Every country has its heroes, legendary or historical, who are remembered for some noble action that has caught the popular imagination and made their names immortal. Among the Romans, just as Fabricius was the type of incorruptibility, Decius Mus of devotion to country, Regulus of faith to the pledged word, so the name of Lucretia was proverbial for chastity. The story of her suicide after she had been violated by Sextus Tarquin is recounted by the historians Livy, Dionysius, and Diodorus, and alluded to by many Roman poets and prose-writers. But apart from such allusions, it is curious that of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us none save Ovid has treated her story at any length; moreover, there is apparently no representation of her among the extant remains of Roman art. To painters and poets of later times, however, she made a strong appeal. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, for example, there is the famous painting by Titian; and in our own literature Chaucer sang the praise of ‘the verray wyf, the verray trewe Lucresse’ in his Legend of Good Women, Gower included her in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare in his youth composed that highly coloured arabesque The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood turned the story into a tragic drama, and most recently Benjamin Britten has made it the subject of an opera.

That Ovid found in Lucretia an attractive figure is evident from the detailed manner in which he treats her story in the second book of his Fasti.

The imposing and romantic remains of the Tiberian palace on the eastern heights of Capri are now visited by relatively few people, and it is often possible to wander among the ruins for an hour or more without meeting another soul. Yet for about a decade, from A.D. 27 to 37, this villa seems to have been the principal residence of the emperor of the Roman world, and Capri, together with Rome, the administrative centre of that world. As imperial residence, as administrative centre, and as a typical Campanian villa, this and the other imperial buildings on Capri must have been thronged with people, from the emperor's family and friends to the palace staff to administrative personnel. It is the purpose of this paper to consider Tiberius' stay on Capri in various contexts, especially that of the people who were on the island with him, in order to understand more clearly what his life there was like.

Until the last years of the Republic, Roman governors might officially see their wives present in their provinces only in the form of honorific statues. The chaos of civil war was to bring to a number of senatorial husbands, as they mounted their campaigns in the eastern provinces, the solace of their wives' companionship in the flesh. First in time amongst these refugee wives was Caecilia Metella, who was present with Sulla at Athens in 86 B.c. Later, and in less auspicious circumstances, Cornelia was to travel to Lesbos and then to Egypt to be with the doomed Pompeius in 49–48 B.c. Occasionally, such loyal wives joined their husbands over die latter's objections. They might, it seems, be expected to remain in Italy in order to avoid danger or even proscription, and not least to defend the family interests so far as this was possible.

It must occur to anyone who reads Plutarch's account of Marius' flight and exile to wonder how much of this thrilling and romantic tale is historically true. There is indeed much to cause disquietude. Historiography of Plutarch's day had no distinct genre for the romantic novel, as Perrin so well points out, and consequently included much that history proper would exclude. Incidents in the flight and exile have in fact been described as ‘fairy-tale-like’ and ‘out.of the Arabian nights’. The debating points of the schools of rhetoric have had their influence too, involving Marius in several dilemmas which seem to have been invented for suasoriae (e.g. Marius and the slave-herdsmen, 36. 3; and the shipowners, 37. 2; and the old fisherman, 37.4; and Sextilius' envoy, 40. 3–4; the deliberations before the grove of Marica, 39. 4, are another example).

In the Aeneid actions are consistent with character and psychology, indeed indicative of character and psychology. This statement has, I think, general if not universal truth. At any rate, one should not hastily assume otherwise.

Conduct in human relationships, in amicitia (‘friendship’), is a prevalent theme in Horace's works, and was of considerable interest to ancient philosophers. The extent to which such aspects of human behaviour should be regarded as philosophical is a question that has been discussed both in relation to ancient philosophical texts and to Horace. My concern here, however, is not primarily to argue for their philosophical nature but to illuminate certain influences in the Satires and Epistles that draw on philosophical texts pertaining to conduct and amicitia, and in particular those of Horace's near contemporary, Philodemus.

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.

It used to be said that, as far as schools were concerned, Roman history ended at 31 b.c. Nowadays it ends at a.d. 180. No doubt that date is a convenient stopping-point; but the later centuries have in them just as much as the earlier to instruct our generation and to thrill the imagination. The events which this paper describes justify, I think, that contention.

This passage has suggested that it might be interesting to collect, as far as possible, the passages dealing with the use of dogs in ancient warfare and make a comparison with modern practice. The references which I have discovered, and which seem mainly to refer to Greek warfare, are numerous, but no doubt there are others which I have failed to trace.

Sixty years ago, on 25 April 1953, probably the most influential scientific article of the twentieth century appeared. Its uninviting title, ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid’, concealed the revolutionary discovery by the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure of what became known as ‘the molecule of life’. The ‘radically different structure’ that they proposed for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) had ‘two helical chains each coiled round the same axis’. ‘Both chains’, they wrote, ‘follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions.’ When Bruno J. Strasser asked in the same journal fifty years later ‘Who cares about the double helix?’, he answered that it marked ‘an age of (lost) innocence, when youth, intelligence and self-assurance were sufficient to make great discoveries in science’.

