My subject is point of view in the Aeneid. I want to make some theoretical points about that concept, and to discuss some examples. In writing this paper, however, I have come to realise that underneath there lies an attempt to come to terms with the work on Virgil of two of my elders, betters, and friends, Oliver Lyne and Gian Biagio Conte, to whom this piece is offered with affection. But I shall not try to conceal the Oedipal nature of these encounters. As will be seen, there is also an element of prolepsis: I want to forestall a particular line of interpretation about the Aeneid which I sense is about to make its appearance.

In my title I use the term ‘focalisation’ rather than ‘point of view’. The term is Genette's, later taken up especially by Mieke Bal. I use it for three reasons. First, I believe the reason that led Genette to coin it was a valid one, and perhaps the single most important proposition in his narratology. Genette criticised traditional accounts of point of view for confusing two distinct questions: ‘who speaks?’, and ‘who sees?’. In relation to any textual feature, the answers to these questions may be different. For the first phenomenon, we have the term ‘voice’, and it is helpful to have a separate term for the second; that is, focalisation.

This article involves a case-study of one of the most generally accepted literary accounts of a Greek settlement abroad – the Greek colonisation of Thasos. Here, according to the generally accepted account, we have an eye-witness, Archilochos, son of the oikist, who actually settled on Thasos not during the first Greek settlement but during a subsequent wave of settlers. He didn't like it much – he calls it ‘thrice-wretched’ (228W), the settlers were the dregs of Greece (102W), the island looked like the back of an ass (21W), it wasn't pretty like Sybaris in Italy (22W), and the Thracians were described as ‘dogs’ (93aW). Fighting between Greeks and Thracians is portrayed (5W).

The archaeological evidence for the first period of Greek settlement on Thasos is scarce, but what there is has been marshalled in support of this literary model. Archaeology's main role has been to be used in chronological disputes. The orthodoxy dates the Parian colonisation to 680 BC, arguing that the Delphic oracle concerning the foundation of Thasos has Archilochos' father as oikist. The subject-matter of several of the poems has allowed Archilochos' poetry to be dated to 650 BC, and therefore the colonisation of Thasos to a generation before. Pouilloux (1964), indeed, has used the archaeological evidence from a house in the lowest levels of Thasos town to argue for this early date for the Parian settlement, seeing the ‘Thracian’ (and distinctly un-Cycladic) character of many of the finds as indicative of a certain amount of interaction between Parians and Thracians in the first generation of the colony.

Few passages in Greek literature are as familiar, and as perplexing, as the story of the various races of men in Hesiod's Works and Days. On the one hand, this myth seems perfectly to fulfill Italo Calvino's definition of a classic: somehow we seem always already to know it even when we come upon it for the very first time. For the conception of a golden age, when life was easier and men were better than now, has become so basic a motif of western culture that it is familiar even to the many who have never read or even heard of the Works and Days; moreover, Hesiod seems at first glance to deploy such widespread notions as those of a succession of ages of world history and of a steady moral and physical deterioration from the beginning of human history to the present. But on the other hand, the specific literary form which this myth assumes in the text in which it is embodied here seems strangely at odds with these familiar ideas. For Hesiod's text has a richness and complexity far in excess of what would be needed to communicate them, and in certain crucial respects seems to be at variance or even in contradiction with them. Instead of simply distinguishing between past and present, Hesiod apparently constructs a complicated scheme juxtaposing four metals in descending order of value, from gold through silver and bronze to iron; but he then goes on to confuse this pattern by inserting between the bronze and iron races a race of heroes who not only are not associated with any metal but also interrupt the steady decline by being better than their immediate predecessors. Without Hesiod, we probably would not even have this myth; yet his own version of it seems oddly defective.

Quaeritis unde is a good opening for a book of the Fasti (5.1). The question and answer form here exemplified is basic to the poem, even if in the classic Callimachean form from which Ovid draws his inspiration it is the poet who asks the questions – and this in fact happens with the exhortation dicite in line 7. But this quaeritis unde has also, I believe, an allusive value: it opens another book of elegiac poetry, Propertius' second book, where it is the more remarkable as an opening in that as far as we know it is the earliest example of a direct address to the reader in Roman poetry.

The purpose of this allusion becomes clear if we take a wider look at the two contexts. In the first elegy of his second book Propertius inserts a celebrated negation of the Musenweihe:

non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo (2.1.3)

while Ovid, on the contrary, is just about to consult Calliope and her sisters. The allusion offers other points of interest if we consider the subsequent development of Propertius' poetics.

