It was a cliché of ancient literary criticism that Sophocles was ‘most Homeric’: Polemo put the idea epigrammatically when he said Homer was the epic Sophocles and Sophocles the tragic Homer.1 Modern scholarship has tended to endorse this view without paying very close attention to the particular ways in which Sophocles uses his epic models or to the new kinds of perception and sensibility he brings to bear on them.2 Of course there are important similarities: Sophocles seems more interested than either of his great rivals in heroic behaviour and (in the extant plays at any rate) characteristically chooses models of human experience that are very like those of the epic, as when he shows a great individual pitting his moral strength against the rest of the world in a sort of test of man’s endurance.

Armed conflict and the proximity of soldiers and other combatants shaped late ancient monastic communities in diverse ways that reflected not only the vulnerability of victims but also the resourcefulness of innovators. Monks were wounded, captured, and killed, and some became the objects of veneration as martyrs; monastic communities built walls and towers for protection and offered help to victims of violence; monks interacted with barbarians peacefully and violently and integrated their fears of barbarians into their spiritual lives; monks formed new and often beneficial relationships with military men, some of whom chose to become monks themselves; and the military may have provided one of the models for the organization of monastic communities. Monks saw themselves as soldiers of the heavenly king, not entirely different from the nearby soldiers of the earthly king.

My choice of title calls for a word of explanation – perhaps of apology. When I opted to discuss the study of Greek manuscripts I was thinking particularly about the pioneering days of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and I hoped to find out what sort of imaginative impression was made on classical scholars of the time by Byzantine culture in the shape of its books.

What I have found is plenty of evidence to reinforce my sense that this was indeed an exciting and even heroic period, when scholars attached enormous importance to tracking down manuscripts, and lavished a great deal of money and effort on travelling to find them and make collations or to acquire them for their own collections.

There is no trace of this comparison in the published version of Demosthenes’ response to Aeschines in the dispute over the crown (18); for whatever reason Demosthenes decided not to use it – or maybe it was Aeschines’ invention in the first place.1 For my purposes ownership is not the most important point: either way, the music of the Sirens is a memorable image for the voice of the actor/orator, and its associations – glamour, power, danger – are relevant to the two related questions that I attempt to deal with in this paper, namely what is the logic of Demosthenes’ critique of Aeschines qua performer, and how far can this be related to contemporary perceptions of actors in public life.

The Exodos of Trachiniae (971–1278) is generally agreed to be the most problematic part of a problematic play. Of the many questions that could be asked about it this paper proposes three: I. What sense can we make of the presentation of Heracles? II. What are the implications of the two new motifs introduced in the Exodos – the pyre on Mt. Oeta and the marriage of Hyllus and Iole? III. Who speaks the last lines and to whom? These are not novel questions, or ones which admit of conclusive answers, but they are worth reconsidering in the light of continuing critical discussion of the play.

In 1915, the Panama–Pacific International Exposition announced San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake that had devastated the city. This chapter examines why the fair organizers and architects used classical architecture to promote San Francisco’s economic success and to articulate the continued narrative of American progress. Roman architectural forms were used extensively in many of the fair’s courts, including the Court of the Universe. The neo-antique architecture and sculpture of the Court of the Universe was also a crucial way for the fair organizers to demonstrate San Francisco’s unique position (due to its West Coast geography) to develop economic ties with Asia. Neo-antique architecture helped to prove that San Francisco was a modern city, fully recovered from the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and poised for cultural and economic greatness. This chapter also examines why other state and national pavilions were erected in a classicizing style, demonstrating the potency and flexibility of ancient architecture in conveying different aims. Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts was the fair’s architectural hallmark. His decision to evoke the ruins of ancient Rome for his Palace was a strikingly modern choice and stands in contrast to the celebratory architecture of the rest of the fair.

Nearly a century after his death, Richard Jebb is the only Greek scholar of his generation whose publications are being reprinted on a heroic scale: the collected works, excluding commentaries and translations, in nine volumes and the Sophocles commentaries in seven.1 Christopher Stray’s essay published alongside this one (Stray 2005) is one of three essays newly devoted to Jebb: the others are by Robert Todd in vol. 1 of the Collected Works (Jebb 2002: x–xvii) and myself in the general introduction accompanying each volume of the new edition of the plays (Easterling 2004a = this vol., Chapter 22). All three have been influenced by Roger Dawe’s acute and sympathetic reading of Jebb’s work, which brings out some of the features that distinguish it from typical late Victorian scholarship.2

This chapter examines the early development of Constantine’s religious imagery following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 ce. It argues that Constantine’s administration swiftly began portraying the civil war against Maxentius as a religious conflict, with Constantine defeating Satan through the aid of the archangel Michael. The chapter highlights the apocalyptic nature of this imagery, emphasizing Michael’s role not only as a heavenly warrior but also as a herald of the end times and Christ’s millennial reign. Scholars have overlooked both the early emergence of this imagery and Michael’s significance within it. While the imperial court may have believed in this narrative, its promotion in the aftermath of civil war suggests that not all Christians in Constantine’s new territories necessarily welcomed their new emperor.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.