This paper attempts to set out what is known about the places in the city of Rome used for detention and execution. It is not based on personal inspection of the sites, but only on the ancient evidence and modern discussion, and simply aims to meet the absence of a full up-to-date account in English of the history, location, character and function of these places, viz. the carcer, lautumiae, Saxum Tarpeium, Scalae Gemoniae, and the elusive robur. It does not deal with the wider question of what crimes merited the death penalty or called for its infliction in this or that manner, nor, apart from a few items, is it carried beyond the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) made its first appearance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, partly as a result of the ongoing treatment of veterans from the Vietnam War. Although PTSD is not only or even primarily a disorder caused by combat, combat is a regular trigger and my chief concern in what follows. Therefore I will not be examining such evidence as exists for the psychological traumas of civilians in the ancient world who were exposed to violence, rape, enslavement, or the execution of family members in the context of conquest. My focus is on the soldier.

My subject concerns the practicalities of finding one's way round an ancient city. What aids were there to guide a stranger in town? How did he trace a particular house or other destination? I propose to examine the problem with reference to one of the best known of all ancient cities, Pompeii.

‘As writes our Virgil, concerned more with what made the best poetry than with complete accuracy, since his object was to delight his readers rather than to instruct farmers.’

Seneca passed this judgement on the Georgics after witnessing certain agricultural practices where he was staying (at Liternum on the north-west coast of Campania), which appeared to disagree with a statement of Virgil's (G. 2.58). He then proceeded to mention another Virgilian agricultural error (G. 1.215–16), selected from ‘all the others’ (alia omnia) that he says he could have discussed, in order to drive his point home.

I think we have to accept that the term intertextuality serves a purpose. One of the terms it allows us to dispense with, allusion, has its disadvantages.

Up until recently I was happy with ‘allusion’: Vergil ‘alludes’ to Homer. The term was time-honoured, and, surely, unproblematical. Unproblematical, and not, so far as it went, and in the right hands, unsubtle. One meant that Vergil was not just using his source text (or his significant source text) as raw material. The source text became part of the new text, its characters and context were relevant to the new text. Thus, when in his opening speech Aeneas ‘quotes’ Homer's Odysseus, we sense that Vergil is casting Aeneas as a new Odysseus, comparing him and contrasting him with Odysseus, in a new Odyssey. And so the Aeneid proceeds: an allusive text, constantly alluding to Homer, re-forming Homer, remaking the Homeric characters, re-forming other texts in the same significant way … What texts? What texts does it not significantly re-form?

A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts. In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.

In a recent article Christina Kraus shows how Livy, in the first decade, creates an overlap between the text that he is writing and the subject he is writing about: the city of Rome.1 ‘Like the city it describes and constitutes, then, the Ab urbe condita is a growing physical object through which the writer and the reader move together’ she observes. As a result the foundation and fall of the city, the two most dynamic moments of this space-entity, create parallel junctures both in the development of the city and in the development of the text. Kraus offers an apposite example. In book 5 of Ab urbecondita, Rome comes close to disaster not once but twice. The exordium of book 6, the beginning of the new pentad, refounds both the city and its history, creating a perfect analogy between the text and the city. Most importantly, by means of assimilation to other cities that have endured a similar fate, Livy is able to shape further the significance of the event. By construing the near fall of Rome in book 5 through the filter of the fall of Troy, Rome at the end of the first pentad symbolically moves beyond its Trojan past and refounds itself for good.

The relationship between Tiberius and the senate as a corporate body has attracted frequent attention. That between Augustus and the senate, on the other hand, has suffered comparative neglect. Explanations of the contrast quickly suggest themselves. Not only did Tiberius prove the more willing of the two emperors to participate at sessions; his relationship with the senate is also much better documented, since it forms one of the principal themes of Tacitus' account of the reign in his Annals. But although the relationship which Tiberius determined to establish did have its own distinctive character from the outset, it is important to recognize that it was developed from a foundation painstakingly laid by Augustus. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to trace the nature and growth of Augustus' relationship with the senate, and to assess briefly the significance for the corporate body of Tiberius' different attitude.

‘War with its strenuous exertions is the direct opposite of love with its languid sentimentality: nevertheless, that truism challenged ingenuity to invent reasons why they should not rather be considered as similar.’ This statement may serve as a basis for a survey of the use of the military metaphor in love poetry, in particular in Ovid's Amores, which illustrate the image in its most highly developed and perfected form.