Plays, we say, are about people, about people doing and saying things. What they say and do gives us access to the kind of people they are – their personalities, their individuality, their ‘character’. And we find people interesting. Simply, crudely put, this is the basis of what we call our interest in dramatic character. It is in her clear-sighted attention to this simple but central fact that Mrs. Easterling's essay on ‘Presentation of character in Aeschylus’ is at its most effective. But as we go on to ask further questions, about precisely what our interest in dramatic personality amounts to, about what it springs from and what are its necessary conditions in dramatic and theatrical form, further discriminations become necessary. I am not at all sure, for example, that it is true, as Mrs. Easterling suggests, that ‘the people and events of Aeschylean drama … convince us with the same kind of blinding authenticity as we find in Shakespeare and George Eliot'. We may have to distinguish between very different modes of authenticity. Again, Mrs. Easterling's appeal to ‘human intelligibility’ seems to me not without ambiguity. This paper is an attempt to forward discussion of dramatic personality in the context of Greek tragedy by examining some of the ambiguities inherent in the concept and to offer some possible discriminations. It is a contribution to an argument rather than a statement of a position.

Mr Vice-Chancellor,

May I thank you for coming to preside at this occasion, and thank everyone else for coming to be presided over – most especially my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics. You were not all here when I joined the Faculty eighteen years ago, but you have all helped to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation, good will, and intellectual adventure, which has made this Faculty such a wonderful place to work and teach in. There is much that I shall miss when I go. But that is not what I want to talk about now. To borrow the words of our Chairman, Ian DuQuesnay, I should like this occasion to be a party rather than a wake.

What I want to say is this. It is too late now – twelve years too late – to apologize for not having given an Inaugural Lecture. There was no particular moment when I decided not to, just many many moments when other work seemed both more urgent and, to be honest, more interesting. The trouble with Inaugural Lectures is that you are expected to define your subject and say how it ought to be done. You begin by paying respectful tribute to your predecessor – in my case G. E. L. Owen, so the tribute would have been sincere and a pleasure to compose. But then comes the hard part, in which you set out ‘the aims and objectives’ (as the managerial language of our present rulers would have us call them) of your discipline. In other words, I would have had to tell myself and my colleagues where ancient philosophy in Cambridge ought to go and how it ought to get there.

Stock-keeping in the Mediterranean has to be adapted to the fundamental characteristics of the Mediterranean climate (mild wet winters and hot dry summers) and to the distinct variations in soil type and plant growth at different altitudes. The natural vegetation of the coastal regions is dominated by plants that can withstand the summer drought (when temperatures average 70–80 degrees F) such as the olive, holm oak, cork oak, and macchia scrub. The lowland pastures are green and succulent from autumn to spring, when temperatures average 45–55 degrees F and rainfall is relatively abundant, but are withered and of little nutritional value in the summer. In the interior mountains of Spain, Italy, and Greece, average January temperatures are below freezing and snow covers the highest regions through the winter months, but there is extensive grazing of excellent quality from the late spring to early autumn.

‘It's such a pity that we don't have
Anything like a photograph
Of her about whom the ancients rave …’
…
Fragments, copies, our museums still hold
Of statues she modelled, or so we're told

(from Phryne by Robert Conquest, 2000)

Phryne, the celebrity hetaira who is said to have lived and loved some time during the fourth century BCE, was reputed to be ‘by far the most phenomenal of the hetairai’ (ἐπιφανεστάτη πολὺ τῶν ἑταίρων). This article aims to examine the anecdotes told about Phryne and argues that collectively they constitute a discourse on viewing that illuminates a significant aspect of the production and interpretation of art: the ethical and aesthetic problems involved (for the artist, subject, model and other viewers) in making and describing naturalistic art, especially that which represents the gods. A rich repertoire of written material on Phryne, and on the statue of the Aphrodite of Cnidus for which she was said to have been the model, has survived, although mostly by later rather than contemporary writers. Among the descriptions of the statue there is a group of epigrams collected in the Greek Anthology whose authorship and dating are largely uncertain. On Phryne we have accounts and imaginative scenarios in Alciphron, Lucian and Pausanias, all presumed to be writing in the second century CE; Athenaeus, who most probably wrote in the third century CE; and quotations from earlier writers.

