In his discussion of Roman military institutions Polybius described how the desire for fame might inspire Roman soldiers to heroic feats of bravery, including single combat: τ δ μέγιστον, ο νέοι παρορμνται πρς τ πν πομένειν πρ τν κοινν πραγμάτων χάριν το τυχεν τς συνακολουθούσης τος γαθος τν νδρν εκλείας. πίστιν δ' χει τ λεγόμενον κ τούτων. πολλο μν γρ μονο-μάχησαν κουσίως ωμαίων πρ τς τν λων κρίσεως κτλ. Modern scholars, however, have taken little notice of this remark and some (...) have tried to belittle the importance of single combat at Rome. Thus G. Dumézil alleged that the Romans fought few single combats and that this was significant for their outlook upon war, while R. Bloch described the duels in the seventh book of Livy as ‘un mode de combat absolument étranger à la tradition romaine, mail auquel les Romains ont été contraints par les habitudes et par les défis des Celtes’. W. V. Harris is the only scholar to have understood the importance of monomachy in the Roman Republic, but even he has not assembled all the evidence necessary for an accurate assessment of the phenomenon. This essay is intended to provide a full treatment and thus to make some contribution in a limited but interesting area to our understanding of Roman attitudes to warfare. I have included a list and discussion of all instances of single combat from the Roman Republic which I have discovered and have argued that the custom continued from prehistoric times at least to 45 b.c. (shrink)

Thêsauroi, or treasure-houses, are small, temple-like structures, found typically in the sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. They were built by Greek city-states to house the dedications of their citizens. But a thêsauros is not just a storeroom: it is also a frame for costly votives, a way of diverting elite display in the interest of the city. When placed on view in a treasure-house, the individual dedication is re-contextualized: although it still reflects well on its dedicant, it also glorifies the (...) polis. Thêsauroi effectively nationalize votives—and, with them, a dedicant's privileged relationship to the gods. The sculptural program of the Siphnian treasury exemplifies these issues. (shrink)

‘Hoplites are troops who take their name from their shields’. ‘The individual infantryman took his name, hoplites, from the hoplon or shield’. Such is the orthodox view. This paper will endeavour to show that its basis is inadequate. Rather, we shall argue, hoplites took their name from their arms and armour as a whole, their hopla in that all-encompassing sense; so that the original and essential meaning of the word hoplite was nothing more than ‘armed man’.

In Herodotus' royal council scene, where Xerxes decides whether or not to punish the Greeks, the king's cousin and adviser Mardonius is made to say these famous lines (Hdt. 7.9β.1):καίτοι [γε] ἐώθασι Ἕλληνες, ὡς πυνθάνομαι, ἀβουλότατα πολέμους ἵστασθαι ὑπό τε ἀγνωμοσύνης καὶ σκαιότητος. ἐπεὰν γὰρ ἀλλήλοισι πόλεμον προείπωσι, ἐξευρόντες τὸ κάλλιστον χωρίον καὶ λειότατον, ἐς τοῦτο κατιόντες μάχονται, ὥστε σὺν κακῷ μεγάλῳ οἱ νικῶντες ἀπαλλάσσονται· περὶ δὲ τῶν ἑσσουμένων οὐδὲ λέγω ἀρχήν, ἐξώλεες γὰρ δὴ γίνονται.Yet, the Greeks do wage war, (...) I hear, and they do so senselessly, in their poor judgement and stupidity. When they have declared war against each other, they find the finest, flattest piece of land and go down there and fight, so that the victors come off with terrible loss—I will not even begin to speak of the defeated, for they are utterly destroyed.This passage has long been one of the pillars of the ‘orthodox’ view of Greek warfare. It appears to describe a very peculiar way of war, in which conflicts were resolved by single battles at prearranged times, fought on open ground where neither side had an advantage. Fairness counted for more than tactical skill; all conditions were made equal, so that the winners could truly claim to be the braver and stronger men. The result, as Mardonius stressed, was needlessly bloody—but it was quintessentially Greek. Modern authors have argued that this ‘agonistic’ style of fighting, this ‘wonderful, absurd conspiracy’ of open hoplite battle, determined the shape of Greek warfare until the long and hard-fought Peloponnesian War changed the rules. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition , where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary , have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language reflects, (...) when it does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato . But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition, where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary, have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language reflects, when it (...) does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato. But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTIONIt has become a commonplace in contemporary historiography to note the frequency of war in ancient Greece. Yvon Garlan says that, during the century and a half from the Persian wars (490 and 480–479 B.C.) to the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.), Athens was at war, on average, more than two years out of every three, and never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. ‘Given these conditions’, says Garlan, ‘one would expect them (i.e. (...) the Greeks) to consider war as a problem …. But this was far from being the case.’ The Greek acceptance of war as inevitable was contrasted by Momigliano and others with the attention given to constitutional changes and to the prevention ofstasis: ‘the Greeks came to accept war like birth and death about which nothing could be done …. On the other hand constitutions were men-made and could be modified by men.’Moralist overtones were not absent from this re-evaluation of Greek civilization. Havelock observed that the Greeks exalted, legitimized, and placed organized warfare at the heart of the European value system, and Momigliano suggested that:The idea of controlling wars, like the idea of the emancipation of women and the idea of birth control, is a part of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century and meant a break with the classical tradition of historiography of wars. (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTION It has become a commonplace in contemporary historiography to note the frequency of war in ancient Greece. Yvon Garlan says that, during the century and a half from the Persian wars to the battle of Chaeronea , Athens was at war, on average, more than two years out of every three, and never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. ‘Given these conditions’, says Garlan, ‘one would expect them to consider war as a (...) problem …. But this was far from being the case.’ The Greek acceptance of war as inevitable was contrasted by Momigliano and others with the attention given to constitutional changes and to the prevention of stasis: ‘the Greeks came to accept war like birth and death about which nothing could be done …. On the other hand constitutions were men-made and could be modified by men.’ Moralist overtones were not absent from this re-evaluation of Greek civilization. Havelock observed that the Greeks exalted, legitimized, and placed organized warfare at the heart of the European value system, and Momigliano suggested that: The idea of controlling wars, like the idea of the emancipation of women and the idea of birth control, is a part of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century and meant a break with the classical tradition of historiography of wars. (shrink)