Richard Jebb’s commentaries on Sophocles are unique: a series of editions of one of the most intensely studied of all ancient poets, which have never fallen out of regular use since they were first produced (1883–96). No one studying Sophocles and making any serious engagement with the original Greek can afford to neglect them; they are still quoted as often and with as much sense of their current relevance as any modern edition, and ‘dated and flawed as in some respects they may be, [they] remain the yardstick by which all subsequent ones are measured’ (Dawe 1990a: 241).1

Traditional wisdom1 is deeply embedded in Greek tragic discourse, and the gnōmai that were its usual medium of expression offered the playwrights many ways of reaching out to large and diverse audiences. They could serve as markers of the beginnings and ends of scenes, as rhetorical tools in debate, as appropriately resonant generalisations to conclude messengers’ accounts of disastrous changes of fortune, and as focal elements in the meditations of characters and choruses.2 Their applicability to a multiplicity of contexts gave them staying power as quotations, often far beyond the survival of the plays in which they featured: in the long history of ancient ethical debate and rhetorical education, for example, memorably phrased sayings from the dramatists always had a part to play, and their presence in (e.g.) Aristotle, Plutarch, the tragic scholia and Stobaeus’ Anthology shows how many fragments of lost plays owe their survival to their gnomic content.3

While the evidence of inscriptions speaks to the range of female patronage in the public spaces of Roman cities, the frequency of such attestations corresponds in the main with the period marking the efflorescence of the epigraphic tradition in the Graeco-Roman world (the first three centuries CE). Honorary inscriptions which attribute to elite female patrons the funding of public buildings, games, banquets and other amenities in the city of Rome and Italy appear at first glance to follow a similar pattern of frequency. This is not to say that our sources of information about women of wealth during the later Roman Republic are restricted to the literary record and a minimal residue of pertinent honorary inscriptions. A particular category of epigraphic designation – examined to date in relation to its philological or relational application – offers a useful lens on the phenomenon of wealthy female patronage: inscriptions dating to the Republican period that include the term patrona or the name of the patrona. These inscriptions identify a cohort of women who exercised their prerogative as financially independent benefactors in service to the social fabric of towns and cities across first-century-BCE Roman Italy. By tracking the involvement of wealthy women recorded in the exercise of household or civic patronage, this corpus of inscriptions provides evidence of female participation in those social and cultural processes associated with elite households which speak to the exercise of categories of formal and informal power during the Roman Republic.

Thanks to the advances in modern literary scholarship, we are at some distance from ancient tradition, according to which characters in plays were studied as individuals, quite independently of both the compositional style and the dynamic of any individual play. But it still remains true that no play can operate – in the theatre or in the reader’s imagination – without the role of the actor. Whatever our theories concerning the reading of fiction or of human personality, there are always roles to play, which offer us critics something paradoxically solid to discuss. I, for one, have recently1 suggested that what gives theatre its particular appeal is the fact that, although the spectators know full well on one level that what they are watching is entirely fictitious, drama invites them to construct models of reality. As the spectators vividly imagine the motifs, ideas and passions suggested by the characters’ words, they participate in what one might term a ‘metaphysical’ construction.

Philoctetes has attracted more critical attention in the last fifteen years than any other play of Sophocles, more perhaps than any other Greek tragedy. This may be partly because its themes – alienation and communication, ends and means – are familiar and important to modern readers, partly because it is a play of remarkable complexity which presents a special challenge to the interpreter. What follows is a brief attempt to take stock, to see how far there are areas of common agreement and where the important problems now seem to lie.

This chapter argues that Augustine structured book 1 of the City of God according to the urbs capta motives. Urbs capta narratives (such as Livy’s), offer consolation for civilian populations that had suffered the sack of their city. They address captivity, looting, starvation, mass burials, but also sexual violence. In book 1, Augustine calls these afflictions (that is, the urbs capta motives) “law of war” (ius belli). Once recognized as the structuring device of book 1, it becomes evident that Augustine addresses sexual violence against women through the well-known case of Lucretian, but also against (elite) men. Augustine then uses the laws of war, and in particular sexual violence against men, to reframe traditional Roman virtues, especially pudicitia (modesty) and patientia (edurance) as Christian. As a result, patientia and humilitas (humility) become essential responses to war’s devastation, and Rome’s sack a sign of divine correction, while the urbs capta motives are Christianized.

