I never share the feeling of those who go so far in their anger against men of their own race that they not only take away their enemies' annual crops but also destroy their trees and agricultural equipment, thereby leaving no opportunity for reparation. Instead, those who do that seem to me to be extremely short-sighted: the more they assume to be terrorizing the enemy by ruining their land and taking away all their hopes of earning a living – not just for the present, but also for the future – just that much more do they brutalize others and so create a hatred of themselves that is never removed.

Claudius's stay of sixteen days in Britain preceded one of the most famous triumphal celebrations in the history of the early Roman Empire. The emperor's own personal involvement in the conquest of Britain in A.d. 43 was negligible, but that he took the trouble to visit the new province and to receive the submission of eleven kings of Britannia is much to his credit. Claudius is known to have brought with him a great retinue of Roman senators, the Praetorian Guard, and perhaps also a detachment of Legio VIII, to overawe the defeated Britons. Four legions had been enough to crush them, yet here was the emperor with further reinforcements, including his crack Praetorians.

Starkie wrote of this scene (Ach.393–489) that it was ‘perhaps the most successful piece of Aristophanic burlesque in existence'. Recently Dearden has written that the rag-borrowing scene exists only for the sake of the Euripidean parody. ‘Euripides is introduced into the play (it becomes apparent) to provide Dicaeopolis with rags in which he can plead his case before the Acharnians – though before he actually speaks to them he finds it necessary to apologize for these very rags (498). The whole scene is an obvious and elaborate parody of the spirit of Euripides’ plays and in particular of his realism in dressing his heroes in rags and it can hardly be claimed that providing the rags is the main object: they are, rather, the means of satirizing elements of his tragedies.’ I agree that Aristophanes is making fun of Euripides here, of his parentage and personality, his tragic style and dramatic technique, his presentation of a hero who is crippled or blinded and dressed in rags. But there is more to be said for, and about, the scene than that it equips Dicaeopolis and mocks Euripides.

This comment occurs in the closing sequence of the epitaphios of 431/0 attributed to Pericles. The speech was delivered at the public funeral held for Athenian casualties in the first year of the Archidamian War. The earlier part of the speech was devoted to praise of the characteristics, practices, and values of the Athenians as a democratic and imperial community. The features which Pericles is reported as stressing were those which ‘made Athens great’, those by which her dominance was shown. From these is derived the glory achieved by those who died ‘as became Athenians’ (2.43).

I happened to be looking through one of the volumes of Lyra Graeca when I came across the fascinating account, in Pollux's Word-Book, of some of the games played by Greek children, the jingles that go with the different games, and their titles.

‘Here the prince held a review in the park and took a muster of our countrymen and they amounted all told to 11,000 heavy-armed and about 2,000 light-armed infantry. Thence he marched to—, a populous town, where he halted five days. More than three months’ pay was now owing to the troops and they came often to his gates and demanded it. He talked hopefully and tried to put them off, but was obviously worried. For it was not like him to withhold money when he had it. At this place the wife of a neighbouring king came to the prince and, it was said, gave him a large sum of money. At any rate he gave the troops four months' pay. This queen had a body-guard of her own men, but according to camp gossip the prince knew how to pass the sentries. Thence he proceeded another two marches further inland to another large town. There he halted three days and there, it was said, the queen asked him to show her his army. This was in accord with his own wishes. So he held a review of our countrymen and of his own troops. He ordered our men to draw up in their accustomed order of battle, each general in command of his own contingent. So they formed up four deep. The prince inspected his own forces first and they marched past, the horse by squadrons and the foot by companies.Then he inspected our men, driving up and down the lines in a chariot, and the queen following in an armoured wagon.

We know so much more about Cicero than we do about anyone else from antiquity, and because of the nature of our knowledge, especially the ‘personal’ viewpoint which his letters offer, it is easy to think we know more about him than we actually do, or to consider him unique, attributing to him alone as personality characteristics things which may in fact be features common to others of his class and time. So, for instance, he is regularly accused of inconsistency in public life by both ancients and moderns, but I believe here we are led astray by the evidence, and that he was only marginally more changeable than his contemporaries. This is a position impossible to argue, because it would require information that we do not have about the vagaries of political alliances in the 60s, 50s, and 40s bc, and about how many times various people changed their minds about different things. Even the limited material we do have, however, suggests that the successful late Republican politician held very few alliances to be unbreakable. This article explores the possibility that Cicero was particularly susceptible to the charge of inconsistency precisely because he was not one of the nobiles, and so could not lay claim to this aristocratic virtue without being challenged. It also suggests that he may in reality have had to change his mind more regularly than his contemporaries, again owing to the vulnerabilities inherent in his status. Finally, it raises the possibility that inconstantia and levitas in Latin may mean something different from what inconsistency usually means in English, at least to some speakers of the language. After brief discussion of the nuances of constantia and its opposite, I explore the charge of levitas as wielded by Cicero's enemies against him in the trials of 54 bc, his own defences against the charge, and then his use of it against others in the 50s and 40s. I should perhaps make clear that this is not an attempt to rehabilitate Cicero, except insofar as the ancient evidence misleads us into misjudging him; I hope merely to suggest that inconstantia is in the eye of the beholder, and that most of the leading figures of the Senate were more prone to see it in men like Cicero than in men like themselves.

