Synopsis Most research in comparative cognition focuses on measuring if animals manage certain tasks; fewer studies explore how animals might solve them. We investigated bumblebees’ scanning strategies in a numerosity task, distinguishing patterns with 2 items from 4 and 1 from 3, and subsequently transferring numerical information to novel numbers, shapes and colours. Video analyses of flight paths indicate that bees do not determine the number of items by using a rapid assessment of number (as mammals do in “subitizing”); instead, they rely on sequential enumeration even when items are presented simultaneously and in small quantities. This process, equivalent to the motor tagging (“pointing”) found for large number tasks in some primates, results in longer scanning times for patterns containing larger numbers of items. Bees used a highly accurate working memory, remembering which items have already been scanned, resulting in fewer than 1% of re-inspections of items before making a decision. Our results indicate that the small brain of bees, with less parallel processing capacity than mammals, might constrain them to use sequential pattern evaluation even for low quantities.

This introductory chapter contextualizes the contributions of the various articles and their interdiscursive approach in combining material culture and literary evidence. It offers an overview of the difficulties of parsing a hostile historiographical tradition on the emperor Domitian, and the ideological as well as chronological fault-lines created by authors who very often straddled the Flavian and post-Flavian periods, turning from enthusiastic support of the emperor to damning critique; the particular challenges to the material evidence posed by Domitian’s damnatio, and the physical as well as literary forms of oblivion that “erased” the last Flavian emperor; the gaps, absences, revisions, and overwritings that complicate accurate understanding of Domitian’s character, achievements, and historical record.

While recent scholarship has recognized the attractions of Matthew Gwinne's chronicle history Nero (1603), its major drawback – an uncritical over‐dependence on the historical sources – has attracted the charge that the play is dramatically incoherent, ultimately a mere ‘academic exercise’. At first glance this approach might be confirmed in Gwinne's pedantic inclusion of scholarly side‐notes which add little to a play‐text already containing the whole historical record. But through a comparative reading with the quarto text of Jonson's Sejanus (first performed 1603; published with Latin side‐notes, 1605) I will argue that both authors use the interpretative potential of ‘text’ and ‘margin’ to reflect not just on the tyranny of princes but also the obedience of citizens, and more specifically the right conduct of a constituency made up, precisely, of the intended cast and audience of Nero, those closest to monarchical power, the counsellors. After sketching the controlling, pre‐emptive and fragmenting policy of margination in Sejanus in the service of a politically defensive use of the ancient historical record, as Jonson relies upon the authenticity of Tacitus to bolster the integrity of his own play, I contrast Gwinne's own practice in Act IV of Nero, which centres on the aftermath of Agrippina's murder and Nero's decision to exile his wife Octavia. Through the margins, Gwinne opens up contradictions in the historical record and invites complicating reflection and contested interpretation of Nero's reign, above all in his interrogation of the conduct of the tutor‐philosopher Seneca. By framing Seneca's role in government through ancient and modern texts that reflect on the politics and ethics of service under tyranny (above all John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1159) and Savile's The Ende of Nero (1591)), I argue that Gwinne's ‘Tacitist’ Nero goes far beyond mere homiletic instruction.