‘It's my PARTY…;’

The Cambridge Museum of Classical and General Archaeology opened on 6 May 1884 with – what else? – a PARTY. Distinguished guests turned out, the University meeting the Aristocracy, Arts and Politics: H.R.H. Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Queen's son, then an undergraduate), Sir Frederick Leighton (President of the Royal Academy), the painters Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter, the American Ambassador, Sir Frederick Burton (Director of the National Gallery), George Scharf (Director of the National Portrait Gallery), and other assorted dignitaries rubbing shoulders and sharing the fun with Richard Jebb (Regius Professor of Greek), E. B. (Primitive Culture) Tylor, S. H. Butcher (of Butcher and Lang's Odyssey), as well as (in the usual formula) ‘the Heads of Colleges, Doctors and Professors, the officers of the University’ … and their ‘ladies’. ‘Luncheon’ was taken in the hall of Gonville and Caius College at one o'clock. A great feast, no doubt, but a bit of a sprint. By two o'clock the assembled company had already finished the pudding and was proceeding to the lecture room of the new museum in Little St Mary's Lane.

Current descriptions of social status in the Greek world are strongly influenced by the works of Moses I. Finley and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, whose models were grounded in the sociologies of Weber and Marx. This article outlines a new paradigm for social status based on a model from the social sciences, commonly described as status (in)consistency. The article demonstrates the descriptive and interpretive usefulness of this approach using two case studies: social status and social mobility in classical Lakedaimonian society; and the lives and status of Pasion of Acharnai and his son Apollodoros.

Three words of the Aristophanic lexicon, λαικάζειν, λαικαστής and λαικάστρια, are not fully explained by the contexts in which they occur. The remains of ancient learning known to scholars of the sixteenth century contained no clear and unambiguous doctrine about them. A considerable amount of fresh material however has accumulated during recent centuries. The Latinists W. Heraeus and A. E. Housman studied what was available to them around the years 1914 and 1930 respectively and came to firm conclusions but without persuading many students of Aristophanes' comic scripts in particular or of the Greek language in general. G. P. Shipp has recently drawn attention to a third century A.D. document, first published as long ago as 1925, which has the verb in a context leaving little doubt about the user's meaning. This paper attempts to consider systematically the evidence now available and to make clear how Aristophanes and other Athenians of the fifth, fourth and third centuries B.C. used the word group. It is argued that the verb remained alive among some speakers of Greek without change of function until very late and that Housman's explanation of the Aristophanic passages was correct.

The sixth century B.C. was a brilliant age in Ionia. Milesian academic research and Samian opportunism set the bounds for intellectual and mechanical progress, the Chians made money and the Phocaeans sailed the seven seas. The surviving fragments of Ionic sculpture and architecture, the massive relics of the biggest-ever temples, and engineering feats like those of Polycrates in the town of Samos still demonstrate the scale on which the Ionic achievement was conceived. But when the archaeologist turns his attention to the fifth century in Ionia he seeks in vain for comparable creations. Sculpture has virtually disappeared, while painting seems to have come to an end with the Clazomenian sarcophagi and the schools of vase decoration that were associated with them. There are no new city layouts rivalling that of Samos; and only one small temple at Miletus stands out as a meagre creation of this century. The minor arts also were virtually at an end; and—whether in excavation or in surface reconnaissance—the archaeologist discovers scarcely any recognizable testimony of Ionic culture, or even of habitation, on the sites of the Ionic cities in this epoch. In material civilization the fifth century seems to have been the Dark Age of Ionia.

Our situation with respect to Plato is paradoxical. Here is a philosopher who emphatically insisted on truth and repudiated persuasion. And yet the community of Plato's admirers finds itself in the predicament that persuasion (or plausibility) seems all it can get: there is not nor was there nor will there be one way to read Plato. There are only temporary agreements among a number of scholars who share certain basic assumptions. And it does not look as if there is anything one can really do about this situation, not for any deconstructionist reasons, but because Plato's dialogues themselves seem so elusive that one cannot help thinking that he intentionally left us with puzzles without the necessary clues that would guide us to a decisive final picture. So we always go on puzzling anew ….

