They are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years – a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilisation to what it is at present, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem that the study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it.

But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language – to do so with fluency being the mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people know their own affairs best.

Since antiquity, Greek tragedy has continually preoccupied philosophers. From Plato and Aristotle, to Hegel and Nietzsche, many of the most interesting ideas in the history of thought have been developed through a dialogue with tragedy. This article explores the continuities and ruptures between Plato and Aristotle's reading of tragedy and the so-called “philosophy of the tragic” which emerged in the late eighteenth century. The influence of this modern tradition has been so profound that, even today, no reading of Antigone, of Oedipus or of the Bacchae is not also, at least unconsciously, in dialogue with Hegel, with Freud and with Nietzsche. Although there is some recognition that the philosophical understanding of tragedy has historically shaped the discussion of ancient drama, classicists remain resistant to returning to its insights to further the study of classical texts. This article aims to redress the situation not only by revealing the persistent traces of the philosophy of the tragic in our modern critical vocabulary, but also by arguing that a renewed interest in this tradition will invigorate debates within our field. By looking at the examples of the French feminists Hélène Cixous' and Luce Irigaray's interpretations of Sophocles and Aeschylus, the article investigates the apparent tension between historicist and universalising readings of tragedy and argues that these two approaches are not necessarily incompatible.

This essay depends upon certain assumptions, which had better be made explicit at the outset.

The first is that in Attic tragedy the choral odes were always intended to have an organic relation to the drama as a whole. They are not mere intermezzi inserted to relieve tension and allow the audience to relax between successive steps in the real business of the drama, but serve rather as lyrical commentaries on what is happening on the stage, inviting us to the emotional response appropriate at that point in the action, and to reflect upon certain ideas and concepts implicit in the events themselves. They form a bridge between successive acts, and their contextual relevance looks back to what has immediately preceded and forward to what is about to come. At this level we need not expect complete consistency between different odes. The Chorus's interpretation of the situation and the emotional reaction it expresses may change quite drastically in the light of a change in situation or the revelation of hitherto unknown facts.

It is evident that there was no law expressly forbidding the re-election of tribunes of the plebs. When Tiberius Gracchus raised the issue, his colleagues were in doubt, though the majority apparently held that his candidature was inadmissible (Appian, B.C. I, 14–15). Two years later Papirius Carbo proposed a bill ‘ut eundem tribunum plebi quotiens vellet creare liceret’, which was rejected by the plebs (Livy, Epit. LIX, Cic., de Amic. 95). This event would have confirmed the presumption against the reeligibility of tribunes, but of course made no change in the legal position. In fact Gaius Gracchus was re-elected in 123 (for 122) without any recorded protest.

Theocritus' treatment of myth has been discussed many times in the last few decades, particularly in connection with the non-bucolic ‘epyllia’. In this paper I will consider whether anything like what has been called the ‘Destruktion der Tradition’ applies to the bucolic idylls as well; my litmus test will be above all Theocritus' exploitation of mythological paradigms, because almost all the mythological stories which enter the shepherds' world are exempla. All these exempla will turn out to display either a certain or a possible ‘collapse of exemplarity’, because Theocritus more or less expressly focuses both on their exemplary and their opposite, non-exemplary aspects, which complicate and destroy the univocality usually typical of paradigms.

The symbol:‘/’, for ‘Antithesis’, is used throughout this essay to indicate the main alternations in its voicing. What I have in mind is to project the contentiousness that constitutes narration through this discussion of Statius' epic. ‘/’ will mark exchange between the (binary/convergent) views of an ‘Eteocles’ and a ‘Polynices’, then, yes, but also between warring textual ‘forces’ such as uirtus / planctus, etc. / etc. For faction and fraction / threaten to / multiply in, and as, ‘Thebaid’ - to the power of Seven, or regression to Infinity. The essay explores Thebais' - / Barthes' insight:

(T)he antithesis is the battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors; the Antithesis is the figure of the given opposition, eternal, eternally recurrent: the figure of the inexpiable. Every passage through the wall of the Antithesis thus constitutes a transgression …

Pity and the characters' response to it have always been recognized as one of the central themes of Sophocles' Philoctetes. In recent years scholarship on the play has mainly focused either on the cognitive aspects of the dynamics triggered by pity-related emotions (that is, how pity seems to activate and at the same time is triggered by rational reflection and experience) or on its self-conscious meta-theatrical dimension (what Halliwell has called the intrinsic ‘theatricality of pity’ and the audience's response to it). My intention is to contribute to this critical debate by focusing more narrowly on the semantics of pity-related words in the play: a linguistic analysis of the language of pity in Sophocles' Philoctetes will show that the seeming interchangeability of the words oiktos and eleos bears further investigation. The first section of this article will offer a brief diachronic survey of the semantics of oiktos- and eleos-related formations in Homer and the fifth century tragedians (with special attention to Sophoclean usage). Building upon recent studies on paradigmatic semantic relations, it will then be argued that the relation of eleos to oiktos is better described, from a synchronic perspective, in terms of ‘hyponymy’ or ’gradient synonymy.’

