Introduction: The Museum and 'the Trench' In a recent article in this journal, Robin Osborne (2015) makes a number of claims about the relative merits of museum versus ield research, particularly ield research conducted through excavation. In so doing he implies that Mediter

Die Verweigerung der LuÈ ste. Erotische Gruppen in der antiken Plastik by Adrian Sta È hli, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1999, 458 pp., 120 b. & w. illus., DM 83.74 The sexually explicit scenes to be found in Greek, Roman and Etruscan art have attracted no little attention. Besides making for eye-catching postcards to hang outside pavement kiosks, they have provided authors keen to argue the virtues of sexual liberation, and authors keen to make an easy penny, with material which a public that would not otherwise purchase pornography can regard as suitable to grace their coffee tables. Scholarly interest in ancient sexuality has increased markedly over the past quarter of a century, with first Dover's Greek Homosexuality and then Foucault's History of Sexuality as landmarks, but although Dover made a close study of Greek vases as part of his investigations, extensive discussion of the representation of sexual desire and sexual relations in Greek and Roman art has been a feature only of the past decade. Admirable though much of this recent work has been, little of it has looked closely at how conventions changed over time, or tried to understand in detail the relationship between the works and the societies that produced them.Adrian StaÈ hli's ambitious book attempts to do just that. He takes as his central theme the representation in sculpture of sexual relations between satyrs and nymphs/maenads or hermaphrodites. StaÈ hli catalogues surviving examples of such groups and sets them in the context both of the literary evidence of attitudes towards sexuality and sexually explicit representations, on the one hand, and of the history of the representation of the followers of Dionysus, from the sixth century BC onwards, on the other. He starts his treatment one kilometre west of Pompeii in the dining room of the Villa Oplontis with a sculpture of an hermaphrodite thrusting away at a sexually excited satyr, and proceeds from there through an exploration of Hellenistic attitudes to sexuality back to the tradition of the representation of the Dionysiac in the Greek world, before reversing the order and discussing the Hellenistic representations from which the Villa Oplontis group is derived. StaÈ hli's story of what happens in the Greek world is very persuasive. He argues that satyrs and maenads belong to a Dionysiac world which exists only in images, neither reproducing the world of myth as known from literature, nor reproducing cult practices. He sees the visual images of the Dionysiac world as interpretations of Dionysiac cult and myth; interpretations which make cult and myth rational by displaying the order which lies behind individual cult practices. What makes the images particularly interesting, and particularly powerful, is the combination of impossible creations (satyrs) with figures which nothing distinguishes from ordinary women: if satyrs are part of an`Other world' to which men can contrast their own world, maenads, whose part in provoking the sexual attentions of the satyrs StaÈ hli rightly stresses,...

M. I. Finley (1912–86) was the most famous ancient historian of his generation. He was admired by his peers, and was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy. His unmistakable voice was familiar to tens of thousands of radio listeners, his polemical reviews and other journalism were found all over the broadsheets and weeklies, and his scholarly as well as his popular works sold in very large numbers as Penguin paperbacks. Yet this was also a man dismissed from his job at Rutgers University when he refused to answer the question of whether he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. This pioneering volume assesses Finley's achievements and analyses the nature of the impact of this charismatic individual and the means by which he changed the world of ancient history.

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