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“... In Euripides’ drama Hippolytus (428 BC), when the women of Troezen learn that Phaedra, their queen, is ill, they wonder if she has been possessed by a god or whether her ‘soul’ has been bound to her bed by grief because her husband has found another woman. ‘An evil helplessness of labour pains and folly likes to dwell in the difficult composition of women,’ they conclude ...”

“... The ancient Greeks, for all the changes that the industrial age has brought, would have been quick to understand what we now mean by pollution. The oil slick on the white sand beach, the exhaust fumes in the atmosphere, even the soot on the window-sill, are not simply forms of dirt that can by some means be cleansed away: in each case the offending substance indicates that there has been a displacement, that something which belongs to one sphere has entered or even invaded another ...”

“... For many people in this country the garish Texan settings of television serials, with their incessant boorishness, brutality and violence, appear to represent ‘normal’ life in America. When it is discovered that I grew up in New York City, English people ask, in varying degrees of indirectness, whether it is still possible to live there, if it is safe to walk about in the day, and they don’t always believe me when I tell them that everyone else in my family still lives there, that my cousin, who one would have thought might have been pleased to remain in such a luscious spot as Santa Cruz, California, actually wants to move back ...”

“... A generation ago, standard ancient history courses paid little attention to domestic life. I vaguely remember being told that Aspasia was Pericles’s ‘mistress’ and that hetairai like her were often well-educated, and thus able better to serve as ‘companions’ for men than their less cultivated wives. But it wasn’t until relatively recently that undergraduates were encouraged to know how such women were educated not only to discuss poetry and philosophy but also to carry out the less academic functions of their profession ...”

“... errors. It is such autodidacts who tend today to monopolise the label ‘Afrocentrist’. Mary Lefkowitz’s concern, or obsession, with Afrocentrism emerged suddenly in 1991, when she wrote a review of my book Black Athena for the New Republic. As a professor of classics, she was appalled to discover that people were writing books and teaching ...”

“... have gone for good. The same is true of the ancient world in general. That emerges clearly from Mary Lefkowitz’s and Maureen Fant’s spirited anthology. Women’s Life is the title – a feminist would prefer Men on Women’s Life. It is rare to hear a woman speak; rarer still for her to speak as a woman. Beyond that, there are all the usual ...”

“... from the critical examination they have undergone in a number of recent articles by Professor Mary Lefkowitz. Winnington-Ingram is also inclined to accept the view of Bernard Knox that the plague in the Oedipus Tyrannus was suggested to Sophocles by the plague that attacked Athens in 430 BC. But there is a plague in the first book of the Iliad, and ...”