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).

Elite, Athenian, male – all three adjectives usually apply to our sources on the ancient world, and the study of ancient ethics (including even so-called ‘popular morality’) is no different in this respect. There are, however, a few exceptional sources that provide a window into a more diverse population and their hopes, desires, values, and insecurities. In the following, I wish to highlight one of these – the corpus of oracular lamellae from Dodona – and demonstrate how this body of evidence can shed new light on an old question. Specifically, I will consider what we can learn about techne (art, craft, profession) from these tablets; but in addition I hope readers with an interest in ancient ethics will see how promising this source is for further study on other topics. As I will show, alongside the better known peri technes literature – a group of texts from the fifth and fourth centuries bce that discuss medicine and other crafts from a theoretical standpoint – there is a small corpus of texts from Dodona that uses this same phrase and discusses the crafts from a far more practical perspective. The object of this article will be to show how these two corpora are mutually enlightening.

Upon seeing or hearing the name Cyrus, most readers will probably think of the famous Persian king, well known from Xenophon's Cyropaedia and the prophet Isaiah's enthusiastic message about this king as the one who set the Jewish people free from their exile in Babylon. This article, however, will deal with a Cyrus who lived some thousand years later, c.400–70 CE. Cyrus of Panopolis was well known in his day as politician, as (re)builder of Constantinople, as bishop, and as poet. I will first present a short biographical sketch of this remarkable man and thereafter dwell a bit longer upon his poetry.

The story of Gyges has come down to us in several versions. These include a summary of a version recorded by Nicholas of Damascus, which may descend ultimately from the Lydian historian Xanthos; a fragment of a dramatic version by an unknown Greek author; a brief description by Plutarch; Justin's summary of a version by Pompeius Trogus; and a version by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, summarized by Photius. But the most famous and oldest fully extant versions of the story are those told by Herodotus and Plato.

The Augustan constitution—if we may use this word, for which there is no ancient equivalent—is as important a subject as the large number of modern writings devoted to it would suggest, and to judge by their contradictory character, it is a difficult one. Anyone who attempts, as I am attempting to-day, yet another general statement, and that within the compass of a single paper, must hedge himself around with protestations and admissions of what he is going to leave out. I must also at once forestall the criticism, frequently launched at students of this subject, that I am the dupe of ancient propaganda, inscriptions including the Res Gestae, and the coins. I fully appreciate that their insinuating suggestions are constantly misleading; and yet they, as the principal contemporary sources, are what I chiefly propose to quote to you to-day. I must also concede that these sources show a meticulous correctness of terminology, concerning matters such as the legal nuances distinguishing various powers, which must have been lost on considerable sections of the general Roman public. But these sections of the public should not be the concern of a student of the Augustan constitution. His concern is rather with the governing class, the fabricators of this insidious publicity. They, at least, were very far from averse to constitutional niceties; and incidentally, against those who stress the ignorance of the public, these hard-headed men would never have taken so much trouble if nobody was going to be impressed by it.

But I am not plunging into the full intricacy of their efforts to-day; for the compass of one paper requires simplification, and one way in which I shall simplify is by ignoring the many nuances between different categories of power, and considering them as subdivided into two main categories only—on the one side that sort of power which was part of the legal and formal machinery of the State, a potestas, including some powers carrying imperium and some lacking it, and on the other side all those media of authority which were not based on any potestas.

The second act of Plautus' Mostellaria begins (348ff.) with the panicstricken return from Piraeus of the slave Tranio. He has seen at the harbour his master Theoropides, just returned from abroad; now immediate and drastic action will be needed to prevent him from discovering what his son Philolaches (abetted by Tranio) has been up to during his absence. The first essential is to hustle Philolaches and his drinking-companions indoors before the old man has time to get home. Only when that has been done will Tranio have leisure to think out a plan for duping his master. It takes 28 lines (371–98) to clear the stage; then, having at last got the drinking-party safely inside the house, Tranio can tell Philolaches what he wants him to do. His final instruction (404) is:

Clauem mi harunc aedium Laconicam iam iube ecferri intus: hasce ego aedis occludam hinc foris.

Vergil has an accurate eye for visual detail, and describes much as an artist might each cameo of his narrative. It is for this reason that we are shocked by images that cannot be easily translated visually. Perhaps the most arresting of such passages is the description of the monstrum Fama at A. 4. 173ff., which defies any reasonable attempt to convert it into a visual or narrative image.

Among the scanty stage directions in the present text of Shakespeare's plays one reads things like ‘Alarums’ or ‘Drum heard’ or ‘Noise and tumult within’ or ‘March afar off and shot within’. The Elizabethan producer had, it seems, little apparatus and made much play with such a device as ‘noises off’. The simplicity, not to say crudity, of the means at his disposal may not have served him ill. Perhaps an audience is more easily stirred to pity and terror by the sound of distant gunfire than by a realistic battle-scene elaborately produced on a modern stage with its many resources of furniture and lighting. The eyes of the ignorant may be more learned than their ears, but the ears are more imaginative: at least they were when Agamemnon and Henry VIII first walked the stage. Aeschylus, at any rate, and Shakespeare did make effective use of sound effects. It is not altogether fanciful to suppose that all ancient poets practise a similar technique. Homer, Od. 1. 351:

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.

The tradition of classical studies in Poland goes back to the Middle Ages. The first historical chronicle, written in Latin, appeared in this country in the twelfth century. At present Latin is taught in about 30 per cent, of our grammar schools. The course covers four years of instruction, and the texts studied are those of Nepos, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace. Greek is studied at the universities, mainly by students of classical philology, although its knowledge is also required in some other fields of the humanities.

Atticus: Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur, saepe a me lectus in Mario. Sin manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim est sane uetus.

Qvintus: Manet uero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. Sata est enim ingenio; nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae uersu seminari potest.

Atticus: Indeed I recognize that grove and this Arpinate oak, which I’ve often read about in the Marius. If that oak still stands, it must be this one; for old it certainly is.

Quintus: Of course it stands, my dear Atticus, and it will always stand, for it has been planted in the imagination. Indeed no farmer’s cultivation can produce a plant as long-lasting as that which is sown by the verse of a poet. De legibus 1.1

The image of the Marian oak begins De legibus with almost postmodern abruptness. This is in part due to the absence of an authorial preface, such as the long statement of purpose partially preserved in De re publica 1.1–14, which leaves De legibus without a chronological or situational frame of reference. The result is that the treatise begins in a particularly Platonic fashion, as the contemplation of an object in the natural landscape proceeds into a discussion of its symbolic meaning, setting up the dichotomy between perception and reality, ficta and vera, the past and its memory.

The thesis of this paper is that Brasidas, while being second to no Spartan in courage and endurance, excelled them all, if not other Greek generals as well, even during his short life, in grasp of military principles, in energy, enterprise, leadership, in military genius.

Towards the end of the winter 1939–40 I was asked by a nephew, who is the Mayor of a Midland town and had to request his Council to confer the freedom of the borough on some notable, whether there was not in Demosthenes an appropriate compliment for him to quote, expressing the high qualities of the candidate for the honour. I guessed that my nephew had a vague recollection from his school-days of the De Corona, and I found what I thought was in his mind in § 84—the spurious decree granting a crown to Demosthenes because he had always been friendly to the city, and had always said and done all the good in his power on its behalf. My nephew was pleased and used the quotation in his speech. I was then moved to explore the De Corona for myself, and very soon was startled by remarkable parallels to events in Europe in 1940; and the idea of this paper came to me. In the presence of experts, may I ask indulgence for my ignorance? My knowledge of Greek history, especially of this period, is but the sediment of what was never more than a very small cupful.