Aristotle was evidently employing the vocabulary of fourth-century politics to express his contemporaries’ reconstruction of what had happened in early sixth-century Athens: it was as natural for him to explain in terms of oligarchs versus democrats what had been a situation of civic discord in archaic times, as it is for twentieth-century students to see it in terms of a power clash between organized political parties or of an industrial class struggle. But the liberation by statute of a demos from slavery was a concept strange to Aristotle’s world; and so he defined what he thought the tradition meant in this case:

The Choephori and the Bacchae remain masterpieces of Greek literature although an unkind fate has removed a leaf (or more) from their texts. For the first part of this article I would like to assume that an unkinder fate has deprived us of the end of that greater masterpiece, the Oedipus Rex. The play (as we have it) now concludes with the heart-breaking farewell of Oedipus to his infant daughters. We could wish no better end, but it is not characteristic of Greek tragedy in general or of Sophoclean tragedy in particular to end on a dramatic high-point; loose ends must be tied up and the tension must be eased. We may reasonably assume that some such development occurred at the end of the Oedipus Rex. Fortunately, there is a good deal of evidence to tell us (in general) what happened. The versions of Euripides’ Phoenissae and Seneca’s Oedipus may be useful, particularly the latter (which is much closer to the Sophoclean original); there is, of course, Sophocles’ own Oedipus Coloneus; most important of all, there is the evidence of the Oedipus Rex itself, to which I shall now turn.

In recent years the place (or plight) of women in ancient society has attracted much attention. Their legal position, the attitudes towards them on the part of men, the characterization of women in drama, the personality of known and spectacular individuals like Sappho and many other topics have been studied at considerable length from various points of view. It is on the surface, then, somewhat surprising that scarcely any attention has been paid to a topic which in another discipline, linguistics, has proved very popular of late, the question of women’s speech. Sixty years ago the idea that women exhibit a distinctive form of speech was already current; Jespersen devoted a chapter of his Language: its Nature, Development and Origin to ‘The Woman’. Since then with the growth of interest on the part of linguists in sociolinguistic questions an impressive body of literature relating to this topic has accumulated.

Evidence has been accumulating from many languages for the existence of distinctive forms of female speech. A consistently observed characteristic of women is that they are more likely than men of the same social class and age to favour usages which belong to an accepted standard or are of high prestige. Women seem to be more conservative than men. They are also widely believed to be more given to polite linguistic forms. It has, for example, been suggested that men use plain imperatives more often than women; women favour modifiers to soften the impact of an order. Numerous other female traits have been found in different languages. In English certain intonation patterns are said to be typical of women. Other pronunciation differences have been noted in various languages, such as the omission or substitution by one sex of a sound used by the other sex. Women have also been shown to differ from men in their use of such words as particles, personal pronouns, titles and kinship terms.

This is a study of dotal arrangements and the disposition of matrimonial property as they are represented in Cicero’s correspondence. From Cicero’s explanations, suggestions and worries about his daughter’s third marriage and his own fortunes, I have tried to piece together a picture of the extent and function of a wife’s contribution to the economy of a senatorial marriage, and to gauge the scope of her material obligations to the children. For this purpose the letters are of particular value: Cicero wrote to and about his wife Terentia during his exile and, later, during a period of civil conflict, when he was not only absent from Rome, but in fear of confiscation. His situation obliged him to commit to writing those financial concerns which would otherwise have left no record. The correspondence exposes not only the arrangements actually made for the use of property within marriage, but the conventions which determined them.

According to St. Matthew, Pontius Pilate had a wife; after a warning dream, she spoke out against her husband’s decision concerning Christ. The gospel does not mention her name, but a number of apocryphal writings, composed between the third and seventh centuries, give her the cognomen of Procia, under which name, and as the wife of Pilate, she is included in the calendars of the Greek Orthodox and Ethiopian Churches. The earliest source which adds the nomen Claudia to the cognomen Procla was available to St. Jerome, and so extant in the early fifth century — but versions of it surviving today are said to bear little relation to the one he referred to, and their authenticity is doubtful. The name Claudia Procia nevertheless attached itself to the legend, and under it Pilate’s wife has survived even into the fiction of this century.