The earthquake of 62/63 ce was a catastrophic event for Pompeii and Campania. The destruction and death toll were extensive and it is clear that the city of Pompeii was still recovering and rebuilding when the eruption of Vesuvius happened. This article takes into consideration the mental and emotional damage that the earthquake caused and the way in which Seneca and the archaeological record help us to perceive strategies of consolation and therapy. Seneca discusses this earthquake in Book 6 of his Naturales quaestiones and hopes to lead his reader from the shock of the earthquake to a more comprehensive understanding of the physical causes of the tremor. The cultural memory of events not witnessed directly (such as Seneca's write-up of the Pompeii earthquake) makes us all survivors and ‘turn[s] history into a memory in which we can all participate’. If trauma ‘spreads via language and representation’, Seneca wants to limit what exactly is traumatic about this event and employs his creative rhetoric to do so. His account demonstrates how Stoic physics and ethics are connected and moves the reader from his or her fear of earthquakes to the fear of death at the root of the anxiety. Seneca carefully alters the valence of certain terms as well as selected memories of the earthquake to encourage his reader to transcend his or her fear and view earthquakes as natural occurrences, not anomalies to be dreaded. He does this through strategies identified in modern trauma theory as useful for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and this article investigates how contemporary trauma theory can help us understand aspects of Seneca's remedy. Seneca's repetitions of certain events and terminology works to reassess and renovate them from a philosophical angle – in essence it turns potential ‘flashbacks’ and ‘triggers’ into beneficial sites of memory and the means of recovery. Survivors often relive the trauma again and again – Seneca's work alludes to this, but now makes the victim actively revise how to make such iterations part of the recovery.

In his 1982 essay on Catullus 64, Richard Jenkyns offered an eloquent and elegant counterblast to the ‘reductivism that has characterized much recent criticism of Latin poetry’ (p. 82). He argued that to impose a unifying interpretation on such a work as Peleus and Thetis impoverishes it. ‘Anyone who has failed to perceive that throughout this poem Catullus is deliberately various, disproportionate and unpredictable has certainly not understood it’ (p. 92). With the advent of the millennium, it seems that Jenkyns, even if he won the battle, did not win the war, though, doubtless because of him, the unities which scholars now advocate have become decidedly more capacious, more able to serve as hold-alls, than those imposed by their predecessors. The instinct to identify unifying principles appears to be a strong one. In any case, Jenkyns’ own view of the poem – that it ‘is made up of pictures in that it is a gallery of tableaux or set pieces’ (p. 150) – can surely be taken as suggesting the kind of e pluribus unum of a work such as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The various tableaux, each of them displayed, as it were, by the poet to elicit a differing response, may add up to a single experience. It is not simply that the total may be greater than the sum of the individual parts; it is rather that the total may attain a unity of its own.

Many a traveller sailing up the Rhine gorge must have wondered what lies beyond the noble cliffs on either hand. Not all perhaps have realized that if they could scale the heights on their left, leave the ruined castles and flourishing vineyards behind them, and walk some ten or fifteen miles to the north-east, they would cross the great earthen mound and ditch which still remain to mark the boudary of the Roman Empire. This barrier, part of a system more than three hundred miles in length, stretching from Rhine to Danube, is well worth the attention of those who are interested in the British frontier walls.

In 1797 Ennius Quirinus Visconti declared that the starting-gate (aphesis) at Olympia, described by Pausanias, had caused more crashes among modern antiquaries than ever the turning-posts did among the charioteers whom in its heyday it launched on their course; the intervening 170 years have lengthened the tale of academic disasters. But even at the risk of adding to the pile-up of reputations it seems legitimate to attempt another investigation of the subject. The moment is opportune, now that experiments are being made in the use of starting-stalls for horses on British race-courses.

