Satyric drama introduced athletics much more regularly as an activity than either comedy or tragedy. Many of its villains defeated hapless travellers in a boxing or wrestling bout before murdering them. Satyr-plays were often set at athletic contests where the satyrs of the chorus encountered athletes or tried to be competitors themselves. In one of his plays Euripides provided the most detailed critique of athletes in any genre of classical Athenian literature.

Among the plethora of minor players whose names intrude briefly into the historical record of the age of Alexander the Great is Aristonicus of Carystus. A member of Alexander's entourage, he clearly attained some standing in his own right, and at least some of that renown derived, it seems, from his prowess as a ball-player. Thus one of the interlocutors in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistai reports of his honouring at Athens (1.19a) that

In her article, ‘Women's Commensality in the Ancient Greek World', which appeared in this journal in 1998, Joan Burton set out to correct scholars’ neglect of ‘the topic of women's part in the history of ancient Greek dining and drinking parties’. She argued that the proposition that citizen women never participated in symposia is a broad generalization. Based on classical Athenian evidence, it misses variation over time and in different places. Even in the case of classical Athens it is overstated, overlooking the male bias of our sources. Moreover, scholars' concentration on the symposium has led to the neglect of other occasions of commensality and so of the important role played by women in Greek commensality more broadly:

Scholars have taken slight notice (if they mention it at all) of Cicero's interesting comment that Cypriots were exempt from evocatio, the summons of a defendant or witness to a legal proceeding by a Roman magistrate with imperium. While the legal ramifications of the ban on evocatio on Cyprus are clear, the origin of this exemption is not. The only explicit theory on its origin – Badian's argument that the prohibition was part of Lentulus' lex provinciae, a law for the formal organization of the province of Cyprus – has been influential, though it is based on tenuous evidence. Few ancient sources for Roman rule on Cyprus during the Late Republic have survived, and we must rely almost entirely on Cicero's letters. Cicero's correspondence, however, indicates (against Badian) that the ban on evocatio was a codicil of Cicero's provincial edict, and not a part of either Lentulus' lex provinciae or his provincial edict. Personal, political, and military considerations all played a role in Cicero's decision to make the citizens of Cyprus exempt from being called to the administrative gathering for the dispensation of justice and other legal and political matters known as a conventus.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the connections between political history and the use of myth for political purposes at Leptis Magna, birthplace of the African emperor Septimius Severus. The city, capital of the Tripolitanian Emporia in North Africa, was extensively restructured by the emperor and his son, Caracalla, after the civil wars of 193–7 AD. The urban renewal involved the harbour, perhaps very early in 198, and the Eastern area of the city close to the bank of the wadi Lebdah (see figure 1). The inscriptions on the buildings clearly refer to the period of their construction: the Forum Novum Severianum was completed between 202 and 205; the Basilica was built between 209–10 and completed under Caracalla in 215–16; a lead fistula from the Nympheum gives evidence that it was finished in 210. The inscription for the dedication of the tetrapylon arch is missing. This imposing monument on the cross-way between the cardo and the decumanus maximus of the city was the first visible to anyone approaching the city from the hinterland. Scholars now agree in placing its construction around 202–3, during the imperial family's stay in North Africa.

This article takes up the subject of shared memory and its interaction with landscape, with specific reference to Troy, to Homer's Iliad, and to the tradition of ‘pilgrimage’ to Troy and its environs that evolved in the ancient world in response to the Trojan War story. Over the course of centuries this particular location on the Hellespont, a Bronze Age site, exercised a particular fascination, thanks to memories – no doubt gravely distorted – of a great siege by combined Greek forces eager to avenge, as legend tells it, the abduction of Helen. A few centuries later, the site became a destination for ‘pilgrims’ who were eager to see for themselves the landscape of Troy and the Troad and to experience for themselves, physically and emotionally, certain actions that were attributed to the heroes of the so-called Trojan War.

James Joyce was the first reader of Washington Irving's famous tale of Rip Van Winkle to have noticed that Rip is ‘a lazy Odysseus’, as Andrew Burstein has more recently described him. Rip leaves home for twenty years, just as Odysseus did; however, unlike Odysseus, Rip spends this time not heroically fighting and adventuring but sleeping away his mature years. When he finally returns home, then, it is no surprise that the dog in front of his house ‘has forgotten' him, unlike Odysseus’ dog, who greets his master with a tail-wag of recognition. Irving creates in Rip Van Winkle an ironic and humorous embodiment of an Odysseus/Ulysses who, as quoted above, was ‘more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements’.