Heracles was the greatest and the strangest of all the Greek heroes. A long list of superhuman acts of strength and courage stood to his name, and above all else the famous twelve labours, which began with the killing of the Nemean lion and.ended in the capture of the monstrous watchdog Cerberus in Hades. He was a great slayer of monsters, also a great civilizer, founding cities, warm springs, and (as Pindar was fond of reminding his audiences) the Olympic festival. He suffered prodigiously, and he maintained prodigious appetites, for food, drink, and women. He may have had friends, but none close (as, say, Patroclus and Achilles were close), but he did have one implacable and jealous enemy, the goddess Hera. He had two marriages: the first set of wife and children he killed in a fit of madness; the second brought about his own death. He was the son of a mortal woman, Alcmena, and the god Zeus, with Amphitryon as a second, mortal, father; and after his death (by most accounts) he became a god himself and lived on Olympus.

Absent from Thebes at the first outbreak of Bacchic excitement, King Pentheus returns in haste, deeply troubled by reports of revelry on Mount Cithaeron and accounts of the captivating stranger who has led the Theban women astray (Ba. 212–38). When he meets the stranger he asks him about the appearance of the god (469,477) and the features of the rites (471) and complains that he cannot see the divinity who, the stranger assures him, is right at hand (500,502). Pentheus manifests great eagerness to see the Bacchantes with his own eyes, and it is by playing on this desire that the stranger lures him to Cithaeron and his death (810ff.)

Perhaps happiness can be attributed only to the dead because they are beyond the reach of fortune: but that security is denied to one's reputation. The case of Socrates makes this clear, and it is his reputation which is this paper's theme. For since his death Socrates has been the object of such competing assessments that some have despaired of ever finding the real person executed in Athens in 399 B.C. Although that search need not be fruitless, this study is concerned not so much with the sources of our knowledge of Socrates as with the ways in which Plato's Socrates has been represented and assessed. On the one hand are interpreters who hold him up as a model for life and thought, an ideal figure approaching sainthood if not divinity; and on the other more sinister hand are those who claim to discern under the saint's clothing the sly fox, the devious devil whose major aim is to destroy other people's beliefs and arguments. Socrates has been praised and condemned with fervour since his original trial, and although we will not reach yet another final verdict here, perhaps by canvassing a little of the evidence we may come to understand not only something of his reputations, but also how they find their sources in Plato's own writings.

The contrasts could hardly be drawn more boldly than in the speech On the Crown: from the majestic tone of the prayers that articulate the opening, the conclusion, and some transitions (18.1, 8, 141, 324) to the scurrility of the portrait of Aeschines' parents (18.129–30), from the noble conception of Athens' historical mission as leader in the fight for freedom (18.66ff., 199ff.) to the reading off of the names of the traitors of all the Greek states, a veritable muster-roll of infamy (18.295), from the portrait of the orator's own work in building a resistance to Philip (18.79–94,169ff.) to the depiction of his opponent's inertia, venality, obstructionism, and collaboration with the enemy. Black and white divide the canvas between them with very little room reserved for shading.

For Roman politicians, marriage could be a tool of advancement, a way of forging alliances among the influential and the wealthy. The major figures of the late Republic used marriage to realize their political hopes and to increase their political power. Such marriages and their consequences have been discussed often and much scholarly energy has been expended in exploring the ramifications of these alliances.

Fragments and summaries are all that survive of the two primary epics which originally covered the fall of Troy: the Little Iliad of Lesches and the Iliou Persis of Arktinos. I shall also be referring to the late Post-Homerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus. Certain details in Virgil's narrative imply that he and Quintus knew the same source material, though for my purpose here Quintus is chiefly used to indicate another possible mode of narrative treatment, particularly of the relation between the Sinon and Laocoon stories.

By the end of the first century A.D., the teachings of the philosophers as expounded by Cicero on the practice of liberalitas had been largely accepted, often even in detail, by members of the governing class at Rome. Such would not have been the situation in the last generation of the Roman republic. This paper will seek to explain the cautious attitudes to the quality shown in the last three quarters of the first century B.C., and the declining relevance of these reservations, with the consequent rehabilitation of the virtue, in the early principate.