The publication of a generous selection of Pat Easterling’s articles requires little justification. Alongside the commentaries on Trachiniae and Oedipus at Colonus and the monumental (and intensely collaborative) editorial work, articles have been a preferred medium for Pat Easterling (PE) throughout her career. PE uses the concision of the article, as indeed the commentator’s note, to put forward tersely considered arguments that have the weight of much longer discussions. All are significant; many have established themselves as major points of reference. PE’s articles are responsible, even more probably than the path-breaking Trachiniae commentary and the still essential Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, for her status as one of the most influential Hellenists of her generation. Combining sympathetic attention to detail of the texts with a creativity that is discreet and audacious at the same time, they have fundamentally changed the understanding of core issues across tragic scholarship, from character, mythical settings, ritual and language, to fourth-century developments, scholia and transmission.

As in many pre-modern societies, in ancient Rome the use of and protection from violence acted as a blunt display of an individual’s power. When a person did violence to another, they manifestly had the power to do so. Violence not only creates social hierarchies, but it also protects them, and power, status and wealth, and the resources they commanded, played an important role in protecting high-status individuals from the threat of everyday violence and physical coercion, treatment more readily associated with those of lower status. But while we know this to be the case for the powerful men of ancient Rome, can the same thing be said to apply to powerful women? Through an analysis of the physicality of Roman power as it applied to wealthy women, both as agents and targets of physical coercion, at home and in public, this chapter argues that it can.

This chapter examines the presence of women in the Roman census and its socio-economic and political implications during the Republic. In the professio, citizens sui iuris had to declare their name, age, offspring, place of residence, occupation and properties. Viduae (a term including not only widows but also women who were no longer married) and women sui iuris also submitted census declarations. Special lists existed, for instance, of viduae and female wards, who were subject to specific taxes, namely, the aes equestre et hordiarium. This study explores the nature of the information recorded about female citizens in the census and the ways in which they were categorized. In sum, it argues that Roman female citizens should be included into a history of the census and taxation during the Roman Republic, rather than being treated as a marginal or overlooked group.

Ambrose of Milan’s funerary oration for Valentinian II (392 ce) confronts violence, civil war, and imperial authority, ultimately redefining the emperor’s body as a collection of relics. The oration’s ambiguity regarding the circumstances of Valentinian II’s premature and violent death was not merely a matter of political expediency; it also served as a rhetorical strategy to support Ambrose’s innovative treatment of the emperor’s corpse. By weaving passages from the Song of Songs into his oration, Ambrose evoked imagery resonant with same-sex desire, while presenting himself as the emperor’s guarantor – but in his very own way: as a “womanly” father and a lover mourning his beloved. In portraying Valentinian II as a selfless soldier-martyr, Ambrose rehabilitated an emperor who may have died by suicide and without the sacrament of baptism, while also redefining key imperial virtues at a time when they – and the empire – faced mounting challenges from both internal and external forces.

With a title like this I ought to be telling a story, and it is certainly true that a very schematic (and familiar) outline narrative can be told, which goes something like this.

The ancient Greeks had a word for most things; in fact they had several that we regularly and more or less accurately translate as ‘friend’. But they had no word that covered exactly the same ground as ‘friend’ does in our culture. Philos, the commonest and widest-ranging of all the Greek terms, was applied, when used as a noun, to any of one’s ‘nearest and dearest’, irrespective of whether they were kin, affines or other people unrelated by blood, with whom one had personal or familial ties. Used as an adjective philos meant ‘dear’; in our earliest texts its meaning often oscillates between ‘dear’ and ‘own’ (see Hooker 1987 for discussion of the word’s history). This suggests the fundamental importance and value of having people one could call one’s philoi (plural): being aphilos (without a philos) is imagined as a desperate plight, as bad as being apolis (without a city).

How much can we say for certain about Ion’s Omphale? Not a great deal, but even that is considerably more than we can recover about most of the hundreds of lost satyr plays performed at the Athenian dramatic festivals and elsewhere, and it is worth trying to go a little further.

During the Roman Republic, almost all women without living fathers required the authorization of a male tutor (‘guardian’) for certain important legal and property transactions. This chapter examines the legal rules and lived reality of tutela mulierum (‘guardianship of women’) during the Republic. First, it outlines Roman women’s property rights and the circumstances in which a woman required her tutor’s auctoritas (‘authorisation’). Next, it considers the different types of tutor, how they were appointed and how these factors affected women’s financial freedom. Finally, it explores the variability of women’s experience of tutela, depending on the type of tutor(s) a woman had, as well as their personality and the nature of the transaction the woman wanted to perform. The chapter concludes that, although tutela might be a mere formality for some women, for others it could be a real burden and an impediment to disposing of their property as they wished.

Polybius Histories 31.25-28 is an invaluable account of the testamentary and dotal arrangements of the Aemilii Paulli and Cornelii Scipiones. The testaments encompass the introduction of the lex Voconia in 169 BCE and raise many questions about Roman women’s property rights. Does the increasing number of female heirs in the second century reveal a developing preference for female heirs? What kinds of property dispositions should be included in the study of female inheritance? How should the emphasis on Aemilius Paullus’ childlessness and legal rights of Aemilianus’ sisters be understood? This chapter argues that Roman society expected women to enjoy significant shares in their family’s estates despite the introduction of the lex Voconia; that Polybius’ point about the childlessness of Paullus demonstrates his understanding of Roman inheritance law; and, the comment that Aemilianus’ sisters lacked any legal right to Papiria’s property indicates the prosopography of the Aemilii Paulli should be revised.

The question to be addressed in this paper is a simple one to formulate, though less simple to answer, namely ‘What did it mean in the tragic theatre of Classical Athens to show gods on stage?’ I have chosen it as a small way of paying simultaneous honour to Walter Pötscher’s illuminating work on Greek religion and Greek tragedy.

To begin with a negative point. There is nothing in the surviving evidence to suggest that the purpose of showing gods on stage was to make the audience think about the life of gods in their own divine world. The extant plays in which gods are represented as stage figures all direct their focus to the world of human beings.

Anyone with a professional, or at least a serious, interest in what we are used to calling ‘classical literature’ is liable nowadays to encounter problems of definition. At the extreme, they can be formulated along such lines as: What implications does a value-term like ‘classical’ carry in contemporary English? What does ‘Classics’ as a discipline suggest, if not the traditionalist attitudes and assumptions of an elite past culture, offering a badge of membership in a no longer sought-after club? And if one tries substituting ‘ancient’ for ‘classical’ (as in ‘ancient history’) that too raises questions. Why privilege Greece and Rome over Egypt or Persia or China? Why speak confidently of ‘the ancient world’, as if it were coterminous with the Roman Empire? Finally, literature itself has become a problematic category for contemporary criticism – and the Greeks and Romans, in any case, didn’t have a word for it.