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.

Recent work on ritual has had a stimulating effect on the interpretation of Greek tragedy. Critics have at last felt free to set aside the old question of origins and the search for archetypal patterns, and to focus attention instead on the ritual language used in tragic texts. The impetus has come from outside – from structuralist anthropology and the work of such writers as Karl Meuli, René Girard and Victor Turner – but the application of these theories to ancient drama has only been possible because the groundwork had been laid by generations of scholars active in the field of Greek religion, with their studies of sacrifice, mysteries, festivals, cult songs, funerary practices and the rest.1

This short paper considers the problems involved in the writing of intellectual history, or – to be less grandiose – in the attempt to give an account of Attic tragedy in the first half of the fourth century b.c. Not surprisingly, it poses questions rather than offering answers.

The period I have in mind, roughly that of the first couple of generations after the Peloponnesian War, is poorly represented by surviving evidence. No tragedy of the period, apart perhaps from Rhesus, has been preserved for us complete, and what we have, in quotations and papyrus fragments, is not easy to evaluate. This is in striking contrast with the fascinating range of material surviving from the last decade of the fifth century: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Orestes, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Bacchae and perhaps also Ion and Phoenissae.

This chapter aims to qualify any defined boundaries between educated Roman women and their political or public engagement. As one moves further into the post-triumviral period, women pursuing cultural and educational endeavours appeared to gain more acceptance and admiration. This observation is particularly applicable to the case of Octavia Minor, the sister of Octavian Augustus and the fourth wife of Marcus Antonius. This chapter explores instances of Octavia’s educational pursuits, such as her involvement in creating networks of philosophers and tutors to educate her son, Marcellus (Strabo), her patronage (Vitruvius and the Porticus Octaviae) and instances of speech crafted for the Plutarchan Octavia, which blend the political and private spheres and are interpreted as a suasoria (Plutarch). Through these examples, this study positions Octavia as a prominent figure who exemplifies how female political engagement and paideia could be reconciled during the triumviral period.

Given a brief to discuss ‘female voices’ in ancient Greek poetry one might be tempted to choose Sappho or other women poets – like Praxilla or Telesilla – who were influential enough in their own time (and later) to have lyric meters named after them. But the surviving scraps of their poetry are not easily placed in their exact cultural context, and I have chosen instead to use a familiar text that survives in extenso and offers a range of extraordinarily influential paradigms for ways of behaving, thinking and feeling in ancient Greek society – the Iliad.

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.