One feature of the ancient accounts of Achilles' early life in Thessaly is the consistently important part played by Chiron the wise and just centaur. Hesiod tells us that Chiron dwelt on Mount Pelion and taught a number of mythical figures like Achilles, Jason, Medeius, and Actaeon. Indeed Hesiod's interest in Chiron seems to have extended to his writing of a work on the subject of Chiron's teachings, of which there is some minimal fragmentary evidence (The Precepts of Chiron). There are various versions of his role in Achilles' early life, including one that Peleus entrusted his young son to the care of Chiron shortly after his separation from Thetis. This version is not entirely incompatible with what we find in Homer's Iliad(see below), and appears to be the subject of the earliest (fragmentary) iconographical evidence dating from the seventh century B.C. The general picture we get from the ancient sources is that Chiron essentially brings up the boy and gives him an education that includes music, medicine, horses, hunting, and martial arts. These skills prove to be invaluable in Achilles' heroic career including the war at Troy where he excels in virtually every aspect of his endeavours.

It is generally accepted that in classical Athens a widely proclaimed sexual morality expected citizen women not only to be chaste, confining sexual activity to marriage, but also to avoid any suspicion of improper contact with men. While some recent works still suggest that Athenian citizen women did conform to their society's expectations, and even that women lived in seclusion to promote chastity, others have long recognized that Athenian women showed a wider range of behaviour and, sometimes at least, had sexual liaisons with men other than their husbands. It is unfortunate that the most vigorous statement of the view that significant numbers of Athenian women did not in practice accept their society's constraints, an article by Richter in 1971, while containing much of value, weakens its own case by overstatement: few can accept, for instance, that in classical Athens ‘the young wives were as undisciplined a bevy of nymphs as Hellas ever reared’. Nonetheless it seems clear that Athenian women (and of course Athenian men) breached the sexual code commonly proclaimed in their society. It is the purpose of this paper to consider how widespread such breaches were, and in what spirit they were undertaken, whether purely as guilty acts or as behaviour that was at least condoned by an alternative morality.

The idea of a collection of letters from a Roman senator to his equestrian friend might encourage the reader familiar with the Letters of Cicero to expect a certain kind of self-revelation. Seneca, like Cicero, was one of the most prominent men in Rome in his own time. We might expect his letters to tell us his views on the emperor Nero, for instance, or what his motives were for retiring from public life (as he had done by the time he came to write the Letters). But readers of Seneca's Letters, at least in modern times, have often felt disappointed at his failure to provide information about himself and the world he lives in.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has not always been greeted with applause. On the fly-leaf to Volume IV of his copy, Gibbon's contemporary, the writer, antiquarian, and bibliophile, William Beckford gave vent to near apoplectic rage:

If you lived in Reading in 1821, you might be tempted by the advertisement in your local newspaper for forthcoming attractions at the neighbourhood's commercial theatre. Should your taste encompass Greco-Roman themes, you might want to see ‘Monsieur DECOUR, the renowned FRENCH HERCULES!! Who will perform… FEATS AND EVOLUTIONS…’. If you preferred oriental stunts, you would choose ‘The Chinese JUGGLERS from the Court of Pekin!!’ Such exhibitions are fairly typical of the popular entertainments enjoyed during the late Georgian era in any fast industrializing provincial town not too far from London. But what is surprising is that the same newspaper offers a review of a production in the town hall of Euripides’ little known tragedy Orestes.