Map A presents the Peutinger map as a seamless whole, full size, in color. Its eleven segments, photographed in 2000, are rejoined as precisely as the parchment sheets' various small imperfections permit. The grids shown for reference are ones overlaid in the first instance on each segment individually. Hence, as is plainly visible, their horizontal divisions do not invariably quite match.

This display of the map permits a viewer to pan the map view (move up/down, left/right) and zoom in and out. For reference and study, a number of thematic layers are overlaid on the map. These may be turned “on” and “off” at will. Detailed instructions for users are included in the map application itself.

Layers

N.B.: Where there are different strengths or shades of color to be found for a feature on the map (e.g., red for route line work, red fill for mountains), there is no attempt to reproduce the variations in these layers.

Women sang in ancient China and Greece, both when they were weighed down with work and solitude and when they were enjoying leisure and company. What they sang of in both situations is the subject of this chapter. As I will show, Greek women tended to make friendship and, to a lesser extent, the mother–daughter bond the themes of their songs, whereas husbands, in-laws, and sometimes parents were the preoccupations in the poetry believed to have been composed by Chinese women.

A discussion of women's voices will add a crucial dimension to our understanding of the conceptions of gender relations in the two societies by providing an insight into the feelings of those who so far in the study have appeared mainly as objects in the ideologies and institutions created and dominated by men. Before I attempt to retrieve the female perspective, however, I must first address the issue of the nature of the available primary sources, and most importantly, how “genuine” the “women's voices” that have come down to us are.

The question of “genuineness” is a relatively straightforward one to answer for the works by Greek women poets. From the poems of the great, “burning” Sappho in the late seventh/early sixth centuries bce to those of Erinna, Anyte, and Nossis in the fourth and third centuries bce, we have a corpus of poetry by women whose historicity and literary reputations are amply attested in ancient (mostly classical and Hellenistic) sources.

The Chinese and the Greeks in the tenth to fourth centuries bce pursued the goal of social solidarity within different institutions. In Greece, it was at the festivals with their musical and athletic contests, at the symposia and gymnasia where men and boys socialized and exercised, and at various collective activities organized by gender and age that Greek men and women (and boys and girls) competed for individual excellence and cultivated personal friendships, peer-group bonding, and civic fellowship. In China, the contexts that exemplified the ideals of sociability were the ancestral sacrifice, the family banquet, and the communal drinking party, all of which were united by the principles of distinction and hierarchy derived from kinship organization.

The examination of different institutional bases for the pursuit of sociability in ancient China and Greece recalls a view that has long been argued and has recently been refined by Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin in the field of comparative science, namely, that ancient Chinese society was authority-, conformity-, and interdependence-oriented while ancient Greek society was rivalry-, confrontation-, and autonomy-oriented. Whereas previous scholarship has focused on the king's court, the law court, the academy, and the assembly, I bring in a major new social sphere and investigate how the principles and dynamics at work in domestic and extradomestic domains related to each other and shaped each other.

The database provides an entry, with brief commentary, for every name and for every feature except those mountain ranges which the map does not name. An illustration of the relevant part of the map in color heads each entry. For the entire map as a seamless whole, see Map A. The scope of the commentary is explained in the Introduction.

Where a better reading can be gained from the monochrome photographs taken in 1888, an illustration from these is included; for the complete set of these photographs, see Map B (i). In addition, occasional reference is made to the set of color photographs published by Weber (1976).

The rivers on the Peutinger map are outlined on a Barrington Atlas base in Map C (however, no farther east than the Euphrates and Tigris). The routes on the map are outlined similarly in Map D (however, no farther east than Maps 87 and 89). For guidance, see Appendix 9.

The database indexes names and features in multiple ways: see the Database Contents.

Feature Type

For the full range, see the listing in the Database Contents.

Symbol Type

For the full range, see Symbol Classification in the Database Contents, together with Chapter 3, section 4 (c) for discussion.

Grid

Grid figures have three components: the number of a map segment (1–11), followed by the numbers of a square within it determined vertically (A,B,C) and horizontally (1,2,3,4,5).

