The central subject of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is its hero’s journey from life to death, which dominates the entire action of the play. As early as the prologue Oedipus himself introduces the subject (88–95),1 giving what will turn out to have been a clear foreshadowing of action to come. One could well start the discussion there, but in this paper I have chosen to concentrate on the final phase of the long process, as narrated and discussed by the messenger, and to ask what interpretative clues the text has to offer. I hope this choice of topic will be congenial to our honorand, whose close study of Greek poetic texts has taught us so much.

Roman imperial and non-Roman royal women seized the opportunities provided by frequent warfare and by the politics of court society to advance their interests and goals in novel ways in the fifth and sixth centuries. Admittedly, not all of their efforts succeeded. Nonetheless, some Roman imperial women did realize some of their goals, providing models for royal women in the wars that unfolded in the post-Roman Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. This chapter discusses four women as case studies: two fifth-century imperial women, Justa Grata Honoria and Licinia Eudoxia, and two Ostrogothic royal women, Amalasuintha and Amalafrida. These women used the opportunities presented to them by war and the negotiations that precipitated fighting to assert political influence, demonstrating womanly agency in Late Antiquity.

In mid-Republican Rome, the highly visible women within the aristocratic elite, occupying respected positions within their families and society, as patronae of individuals and of communities and with considerable funds at their disposal, might be in a position to achieve desired political goals. This chapter focuses, however, upon the symbolic capital they represented. We consider eight matronae: Cato’s first wife; the mother of Scipio Africanus; and six other women associated with the Scipionic and Gracchan households. Their public projections were all-important, and in the hothouse of elite competition and bitter political debate, those images and the memories of significant women were objects of contention. Surviving portraits (or sketches) are, for the most part, constructed creations transmitted with a purpose. While variations in the ancient portraitures (often contradictory) appropriately prompt doubts about the uncovering of the reality underlying those projections, the fact of the contested memories speaks to their significance.

There are no serious textual variants; Bentley’s παῖς looks a certain supplement. The context in which the fragment is quoted (Hephaestion 13.6, p. 42 Consbr.) is a discussion of the cretic; the lines are cited as a metrical example, without reference to their meaning.

Meineke’s comment on the passage was sensus non plane liquet, but it is tempting to go further, because this is the earliest extant reference to Eros at play, an idea that was to be interestingly influential in later poetry.

This chapter explores the relationships between regulations (laws, senatorial decrees) and female visibility in Republican Rome. The focus is on the earliest epigraphic and literary evidence for regulations mentioning women, citizen and non-citizen. Key examples include the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE), one of the Clusium Fragments (late second to early first century BCE), the lex Osca Tabulae Bantinae (100–91 BCE), the Tabula Heracleensis (post-Social War), the lex Coloniae Genetivae (59 to 44 BCE), as well as Cicero’s references to a lex on female mourning from the XII Tabulae (Twelve Tables), the lex Voconia of 169 BCE and the pontifical responsum and senatus consultum on the Vestal Licinia in 123 BCE. These are compared with Republican regulations attested in later sources. This chapter argues that these regulations rendered some women visible, both physically and symbolically, and that they offer us valuable insight into women’s agency, authority and property in the Roman Republic.

Everyone who reads Aeschylus sympathetically does so, I should guess, with at least an implicit understanding of the point I shall be attempting to make in this paper;1 my reason for elaborating it at such length is that it is barely acknowledged in some of the recent scholarly literature, and the new orthodoxy on characterization is in danger of becoming no more helpful than the old.

Oliver Taplin1 has recently taken a fresh and challenging look at what we can learn from vase paintings about responses to the theatre in the Greek cities of South Italy and Sicily from the fifth to the third centuries b.c. It is not a new idea, of course, that other cities were powerfully attracted by the drama, as by the visual art, of Athens, but what needs to be stressed, as Taplin rightly claims, is the fact that the process begins so early, spreads so widely and involves both tragedy and comedy.

My concern in this paper is with the spread of tragedy outside Athens – not only in the West – in the fifth century.

It has become a commonplace among classical scholars that the Greeks were indifferent to close repetition of the same word; and there is no doubt that their poetry abounds in instances which a modern translator feels constrained to avoid (e.g. βέλος at the end of two consecutive lines, S. Ph. 1299–1300). Campbell, in his essay On the Language of Sophocles, describes the phenomenon in these terms.

This chapter challenges the traditional view of Roman elite women as passive holders of wealth by highlighting their active roles as property owners and managers in the Late Republican economy. While jewels and adornments symbolized status, elite women also exercised economic agency beyond mere conspicuous consumption. Beginning with the famous speech by Hortensia reported by Appian (App. B Civ. 4.32–34) and primarily drawing on Varro, as well as Cicero’s speeches and letters, the chapter explores how women owned, managed and profited from land, urban real estate and financial assets. Despite legal restrictions, women navigated economic structures to control, preserve and enhance their wealth more actively than is often assumed, with their economic engagement having significant socio-political implications. Ultimately, gendered assumptions about wealth and power in the Roman Republic will be discussed.

The Greek Play has been a Cambridge institution since 1882; its history is well documented, but not much of the relevant material is easily available in published form. So it makes sense to begin with a note on the archive and other sources, before attempting an outline sketch of the period between 1882 and 1912 (the date of the last production before the First World War). This is the earliest of the three1 phases into which the story so far seems to fall.

The main collection of material is the records of the Greek Play Committee, which are housed in the University Library under the care of John Hall, the Committee’s Hon. Librarian.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 celebrated the centennial of Tennessee’s admission to the United States. This chapter argues that the use of Greek and Grecian architecture at Nashville was connected to Nashville’s reputation as a city of learning and culture. During the nineteenth century, Nashville was known as the Athens of the South and of the West. A life-sized replica of the Parthenon was the fair’s premier building. Archaeological accuracy and color were also essential to creating the fair’s Parthenon. Other buildings incorporated classical motifs from different periods, demonstrating the flexibility and fluidity of ancient architecture and embodying the neo-antique. This classical architecture embodied Nashville’s arrival as a city, but it also celebrated the New South and reflected the codification of the racist Jim Crow laws. Thus, the appropriation of classical architecture to justify institutional racism is examined. Egyptian architecture played a prominent role here. Shelby County erected a pyramid for its pavilion, which was an exceptional use of Egyptian architecture at United States fairs. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the enduring importance of the rebuilt Nashville Parthenon (and its Athena statue) as a symbol of culture and democracy for the city.