In our present-day secular society, which regards religion as an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing, it is trumpeted as a great discovery that, in classical Greece, religion was not an optional extra detached from the rest of society's working but was ‘embedded’ in the various workings of society. It is of course our society that is exceptional: religion has been embedded in most societies through most of human history. Christianity was far more effectively embedded in western societies in the past than it is now; there are still some links in England between the Church of England and the state, and there are rather stronger links in Norway between the Lutheran church and the state; some Christian festivals are still widely observed as public holidays; and, in other parts of the world (for instance, many countries in which Islam is the predominant religion), the links between religion and state are still much stronger.

‘Ancient Rome!’ The door of the iconic police box squeaks open. The camera pans, following a dark-haired man as he emerges, pushes through a curtained doorway, and, with a glint in his eye, glee in his smile, and a touch of London in his voice, announces their destination to his redhead companion. So begins ‘The Fires of Pompeii’, the second episode in the fourth season of the current BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) science-fiction drama Doctor Who. And so, no doubt, began the scribbling of pens on notebooks, as classicists who examine popular receptions of ancient Greece and Rome recognized a fresh opportunity to explore the dynamics of modern engagements with the classical world. At the time of broadcast, I was ensconced in my Liverpool office, writing the final lecture of a new undergraduate module devoted to Roman society. The topic was ‘Receptions of Roman Life’. My plan was to contrast depictions of Roman life in different media from distinct periods to encourage our students to recognize how modern reconstructions of Roman society are variously informed by questions of authority, genre, and cultural contexts. Serendipitously, ‘The Fires of Pompeii’ provided an engaging contemporary reception of the Roman world on television.

Ancient history and modern thought interact in multifarious ways. While modern concepts can help us to understand, or serve to obscure, ancient reality, the remote past can also be used as a point of reference for contemporary debates about political issues and strategies. In fact, pundits and politicians alike are used to invoking the lessons of (ancient) history in order to justify their recommendations and decisions. This is often done in a most arbitrary and selective way, without regard for the fact that the interpretation of history is too complex a task to yield uncontroversial and straightforward answers to contemporary problems. Nevertheless, it would be rash to dismiss this kind of analysis as unsuitable for academic research; for it should not be overlooked that it can help to broaden the understanding of structural patterns and give a sense of the variety of options available to decision-makers.

In 87–86 BCE, the Roman army under L. Cornelius Sulla invaded Attica and, after a long siege, sacked Athens and the Piraeus. In both ancient and modern eyes, Sulla's sack has been seen as a key event, which marked not only the end of Athenian independence but also the beginning of an irreversible decline for its port, the Piraeus, in antiquity. Ancient literary testimonies in the decades following the Sullan sack portray the Piraeus as an urban wasteland, crammed with ruins but devoid of life. Strabo, writing in the Augustan age, notes that the town of his time endured, but had shrunk between the two harbours (the Kantharos and Zea); Pausanias, writing later in the second century CE, mentions a number of monuments but pays more attention to the old, ‘Classical’, town than to the contemporary ‘Roman’ Piraeus. Rescue excavations in the last few decades have provided corroboration for Strabo's remark. Building remains dating to the Classical period (mainly the fourth century BCE) extend over a larger area than those of Roman date, which tend to concentrate on the isthmus between the Kantharos and Zea harbours. Nevertheless, more recent finds and a reconsideration of the available archaeological evidence has shown that settlement clustering around the main harbour did not result from the destruction of the port by Sulla but had started in Hellenistic times and was intensified in the Roman period.

Book nine of Ovid's Metamorphoses begins with Achelous telling Theseus and his companions the reason behind the lack of one of his horns. It turns out that the river god has lost it during a fight against Hercules, while they were both wooing Oeneus' daughter, Deianira. The other suitors, realizing that they would not stand a chance against such rivals as Hercules and Achelous, left the contest. While the whole competition seems initially to have depended on the ability to convince Oeneus through self-praise, Hercules' intolerance of the river god's sophisms causes the verbal duel to become a hand-to-hand fight. This fight results in Achelous' defeat and loss of both Deianira and his horn.

