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?

Of all the scholars and critics who have interpreted Euripides in the last hundred years no one – at least in the English-speaking world – can match Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) in terms of influence and popularity. But Murray’s most substantial work on Euripides was done before the First World War, and there is something to be said for trying, at this distance, to put his reading in context and to account for the remarkably strong impact that it made both in its own time and for many years afterwards. The task is all the more relevant nowadays, when Murray is more likely to attract attention as a ‘Cambridge Ritualist’ than for his reading of Euripides, and we need to make a real effort to grasp what made this so distinctive.1

This paper is concerned with a problem that has long been one of the most controversial in the Oedipus Coloneus, namely Sophocles’ precise intention in juxtaposing Oedipus’ terrible cursing of Polynices and his mysterious and solemn passing. I cannot claim to offer a new interpretation of these scenes, but I believe that there is at least a little that is new to be learned from a close study of Sophocles’ use of language, an approach which has not often been allowed to play an important part in critical work on the Oedipus Coloneus, despite the very rich poetic texture of the play.

Oedipus is twice importuned by the outside world, first by Creon, who is portrayed as so repellent a hypocrite that we are in no doubt that we are right to sympathize with Oedipus when he contemptuously rejects him. But Sophocles predisposes us to be much more sympathetic towards the next visitor, Polynices.

In many respects Euripides’ Medea is not a problematic play. It is a singularly bold, clear-cut, assured piece of writing, the concentration and dramatic intensity of which are readily felt by reader or audience and command the respect even of those who find the subject matter repellent or who cavil at the Aegeus scene and the dragon chariot. But its starkness makes it deeply disturbing; and this unease is reflected in the critical literature on the play. The language, though consistently powerful, lacks the rich expansiveness of Hippolytus or Bacchae, almost never allowing us to range in imagination away from the immediate painful situation; it is typical that one of the most prominent of the recurring images is of Medea as a wild beast.1

A quotation from Romola in S. H. Butcher’s essay on Sophocles (1891)1 first led me to George Eliot as a reader of Greek tragedy.

The Iliad conveys an impression of, infinite resources of storytelling. The scale is vast, in terms of the numbers of people and divinities involved and the range of places included: besides Troy and its immediate surroundings, and the divine vantage-points of Olympus and Ida, there are the Troad and nearby islands, scene of Greek raids during the long years of the wars against Troy, and the many cities of Greece associated with the different Achaean heroes. But all this material is handled in a strictly selective way,1 and the effect is to concentrate and intensify, to give greater weight to those details that are chosen for attention. The terms ‘economy’ and ‘scope’, often used to characterise the system of formulaic composition, can just as usefully be applied to the narrative design.

This paper asks what might seem like an unanswerable question: can the ancient scholia on tragedy, in this case particularly the scholia on Sophocles, tell us anything coherent about the conceptualization of space shared by dramatists, performers and audiences? The material does not look promising. The surviving notes are often scrappy and seemingly random, having been excerpted from different sources, cut down, reshuffled and sometimes corrupted in the long process of transmission; this means that the great majority are anonymous and undatable, and only a few can be attributed to particular scholars. Their references to what is to be imagined about the stage action may be disappointingly cryptic, or may look like little more than armchair guesswork, and it is easy to dismiss them altogether.

The remains of ancient commentaries, transmitted in the margins of a number of manuscripts of the Greek tragedians, have been known to scholars since the Renaissance.1 Is there anything new to be discovered in these notes, which can often seem banal, cryptic or confused? They have of course been assiduously studied over the centuries by scholars in search of textual variants, of quotations drawn from lost works, of historical or mythological information that may be contained within them, but the literary interests and judgments of the commentators have received little attention. Only in the past twenty years or so, in fact, have these texts begun to be studied systematically, with a view to discovering the critical principles and reading habits of their authors.2

This brief paper began life as the second part of a joint seminar held at the Institute of Classical Studies in December 1991. The first part was contributed by Eric Handley, who gave us a magisterial survey of the types of evidence for Menander’s survival in antiquity: records of production; souvenirs of performances; copies of plays, and derivatives such as excerpts, quotations, translations, imitations, commentaries; references to library lists; evidence of educational use; images of the author. My task was to consider the possible reasons why the work of a writer so triumphantly successful and so widely influential throughout the period of antiquity should have been lost after about the sixth or seventh century AD. I was conscious then that my arguments were speculatively constructed out of more or less insecure pieces of evidence; I am even more conscious of their vulnerability now, when they have to stand alone, unsupported by the erudition of the first half.

Charles Segal’s rich study prompts discussion from many different angles. I begin with his approach to what Aristotle may have meant by catharsis, which at once takes us beyond strict commentary on Aristotelian usage in Poetics and elsewhere and encourages us to range more freely. The broad definition ‘cleansing release’1 conveniently incorporates the ideas of purgation and purification and also recalls the importance for Aristotle of the affective function of tragedy in relation to the spectator. This is a helpful way of making catharsis illuminate modern interpretations of tragedy and the tragic, and Segal’s further suggestion, that it should be associated with tragedy’s use of ritual action, is also an attractive one.

Journeying is everywhere in Sophocles, as a structuring element of plot, as a motivator of dramatic action – linking seen with unseen and present with past and future – and above all as a metaphor with an extraordinary range of resonances. The journey of life, the journey to the beyond, the wanderings of the exile, the quest, the path of destiny: all are potentially tragic images, and I want to suggest that the lasting ‘translatability’ and pervasiveness in modern culture of Sophocles’ surviving plays owes much to the complex power with which such seemingly simple images are invested. My test case will be Oedipus at Colonus, where the idea of the journey informs the whole action with particular intensity, but there are many parallels in the other plays.

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition commemorated the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The St. Louis fair was the first organized after the United States had obtained a territorial empire in 1898. While it might seem evident that classicizing architecture should be used to serve empire, surprisingly, it was not. The so-called “Free Renaissance” architecture of the fair was not primarily classical. Instead, under the banner of the Free Renaissance, vaguely historical and undeniably imposing, if not supersized, buildings were erected. The most original building at the fair, the Mines and Metallurgy Building, embodied the spirit of the neo-antique, combining multiple historical forms, including Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture. Cass Gilbert designed the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts. Now the St. Louis Art Museum, the building is modeled on the Baths of Caracalla and demonstrates that one of the most enduring appropriations of ancient architecture was for buildings associated with high and elite culture. While Roman architecture was used in several important buildings, many of the key edifices, including the Festival Hall, did not evoke ancient architecture. Certain state pavilions and territories—with no apparent connection to antiquity—employed classicizing forms to demonstrate their progress and cultural sophistication.