I have argued in the previous chapter that the ancient Greek and Latin terms sungignôskô and ignosco, usually rendered as forgive in English, do not properly bear that meaning, as forgiveness is commonly understood today – that is, a response to an offense that involves a moral transformation on the part of the forgiver and forgiven and a complex of sentiments and behaviors that include sincere confession, remorse, and repentance. I suggested that, on the contrary, the appeasement of anger and the relinquishing of revenge were rather perceived as resting on the restoration of the dignity of the injured party, whether through compensation or gestures of deference, or else by way of discounting the offense on the grounds that it was in some sense involuntary or unintentional. Is it true, then, that remorse and repentance played little or no role in the process of reconciliation between wrongdoer and victim? If not, did the Greeks and Romans have some moral equivalent to our modern forgiveness in their vocabulary and ethical system?

In this chapter, I approach an answer to these questions through an examination of scenes of reconciliation and the assuaging of anger, where we can perhaps catch a glimpse of how these processes worked in practice.

Among early Christian writers, the theme of repentance plays an enormous role, and whole treatises and sermons are devoted to it. Thus Tertullian (late second and early third century), for example, affirms (On Penitence 4.1): “God has promised his pardon [venia] through repentence [per paenitentiam], declaring to the people: ‘repent [paenitere] and I shall save you.’” So too Saint Ambrose (fourth century), in his treatise On Penitence: Against the Novatians (1.90–1), insists that a person who has committed sins in secret, if he repents sincerely, will be reintegrated into the congregation of the church: “I wish that the guilty person hope for pardon [venia], beg for it with tears, beg for it with groans, beg with the tears of all the people, entreat that he be pardoned [ignoscatur] … I have people who, during penitence, have made rivulets of tears in their faces, hollowed their cheeks with continual weeping, prostrated their bodies so that they might be trampled by all, and with their faces forever pale with fasting, presented the appearance of death in a breathing body.” This is the way to demonstrate sincere repentance and to earn forgiveness from God and the church.

Here again is Saint John Chrysostom, who preached nine homilies on the theme of repentance in Antioch in the years 386–7.

In this chapter, I consider the nature of guilt, confession, repentance, and absolution in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, in which one encounters a moral structure that, if not yet conforming to the complete modern paradigm of interpersonal forgiveness, nevertheless represents a very different pattern from the one that informs the classical Greek and Roman texts examined so far. But before turning to the biblical literature, I should like to consider a text in the Judeo-Christian tradition that exhibits with particular clarity the role of sin, remorse, and redemption. What is more, this work invites comparison with a set of romantic Greek narratives, in which the relationship of suffering mortals to the divine is markedly different. The contrast thus serves to highlight what is distinctive about the attitude toward forgiveness in the Jewish and Christian scriptures and to confirm the absence of such a conception in pagan Greek and Roman culture.

There are ideas, even relatively simply ones, that seem self-evident until one takes a closer look, and then all sorts of complications arise. Saint Augustine famously asked: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know” (Confessions 11.14.17: quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio). I am told that Jaakko Hintikka discovered a similar puzzlement in what might seem to be a far simpler question, namely, what is the height of Mount Everest? Most people are sure they know what the question means, but when asked whether the height includes the snowcap or not, and if so at which season, and whether it is measured from sea level, and if so at what place (as this varies), or rather in respect to the center of the earth, and so forth, perplexity sets in. Forgiveness too is subject to such confusion, or perhaps it is better to call it difference of opinion. In what follows, I set forth some of the features that are essential if an act of reconciliation is to be recognized as forgiveness; to the extent that my discussion lays any claim to originality, it is only in the emphasis on those aspects that are particularly relevant to distinguishing modern forgiveness from ancient practices of conciliation.