The Greeks divided their world into a number of contrasting categories which cut across and dissected each other: Greek and barbarian, slave and free, friend and enemy, insider and outsider, us and them. This essentially bipartite view of the world (although the dualism changed according to circumstance) affected the way Greek society worked, and the way that the Greeks thought about themselves. In this pair of papers, Professor Rhodes and I will be concerned only with one of these oppositions, friends and enemies.

In October 2011 the Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless campaign to end violence in Liberia. Part of her campaign involved a so-called ‘sex strike’. Gbowee is said to have organized women protestors to solicit their husbands' cooperation by withdrawing sex until the men, too, made peace a priority. The Western media, both through official reporting in newspapers and through the less formal commentating in blogs, have repeatedly reported the women's political action by drawing comparisons with the ‘sex strike’ dramatized in Aristophanes' play Lysistrata, and between Leymah Gbowee and the character Lysistrata. In a review in the Huffington Post, Jericho Parms wrote: ‘Employing the strength of Lysistrata, and Aristophanes’ heroines of the Peloponnesian War, they withheld sex from their men'. R. Weinrich commented in Gossip Central, ‘Self-assured and instinctively political, Gbowee is a modern day Lysistrata, as in the ancient Greek satirist Aristophanes’ play'. A report in the Daily Telegraph went even further, and suggested a causal relationship between Lysistrata and the resistance in Liberia: ‘perhaps her [Gbowee's] most famous moment came in 2002, when she persuaded many Liberian women to withhold sex from their warring menfolk unless they came to the negotiating table, a devastatingly successful campaign inspired by the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata [sic], who used the same strategy during the Peloponnesian War'. Reports in the Liberian press, to the best of my knowledge, do not mention Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

The recently published senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre provides the opportunity not only to explore afresh an episode in Tiberius' reign recounted by Tacitus, but also to reassess several aspects of political life during the early Principate. This decree outlines the Senate's judgement of the conduct of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso who had been accused of maiestas for seditious activities in the East, but had committed suicide before the conclusion of his trial. The document adds a considerable number of details to those recorded by Tacitus. Quite apart from its main theme, the text has shed light on such thorny problems as the definition of imperium maius, and the relationship between the fiscus and aerarium The aim of this article, however, is not to investigate such matters, but to consider the rhetorical language with which the Senate treats the whole affair.

The Trojan War has been perennially interesting, whether study centres on works of imaginative literature such as the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, the historical situation which provided the subject for those poems, the Bronze Age world of Troy and Mycenae which formed a background to the war, or the post-classical reworking of the material in the medieval Troy romances, Shakespeare, or Giraudoux. As well as supplying writers with incidents and episodes, the story of the war has given to artists a seemingly inexhaustible supply of themes on which their fancy feeds. A great proportion of Greek and Roman art can be connected with legends that stem from the Trojan War, and the whole complex of myths and history has proved a potent source for later artists. The theme chosen here is that of the Trojan Horse, and we shall look at some ways in which artists in antiquity viewed the incident.

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.

Ancient writers ascribed Rome's political difficulties during the last century of theRepublic to failures of character, specifically to ambitio, avaritia, luxuria, and libido. Sallust gives the clearest and best known account in the introductions to his monographs on Catiline and Jugurtha. The danger of decline had already been noticed by Polybius, and he indicated one point for the beginning of the process: the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. (6.57; 38.21 f.). No longer confronted by the external threat, Romans could relax and give themselves up instead to greed, luxury, and personal ambition. Livy seems to have accepted the same turning point: the first fifty books were devoted to the expansion of Rome down to the destruction of Carthage; those that followed paid more attention to Rome's internal problems. At the same time, Livy was not unaware of the importance of Cn. Manlius Vulso's campaigns in the east and his return in 187 B.C. laden with the spoils which marked the beginning of foreign luxury, including such unmentionable instruments of corruption as pedestal tables and sideboards (39.6, 7).

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

The New York Daily Tribune for 20 December 1859 reported a pro-slavery meeting held the day before under the banner of ‘Justice for the South’ (the Civil War was less than eighteen months away). A lawyer named O'Connor spoke as follows:

Now, Gentlemen, to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature…. He has strength, and he has the power to labour; but the Nature which created that power has denied him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to work. (Applause)…. And that Nature which denied him the will to labour gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make him a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living useful for himself and for the master who governs him…. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him…nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labour in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labour and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and to the society.

That thoroughly Aristotelian defence of black slavery was identified as such by Karl Marx, reprinted in Kapital as a modern commentary on Aristotle's thinking on the role of the slave-owner.