It is a commonly held view that the basic issue in the Ithakan sequences of the Odysseyis the succession to Odysseus’ position as king. Thus J. V. Luce, for example, sees ‘the outline of a power struggle with kingship as the prize for the most powerful noble’. And M. I. Finley declares: ‘“The king is dead! The struggle for the throne is open!” That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the Odyssey can be summed up’. I should like to argue that this highly political perspective is unwarranted, that in fact there is no throne, no office of king, indeed no real Ithakan state, and therefore no succession struggle.

Along with the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia is perhaps the most discussed literary work of classical Greece. In recent years a substantial part of this interpretative effort has been devoted to various ongoing controversies, such as Agamemnon's guilt, or more generally, the interplay of necessity and freedom in the trilogy, but despite these numerous Streitfragen what is particularly striking about the criticism of the Oresteia is its relative unanimity on certain fundamental questions. This will no doubt sound strange to the classical scholar, all too finely attuned to the various important particulars over which he and his colleagues differ in their reading of the plays, but it none the less seems to me to be undeniable that in their assessment of the general movement of the trilogy, most interpretations are, with some variation and shading, cut from the same cloth. By this I mean that in regard to the fundamental questions of the justice of Zeus, and the resolution of the conflicts developed in the first two plays by means of the famous trial which concludes the trilogy, most critics agree as to Aeschylus’ dramatic intention. In what follows, I will argue that this unanimity arises out of certain shared preconceptions concerning Aeschylus which, in my view, are not supported by the text. I will first discuss the main traditional views concerning Aeschylus’ presentation of what is commonly called the Justice of Zeus, and then try to demonstrate that, in reality, Aeschylus portrays a cosmic and political order which is neither moral nor just, but rather tyrannical, in the sense that its ultimate foundations are force and fear.

The story of the Greek settlements in Sicily and southern Italy is not commonly regarded as one of the 'central themes' of Greek history. For long periods, the paucity of documentary evidence means that there is little story to tell anyway, and when a history of events is possible, it is often because those events are closely linked with the more fully documented history of Greece itself. Such an occasion occurred in 415, when the Athenians decided to send a fleet to western waters, and subsequently to undertake the siege of Syracuse. These events, so vividly narrated by Thucydides in the polished narrative of Books 6 and 7, are often studied today, but many modern readers start with a disadvantage shared, as Thucydides would have us believe, with the majority of Athenians of his own day - ignorance of Sicily and its inhabitants. Thucydides responded by giving his readers an account of the various peoples who inhabited Sicily, to impress upon them the number and power of the cities and settlements on the island (6.2-6). This article offers a short introduction to the political situation the Athenians encountered in South Italy and Sicily. It is written with a minimum of documentation, apart from references to the text of Thucydides. (The spelling of proper names follows that used in the Penguin translation, from which quotations are also taken; some suggestions for further reading are given at the end.)

Pirates were frequently employed by the Diadochoi and the Epigonoi of Alexander as an auxiliary military or naval force, and some examples are given below. Unfortunately, the surviving evidence does not allow us to do more than make the general statement. The evidence for piratical activity is largely in the form of personal anecdotes, and the evidence for the nature of Hellenistic military and naval establishments is nothing more than a record of a few persons and/or positions. The authors of our scant literary sources, especially those who wrote many generations after the events which they describe, were not attempting to analyse the role of pirates for posterity, thus they often use the word ‘pirate’ with a notable lack of precision, if they use it at all. Nevertheless, a review of the existing evidence suggests a rather remarkable degree of social and occupational mobility in the third century B.C.

‘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.

The Aeneid, like the Iliad, opens with a seven-line paragraph. The question arises: is this paragraph also a single sentence, consisting of the first three words arma uirumlque cano as main sentence, with all the rest forming one long relative clause of six and a half lines, introduced by qui in line 1, and organized round the one indicative verb apart from cano, namely, uenit in line 2? A glance at the editions confirms that we have a problem here. Everyone agrees on commas after cano, superum, iram, passus and of course on a full stop after Romae. The uncertainties arise after litora and after Latio. Whereas Sidgwick (1890) and Page (1894) put commas at both these points, Mynors (1969), followed both by Austin (1971) and R. D. Williams (1972) puts a comma after litora, but a semicolon after Latio, while Hirtzel (1900) puts a dash at both points. What difference does it make?

II. Just as suicide has been, and is, practised in all sorts of societies, from the most primitive to the most civilized, so there has probably never been a social code that sanctioned it absolutely without conditions. In primitive societies there are often deep-seated superstitions about βιαοɡάνατοι, victims of violent or untimely death. It is a fear of the ghost, which it is thought will be vengeful or troubled and not rest in peace. Special modes of burial with denial of ordinary burial rites, originally an expression of this fear, are attested for Greece and possibly for early Rome. But whatever regulations of a religious kind once obtained in Rome, they seem to have lapsed by the historical period. It has, however, been suggested that the persistence of such feelings may partly explain the fairly frequent cases of mutual killing recorded right into the Empire. The Emperor Claudius, celebrated as an antiquarian, proposed to remove from the senate rolls a man who was said to have stabbed himself (Suet. Cl.16).