Stage properties in Greek tragedy are used economically, a fact which enhances the significance of their dramatic function. Oliver Taplin has amply demonstrated how their appearance on stage is not an adventitious means of lending life to a character or situation but rather a device by which the dramatist underlines some essential aspect of the scene in which they occur or theme in the play as a whole. Economy of props in tragedy is in marked contrast with their multiplicity in Aristophanic comedy. When it comes, therefore, to interpreting the poet's artistic intention in a particular tragedy, the props list may prove a useful critical instrument, as I hope will be evident from this study of their use in Euripides' Electra.

There is a school of thought which attributes the more refined discourse of New Comedy (compared with that of the Old) at least in part to a change in the composition of Athenian theatre audiences. This way of thinking assumes that payment for attending theatre performances (the so-called theōrikon) was discontinued along with other payments for i public service under the oligarchic regimes Macedonia imposed upon Athens in the late fourth century B.C.; and it further assumes that with the elimination of this subsidy many of the poor could no longer afford to attend the theatre. The first of these assumptions, that the audiences for New Comedy did not receive theōrikon payments, is reasonable enough, but the second assumption, that the poor therefore stopped coming to the theatre, is more problematic.

Scenes from Euripidean tragedy can lead us to imagine that sick-nursing was women's work in ancient Greece. In the Hippolytus, a matronly Nurse attends the fretfully ill Phaedra; in the Orestes, Electra cares for her brother. Several prose sources, moreover, seem to corroborate this view of gender roles. We learn in Xenophon's Oeconomicus (7. 37) that the mistress of the household was expected to nurse sick slaves. Demosthenes, in a letter (3. 30), mentions two courtesans who are caring for the consumptive Pytheas. And the speaker in Against Neairanotes explicitly ‘how much a woman is worth during illnesses, when she is there for a man who is suffering’ (Dem. 59. 56).

In an ideal Roman cremation, the body was carried in procession from the house of the deceased to a place outside the city, where it was burnt on a pyre until it was reduced to bones and ashes (cineres or favilla). The pyre should be built specifically for the deceased; having to use someone else's pyre was a sign of poverty, or an emergency procedure. The cremated remains might be buried where they had been burnt, usually in a ditch which was filled in and covered or marked; in this case the tomb was called a bustum. More usually, the cremation was carried out somewhere other than the final resting place, at a spot designated ustrina in Latin literature. This might be within the same tomb-precinct or columbarium, as in many tombs at Ostia, or at a separate public site. The bones and ashes therefore had to be collected up and placed in a container, preferably a specially made and ornamented one (cinerarium, oss(u)arium, olla, urna), to be placed in the tomb. The force of the fire, the raking and collapse of the pyre during burning, and eventual quenching with cold liquid would together normally be sufficient to reduce the bones to small fragments which would fit easily into the container. This sort of burial of the remains is assumed in such wishes for the dead as:

I pray that you rest quiet and safe in the urn, bones,

And that the earth is not burdensome to your ashes.

It was never a foregone conclusion that the Roman Empire should have made any significant use of steam power. The basic principles of the steam engine were certainly known by the mid-first century A.D., as seen in the ‘wind-ball’ (aiölipile) described by Hero of Alexandria in his treatise on Pneumatica. Hero's device, in which a copper sphere was made to rotate by jets of stream when the reservoir of water underneath was heated to boiling point, clearly demonstrated that steam could serve as a source of propulsion. It was, admittedly, a very inefficient design: in modern reconstructions, either too much steam escaped through the joints or the joints had to be made so tight that friction became a serious problem. Such deficiencies were by no means insurmountable, and all the other elements necessary for the construction of a working steam engine – pistons, cylinders, an effective valve mechanism – can be found in Hero's writings or in those of his contemporaries.

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.