This paper is intended to discuss the household in which Classical Athenians typically lived, and the interest in it shown by the polis. Aristotle saw the household – in his vocabulary the oikos, or sometimes the oikia – as the basic social unit of the polis. He defines the primary relationships within the household as: master and slave, husband and wife, father and child. Clearly for Aristotle the household was paradeigmatically made up of the nuclear family together with whatever slaves the family owned. Modern scholars, while often differing about the roles of the members of the household, have generally accepted that the polis, and in particular Classical Athens, was indeed made up of a number of such households. The slave's role in the household, though important, was obviously different from the roles of the members of the nuclear family, and slaves will be left out of account in this paper.

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.

Anyone who has ever read the tragedies of Seneca must have wondered at the intention of the author. In the absence of any external evidence for their staging this is not surprising. W. Beare argues for declamation before a select audience who would have appreciated the sparkle of the rhetoric. G. E. Duckworth, whilst stressing that presentation on stage cannot be proved, suggests tentatively that they were at least written with an eye to performance. C. D. N. Costa holds out for solo virtuoso recitals, with perhaps extracts or a few scenes being performed. F. Ahl recalls the emperor Domitian's enactment forbidding plays to be presented anywhere except indoors, and thus the large houses of the aristocracy may have been home to tragic theatre. V. Sorensen feels that a public performance of Seneca's tragedies would have been a notable public occasion, and with his ample means to fund such events, Seneca may have been trying to entice a large audience towards the benefits of Stoic philosophy.

Of the poet Martial we know a great deal – especially when compared with what we know about his younger contemporary Juvenal, yet one needs to be careful in approaching what he tells us about himself. For instance, he refers several times to his suburban smallholding at Nomentum, usually identified as modern Mentana but possibly Casali, and in so doing is accustomed to belittle its produce. Hence he claims to send as a harvest gift fruit bought in the Subura rather than his own indifferent home-grown (10.94), and declares at 2.38 that what his estate yields is (not produce but) respite from the troublesome Linus. Now it is well appreciated that jokes regarding the viability, or rather otherwise, of suburban estates were standard; but it is possible that Martial's Nomentan estate was originally part of one owned by his compatriot the Younger Seneca, and we are told by Columella (3.3.3) that the vineyards on this estate were especially famed. Thus, although Martial's estate would have been small, the wine it produced might in fact have been very good of its kind – for all that his Nomentan neighbour Quintus Ovidius is credited with better (13.119):

Nomentana meum tibi dat vindemia Bacchum:

si te Quintus amat, commodiora bibes.

‘A Nomentan vintage gives you my wine. If Quintus loves you, you will drink better.’

Euripides' Medea has penetrated to parts of modernity most mythical figures have not reached. Since she first rolled off the printing presses half a millennium ago, she has inspired hundreds of performances, plays, paintings, and operas. Medea has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West, and can today command huge audiences in the commercial theatre. Yet in Britain, at least, her popularity on the stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Medea has transcended history partly because she enacts a primal terror universal to human beings: that the motherfigure should intentionally destroy her own children. Yet this dimension of the ancient tragedy was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances. On the British stage it was not until 1907 that Euripides' Medea was performed, without alteration, in English translation.