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.

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.