Professor Kitto’s recent study1 of Trachiniae prompted me to write this paper; he makes many important points which I by no means wish to call in question, for example about Sophocles’ use of oracles, but the central problem, ‘What is the play about?’ seems to me to demand further discussion. Kitto believes that the play has a moral focus, and that it is fundamentally ‘about’ Zeus’ punishment of Heracles for his hubris.

After more than a decade of intensive study there is a good deal that can now be taken for granted about the way women were perceived in fifth-century Athens. Most people, I think, would accept the conclusions reached by John Gould in his major article in JHS 1980.

This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

This stasimon has always attracted particular attention, partly because it contains some famous textual problems, partly because it has much to say about ate, a theme especially dear to interpreters of Greek tragedy. It is also a very fine lyric and many critics have been sensitive to its poetry; is there then any need for further discussion? My defence is simply that the best known passages of great literature tend to become encrusted with clichés, so that every now and again it is worth our while to attempt a fresh reading.

Everyone agrees that the most obvious function of the ode is to offer some sort of commentary on the bewildering events of the preceding scene – the confrontation between Antigone and Creon, which opens with Antigone defending her action by appeal to the Unwritten Laws (450ff.) and ends with Creon condemning her to death (575ff.).

For the student of Greek literature authority starts with Homer. One might indeed have chosen to write about Homer himself, or his poems, as images of authority in later times, but I have preferred to be more literal-minded and to take one of the Iliad’s most obviously authoritative emblems, Agamemnon’s skēptron (neither ‘sceptre’ nor ‘staff’ is quite adequate,1 and the safest plan is probably to avoid translation altogether).

Now that more attention is being paid in Homeric studies to artistry and design we can take it as a working assumption, without the need for elaborate demonstration, that passages of detailed description are to be seen not as ‘mere’ ornament randomly placed, but as potentially enhancing the significance of the person, event or place to which they are attached and making links between different parts of the narrative.

This chapter examines the role of elite women as property owners and financial managers in the Late Roman Republic. It highlights how women, often perceived as temporary custodians of wealth, actively engaged in economic transactions, from land-ownership to commercial investments. While matrons such as Cornelia and ‖Turia’ were praised for their responsible management of wealth, others like Clodia and Fulvia were criticized, often as a tool for political delegitimization. Legal and social transformations, including increased autonomy in property management, enabled women to exert financial influence, sometimes even in political spheres. However, ancient sources frequently downplay or stigmatize their economic agency, portraying wealth as a destabilizing factor in gender and social hierarchies. By reassessing historical and literary evidence, this study sheds light on the complex relationship between Roman women, wealth and power, revealing their significant yet contested role in the economic framework of the Republic.

In contemporary English the rather pretentious metaphor ‘icon’ is steadily taking the place of ‘star’ (and the older ‘idol’) as a way of designating performers and others in the public eye – rock musicians, screen actors, footballers, models, princesses – who have an exceptionally magnetic appeal for audiences. What all who achieve iconic status have in common is the extreme seductiveness of their glamour, which depends as much on charisma and physical presence as on particular virtuoso skills. There is no reason, of course, to see this as a purely modern phenomenon: although television and newspaper images can magnify iconic status they hardly create it out of nothing.

This paper has a simple objective: to look for traces of the responses of ancient readers and critics to some familiar and long-studied Greek texts.1 My source material is the scholia vetera on Sophocles, the notes inherited from antiquity which are carried in the margins of some of the surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine period and which were much used by the compilers of the Suda lexicon.2 They have been available in print since Janus Lascaris published them at Rome in 1518, and with this record of continuous transmission since antiquity one might think they had been exhaustively studied by now, but until recently their main interest for scholars has been the light they occasionally throw on the state of the text,3 the antiquarian or mythological information that they sometimes preserve and their (considerable) value as sources of quotations from lost works.4

How far can we rely on statements made about the age of Greek manuscripts before the time of Mabillon and Montfaucon, when the systematic study of palaeography had not yet come into being? I pose the question not merely out of curiosity, but also because it has some bearing on the history of texts, as one or two of my examples will show. Of course it is far too general a question to admit of a precise answer, but I think there are at least some rough criteria by which we can evaluate the remarks about dating that are scattered here and there in scholia, on flyleaves and in the prolegomena to early printed editions.

The first point that emerges from a study of notes of this kind, other than actual subscriptions,1 is that they are normally very general, employing such terms as antiquus, vetustus, in what appears to be a quite non-technical way.

“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.” The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe. And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history. Where has war gone?