In 1936, T. B. L. Webster argued that Sophocles' Trachiniae has strong allusions to Aeschylus' Agamemnon, particularly in the characters of Deianeira and Clytemnestra. Once identified, it is easy see: each kills her husband as he returns from battle, and in each case the death contains an element of entrapment. Heracles' poisoned robe indeed seems deliberately to reflect the famous net used to entrap Agamemnon: Heracles' description of it (οἷον τόδ᾽ ἡ δολῶπις Οἰνέως κόρη / καθῆψεν ὤμοις τοῖς ἐμοῖς Ἐρινύων / ὑϕαντὸν ἀμϕίβληστρον, ‘…this woven garment of the Erinyes which the treacherous daughter of Oineus fastened on my shoulders’; Trachiniae 1050–2) is similar to Aegisthus' words near the end of Agamemnon (ἰδὼν ὑϕαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων / τὸν ἄνδρα τόνδε κείμενον ϕίλως ἐμοί, ‘…seeing this man lying in robes of the Erinyes, to my joy’; 1580–1). Even if the direct verbal allusion fails to resonate with an audience, it seems unlikely, given the high level of audience competence, that audience members would not make the thematic connection. It is almost impossible to deny, therefore, that in Deianeira Sophocles was writing a deliberate response to Clytemnestra and contrasting the accidental murder caused by a loving wife with the carefully planned murder by a bitter wife.

Street fights seem to have been as common in classical Athens as they are in modern cities. One incident, which probably took place a few years after 394 bc, involved two rivals for the attentions of a young Plataian, Theodotos, apparently a slave and a rent boy. There was a history of violent disagreement between the opponents, one of whom was a wealthy, middle-aged Athenian citizen whose name we do not know. The other, a (probably) younger man named Simon, claimed to have had a contract with Theodotos for sexual services, which was breached when the older man enticed him away. For the sake of a quiet life, the older man left Athens for a time, taking Theodotos with him, and did not come back until he thought Simon would have forgotten about the boy. But not long after their return there was another fight, accounts of which conflicted sharply. According to Simon, the older man went to his house threatening to kill him, and attacked him with some broken pottery, causing a serious head wound. The older man's story was that Simon and his friends got drunk over lunch, then lay in wait near the house where he and Theodotos were inside, and jumped on them as they came out. After a chase through the streets, the incident developed into a general mêlée in which everyone ended up with a broken head. The older man claimed that he had considered prosecuting Simon for assault, but had been too embarrassed and fearful of damaging his reputation. Four years later, though, Simon prosecuted him for trauma ek pronoias, which we may tentatively translate as ‘intentional wounding’.

Athene is mentioned in the Iliad nearly 200 times and almost as often in the Odyssey. On ninety-two occasions Homer calls her γλαυκ⋯πις. How should we translate this constantly recurring epithet? Neither Chapman nor Pope claims to provide a literal translation. Often they are content with ‘Athenian Maid’ or ‘Minerva’: but when they do attempt to render γλαυκ⋯πις they offer ‘Blue-eyed Goddess’, ‘Blue-eyed Maid’, &c. Cowper prefers ‘Pallas cerulean-eyed’, and Lord Derby ‘blue-eyed Pallas’.

Ancient drama is frequently said nowadays to be unsuited to the taste of modern audiences, and when one sees modern productions of ancient plays one is inclined to agree. And yet the plays read well, and they certainly appealed to a wide variety of audiences in ancient times. Can it be that it is the production and not the play that is at fault? Apart from the obvious fact that most modern producers are unable or unwilling to handle a chorus effectively, it does seem very often that the production is based on an interpretation of the play, which, if it is not actually misguided, is at any rate hesitant. There are two factors which make it extremely difficult to interpret or appreciate an ancient play. First, the influence of Aristotle has caused us to judge ancient drama by the rules which he laid down and to measure all tragedies by the standard of Sophokles' Oedipus the King, although it is obvious that the poets were not guided by Aristotle's rules and that many tragedies aimed at effects quite different from those of the Oedipus the King. Thus we expect ancient tragedy to be ‘tragic’ in our sense of the word, and we are baffled when we find no ‘tragic’ element to satisfy our expectations. Secondly, the knowledge that drama originated as part of the cult of Dionysos impels us to label it ‘ritual drama’, and to feel that it must be solemn and conventional and must concern itself with weighty moral and theological problems. We are slightly surprised to find that it is not confined to a re-enactment of the Dionysos myths, and we hardly dare to contemplate the possibility that poets dealt very freely with the myths and legends which they took as their subjects. But ancient drama had to appeal to mixed audiences. It could not afford to be bound by academic rules or by excessive subservience to tradition. The fact that dramatic performances were organized as competitions was in itself an inducement to introduce new methods of handling the traditional material; and, if we look at the plays which have survived, we can see that drama changed constantly to suit the inevitable changes in public taste.

This scene constitutes the first meeting between Antigone and her sister Ismene since their dramatic parting at the end of the first scene, in which, as Jebb says (Antig. Introd., p. xxix), there has been shown to be ‘a spiritual division which no emotional after-impulse can cancel’. It is plainly seen that Ismene can never rise to taking part with Antigone in Polyneices’ burial; Antigone realizes this; so do the spectators, and no further scene should be required to emphasize it.