Clothing has both a material and a non-material dimension. Far from merely covering one's body, clothes reveal and reflect something about the wearer's identity: his or her character, gender, social status, ideas, and emotions. The opposite is also true, insofar as clothes can be used in order to ‘disguise’ and conceal one's real values and beliefs, thus transforming existing identities and creating new ones. In other words, clothing has the power both to reveal and to conceal levels of reality. According to Gilman, symbolism is one of the strongest of the primary motives in dress: we dress not only in order to cover the body but also, and most importantly, because clothing is a kind of costume and, as such, it enables us to communicate and at the same time to confirm our identity. As she remarks, ‘The element of symbolism is interwoven with even such a practical garment as the trousers. The small boy's mad desire to get into his first trousers is not based on added comfort or freedom, but on the proud exhibition of the fact that he is a boy.’

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.

After the rape and suicide of Lucretia, Lucius Brutus is in the Roman Forum, urging the citizens to rebel against Tarquin. Here, in T. J. Luce's translation, is Livy's summary of his speech:

He spoke of the violence and lust of Sextus Tarquin, of the unspeakable rape of Lucretia and her wretched death, of the bereavement of Lucretius Tricipitinus and the cause of his daughter's death, which for him was more unworthy and more pitiable than the death itself. He mentioned also the arrogance of the king himself and how the plebs had been forced underground to dig out trenches and sewers: the men of Rome, victorious over all their neighbours, had been turned into drudges and quarry slaves, warriors no longer. He recalled the appalling murder of King Servius Tullius and how his daughter had driven over her father's body in that accursed wagon, and he invoked her ancestral gods as avengers. (1.59.8–10)

There is an abundance ‘to eat’ in the pages of Roman literature, where lavish and exotic dishes crowd the tables at banquets that flatter and fortify indulgent and insatiable appetites in unrestrained festivals of eating and drinking. As Emily Gowers explains, ‘Imperium had turned Rome into the world's emporium: its alimentary choices are presented as almost infinite, from the turnips of Romulus to the larks' tongues of Elagabalus’. Nevertheless, in Roman society, where the food a person ate (its quality, quantity, and presentation) reflected their station in life and where large numbers of the population struggled at subsistence levels, these literary banquets are neither reliable, nor even factual, accounts of a Roman meal. In fact, food or events of consumption appear to have occupied an ambivalent, even undistinguished, place in Roman literature, which typically saw their inclusion in comedy, satire, epigram, and the epistle but not the serious genres of epic, tragedy, elegy, or lyric. Generic considerations could possibly therefore influence an author's inclusion of culinary description in ancient literature, although food details did not merely satisfy these expectations and were typically shaped by the attitudes, social values, or artistic insights of an individual author.

This paper deals with issues of ethnic representation; it aims at highlighting how Roman authors tend to portray the Etruscans as ‘others’, whose cultural models deeply differ from those proposed by Rome. Several studies, conducted from different disciplinary and methodological positions, have highlighted the existence, in the Greek world, of complex representations of ‘other peoples’, representations that served political, cultural, and economic purposes. Whether the study of alterity is to be set in the context of a Greek response to the Persian wars (as P. Cartledge and others have pointed out, the creation of the barbarian seems to be primarily a Greek ideology opposing the Greeks to all other peoples), or not, it seems clear from scholarly studies that the Romans often drew upon and reworked Greek characterizations, and created specific representations of other peoples. Latin literature, which (as T. N. Habinek has noted), served the interests of Roman power, abounds with examples of ethnographic and literary descriptions of foreign peoples consciously aimed at defining and marginalizing ‘the other’ in relation to Roman founding cultural values, and functional to evolving Roman interests. Outstanding examples are Caesar's Commentarii and Tacitus' ideological and idealized representation of the Germans as an uncorrupted, warlike people in the Germania. In several cases there is evidence of layering in the representation of foreign peoples, since Roman authors often re-craft Greek representations: thus, the biased Roman portrayal of the Near East or of the Sardinians largely draws on Greek representations; in portraying the Samnites, Latin authors reshaped elements already elaborated by the Tarentines.

The contention in what follows is that, in describing the invasion of Priam's palace in lines 469–505 of Aeneid 2, Virgil uses language that has connotations of sexual violence, suggesting a literal as well as metaphorical rape.

The many-sided and lively-minded writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902) attended St John's College, Cambridge, from 1854 to 1858. There he penned a brief account of College rowing in the manner of Herodotean ethnography. It was preserved by a friend and published posthumously.