The theme of the building and destruction of cities is a conspicuous one in theAeneid. The poem opens with a paragraph which summarizes the suffering that is to lead to the building of ‘the walls of lofty Rome’, and this passage is linked by verbal echoes to Aeneas' entry not much later when he bewails the fact that he has not died a heroic death beneath ‘the lofty walls of Troy’. The city which is to rise and the city which has fallen are in their very different ways inescapable features of theAeneid'sgeography.
In Euripides' Suppliant Women, Theseus at fijirst rejects Adrastos' supplication to recover the bodies of the Argive dead. Later he changes his mind. This article discusses the initial failure of the supplication, both examining the failings in Adrastos' appeal and suggesting that a strong case can be made for Theseus' rejection: neither he nor Athens would have sufffered from gods or from men had he stood by it. Why then did he have the change of heart that the play clearly approves? The article links his rejection with a narrow nationalism evinced in his response to the exogamous marriages Adrastos had contracted for his daughters. His attitude looks back to Perikles' marriage law of 451 BC and reflects the chauvinism that it brought in its wake. Theseus must unlearn this limited mind-set and become a truly Panhellenic hero. The article traces how this in fact happens in the course of the play, above all through the developing relationship between Theseus and Adrastos. His jingoism and isolationism melt away, though in her ex machina appearance Athena undermines the great-heartedness that both kings have displayed. Despite that, the play ends afffijirmatively, endorsing the theme of the inadequacy of a narrow Athenocentrism.
As the first in what is hoped to be a continuing series, the editors of Greece & Rome have invited two contributors to attempt a critical appreciation of Propertius iii. 10. The contributors were asked to present their opinions independently and no ‘rules’ were laid down by the editors. It is our intention to publish from time to time further exercises of this type.
In a famous passage from his second book, Thucydides sums up Pericles' policy for the conduct of the Peloponnesian War and adds that after his death (2.65.7): … … they [the Athenians] did the opposite of all these things, and did still other things which appeared irrelevant to the war. For the sake of private ambition and private profit they pursued policies which were bad for themselves and for the allies, from which the honour and advantage accrued rather to private individuals when they succeeded, but which when they failed brought damage to the city with regard to the war. (tr. P.J. Rhodes) Going on to say of Pericles' Athens that in what was in theory a democracy, power was in fact in the hands of the first man, Thucydides comments that 'the leaders who followed Pericles were more on a level with one another, and as each strove to become first they tended to abandon affairs to the whims of the people' (2.65.9-10). 2 This remained the familiar picture of the demagogue 3 until the 1960s. Yet as early as 1849 the Victorian banker-cum-historian George Grote, who referred to 'a new class of politicians-Eucratês, the rope-seller-Kleon, the leather-seller-Lysiklês, the sheep-seller-Hyperbolus, the lamp-maker', had mounted a strong defence of Cleon. 4 353 1 I am grateful to P.J. Rhodes for his helpful advice on the so-called demagogues. 2 3 The word is used by Thucydides only at 4.21.3 (of Cleon). He uses 'demagogy' at 8.65.2 (of Androcles). 'Demagogue' is used in what is certainly a derogatory sense by Xenophon at Hell. 5.2.7. Favourable uses are given by J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton, 1989), 106-7. For a short summary of the different uses of the word by different authors, see P.J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1993), 323-4. Part of the problem discussed in this article is the exclusively pejorative use of 'demagogue' in English: John Milton referred to the 'affrightment of this Goblin word' in
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