A notable intellectual development of the past decade or two has been the ever-growing interest in human consciousness and the workings of the mind. Sometimes grouped under the umbrella term ‘cognitive sciences’, diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics have all made major contributions to our understanding of the human mind and brain; and the large number of popular science books published in this area show that this can be an engrossing topic for the layperson as much as for experts. In this article we want to explore, at a rather general and non-technical level, how this focus on matters of cognition can help us think about an aspect of Greek tragedy.

The first-century-AD philosopher Onasander (Strategikos 1.13, 15) comments that a general must be a good and effective speaker in order to encourage his men before battle, and ancient historians on occasion have commanders address large audiences of soldiers in an age when there was no artificial amplification of the human voice. In 1993, and reiterated in 1998, Mogens Hansen argued that the extensive pre-battle ‘speech’ found in our sources was, if given at all, only ‘a few apophthegms that could be shouted by the general as he traversed the line, or a speech made to the officers only who passed it on to the soldiers’. He accepts that a general often addressed his troops in camp or in parade formation; his objection solely relates to those speeches ostensibly given immediately before battle to troops already arrayed for combat. For Hansen, ‘a brief exhortation of the troops, unit by unit, while the commander walked along the front is probably all the historical reality [one] may expect to find behind the fully-fledged speeches reported by the historians’, these being a ‘literary composition and not the historian's report of a speech which had actually been made’. In Hanson's view, unless the harangues were given to troops in camp, or to individual units in battle formation, or, perhaps, to small military forces, these speeches could not have been given as reported. With respect to the last possibility, Hansen only rather reluctantly acknowledges that Thrasybulus' speech delivered to approximately 1000 Athenian insurgents in 404 BC, and reported by Xenophon (Hell. 2.4.10–12), ‘is possibly right’.

It is hard for biographers, ancient and modern alike, to resist the story of the young Julius Caesar's kidnapping by a band of pirates. Suetonius and Plutarch both include full versions of the tale, with specific details (Suet. Iul. 4; Plut. Vit. Caes. 1.4–2). Suetonius, for instance, writes that the kidnapping took place near the island of Pharmacusa (just off the coast of Asia Minor), while Plutarch, noting that too, also specifies that the ransom that freed Caesar came from the (nearby) city of Miletus. And while Suetonius writes that Caesar, after his release, launched a fleet, pursued the pirates, and punished them, Plutarch includes another phase in the story: having taken command of a fleet and set sail (again, from Miletus), Plutarch's Caesar captured nearly all the pirates but, instead of killing them right away, ‘he himself went to Iuncus, the governor of Asia, on the grounds that it belonged to him, as governor of the province, to punish the captives’. When Iuncus postponed a decision on the matter (evidently hoping to make a profit out of the situation), Caesar returned to Pergamum, took the robbers out of prison, and only then crucified them himself.

In the early Imperial Age, the steadily growing Christian movement was viewed with suspicion by both the authorities and the people of Rome; in the second century, the Roman rejection of Christian teachings, customs, and practices resulted in a most intriguing counter-movement. During this century, two types of negative response to the Christian faith had become established. The first encompasses the anti-Christian accusations circulating among the Roman population during most of the period, occasionally resulting in Christians being persecuted. At the end of the century, supplementary controversy arose from within the intellectual world. Those who engaged in this polemic were authors who had studied Christian customs, and who consequently targeted the substance of the Christian teachings.

During the three centuries from Homer to Hippocrates, views of human ageing and longevity evolved in a socio-cultural sense, with relationships to Greek medicine and science. I, as a biomedical scientist, examine ancient literature for roots of the idea that life-course outcomes can be influenced by tangible ‘natural’ factors, whether these are environmental or the result of lifestyle. The concept that an individual has any choice in health and ageing departs radically from ancient, persistent beliefs in the primacy of the supernatural, that the gods could predestine one's life span by birth or could alter it at any time.

The Περὶ Ἀλυπίας (‘On Consolation From Grief’, henceforward PA) of Galen, recently rediscovered in a fifteenth-century manuscript in a monastery in Thessalonica, contains a wealth of information for the scholar of Roman libraries and books. The work, a treatise on the avoidance of the grief contingent upon loss and suffering, begins by listing the losses suffered by Galen himself in the fire of AD 192. The fire destroyed the Templum Pacis, a series of warehouses and storerooms, and the libraries on the Palatine hill. As Galen had spent much effort copying books from these libraries, and had then deposited his copies in the warehouses that also burned, his work was lost beyond the possibility of recovery.