This chapter delves into female influence on money and wealth from an individual perspective, using the concept of matronage as a framework. Cicero, who was often burdened by financial concerns, had two women as intermediaries: his wife Terentia and Teucris, possibly to be identified with Mucia Tertia. Mucia, by leveraging her personal and familial wealth, showcased remarkable agency in strategically deploying capital during her marriages to Pompey and Scaurus. Her career and influence highlight the power of matronage, particularly in times of crisis, when Scaurus relied on her network. The chapter calls for a re-evaluation of sources, which often take an androcentric perspective and neglect the significant role of women in power structures and their impact on political and economic events. Mucia epitomizes many elite women who exercised decisive influence through their networks and resources.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s core arguments – specifically, that studying the reception of ancient architecture at the world’s fairs at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco furthers our understanding of the complex and possibly conflicting and contradictory ways in which the ancient world and its architecture were understood in the United States between 1893 and 1915. The appropriation of classical architecture for museums and fine art galleries emerges as a major theme. While classical architecture could be used to justify empire and institutional racism, it could also symbolize democracy and cultural sophistication. The fluidity and flexibility of ancient architecture underscore why it was so widely and creatively adapted in the United States. The physical legacy of these fairs – the buildings that survived and the parks – is also considered. In addition, the conclusion discusses the decline of ancient architecture as one of the most potent ways in which fair organizers expressed their cultural, political, and economic goals; the rejection of historical forms was vital to the birth of architectural Modernism. In sum, neo-antique architecture at American world’s fairs helped the nation and various cities to forge imagined ties to a glorious past, frame the present, and envisage the future.

The inspiration for this paper is a piece published by Richard Green in 1999: ‘Tragedy and the Spectacle of the Mind: Messenger Speeches, Actors, Narrative, and Audience Imagination in Fourth-Century bce Vase-Painting’,1 which elegantly illustrates the productive interconnections that his work has often traced between artefacts and texts. Green discusses the presence, on many South Italian (mainly Tarentine) vases which deal with tragic subjects, of a figure usually to be identified as a family retainer, who is typically elderly and bent, carries a staff, and ‘makes the speaking gesture with his right hand’.2 This is his regular pose: he is telling the awful story of the events represented on the vase.

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, or White City, marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World” and showcased Chicago’s ambition to be a modern metropolis. While Chicago’s architecture is often labeled as Beaux-Arts or Roman, this chapter argues that the architecture of its key buildings and central spaces embodied the bricolage of the neo-antique. The White City established neo-antique architecture as the preferred architectural idiom for American world’s fairs. This architecture also demonstrated that the United States was now a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. The lasting impact of the White City’s architecture is evident in urban planning, especially in the City Beautiful movement and in civil buildings built after the fair. Other buildings at the fair, such as Haiti’s pavilion, also utilized classicizing architecture. For Haiti, the ideals of democracy and the cultural cachet of classical culture informed the choice of classical architecture here. Ancient Egyptian architecture also appeared in the form of a replica of the Temple of Luxor, located in the Midway Plaisance, the fair’s entertainment zone, aiming to educate and entertain visitors. The reception of ancient architecture at the White City reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between nineteenth-century America and the ancient world.

Scholars writing about Euripides in the theatre1 have been particularly interested in his innovations, made notorious by texts like Aristophanes’ Frogs: ‘modern’ music with lyric solos in operatic style, homely images of the heroes, gods ‘from the machine’, a new ironic, highly sophisticated, sometimes irreverent, tone. All these features are worth studying closely, but we should remember, too, that from the fourth century b.c. onwards, as Euripides became the acknowledged theatrical master and the model for other dramatists to follow, what had been specifically new about his drama became classic in its turn. From our point of view it is just as important to ask what gives his plays lasting significance in the theatre as to study what was innovative about them in their own time.

Octavia, sister of the later Augustus, often stands in the shadows of great matronae, such as Fulvia and Livia Drusilla, in modern scholarship. Yet she played a vital part in the triumviral political programme and exercised significant influence on state and triumviral politics in the years 39–32 BCE. This chapter argues for Octavia’s political influence on M. Antonius and Young Caesar being instrumental in maintaining peace between the two colleagues from the aftermath of the Bellum Perusinum to the eventual final collapse of relations between the two triumvirs in 32. This chapter further argues that the historical Octavia built on traditional modes of influence originating from the socio-political elite milieu of the Late Republic but that the Octavia constructed in the historical narratives looked ahead to the creation of the ideal matrona of the Imperial domus all while paying tribute to her vital role in preserving concordia in the res publica.

This chapter demonstrates the enduring vitality and importance of the trope of the captive city (urbs capta) for late antique authors. Narratives of captured ancient cities follow a set pattern often modeled on the destruction of Troy but also, in Jewish and Christian contexts, on the sieges of Jerusalem. While these highly formulaic narratives are of little use to modern scholars interested in reconstructing specific acts of siege warfare, they provide historians with invaluable evidence for ways in which late Romans reckoned with the impact of war on civilian populations, which assumed a new urgency in the later empire when the sacked cities were increasingly Roman, and when both victim and aggressor were Christians. By tracing the use of the captive city trope from the late fourth to the sixth century, the chapter explains how Christian authors reframed the urbs capta motif by shifting the focus from the city to the church as the locus of suffering.

The essays in this collection are remarkable for the wealth of the evidence and the power of the arguments presented, about Roman republican women, by twenty-first century women–and men–from around the globe. The capacious reach of the research shared, notwithstanding the ostensibly narrow scope of the topic, demands a similarly capacious perspective in framing a response to these, puissant, riches. Hence I would urge all of us who benefit from this research to be as elastic, and as generous, as possible in thinking, for the future, about how we might most capaciously and productively define all three terms that have framed this volume–women, wealth, and power–in the context of their time, place and socio-cultural ambiance. I consequently pose the question: in our subsequent investigations on this topic, what and whom might we include in each of these three analytical categories, women, wealth, and power, that have yet to be accorded as much scrutiny as they might?

Sophocles belongs to that small group of authors whose works – or some fraction of them – have always been classics.1 Even Euripides, who was ultimately more influential – more widely performed after his death, more often quoted and studied – than Sophocles, was not as popular for a start, whereas Sophocles, like Homer as represented by the Iliad and Odyssey, or Virgil, or Horace, did not have to wait to achieve canonical status. A high proportion of his plays were outstandingly successful when first put on in the drama competitions of his lifetime; some of the most admired of these became part of the theatrical repertoire after his death and stayed there as long as plays were performed; at least a handful were intensively studied by the students and scholars of later antiquity, survived as classics in the Christian educational system of the Byzantine period and safely reached print in Venice in 1502.

Anachronism-hunting has been out of fashion with scholars in recent times, for the good reason that it can easily seem like a rather trivial sort of parlour game. But given that Greek tragedy draws so heavily on the past, a close look at some examples may perhaps throw light on a far from trivial subject, the dramatists’ perception of the heroic world.

So long as anachronism was treated as an artistic failing the debate was bound to be unproductive; one can sympathise with Jebb’s view (on Soph. El. 48ff.) that Attic tragedy was ‘wholly indifferent’ to it. And one can see why later scholars have objected to the very idea of anachronism as irrelevant and misleading. Ehrenberg, for example, wrote in 1954.

A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts.1 In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.