Who is that man with the handshake? Don't you know …

He is an onlooker, a heartless type,

Whose hobby is giving everyone else the lie.

Laudatur et alget. The Fifties had faith: ‘This satire is nowadays the most popular of all and still read in many classical sixth forms where one otherwise shuns the Sermones.’ The Sixties knew: ‘This poem … will always be a general favourite’; yes, I bear witness, who lent an ear to the L. A. Moritz track for J.A.C.T.'s showcase of Latinitas back in the golden age of vinyl (I still do: ego uero oppono ∣ auriculam, 76f.). (…) The Nineties wonder. ‘Perhaps the most straightforward and immediately appealing of the ten poems, and perhaps the most delicious example of Horace's brand of ironic humour.’

My title has a narrow and a broader reference. The narrower one relates to the question of whether the study of ancient science will continue in this University. Valedictories do not have the same well-established conventions as inaugurals. But some taking stock of what has been happening in the field of studies picked out by the title of the Professorship that I have held for fifteen years may be thought appropriate or at least will be forgiven. The very fact that I raise this as a question (‘is there a future?) may suggest that in this last public act of my professorship, I may be about to pronounce an obituary for a subject that I have cultivated ever since I first began lecturing in this University. The prospects for the study of the subject here are indeed unclear. It may not be so much a matter of après moi le déluge, as après moi – rien ne va plus. But I am more concerned here – the Vice-Chancellor may be relieved to hear – not with the narrow, so much as with the broader issues suggested by my title. Where, in the wake of recent developments in the history and philosophy of science, is there a place – and is there a place – for ancient science?

Aristophanes' Plutus is often regarded as a dull play. According to two of the leading specialists on Aristophanes in Great Britain, the comedy displays ‘a certain amount of disjointedness in its moral and religious themes, and a certain lack of energy in its humour’, and the modern reader feels a ‘decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness’. Others regret alleged or real inconsistencies, the lack of punning and verbal play, the absence of nearly all choral interludes, a parabasis, and political advice in general, and the dearth of references to historical figures. Thus, the temptation is strong to follow those who read a medical history into Plutus: Aristophanes, by now sixty-five years old, had grown tired and saved his esprit for every third or fourth play. But such speculations do not do justice to a poet who did not have to write for a living. Before accepting them, we should first try to explain the change in other ways, admitting that Plutus may differ from the earlier plays for generic reasons. On this path, the linguistic analysis of Plutus will turn out to be helpful.

This essay aims to discover and to illustrate one of the leading themes of Horace's first book of Epistles. This theme, good manners, despite its importance, is nonetheless neglected, or at any rate huddled up within the general praise of Horace's tact. Tact there certainly is, and we shall watch it in operation. But the poet would be setting aside that uerecundia which his patron praised (Epist. 1.7.37) if he were merely blowing his own trumpet. The display of tact and good manners perhaps serves other ends, and the suggestion of reasons for this choice of theme will form the substance of my remarks.

Some preparation of the ground is necessary. This essay completes an argument begun in an article entitled ‘Horace's Epistles I and philosophy’ which will appear in the American Journal of Philology for 1985. In order that this essay may be fairly complete in itself it will be useful to set out very briefly the considerations which induced me to look more closely at good manners. To do this most compendiously, I shall offer some quotations from E. C. Wickham's English commentary on the first epistle and explain why they appear unsatisfactory. Wickham is not chosen as a whipping-boy for any other reason than that he neatly expresses a common view; in all respects he is a serious and helpful student of the poems.

The study of narrative, narratology, has for some decades now been a well-established subdiscipline within the large field of critical methodology. Even classical scholars generally resistant to theory have found it acceptable. In part this can be explained by its classical ancestry: it was Plato who emphasised the importance of distinguishing narrator-voice and character-voice, and Aristotle who identified some of the key elements constituting plot structured as story. Part of the success of narratology is also due to the distinction of its classical practitioners. Naturally, the main emphasis among the studies of classical texts has been upon the major narrative forms, epic and the novel; but broader examination of the whole generic range has extended the scope of this method, and the first volume of an encyclopaedic study of narrator and narration in classical literature has recently appeared.

quae tuo ueniunt ero,
quanta gaudia, quae uaga
nocte, quae medio die
gaudeat! sed abit dies.

In PCPS n.s.24 (1978), 99 Professor Nisbet emended medio to emerito, and offered a new interpretation of the lines in which the time of day specified will now be, as he admits, roughly the same in each quae clause. Two points may be worth making about this proposal.

First, the fundamental necessity for change has not been demonstrated. As to the sense of the lines as they appear in the MS. tradition, Professor Nisbet says that mention of love-making between husband and wife in the afternoon ‘has no place in an epithalamium, a serious celebration of married love’. How do we know this? We have only one complete epithalamium in republican Latin poetry, and this is it. It is not therefore possible to say with any confidence what the genre does or does not allow at this stage of its development, except in so far as this poem casts light on the matter. And in this poem we read, not many lines after these, of Torquatus's concubinus. We are told that the concubinus attends Torquatus on his visits to his country estates (136f. ‘sordent tibi uilicae’), and furthermore that Torquatus had quite a developed taste in pueri delicati (141–3 ‘diceris male te’).

