In this chapter I explore the reasons for placing the composition and production of Sophocles' Trachiniae during the plague years and the implications of such a situation for understanding this tragic drama about the circumstances of the death of Heracles. Since the production of only two extant Sophoclean dramas, the Oedipus at Colonus, staged posthumously in 401 bce, and the Philoctetes of 409, can be fixed to definite years, most scholars generally rely on internal, stylistic, criteria to date the other five with some hope of accuracy. Yet studies of the Trachiniae on such grounds have been inconclusive, not least because they contradict one another. Moreover, this drama seems to lack completely any secure reference to external events, which thus enables a startlingly large range of possible dates; anywhere from 457 to 410 has been proposed at one time or another. It is, I suggest, at the very least a worthwhile intellectual enterprise to examine the reasons for accepting the later (though not the latest) part of this range and why Sophocles might have composed such a work during the 420s. But I also more fundamentally propose to change the way we ask this question: let us accept, for the moment, that Sophocles composed the Trachiniae sometime between 430 and 425, and then consider what would happen to our understanding of it in such a context.

In this edition I have had two intentions especially in mind: to try to bring to life for the reader the Achaemenid empire, and to offer a good deal of help with the grammatical aspects of the text. The first intention responds to a growing interest in Greece's relationships with the Ancient Near East, and will I hope prevent the commentary and its readers from taking too Hellenocentric a view of Herodotus' account. That Herodotus makes a strong distinction between ‘Greeks’ and ‘Persians’ is an idea that is slowly being revised, as the complexity of his presentation is more and more explored. The second intention responds to my experience at the JACT Greek Summer School, held annually now at Bryanston School, in Dorset. I am very grateful to my various students there not only for making it clearer to me what is required in a modern commentary on a classical text, but also for permitting me to try out on them earlier drafts of the commentary.

Although a new text of Herodotus, based on fresh study of the MSS and a consideration of the linguistic problems involved in constituting such a text, is much to be desired, the text offered here is not the result of a new inspection of the MSS, but aims to be an accessible and readable text.

The defence of private property has been a feature of philosophical, theological and legal discourse from antiquity to the present day. This book seeks to explore the ancient ‘foundational’ texts concerning ideas of property and their reception up to the early nineteenth century. I begin with Plato's thoughts on property in the Republic as expressed in his vision of the ideal polity, or Kallipolis. Other texts or foundation narratives include New Testament passages on the community of the first Christians at Jerusalem and the poverty of Christ and his apostles, and a collection of texts on primeval humanity drawn from a variety of literary works. But in addition to examining the various discussions relating to property and property regimes, I set out to challenge the dominant historical paradigm that the ancient world made little, or in some accounts no, contribution to Rights Theory, and in particular to the right to private property.

I am particularly interested in the confrontation that occurs in the works of philosophers, theologians and jurists, and other literary genres, between regimes of sharing of one sort or another and private property regimes, and I study the ways in which the themes of the origin of private property, and the transition to private property from primitive communality (as I call it), are handled by authors from antiquity to the Age of Revolution and the immediately following decades.

As his last act before going into hiding to avoid being enthroned as Pope, the Christian deacon and former urban prefect Gregory made a famous speech to the Roman people, a speech known to posterity in the Histories of his contemporary Gregory, bishop of Tours. The occasion was the outbreak in Rome during the winter of 589–90 of a plague, which had caused the death of Pope Pelagius II and was caused in turn by a prodigious flooding of the Tiber. The deacon Gregory's first recorded address to the People of Rome was a call to arms against the plague.

Since earthly medicine could do nothing to stop the disease's fierce progress, Gregory proposed that his people look to their own hearts, whose hardness might be the cause. The plague had been sent by God to warn his people of their failings.

This study considers the end of the Roman empire from the point of view of household and family life. This is an aspect which has been comparatively neglected in the otherwise voluminous literature on the empire's decline and fall. At issue here is how late Roman householders drew on an emerging Christian wherewithal of ideas and resources – I do not mean theology but practical ethical ideas and personal relationships with Christian virtuosi: nuns and bishops, priests and monks – to help them find a path through an unprecedented period of social change. At the end of antiquity, I will argue, the older vision of Roman family life based on the legal powers of the paterfamilias gave way to a new ideal, in which the paterfamilias had essentially ceded to the Christian bishop his role of arbiter in matters of piety and justice. But this development did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it had roots reaching back into the third century, to an erosion of the powers of Roman heads of households that had more to do with tax-collecting than with religious ideas.

