It is often said that amicitia, so prominent in the love poetry of Catullus, plays a negligible role in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the elegists avoid the vocabulary of amicitia and prefer to describe the relationships with their beloveds in terms of militia and seruitium amoris. In this paper, however, I shall show that this is mistaken. While the elegists do not use the vocabulary of amicitia systematically, they clearly do continue to appeal to its protocols and moral code – Ovid above all. It will be seen that Catullus and the elegists share the use of the ideology of amicitia to pressurize their beloveds to accept or make a return on the benefacta which they as lovers bestow.

Constantine the Great's sons, Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans, were the first Roman emperors since Commodus (AD 180–92), Marcus Aurelius' son, to have been brought up in the imperial household and groomed as heirs apparent. Constantine II reigned for a mere three years and suffered damnatio memoriae, while our evidence for Constans is scant due to the loss of the early books of Ammianus' Res Gestae. As a result, we know little detail regarding their education and any subsequent influence it may have had upon their respective rules. Fortunately, the same is not true of their brother, Constantius, who reigned for some twenty-four years as Augustus and is the subject of seven still-extant panegyrics.

For Stefania

The Amazon's son

Two things distinguish Phaedra's from the other letters in Ovid's Heroides. In the first place, Phaedra's is not a letter without consequences. On the contrary, it will have a decisive effect on the addressee. But above all, Phaedra's letter is important just as a letter. The very fact of Phaedra's writing a letter touches a fundamental point in the story, and a controversial one. In the Heroides problems of communication are important in themselves, but, after the gratuitous letters by Penelope, Phyllis and Briseis, this is the first (and it will remain the only one) in which the complication always caused by an epistolary intrusion into the body of the story is superimposed on a pre-existent problem. Phaedra's declaration of her love to Hippolytus is a crucial point, a turning-point for the various tragic treatments of the history. Ovid adds problem to problem.

This is not the age of the amateur. There is every inducement for the specialist to remain a specialist, and if he strays beyond the limits of his particular field, he will be mistrusted, and perhaps rightly. But there are times when he has no choice but to do so, and to risk the consequences; there are some fields which are so untrodden that the amateur will find himself in good company, or perhaps in no company at all. And there are times when the classicist, the Old Testament scholar, and certainly the Egyptologist will need to remind themselves that the world of the eastern Mediterranean was never a large one, and that communications in the first millennium B.C. were not so rudimentary. A month's journey could have covered much ground, or sea: and some people had the courage to travel far longer than this.

Herodotus (5.115) records how, shortly after the outbreak of the Ionian revolt, the Persians launched a counter-attack, retook Sardis in Lydia, and turned south across the river Maeander into the thickly-wooded areas beyond. It was no time to be a defender. Two disastrous engagements are recorded, together with some Herodotean numbers of dead, but the few survivors succeeded in laying a night ambush for the invading Persians, and cut them to pieces. All three Persian commanders perished. As it happened, it was no time to be a Persian.

Our discussion will be primarily concerned with hiatus and prosodic hiatus in Vergil; emendations will be proposed at E. 3.6; A. 4.235; 7.226; it will also be suggested that some of the hiatus-free readings to be found in Carolingian and later MSS deserve consideration. Emendations will also be proposed at Horace, Odes 1.28.24; 3.6.10. In order to evaluate Vergilian innovation and Vergilian influence, we will need to give some brief account both of his predecessors and of the other Augustan poets.

Vergil's immediate predecessors

Comedy of course has its own rules, and a full discussion would be irrelevant; however it will be seen that some aspects of comic versification can be used to illustrate later practice. The fragmentary Latin poets are also excluded; what little we have of them has been exposed not only to the ordinary accidents of transcription but also to accidental misquotation; it is thus hardly possible to draw any certain conclusions.

The close association in the literature of antiquity of seeing with sexual desire inspired the tragic poet Agathon to pun on the similarity between the Greek verb ‘to see’ (ὁρᾶν) and the verb ‘to desire’ (ἐρᾶν), as suggested by a fragment preserved by Zenobius: ἐκ τοῦ γὰρ ἐσορᾶν ἐγένετ' ἀνθρώποις ἐρᾶν. As is the case with many fragments, it is difficult to identify the degree of irony (or seriousness) with which Agathon intended this isolated line, but the passage is repeated (without attribution) in a number of other ancient sources, and it perhaps lays some claim to a measure of ‘folk wisdom’: for human beings the source of erotic desire lies in an act of seeing. In his brief and pithy love-letter ‘To Nicetes’ (Epistle 52), which Nauck observes may well draw on the pun of Agathon, the third-century sophist Philostratus would similarly appeal to the association of ὀρᾶν with ἐρᾶν to refute, in an ironic way, two time-honoured maxims about erōs: that love is a ‘disease’; and that lovers are ‘blind’: οὐ τὀ ἐρᾶν νόσος ἀλλὰ τὸ μὴ ἐρᾶν· εἰ γὰρ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὁρᾶν τὸ ἐρᾶν, τυφλοὶ οἱ μὴ ἐρῶντες.