The present text of Livy's Fourth Decade rests upon two main lines of tradition: first, the eleventh-century Bambergensis with fourteenth–fifteenth century recentiores and Gelenius' notes (1535) of the lost Spirensis; secondly, Carbachius' recording (1519) of the lost Moguntinus. This paper is concerned with the effect which more recent knowledge of the archetype of the first tradition may have upon emendation of the text. In the light of uncial fragments discovered at Bamberg in 1904 Traube showed that Bambergensis is a direct copy of the fifth-century MS. which they represent. At one step we are back in the world of late Roman scholarship, and one may correct Bambergensis in terms of the copying of continuous uncial script.

Like everything else that Mr. T.C.W. Stinton writes, his recent article ‘“Si credere dignum est”: some expressions of disbelief in Euripides and others’ displays a range of learning and a subtlety of argument with which few of us could attempt to compete. If I now take issue with his interpretation of one particular passage, I am certainly not doing so in any spirit of rivalry or depreciation of his achievements. I am, however, emboldened to write this article by his frank admission, concerning his account of HF 1340-6, ‘I am not sure that I now believe it myself’ (p. 89, n. 56). Where Stinton is in doubt about his own interpretation, it may not be presumptuous for a lesser mortal to advocate another.

A cursory glance at the reports of the later students of harmonic theory is enough to give a clear if perhaps artificially systematic picture of the character and relations of the major conflicting schools of thought in the first century or so A.D. In the centre of the field are the supposed followers of Aristoxenus, lined up against the forces of the so-called Pythagoreans. Each side is linked with a more or less lunatic fringe; to the right of the Pythagoreans those mathematical extremists who find no place in harmonic studies for αἴσθησις at all, and to the left of the more empirical Aristoxeneans a collection of persons known as ὀργανικοί, whose work, whatever it was, is based wholly in perception and in familiarity with the properties of musical instruments, and who find no place for theory or for the pursuit of the αἰτίαι of harmonic truths.

Attempts to interpret the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles have been so numerous that anyone who seeks to add to their number is almost compelled to start by apologising for being so presumptuous as to think that he could offer anything new. I would incline to classify these attempts under four ‘main’ and three ‘ancillary’ headings. The ‘main’ interpretations are those which seek to interpret the play as a drama, and vary according to the view they take of the guilt of Oedipus. There are those who assert (with or without qualification) that Oedipus is to be viewed as guilty; those who see him as a victim of a malignant fate (and hence innocent); those who are content to assert his innocence without stressing the element of fatality; and those who leave the question of guilt or innocence aside. The ‘ancillary’ interpretations are those which seek to find in the play a non-dramatic relevance, i.e. a political relevance, a religious relevance, or a psychological relevance.

During the course of some work on the Parmenides, I found I was coming to a conclusion about the First Part of the dialogue which was at variance with what I supposed to be the traditional and commonly accepted view. It therefore seemed advisable to ascertain precisely what this traditional view was, and what were the arguments in favour of it; and the contents of this paper represent some part of an attempt to do this. As it happens, they also tend to make the writer appear as one playing the part of a Zeno to his own Parmenides, showing that even stranger results follow from the hypotheses of those from whom he differs than from his own.

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This sentence belongs to a passage in which Thucydides discusses the reactions of the Athenians (108, 1–2) and of their subject allies (108, 3–6) to the fall of Amphipolis. He describes very graphically the incautious enthusiasm with which the allies embarked upon plans for revolt, encouraged by the Athenian failure to save Amphipolis, which closely followed the defeat at Delium, and by the tempting propaganda of Brasidas. The phrase ὅση ὔστερον διεϕάνη in the sentence quoted above is widely interpreted as a reference to the unexpected recovery of the Athenians in the period after the Sicilian disaster and is accordingly accepted as evidence that this sentence at least, and perhaps the whole discussion to which it belongs, cannot have been written before the closing years of the Peloponnesian war.

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

The sufficiency of virtue for happiness is a central Stoic doctrine. Indeed it can be argued that it is one of the doctrines that define the Stoic position; and it was the subject of extensive controversy in antiquity, coming under attack both from Academics and from Peripatetics. And Peripatetics had a particular interest in the topic, for Aristotle had already discussed it in Nicomachean Ethics 1.8–10, in a way which, to say the least, left room for a range of divergent interpretations.

The objections that were raised against the Stoic position in antiquity differ in their degree of persuasiveness. Some indeed point to fundamental differences of opinion of the sort that are not easily, if at all, reconcilable by argument. But others simply misinterpret or misrepresent the Stoic position. It is with some of the latter that the present paper will chiefly be concerned. Its aims are therefore limited even though the issue is important.