Recent contributions to the debate on the role, status and autonomy of the artist in classical Greece remain polarised in terms which have remained largely unchanged for more than a century. On one side, we find ‘modernisers’ who hold that the role of the artist, the function of art and the social structure of the Greek art world was more similar to the modern western art world than different. On the other side are ranged the ‘primitivists’ who argue that modern conceptions of artistic autonomy and creativity are an anachronistic imposition on ancient Greek art, which was a largely anonymous craft, performing traditional functions and oriented to the reproduction of traditional artistic forms rather than the individualistic innovation held to be characteristic of western European art since the Renaissance. The modernisers look back to Winckelmann's neo-classical view of the Greek artist as free and autonomous creator, whilst the primitivists ultimately draw their inspiration from Jacob Burckhardt's alternative account of the Greek artist as mechanical craftsman or banausos. In this century, the primary point of reference for the debate has been Bernard Schweitzer's argument that whilst artists were held in low esteem during the classical period of Greek history, the fifth and fourth centuries, they came to be recognised as ‘creative’ in the Hellenistic period, the third to first centuries B.C. More recent contributions have largely been concerned with adducing, or criticising, new evidence for one or other side of the debate, whilst retaining the assumptions within which the debate was set up in the nineteenth century.

This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate education and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.

A possible place to start yet one more discussion of the song of Silenus is to reiterate Otto Skutsch's ‘robuste Fragestellung’ of 1956: ‘Was will im Grunde die sechste Ekloge besagen?’ One could argue that the answer is ‘Gar nichts’: this is perhaps the implication of some treatments, notably of Zeph Stewart's article and of at least the first part of Williams's discussion of the poem in Tradition and originality in Roman poetry. Anyway it is a tenable hypothesis that we should regard the values of the sixth Eclogue as purely formal and that it is a positive error to look behind its exquisite formal ποικιλία for some discursive statement about life or poetry or both. ‘Look behind’ is certainly what in this case we have to do if we want a discursive statement, because overtly the poem makes no such statement. But from antiquity to now it has been hard to rest with the hypothesis that the poem's values are purely formal, and this recurrent unease seems motivated by something about the poem, not just something about its readers: reluctant or not, at intervals most of us do grit our teeth and say: ‘Etwas besagt sie schon.’ The variety of views about what that something might be and the sad banality that the something too often turns out to exhibit have not so far deterred us from trying to find it.

‘The modes of music are never disturbed without disturbance of the most fundamental political and social nomoi’. This dictum of the influential fifth-century musical theorist Damon, friend and adviser of Perikles, reflects the deep-seated relation that was felt to exist between the modes of music and the fundamental conventions governing social and political life in ancient Greece. This relation deserves much further exploration. Our present thesis is that elaborate linguistic and semantic play between the registers of the musical and the social order is to be found in the Oresteia far more than in any other surviving work. It is, perhaps, not surprising that in this trilogy, where the claims of conflicting nomoi are powerfully dramatised, the musical order is also exploited in complex and subtle ways to reflect upon the social and political order; and that disruptions or distortions in the social order find their counterpart in the musical order. Though some have noted the operation of this interpenetration of registers, it has not been studied in the depth it deserves.

The Georgics stand at the threshold of Augustan literature, the Fasti at its end, but despite Ovid's respect for Rome's first great didactic poem, Lucretius' De rerum natura, and despite all the intervening achievements of Augustan poets in incorporating national and aetiological themes into other poetic genres, Ovid's poem repeatedly acknowledges by echoes of form and theme the primacy of the Georgics as model for his aetiological work.

