accepted the same turning point: the first fifty books were devoted to the expansion of Rome down to the destruction of Carthage; those that followed paid more attention to Rome's internal problems. At the same time, Livy was not unaware of the importance of Cn. Manlius Vulso's campaigns in the east and his return in 187 B.C. laden with the spoils which marked the beginning of foreign luxury, including such unmentionable instruments of corruption as pedestal tables and sideboards (39.6, 7).

Like many features of democratic Athens, the legal system is both strikingly familiar and disturbingly alien to the modern reader. The principle of trial by a jury of laymen is one which, though intermittently criticized, remains the basis of the decision-making process in modern Britain. At the same time, the size of the jury panels, their powers, the reliance on volunteer prosecutors, the use of an exchange of speeches as the method of presentation, these and other features diverge significantly from accepted practice in our own courts. My concern in this paper is with one striking divergence, the way in which the relationship between the legal system and society at large is conceptualized, and with the problems it raises. In modern developed societies the law and the lawcourts are fenced around with procedural, psychological, and in some cases constitutional barriers. The law itself is a self-contained system, distinct from other coercive forces, and perceived as separate from the political life of the community. Procedures and participants in the courts are given a degree of protection from constraints which apply elsewhere, in order to ensure that all relevant information is disclosed and that a verdict is given on the facts of the case, taken as far as possible in isolation from the rest of the lives of the participants and the community. All these barriers are absent in the context of classical Athens. In practice and in conception the law and its administration are in some important respects indistinguishable from the life of the community in general.

Athenaeus (xiv. 640 b–c) quotes from the Olbia of Euboulos, the Middle Comedy poet, some lines which begin ⋯ν τῷ γ⋯ρ αὐτῷ πάνθ' ⋯μο⋯—a phrase reminiscent of Anaxagoras for ancient hearers and for modern readers—and which continue, παρ⋯ προσδοκίαν, as follows: ‘“Everything together in the same place” will be for sale at Athens, figs, summoners, bunches of grapes, turnips, pears, apples, witnesses, roses, medlars, haggis, honey-combs, chick-peas, lawsuits, beestings, beestings-pudding, myrtle-berries, allotment-machines, irises, lambs, water-clocks, laws, indictments.’

Most of this article will be concerned with the institutional organization of Athens’ public finances, but to provide the background to that I begin with some basic facts about income and expenditure. Athens’ finances, and Athenian administration generally, were on a larger scale and more complex than those of most Greek states – partly because Athens itself was an exceptionally large state, with a territory of 1,000 square miles (2,600 square kilometres) and a body of adult male citizens numbering perhaps 60,000 before the Peloponnesian War and 30,000 after; and partly because, in addition to its domestic business, for much of the fifth century Athens had the business of the Delian League to deal with and for forty years in the fourth century it had the business of its Second League. The Delian League was without precedent in the Greek world as an alliance founded with a view to ongoing warfare, and as an alliance to which many members from the beginning and almost all members after a while made contributions by annual cash payments of phoros (‘tribute’). Athens thus needed to develop skills in managing large and small sums of money to a much greater extent than other states. Athens’ administration depended largely on annually appointed officials, and our evidence gives prominence to the principle of accountability and to various accounting procedures; but, although Athens applied the principles in its own way, the principles were not distinctively Athenian or distinctively democratic: the use of rotating officials and of accounting procedures was widespread in Greek states of varying political complexions.