In the year 1671, Molière produced a short, three-act farce entitled Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Ruses of Scapin), loosely modeled on Terence's comedy, Phormio, which was based on a Greek original, now lost, by Apollodorus of Carystus, a somewhat younger contemporary of Menander (Apollodorus's play was called Epidikazomenos). The story is as follows. Two young men, Octave and Léandre, have married without the permission of their fathers, who have been journeying abroad. Octave has wedded Hyacinte, a poor orphan whose mother has just died, while Léandre has bound himself to the Gypsy girl Zerbinette. As the play opens, news arrives that the fathers have just returned, and in this bind, they appeal for help to Scapin, a wily fellow who had been appointed to look after Léandre (in this, he differs from his prototype, the “parasite” Phormio, who intervenes to help the two youths in Terence's comedy out of friendship and high- spiritedness). The fathers are furious with their sons, in part because they have made such dubious alliances, but also because Argante, Octave's father, has promised to wed his son to the daughter of Léandre's father, Géronte: this is a daughter that Géronte had by a second wife, in Tarentum (the scene of the play is Naples); he has kept this liaison a secret until now, but the wife and daughter have embarked for Naples for the sake of the intended marriage.

The thesis of this book is easily stated: I argue that the modern concept of forgiveness, in the full or rich sense of the term, did not exist in classical antiquity, that is, in ancient Greece and Rome, or at all events that it played no role whatever in the ethical thinking of those societies. What is more, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor again in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures; it would still be centuries – many centuries – before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, and the set of values and attitudes that necessarily accompany and help to define it, would emerge. This is not to say that there were no other ways of achieving reconciliation between wrongdoers and those who are wronged, just that forgiveness in the modern sense was not among them. The absence of forgiveness in these ancient cultures is not merely a matter of terminology or theory, moreover, but involves a sharp distinction in ethical outlook, and may even be said to reflect differences in the ancient and modern conception of the self – a term that is often vague in its reference but in connection with forgiveness has a specific and clear use, and one that helps distinguish modern from classical conceptions of ethical identity.

In the article “Forgiveness,” Berel Lang writes, “It is possible, of course, to imagine a world without forgiveness or any of its allied concepts. But that world would, it seems to me, either be more than human (that is, one in which no wrongs are committed or suffered) or less than human – one where resentment and vengeance would not only have their day, but would also continue to have it, day after day after day” (Lang 1994: 115; quoted in MacLachlan 2008: 2). This seems an extreme pair of alternatives: either godlike perfection or the perpetual cycle of the feud. The classical societies of Greece and Rome represent neither of these extremes, and yet, as I am about to argue, forgiveness in the modern sense was not a feature of their moral life – and it is the modern sense of the word that Lang intends in his article, when he affirms that, in forgiveness, “two agents are involved, both of whom recognize a failure by one of them in fulfilling an obligation to the other.

This volume is about the related concepts of house and household in Classical Antiquity and about how those concepts were materialised at different times and in different places through the physical structure of the house itself. More importantly, it considers how that physical structure and its associated concepts can help to address major questions about social structure, patterns of cultural interaction, continuity and change in Classical Antiquity. The chronological scope is long, ranging from the tenth century bce (the Early Iron Age) down to the fourth century ce. The geographical spread is equally broad, stretching from modern Turkey in the north east to Tunisia in the south-west, taking in Greece and Italy on the way. My goal, however, is not to present a comprehensive account of everything that is known about housing and households within this span. Instead, the individual chapters constitute case studies based on evidence from specific regions during particular periods. In each instance discussion begins by seeking to understand the appearance, organisation or representation of housing through archaeological, iconographic and/or textual sources, but the aim is much broader. The size, form and decoration of an individual domestic structure are determined by a variety of factors: environment, technology and availability of resources impose broad parameters. Nonetheless, an equally important role is played by culturally specific expectations about the kinds of architecture and decoration that are appropriate, about how and where different activities should be carried out, and by and with whom.

INTRODUCTION

In or about the year 138/137 bce, on the island of Delos, the sculpted portraits of a woman and a man were set up inside a house in an old residential neighbourhood of the main town (Plate 4.1). The figures are made of white marble and are depicted at life-size. Now missing their heads, each one poses in a manner comparable with other images of this period. He has his right arm crooked under the folds of a himation or robe – a stance used in Greek civic and funerary sculpture since the fourth century bce. She is pulling tight a thin shawl to reveal the folds of a thicker dress beneath, in a manner popular in sculpted figures of women from the third and second centuries bce. An inscription on the statue-base, written in Greek, identifies the couple and is quoted above. It refers to a gift made to the famous temple of the god Apollo on Delos, by Dioscorides, son of Theodorus, who came from the community of Myrrhinous (modern Merenda) in the territory of Athens.