Our concern is with the Western, Latin-speaking part of the Empire, which after the death of Theodosius the Great in 395 became first an administrative unit separate from the eastern territories, and then a cluster of independent kingdoms under Gothic, Vandal, and other non-Roman kings.

Why should the Athenians, as a response to the waves of plague that struck their city during the first half of the 420s, have placed, six or seven years later, their new Asklepieion on the south slope of the Acropolis, as Figure 1 shows, below the Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athena, and above the Theater, part of the sanctuary dedicated to Dionysus? Does Asclepius have some connection with drama, or was the shrine location purely coincidental? I have demonstrated that drama shows a persistent, though undeveloped, interest in disease imagery that becomes especially strong after the plague's onset, and this interest opens the door to the arrival of Asclepius near and in the Theater of Dionysus. The development of the cult of Asclepius in Athens and the range of myths involving him both associate him with Dionysus, the Greek god of, among other things, theater. Thus, on the levels of theme, ritual and performance Asclepius is important to Greek drama in the last quarter of the fifth century and beyond. Here I should make it clear, however, that I am not positing Asclepius as a god who appears as an overseer of the action in tragic plots, for he is far too benign and helpful a figure to play the same part as the more ambivalent gods Apollo and Dionysus.

Introduction

The previous chapter developed an account of Etruscan funerary architecture that demonstrated the importance of creating discrete and readily visible boundaries for the dead. In this chapter, a similar argument will be proposed for the physical and architectural setting of formal ritual practice. In the earlier period of Etruscan history, the locations of religious activity are difficult to perceive archaeologically; however, by the late sixth century it is possible to discern formal sanctuary complexes with architecturally discrete temples. This chapter examines this change in the treatment of ritual space by focusing on two aspects: first, the form and decoration of the temple; and second, the form of sanctuary complex. The stress here is on the planning and construction of temple architecture, with all the choices involved in how this should be accomplished. At every stage, alternatives (both well-established and innovatory) were available and decisions were made on how to move on to the next stage of the construction; every element in temple architecture was made deliberately, and the methods of construction were intentionally selected. As discussed in Chapter 1 this active process of selection applies to all material culture, and all aspects of the Etruscan ritual environment, from the location of the temple in the landscape to the details of the decoration of the gutter tiles. The manner in which objects or buildings are made, decorated or located is never arbitrary; they exist because they have meaning, and they occur in the form that they do because those forms have meanings.

The cultural landscape explored in the previous chapter should not allow us to forget that the champions of romanitas were not exclusively men and women of leisure. More often than they wished to admit, they were engaged in running the productive concerns on which their wealth depended, and their management of these concerns was decisive for the well-being of their dependents, often numbering in the hundreds and sometimes thousands. Agricultural wealth was the basis on which cultured leisure rested, and for all the rhetoric of otium, the men and women of this class had to manage numerous agricultural holdings – or more precisely to direct the work of overseers in doing so. A pyramid of human effort depended on their will, involving slaves, tenants, and paid labourers. In addition, for the large landowners, there were periodic negotiations with their estate managers and with conductores, the large-scale tenants who leased whole estates; landowners might also themselves act as conductores, taking on parcels of imperial land or land belonging to other domini. In all of these negotiations, a balance had to be found between the financial interest of the domini and the ability of those below them in the pyramid to bear the weight of their leisure.

Otium and commerce were so closely yoked in the rural life of the dominus that it is often hard for the historian to tell them apart.

Introduction

The preceding chapters have emphasised the deliberate nature of the creation of all aspects of material culture. In this way, changes in Etruscan material culture are accorded particular importance in the transformation of late sixth-century Etruria. As a result, such changes cannot be explained simply in terms of a natural evolution towards a more ‘sensible’ form, or in terms of the importation of ‘superior’ models; instead, the changes in Etruscan material forms are characterised by an increased concern with surface as a means of expressing difference. I have argued that the boundaries of physical entities became, in the sixth century bc, condensed to their visible, exterior surfaces, and further, that such physical distinctions echoed ontological ones. Thus, the outer, visible surface of the body, the tomb, the temple, the house and the city became the point at which these entities conceptually began. Surface thus became crucial for the expression of difference and identity in late sixth-century Etruscan material culture.

The importance of surface is not absolute or universal: the treatment of surfaces and boundaries changes over time and space, and is therefore relational. In the areas of Etruscan material culture examined here, for example, the treatment of surface in the late sixth century is more acute than that in the seventh century. The multiplicity of choices and decisions that were made by artisans in the creation of material culture led to objects and spaces that emphasised, to a greater extent than before, boundaries and distinctions through the explicit manipulation of their visible surfaces.