Volume 11, Issue 1

This paper investigates the law of the Cypriot city-kingdoms in the Archaic and Classical periods. New insights concern the property rights of upper-class women from Cyprus, specifically from Idalion. The paper provides a fresh analysis of the content of the Idalion Bronze Tablet and of two scarab-seals. The data coming from their examination are compared with the iconography of women in Cyprus and the contents of two paragraphs of Lysias’ speech, On the Property of Aristophanes . The analysis of these testimonies demonstrates that in the Archaic and Classical periods, Cypriot upper-class women may have been landowners who rented out their properties, may have owned personal seals, and conceivably, may have managed family estates in the event of their husband’s death.

Thucydides’ detailed description of the Athenian plague, which is estimated to have killed from a quarter to a third of Athens’ population has been approached from a variety of scholarly perspectives, yet its memorializing function is still under-explored. This article contends that Thucydides’ plague episode serves an inherent commemorative function and memorializes the plague through narrative emphasis, pathos, ἐνάργεια, and his focus on abortive burial rites.

Reexamining inscriptional and literary sources on grants of politeia by ancient Greek cities in exchange for money allows us to rethink the commonly accepted interpretation of these grants as the sale of citizenship. This article argues that such grants actually reciprocated benefactions that involved a financial expenditure in the interests of the city. These grants could be interpreted as a sale of politeia , similar to today’s grants of citizenship offered by many countries in return for investments. However, like these modern gifts of citizenship, the grants in ancient Greece reflected a basic norm that politeia could only be conferred on benefactors.

This article argues that the bronze coin types of the earliest Seleucid kings clearly illustrate the royal ideology of Seleucus I and his co-rulership with Antiochus I. This article considers the audience and meaning of the bronzes, as well as their minting patterns. After a discussion of the obverse and reverse types, this article focuses on two images: that of the bull and the anchor. The bull being both highly produced, and open to interpretation, and the anchor being a symbol more personal and specific to Seleucus I. This article then goes on to put forward that the bull/anchor types produced at Aï Khanoum/Bactra were a deliberate link on the part of Antiochus to the types produced by Seleucus I to create an imperial image.

Despite extensive scholarship on trials regarding misconduct in the court of Philip V of Macedonia, the trial of his son Demetrius on the charge of assault on his brother and heir apparent Perseus, which is the only example of a trial of a Macedonian king’s son, seems to have escaped the attention of modern historians. Given that it is an event whose most detailed description appears in Livy’s history and that the Roman historian offers a very positive picture of the romanophile Demetrius, it is easy to understand why this trial has not been considered worthy of study. Nevertheless, Livy’s account reveals that the king observed specific procedural rules which are known from the other trials he dealt with, and which demonstrates Philip’s somewhat juridical attitude in legal processes against misconduct of the members of his court. The main purpose of this article is to highlight Philip’s juridical attitude by showing the similarity of the procedure applied in the trial of Demetrius as described by Livy to the legal processes followed by Philip in the trials of his courtiers during his early reign.

Many scholars have suggested that Augustus and Tiberius were afraid of prodigies and the Sibylline Books. Not only, they claim, did these emperors suppress prodigy reports, they also destroyed parts of the official Sibylline collection. This paper argues that the early emperors were not afraid of state divination. Rather than being a threat to their power, prodigies, expiations, and the Sibylline Books were used to confirm their position and to counter the authority of competing forms of divination.

Intense recruitment for the Roman army among the Batavians of the Lower Rhi­ne exposed their community more profoundly to Latin literacy and the universal cul­ture of the empire than many oth­er provinces. How­ever, through an anthro­polo­gi­cal examination of their commu­ni­ty, the present paper demonstrates that even under the­se con­di­tions, the cultural amalgamation of the impe­rial and the lo­cal was li­mi­ted, and Batavian society retained a markedly distinct cul­ture through­out centuries of Ro­man rule.