The imagery of black and red figure pottery continues to be a valuable source of information for the social and ideological history of ancient Athens. These images have traditionally provided historians with insights into material culture, religion and daily life activities, and increasingly, in large part due to francophone archaeologists like François Lissarrague, they are also being employed as detailed evidence of the conceptual world of archaic and classical Athenians. It is striking though that in spite of the clear evidentiary value of finely painted Attic pottery, almost no sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the critical issue of whose lifestyle and ideological point of view were replicated in images by Athenian pottery painters. In light of this lacuna the recent research project of David Gill and Michael Vickers to isolate more exactly the status of red and black figure pots in Attic society would appear to be most promising. Their findings end up challenging two widely held but never fully substantiated articles of faith of classical archaeology, namely that this type of pottery was used extensively and valued highly by the Athenian elite, and that these ‘vases’ were an important and privileged medium for the development of Greek art. Gill and Vickers seek to demonstrate that the homes of upper class Athenians were crammed full of precious metal vessels and had no place for mere painted pots. They maintain instead that such fictile pieces were inexpensive, and slavishly imitated the shapes, colours and even imagery of the vastly more valuable vessels made of gold and silver. Consequently, Gill and Vickers argue that Attic finely painted pottery was entirely dependent on the artistry and inventiveness of the designers and smiths of precious metallic pieces.

In 1931 F. Granier argued that treason trials and other matters of major political importance were heard by meetings of the Macedonian army assembly and this view received wide acceptance. However in the 1970s it was challenged by R. Lock and R.M. Errington, who concluded that there was no right of the army to be consulted in such cases, but that the king might seek to win the troops' approval before undertaking controversial actions, such as executing popular officers. More recently, N.G.L. Hammond has revived the view that the Macedonian army had the right to hold trials in cases of treason.

Sallust had something to say about Cicero. It could not be otherwise in the circumstances: the conspiracy of Catiline was the chosen subject of his first historical essay, and he agreed with Cicero that it was a crime unparalleled to that date. Cicero's activities in suppressing it would be central to the narrative, and his character relevant to anything in it covered by the term ‘human interest’. Even minimisation of Cicero would require preparation in the text for the natural questions of Sallust's readers. As he wrote, Cicero was either engaged in a political duel with Mark Antony or had recently succumbed. Was the orator a troublemaker or a hero? He would be the same man in 44-3 as he was in 63 unless the historian enforced a contrast; which he does not.

The third letter of the Heroides has long been appreciated for the consummate skill with which Ovid takes the Briseis of Homer's Iliad, where she is virtually a nonentity, and presents her in a new guise. By his masterly transformation of the enslaved girl into a lonely and desperate elegiac puella who is lost and bewildered in an epic world, he skilfully exploits the literary gulf between the two genres to produce a subtle masterpiece which can arouse only compassion for his heroine. There is, however, much more to appreciate in this letter than its poetic artistry.

Standard text-books have usually presented a cut-and-dried account of three stages of Roman education: primary from age seven, with the grammaticus from age twelve, and rhetoric from about fifteen or sixteen. Most detail is devoted to the rhetorical stage, as that is where the future leaders (politicians, lawyers, army generals) were trained; so there is much detail on rhetorical exercises, declamation, and the like. Such accounts present the Romans as formalistic and rigid, and the focus on adolescent upper-class males tells us nothing about the socialisation and training of younger children, of girls, the lower classes and slaves. (Slaves comprised at least a quarter of the population of a large city like Rome in the late Republic and High Empire, which had a total population of about one and a quarter million at its height, in the 2nd century of this era.)

The Nostratic Theory was first proposed by the Danish scholar, H. Pedersen, at the beginning of this century. He had observed certain similarities between Indo-European and Semitic and saw these two families of languages as belonging to our territory around mare nostrum and hence his name for this group.

Speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages were surprised that Indo-Europeanists after working on the comparative philology of IE should turn next to Semitic, but the interest in Arabic as the preserver of Greek mathematics and science and Hebrew as the language of the Old Testament inevitably suggested that Semitic had an interest for Philology as well as Theology. But there is a closer resemblance of Finno-Ugrian to Indo-European than there is between Indo-European and Semitic. Moreover, Finno-Ugrian has been in contact with and a close neighbour to the North of IE since prehistoric times. Burrow lists over 20 words of Sanskrit origin borrowed by Finno-Ugrian languages in the prehistoric period when both families of languages were in contact probably in south Russia. Strangely enough they include the Sanskrit svásar- ‘sister’ giving Finnish sisar, Mordvin sazor ‘younger sister’, Cheremis suzar id. where the survival of the sibilant is a clear indication of borrowing before the Aryan branch split into Indian and Iranian with the characteristic Iranian sound change to h as in Av. xvanhar-. It is surprising to find ‘sister’ among these loan words.