This paper attempts to measure Ovidian response to the Georgics at two levels, the level of formal, verbal allusion and the level of themes and values. I have been led to focus on Ovid's treatment of Ceres/Demeter (and less prominently Liber/Bacchus) because Ceres as teacher of agriculture and benefactor of men is central to Virgil's representation of evolving human culture. But Ceres is equally important to the Fasti (although her sober personality makes her unappealing as a candidate for interview by the poet) as a major deity in the largely rural Roman calendar, as a symbol of the didactic principle, and for her very centrality in the Virgilian poem that Ovid is emulating.

‘Then babble, babble words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three…” Beckett.

In this paper, I intend to discuss three central Hellenistic poems: Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus, Theocritus' Idyll 11 and Idyll 7. Each of these poems holds a privileged position in the discussion of the Hellenistic era as well as in each poet's corpus. I am certainly not offering here what could be called complete or exhaustive readings of these works – that would be far beyond the scope of a paper of this length; rather, I want to focus on a key point of interpretation in each poem. In the Hymn to Zeus, I am going to investigate the language of truth; in Idyll 11, the poem's structure of frame and song; and in Idyll 7, the poem's programmatic force. There are two aims in this strategy: the first is to investigate the topic of the ‘poet's voice’ in Hellenistic poetry. The three poems and the three topics of my discussion are linked in the concern for how a poet places himself within his poetry – ‘Who speaks?’, as Roland Barthes put it. The interest in poetry and how a poet relates to his poetry is a constant and fascinating theme through these works, and each of the topics I have chosen to discuss will illuminate this interest from a different aspect. Secondly, through a consideration of these three key moments of interpretation, I shall be arguing for an increased awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hellenistic poetry. I intend to show how critics' approaches and decisions with regard to these nodes of interpretation, which may be regarded as paradigmatic, have led to a worrying oversimplification of Hellenistic poetry. I hope to show in some measure how the intellectual complexity which makes these poems so hard to read and to criticize, can also be a source of their continuing interest and delight for us.

In PCPS N.S. XV (1969), 69 ff. I defined the triadic structure of P. Oxy. 2735 fr. I and suggested that the contents of this and other fragments would seem more at home in Ibycus than in Stesichorus. It was already clear that not all the fragments of this papyrus come from the same poem, but I had not yet noticed that the number of poems represented is probably at least three, and that there are now further reasons for preferring Ibycus as author.

The following two fragments belong to poems different from each other and from fr. 1:

(a) P. Oxy. 2735 fr. II

(i) The tradic structure (top of column)

(a), (b), (c) with paragraphos mark stanza-ends according to the three schemes described immediately below.

Though the left-hand margin is nowhere preserved, I take it as self-evident that these are the beginnings of lines. It is likely, in Ibycus or Stesichorus, that eighteen lines will cover at least about two-thirds, perhaps the whole, of a triad; and in fact it seems obvious that strophe, antistrophe, and epode are represented here, although it is not quite certain where the stanzas end.

There are three choices:

(a) 1–6 = ant., 7–11 = ep., 12–17 = str., 18 ff. = ant.

(b) 1–5 = ant., 6–10 = ep., 11–16 = str., 17 ff. = ant.

(c) 1–5 = str., 6–16 = ant., 17 ff. = ep.

When translating the ‘potential’ Homeric Greek optative into English, ‘could’ is often the best modal verb to use, to be preferred to the more usual ‘would’. I will argue that, in some cases, this reveals that the optative expresses what is termed in the literature ‘dynamic’ modality. Examining several examples in more detail I will claim that the optative expresses a wide range of meanings, the differences between which are subtle and not always clear-cut.

Almost four decades ago, Donald Russell published in this journal an analysis of the first sixteen chapters of the Life of Alkibiades, which consist largely of short self-contained anecdotes about Alkibiades' childhood, youth and early career (Russell 1966b). As Russell demonstrated, most of these anecdotes are juxtaposed without any causal link. Although there are the occasional chronological markers – indications, for example, that Alkibiades is getting older and passing from childhood to early manhood – some are plainly out of chronological order and it is impossible to extract a clear chronology from them. Russell argued, however, that to try to extract such a chronological narrative would be to misunderstand the function of this material, which is not to provide a narrative of Alkibiades' early years but rather to illuminate and illustrate his character.

Russell's argument, in particular the stress on Plutarch's interest in character, was seminal; together with two other papers published at roughly the same time, it marked the beginning of a new appreciation of Plutarch as an author of literary merit. But Russell was rather less convinced of the logic of selection of the first five anecdotes, which relate to Alkibiades' youth and comprise some one-and-a-half pages of Teubner text (Alk. 2–3).