Everyone is now celebrating the Bimillennium, and very many are writing about it. Bimillennium of what? Of our era, of course: A.D. 2000. Our era is supposed to have begun with the birth of Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ was not, unfortunately, born in A.D. 1: he was born in 11 or 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 B.C. We do not know exactly when, and our sources have made no particular effort to tell us. Our era was only established by a Russian monk Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century A.D. – he had been asked to attack the problem by Pope John I. The theory of Dionysius (which appears, incidentally, to be based on a mathematical error) was taken up by the West, and has held the field ever since. That is why, quite illogically, we commemorate the Bimillennium today: and why governments are spending a great deal of their peoples' money to do so. But let us not, all the same, belittle this misconceived Bimillennium. For it gives a great many people the opportunity to think a lot about their lives – to turn over a new leaf, hoping confidently that their new era and behaviour will be an improvement on the past. So for that reason let us welcome the Bimillennium. But not because it is the Bimillennium of the birth of Jesus Christ, because it is not. Not that the public, as a whole, minds. Any more than it minds about the religious basis of Christmas. It is, however, in my opinion, worth recording that this religious basis exists, and that on these grounds the whole foundation of the Bimillennium is fallacious, although no doubt it will receive the most massive celebrations, and these are justified in so far as they persuade people to change and improve their lives and the life of the community to which they belong. This was certainly the case in A.D. 1000, and I hope and believe it will be the case in 2000 as well.

None of these three passages from the Iliad would be classified as anything other than an extended simile, but the differences between them in subject matter and what is compared make clear how difficult it is to make any simple summary of the nature and functions of the extended simile in Homer that would gain general assent. As the immense quantity of scholarship on these similes would indicate, it is impossible either to argue convincingly that they can have only one or two main functions in the narrative, or categorically to prove or deny that a particular simile has a certain effect or significance for the narrative. To give one brief example, Stephen Nimis usefully distinguishes six major trends in interpretation among earlier scholars' views on the function of similes in Homer: (1) the presentation of the generic alongside the individual, (2) creation of atmosphere, (3) imagistic continuity, (4) characterization and foreshadowing, (5) incorporating the past into the present, and (6) allusion to antecedent literary traditions. Not all of the three similes quoted above perform all of these functions at once, but they certainly perform more than one of them. The only definition that would probably be generally accepted is the rather dry and unhelpful one that a simile functions by briefly interrupting the narrative in order to compare one element in the narrative with another, in order to illuminate something about the original element in the narrative. Moreover, an extended simile begins from an original main point of comparison, but it compares the likeness of two things that are actually not alike in many other respects.

This paper is concerned with some of the ‘dark’ aspects of the lives of Athenian women of the Archaic and Classical periods. Through a review of images of women with light in hand and of female activities that were illuminated by lamps and torches, the amount and significance of women's activities which required lighting devices may be traced. These may have taken place in private, inside the oikos – for which our knowledge is limited – or outside the oikos, where women enjoyed a restricted participation in certain socio-religious activities. The kind of females under discussion range from ‘respectable’ wives and daughters of Athenian citizens to hetairai, the professional female entertainers. On the basis of literary and iconographical evidence, I shall seek to identify the nature and timing of those female activities, and to assess whether the type of lighting device chosen for a particular action may possibly reveal other aspects of the life of Athenian women, notably age or social status.

This paper is concerned with reassessing the importance of the destruction of the house of Cicero in the light of recent investigations into housing in the Roman world. In recent years, the quantity and quality of such investigations have intensified but Cicero's house remains somewhat unpopular – despite excavations on the Palatine slopes which have revealed more details of the houses occupied by Cicero and his Late Republican neighbours.3 The saga of Cicero and his house had not been dealt with for several decades until the presidential address of Susan Treggiari in the 1998 Transactions of the American Philological Association. Her paper, however, is not so much concerned with the actual relationship between private and public in the house of Cicero as Cicero's private and public attempts to come to terms with his grief over the death of his daughter Tullia.

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.

When the first edition of the Metamorphoses appeared in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city. His literary début, the Amoves, immediately established his reputation as a poetic Lothario, as it lured his tickled readers into a typically Ovidian world of free-wheeling elegiac love, light-hearted hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery. Connoisseurs of elegiac poetry could then enjoy his Heroides, vicariously sharing stirring emotional turmoil with various heroines of history and mythology, who were here given a literary forum for voicing bitter feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing their strong hostility towards the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei, and once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition à la mode Ovidienne, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos presented in his Ars Amatoria, his (male and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true Barthian jouissance in the act of reading a work, which is, as a recent critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’. And after these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, his readers, having become hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote Ovid offered in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris, a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid.

There can be no student of Roman history who has not, at one time or other, pondered the significance of the emperor Caligula's (A.D. 37–41) alleged command to his soldiers to gather seashells for transportation back to Rome as the spoils of war. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I dare to offer yet another interpretation of an event which, as we shall see, has not lacked commentators.

Judges, and tabloid newspapers, have a habit of saying that violent criminals ‘behaved like animals’. After all those years of David Attenborough they ought to know better: very few other species behave as badly as humans. But they are invoking the ancient belief that animals have neither reason nor justice. Consequently, ‘animal passion’ is fierce and overpowering. Animals are beasts. They are savage and unsocial. They cannot control their passions by reason and are unrestrained by respect for others, by a sense of fairness or by social order.

The Roman empress Eusebia, wife of the Christian emperor Constantius II (A.D. 337–361), owes what fame she enjoys amongst historians to her role in the life of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor (361–363); in the years 354–355 the empress emerged as the saviour and advocate of her (still in the closet) pagan in-law. However in this article I wish to focus exclusively on the treatment of the empress Eusebia in the history of Ammianus Marcellinus, the great historian of Late Antiquity and himself a devotee of Julian. This treatment merits attention not just for the undoubtedly interesting fact that Eusebia is one of the few female characters to surface in the history, but also because in the history the empress is cast in seemingly different personae. She is the kind and beautiful empress, akin to the image Julian himself created of her in his Speech of Thanks to Eusebia, written in commemoration of his salvation at her hands; but she is also a devious player, as we find too in Zosimus' treatment of the empress, though in Ammianus her deviousness is malevolent. It is this contradictory characterization aspect of the treatment that I wish to explore here. For whilst general attempts have been made to reconcile these images in the context of political history, the repercussions for our understanding of Ammianus have been little explored. How can the historian let these contrasting images co-exist? Has he merely assembled his history clumsily, or is there a more rewarding explanation for the impression of the empress's split personality?