The basis of comparison between the Homeric poetry and Modern Greek folksong is that in either case we have a body of poetic texts behind which stretches a long tradition of oral composition; they both have existed, roughly, in the same geographical area, including mainland Greece, Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Sea, Crete, and Cyprus; and they are cast in cognate language forms. But the two bodies of poetry are separated by a great time distance, though how great it is difficult to determine because whatever we can say about the origins of modern folksongs is hypothetical and uncertain.

Classical scholars have always lived in a united Europe. Our subject matter is the birth and youth of Europe and fellow scholars all over Europe and all over the world are our daily companions.

Within our own traditions we work with the same data on the same problems and our solutions are common property. In theory the political unification of Europe is irrelevant to us. We have always been a republic.

Isocrates was perhaps the first in antiquity to focus his political theories on the idea of Europe and the opposition between Europe and Asia. No doubt, if we look into his doctrines and what he said about that theme, they seem to our modern eyes terribly simple and sketchy: they just provide a beginning, a starting point. But even that is remarkable; and it seems worth going into the trouble of seeing what he meant by ‘Europe’, and what place the notion had in a programme which he never stopped defending, all through his life.

Apollonius' Jason has been variously described by scholars as a ‘weak and insignificant hero’, a ‘tame and insipid’ character compared with that of Medea, ‘discreet, proper, quite weak, and somewhat colourless’, ‘never quite equal to the emergency, and can never rise above his immediate troubles’, ‘cold and selfish’, ‘uninteresting when he is not repellent’, an anti-hero, and a love-hero. But, with the exception of R. Hunter's view of Jason as a human being forced by necessity to carry out tasks which no Homeric hero was ever called upon to do, most scholars have erred in comparing the Hellenistic hero Jason with the archetypal hero of epic tradition.

By 1994 no less than 2,500 years will have passed since Kleisthenes (in 507 B.C.) introduced democracy to Athens, and the anniversary will undoubtedly be celebrated by all nations that call themselves democracies, i.e., practically everywhere in the western world. But during the celebrations sceptics will probably ask at least two fundamental questions: first, how much do Athenian demokratia and modern democracy have in common and second, to what extent were modern democratic ideas and institutions shaped by looking back upon the ancient model? Was Athens the school not only of Hellas – as Perikles claimed in his funeral speach – but also of the political system and ideology that are universally accepted in the western world of today? Or, alternatively, is the Athenian example just one small piece in the great jigsaw puzzle that constitutes modern democracy and even a fairly unimportant piece, one of those elusive pieces that has nothing but sky or water on it and, accordingly, is almost impossible to place correctly?

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Cicero had a relatively small number of slaves in his urban household, reflecting his modest wealth compared to that of some Romans. The argument follows three lines. Firstly, there were relatively few job titles among the slaves of Cicero compared, for example, to those of the household of Augustus' wife Livia. This reflects Livia's relative prosperity, for the wealthier the household the more specialists it could support. The converse also follows: Cicero had fewer slaves with job titles, reflecting the smaller size of his household. Secondly, even those slaves in the household of Cicero who appear to be specialists because they had job titles were not really so since the tasks they were given were not as narrowly defined as their specific job titles suggest. Thirdly, other evidence from Cicero's correspondence and elsewhere suggests that Cicero's household was relatively small compared to other elite households of the Late Republic and Early Imperial period.

Over the last few years much work has been carried out on the export of olive oil from the province of Baetica to both Rome itself and the rest of the Roman Empire. The key for understanding the export traffic to Rome is the material from the Monte Testaccio in Rome, which is almost completely composed of amphorae from Baetica dating from the Imperial period, where a team of Spanish and Italian archaeologists have carried out two campaigns of excavations in 1989 an 1990 under my direction (Plate 1). This article also contains some other conlusions drawn from the work done in recent years by the team of Spanish archaeologists who work on the Monte Testaccio, investigating the topic of the Baetician oil trade.

Long before his obsessional wish was finally fulfilled in 146 B.C, the elder Cato had yet other concerns than Carthaginem delendam esse. In his manual for the farmer, De agricultura 143, he gives ample prescriptions concerning the way the wife of the bailiff (the vilica) of an estate should behave:

‘She must visit the neighbouring and other women very seldom, and not have them either in the house or in her part of it. She must not go out to meals or be a gad-about. She must not engage in religious worship herself or get others to engage in it for her without the orders of the master or the mistress; let her remember that the master attends to the devotions for the whole household.’ (translation: W. D. Hooper & H. B. Ash. Loeb)

The two ivory tablets in Paris and London, dating from late antiquity and forming parts of one diptych (Plates 1, 2), have been convincingly placed in their stylistic setting by the scholar to whom this article is dedicated. With other works in ivory from about A.D. 400 and with the Rothschild cameo, they form a ‘classicistic’ group, some manufactured in Rome, some in Milan. The cameo probably refers to the marriage in A.D. 398 of the young Emperor Honorius to Maria, daughter of Stilicho. We may assume that the diptych under consideration here also has reference to an aristocratic wedding, although its iconography is quite different. It shows not the portrait of a bridal pair, but two female figures, hitherto regarded as pagan priestesses. It is not these figures, but the tabulae ansatae at their heads that give support to the hypothesis that the diptych was made on the occasion of a marriage between the two families named on the tablets, the Symmachi and the Nicomachi. Matrimonial unions between members of the pagan aristocracy in officially Christian Rome may not only be presumed, but in the case of the Nicomachi and Symmachi may be actually shown to have happened. The following observations would seem to provide appropriate reinforcement for reference to a wedding on iconographic grounds.

‘These teachings are, therefore, no novelties, no inventions of today, but long since stated, if not stressed; our doctrine here is the explanation of an earlier, and can show the antiquity of these opinions on the testimony of Plato himself.’ This quotation, from Enn. V 1.8, where Plotinus is actually presenting his doctrine of the three hypostases – a metaphysical elaboration never envisaged by Plato – encapsulates the interesting relationship which links this great original mind to the other great original mind whom he wished to claim as his master. There is, of course, nothing strange, in the intellectual world of late antiquity, in this desire to base one's doctrine on some time-honoured authority; what is unusual is the degree of originality of the man who is doing this.

As a contribution to the study of ‘Latin in use’, we focus in this article on the ways a writer indicates what s/he wants to emphasize within the sentence; the specific linguistic signs s/he uses to that end; and the range of effects that these may have for an alert reader. We have used, on the one hand, recent developments in the study of narrative, discourse and general linguistics and, on the other, the work of earlier pioneers in the field of word order in Latin.

One day the shepherd Apollo saw a pregnant woman in the fields. A dark thought struck him: he wanted to see how the foetus was lying in her womb. He therefore killed the woman and ripped her open. Afterwards he repented and took refuge among the monks of Scetis in Egypt, where he became a hermit (133). By contrast, Hilarion came to be a hermit in a wholly honourable manner, as related by Hieronymus in his Life of Hilarion. He felt drawn by St. Anthony, gave away his inheritance, and embarked upon a life of solitude in the Gaza region. Apollo, Hilarion, and all other monks and hermits whose sayings and biographies have been I handed down by the early Church had in common that they abandoned the society they lived in and developed an alternative lifestyle. They were not, however, the first in antiquity to go against established norms and values.