This chapter sets out to look for what was distinctive about Greek practice in the staging of tragic stories. There is no doubt that this new art form of the late sixth and early fifth centuries was a highly original experiment, with no obvious model in other cultures, but of course the early dramatists did not have to start from scratch. The epic and lyric traditions offered them a great range of serious narratives which had already been shaped for performance, whether by rhapsodes or by choruses, and without this precedent it would be hard to imagine Attic tragedy having developed as quickly as it did into a genre of such richness, sophistication and popular appeal.1

This chapter examines the evidence for the economic situation and legal rights of Licinnia, daughter of Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus and wife of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It is argued that she owned (probably as part of her dowry) the house on the Palatine where the couple lived together until Gaius Gracchus moved near the Forum in the last year of his life. The wealth Licinnia brought with her supported her married life and her husband’s prominent career. After her husband’s violent death and the confiscation of his property by the state, Licinnia retained her dowry and subsequently sued successfully for damages to her dotal property that had resulted from rioting. Licinnia’s experiences illustrate the economic and social independence of Roman women in the late second century BCE.

This paper is about Furies as stage presences in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which may have been the first play to introduce them to the Greek theatre and certainly gave Greek literature some of its most influential images. I use ‘Furies’ as a convenient shorthand for Erinyes/Eumenides/Semnai Theai, without wishing to imply that their complex identity can be captured in a single English word.1 In concentrating on theatrical performance I am deeply indebted to Oliver Taplin’s inspiring work, and I want to use an approach akin to his in addressing a question central to interpretation of the Oresteia, namely how we are to understand Athena’s persuasion of the Furies and their ultimate acceptance of honours at Athens. Are they ‘transformed’? Are they ‘subordinated’?

This short note is offered to Bernd Seidensticker with much gratitude for his influential work on dramatic texts and their performance and reception in antiquity.

The ancient scholia on tragedy are studied more thoroughly nowadays, and taken more seriously, than they were a generation ago, and scholars have been paying more attention to the critical language found in some of the notes.1 The phrasing of a couple of scholia on Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus has led me to reconsider the implications of σεμνός and its cognates as value terms in the discussion of tragic language and action.

This chapter considers the role of elite women in the auctions of confiscated property during the Late Republic, particularly Sulla’s proscriptions of 81 BCE, and argues that elite women could benefit economically from civil war. While participating in these confiscations harmed the reputations of men close to the dictator, association with the proscriptions was even more damning for the women involved. Several of Sulla’s female relatives were said to have participated in the proscription auctions, with his Caecilia Metella branded as a sectrix proscriptionum or ‘auctioness of the proscriptions’. This label transformed elite women into distasteful, lower-class brokers of proscribed property, showing how the issues of inheritance and wealth raised by the proscriptions could influence female reputations. A comparison with the Servilia and Fulvia, later alleged female profiteers, reveals a continued discourse about the economic and political power of women who profited from confiscated property.

Among the remarkable surprises offered by the Archimedes Palimpsest there is one in particular that prompts my choice of topic: the discovery of parts of two speeches by Hyperides as the lower text in five bifolia of the prayer book, announced by Natalie Tchernetska in ZPE in late 2005.1

Until this identification was made, the scholarly consensus was that Hyperides was one of the many casualties of late antiquity, that despite his eminence as an orator spoken of for centuries in the same breath as Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines and sometimes even Demosthenes, and despite his prolific output and the survival of some of his works in papyri, along with many quotations and other testimonia,2 he failed to survive long enough to be copied in minuscule, unlike significant parts of the rest of the work of the so-called ‘Canon’ of Ten Orators.

Oedipus at Colonus is not unique among Greek tragedies in using oracles as both structuring elements in the plot and clues to interpretation, but Sophocles makes especially telling use of them in this play, as many scholars have noted. Even so, I believe there is a little more to be said, and I hope the topic is one that may appeal to our honorand, whose observations on the name and nature of Apollo may serve as guidelines for this paper, particularly his characterisation of the god as ‘the word waiting to be translated into action’.1

The historian looking for contemporary evidence of fifth-century Athenian mentalité might reasonably think there is something to be learned from Greek tragedy about how (if not precisely what) the playwrights and their audiences thought about the community they lived in. After all, the plays were designed for the benefit of the community, for performances at public festivals in the presence of large audiences, and they were presented on the community’s initiative and behalf, with state funding, both direct and indirect, and citizen performers. So it certainly makes sense in general terms to look to the plays for some kind of refraction of the society that provided the context of production; but it is much harder to go further and attempt to read the signs in detail.

The volume introduction sets out the current debate on the role of women in Roman politics and the significance of wealth and draws attention to the understudied intersection between these topics, which is the justification for this volume. A summary of the volume sections then follows.

To the modern reader there is nothing initially surprising about the presence of kings in Greek tragedy. After all, in European tragedy down to at least the eighteenth century kings were regarded as the natural dramatis personae of the genre.1 But if we forget for the time being about later traditions and consider the fifth century B.C. at Athens there is – or seems to be – an element of paradox in this choice. Athens was by now the leading democratic state in the Greek world, and, although she had known tyranny under the Pisistratids in the sixth century, the monarchy had of course long since vanished. It is inconceivable that monarchy as such represented any kind of threat or problem to the Athenians; tyranny or oligarchy might indeed be feared, but no one can seriously have thought that rule by a king was now possible at Athens, whatever may have been true of conservative Sparta. Why then were royal persons regularly chosen as the leading characters in Attic drama?