In any history of Greek mythological writing, the longer Homeric Hymns deserve a place of honour. They are the almost unique vehicle of a distinctive and important form of narrative about the divine world. As a prooimion to a discussion of the Hymn to Demeter, it may be worth sketching some general characteristics of the genre, to bring out its special interest for the historian of religion, and indeed for anyone who cares for the imaginative world of the Greeks.

In the Gorgias (463aff.) Plato makes Socrates say to Polus that rhetoric is not a skilled art (technê) at all, but one of a number of occupations collectively described as ‘flattery’ (kolakeia) and said to be based on experience. The other examples given are sophistry, cosmetics, and cookery. These practices have no understanding of what they do, or as Plato puts it they can give no account of it (465 a).

‘And so,’ said Appius, in Varro's De Re Rustica, ‘in the matter of farmyard-feeding we come to the third act, which is about fishponds.’ ‘Third act be hanged!’ said Axius; ‘do you suppose that, because you were so very economical when a young man as not to drink wine and honey at home, we are going to neglect honey ?’

The adjective ωἷνοψ in the phrase translated ‘the wine-dark sea’ is normally regarded as a formulaic epithet, a meaningless romantic flourish evoking the colour or texture of wine. Homer's wine is elsewhere only red or black (⋯ρυθρός, Od. 5.165, 9.163; μέλας,5.265, 9.196, 346; αἶθωψ, Il. 1.462, 4.259), and thus, we assume, the colour of modern Mavrodaphni. Cattle of this colour (Od. 13.32, Il. 13.703) are probably dark red.

Poliziano's theory that the sparrow of Lesbia in Catullus 2 and 3 is none other than the phallus of the poet has not fared well in recent years. H. D. Jocelyn has mounted a spirited attack against it, taking most effective aim against the arguments of E. N. Genovese and G. Giangrande, whose articles, as he points out, ‘seem to have no nineteenth or twentieth-century predecessors’. This attack has been facilitated by the tendency of both Genovese and Giangrande to dilute their arguments with extravagant claims. Thus Genovese would have the passer stand not only for the poet's phallus, but for an actual pet of Lesbia, a fascinum charm around her neck (with bells on it!), and a human rival, possibly named Passer, as well. Similarly, Giangrande spends too much of his time attempting to attach poem 2b to 2 by means of a tortuous interpretation of the Atalanta myth, just as he develops a convoluted argument about the tension between topoi of Totenklage um Tiere and impotence at the end of 3. Even Jocelyn gets too far away from the poems themselves with detailed examinations of masturbation and fellatio among the ancients (pp. 429–33) and a careful footnote on the missionary position (pp. 433 n. 65). There are only two ways to establish the probability of an obscene allegorical interpretation of Catullus 2 and 3: to examine the usage of passer in the poems themselves, and to see whether Catullus' imitators in antiquity – especially Martial – were aware of and exploited Catullus' double entendre. In defending Poliziano's theory, this paper will argue these two points in more detail than they have been treated in the past.

We know that Cicero successfully defended Sextus Roscius on a charge of parricide in 80 B.C.; we know that Vespasian became emperor after the civil wars of A.D. 69, and founded the Flavian dynasty which ended with his son Domitian's death in A.D. 96.

Within the last fifty years, there has been a dispute among scholars as t whether or not Aeneas' character undergoes development. Did Aeneas learn anything during his trip to Italy and then change his attitude and behaviour or did he already have, from the beginning of the Aeneid, the same character and personality as he has at the end?

That the De Rerum Natura has a message is not clear from a cursory survey of its subject-matter. Book I (we read in the Penguin table of contents), Matter and Space; Book II, Movements and Shapes of Atoms; Book III, Life and Mind; Book IV, Sensation and Sex; Book V, Cosmology and Sociology; Book VI, Meteorology and Geology. Is this nothing more than a science textbook—and a potted one at that? One may be forgiven for thinking so. Even Bailey accepted that emphasis when he wrote that Lucretius' aim was ‘to set forth the physical theories of Epicurus’ and that other aspects of Epicureanism such as the moral theory ‘crop up from time to time in the poem, but only incidentally and in a partial treatment, which is subordinated to the main purpose and structure’. As a description this is misleading to the point of distortion. The work is indeed structured upon an exposition of physical theory, but its main purpose is to win converts to Epicureanism—and the ‘incidental’ non-technical passages do not ‘crop up’ by some chance intrusion but form a series of deliberate reminders of the overriding evangelical aim. We may guess at the tactical considerations which led Lucretius to adopt this form. His call to the Epicurean way of life would consist of two elements—impassioned appeals (appropriate to the central moral theory) and systematic exposition (needed for the supporting technical arguments): since the former had the greater potential impact but much less bulk, he chose to deploy them as a series of interjections in the latter. Thus what are in structural terms ‘digressions’ lie closest of all to the heart of the work.

I began the oral version of this paper by remarking that it was a great honour and pleasure to have been invited to visit the place in which it was delivered and to address my audience – and asking my audience to remember that I had said that.