The intention of Theophrastus’ Characters still escapes us. This paper offers a new answer to that centuries-old question by looking closely at the one political sketch of the collection: ‘The Oligarch’ (C.26). We argue that C.26 reveals a political intention in the Characters, presenting oligarchy as the inherently flawed projection of a character trait onto political events. Read in this way, C.26 appears as a medium through which Theophrastus can take a definite but careful stance in contemporary Athenian politics.

Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find his puella Cynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situation has been pointed out in previous accounts of the poem; this treatment takes a closer look at the text, especially at the mythical analogues for Cynthia applied at the beginning of the poem, and argues that part of the wit and amusement of the poem derives from its articulation of the poet's suspicions of Cynthia's infidelity. This is not a tragic or dramatic effect, but rather a clever and amusing comedy; the amusing self-characterisation of the poet as a drunken bumbler racked with lust and suspicion is fully consistent with the kind of elegist envisaged by Paul Veyne, who rightly stresses that Roman love-elegy has much more to do with literary entertainment than with the intense analysis of passion. The scene is being narrated by the poet with retrospective wit and irony against himself; to use the convenient terms employed by Winkler in his book on Apuleius, the poet as auctor (writer of the poem) provides an entertaining view of the poet as actor (character in the poem's story).

The word cursus may seem to be keeping strange company with slaves and freedmen. It does not refer here to the cursus publicus, but to the system of promotion in the sub-equestrian regions of the Imperial administration. Cursus implies movement, advancement, promotion. No bureaucracy can function efficiently without order and opportunity in its lower as well as its higher ranks. If a cursus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent one. It is necessary to affirm this of the lower ranks of the Roman bureaucracy in the early empire precisely because it has so often been denied or ignored. The impression gained from reading many works on the Imperial administration is that of fervid equestrian movement from post to post and province to province at the top, with a static substratum of Imperial slaves and freedmen providing stability and continuity below. Such an account is to some extent true. But that it is not true enough is largely the fault of the evidence.

The plays of Aeschylus contain many contradictions, and much recent criticism of the dramatic technique of this author has been directed at attempts to extract from these contradictions a unified picture of what the poet really intended us to understand in the case of each particular play. Within the last few years no less than four major articles have been devoted to giving a logically consistent interpretation of the Seven, and if one extends the range to, say, the last thirty years, one can find that all the plays of Aeschylus have been subjected to criticism of a similar kind.

All this may seem entirely praiseworthy; and yet, as we come to read more and more of these books and articles, the sensation may grow upon some of us that we are not so much learning about Aeschylus as witnessing the transactions of a private club: transactions conducted with admirable propriety, but according to a system of rules which has been left unrevised for too long, untouched even after the notorious affair of the Suppliants. Although the members of this club are willing to challenge each others' view-points, they are all agreed that no gentleman would venture to call in question the one great assumption that underlies all their discussions: namely that Aeschylus could not possibly have constructed plays in which such contradictions were deliberately intended; and only seldom can he be allowed to have contradicted himself by oversight.

The private collection of the Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome holds the only surviving large-scale sculpture of a hunchback [fig. I]. Although this hunchback has been intensely studied, it remains enigmatic. The hunchback is generally agreed to be Roman and dated to the second century CE on the basis of its portrait head, particularly in the drilling technique of its hairstyle, though the realism of its misshapen and ugly body is in the direct tradition of works of the third century BCE.

Whether this hunchback is an original of its time or a copy of a now lost Greek work is still contentious. Since its discovery in the Baths of Caracalla, the figure has been identified as the famous Greek fabulist Aesop, who, according to literary tradition, may have been a hunchback. Although several scholars have suggested new possibilities for the identity of this hunchback, including the proposition that it is a Roman original representing a jester of the imperial court, its association with Aesop has remained. But is its identity necessarily key to understanding its significance? This article intends to move away from the identification of this figure to consider the hunchback primarily as a type, rather than a person, and shifts the emphasis to its context within a bathhouse.