I Άρετή, εὐδαιμονία: their translation

The key terms in my title pose problems of translation with which I can only deal in the most cursory manner. On ‘virtue’ for ἀρετἡ I need not linger at all, for whatever may be the general usage of ἀρετἡ, Socrates' use of it is fixed beyond doubt by the fact that whenever he brings the general concept under scrutiny – as when he debates its teachability in the Protagoras and the Meno – he assumes without argument that its sole constituents or ‘parts’ (μόρια μέρη) are five qualities which are, incontestably, the Greek terms of moral commendation par excellence: ἀνδρεία, σωφρούνη, δικαιοσύνη, ὁσιότης, σοφία. ‘Happiness’ for εὐδαιμονία is a more contentious matter. Leading Aristotelians, Ross and Ackrill, have claimed that ‘well-being’ would be a better translation. But in their own translations of the E. N. both stick to ‘happiness’ all the same. It is not hard to see why they would and should. ‘Well-being’ has no adjectival or adverbial forms. This may seem a small matter to armchair translators – philosophers dogmatizing on how others should do the job. Not so if one is struggling with its nitty gritty, trying for clause-by-clause English counterparts that might be faithful to the sentence-structure, no less than the sense, of the Greek original. And ‘well-being’ suffers from a further liability: it is a stiff, bookish phrase, bereft of the ease and grace with which the living words of a natural language perform in a wide diversity of contexts. Εὐδαιμονία perfectly fits street-Greek and Aristophanic slapstick, yet also, no less perfectly, the most exalted passages of tragedy.

Hyginus, Fabula 274.10-13:

antiqui obstetrices non habuerunt, unde mulieres uerecundia ductae interierant. nam Athenienses cauerunt ne quis seruus aut femina artem medicinam disceret. Agnodice quaedam puella uirgo concupiuit medicinam discere, quae cum concupisset, demptis capillis habitu uirili se Herophilo cuidam tradidit in disciplinam. quae cum artem didicisset, et feminam laborantem audisset ab inferiore parte, ueniebat ad eam, quae cum credere se noluisset, aestimans uirum esse, illa tunica sublata ostendit se feminam esse, et ita eas curabat. quod cum uidissent medici se ad feminas non admitti, Agnodicen accusare coeperunt, quod dicerent eum glabrum esse et corruptorem earum, et illas simulare imbecillitatem. quod cum Areopagitae consedissent, Agnodicen damnare coeperunt; quibus Agnodice tunicam alleuauit et se ostendit feminam esse. et ualidius medici accusare coeperunt, quare tum feminae principes ad iudicium uenerunt et dixerunt, Vos coniuges non estis sed hostes, quia quae salutem nobis inuenit eam damnatis. tunc Athenienses legem emendarunt, ut ingenuae artem medicinam discerent. (ed. Rose)

The sixty-fourth poem of Catullus, a work which has in times past been dismissed as contrived, is now appreciated precisely because it is carefully contrived. The majority of modern scholarship seems willing, implicitly or explicitly, to look upon the poem's intricacies and apparent contradictions as constituting part of its attraction, acknowledging that artifice does not necessarily preclude art.

The complexities of poem 64 are contingent to a large degree upon its interaction with earlier poetic models. Structural devices of narrative are borrowed from a variety of sources; themes and scenes are delineated so as to reveal their full meaning through reader awareness of other works; literary allusions pervade the text. Perhaps the most salient intertextual feature of Catullus' epyllion is its interaction with previous literary treatments of the myth of Jason and Medea. In this regard, it has long been recognised that a poem of central importance for the reading of Catullus 64 is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, and this present exploration of allusion in poem 64 will concentrate on the intertextual connections between 64 and its Hellenistic epic predecessor.

The subject of ethnic identity in antiquity has a long-established – if somewhat dubious – pedigree. From as early as the end of the eighteenth century, scholars such as Friedrich von Schlegel were applying themselves to the art, customs and political forms which were thought to characterise Greek Stämme such as the Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians and Athenians. It was the nineteenth century, however, which witnessed a more systematic treatment of ancient ethnicity, as scholarly intuitions were subjected to the rigorous interrogation that was demanded by the newly-established discipline of Altertumswissenschaft. Typical of the new breed of professional scholars was Karl Otfried Müller, who devoted himself to analysing the Volksgeist of groups such as the Etruscans, the Minyans and – most famously – the Dorians.

Damnatio memoriae, the ill-defined group of processes that we often now refer to by the term ‘memory sanctions’, is generally thought of in wholly negative terms. It is imagined as a process of destruction, of erasure, and of silence. Yet these complex assaults on the memory of fallen enemies were far more than simply destructive processes. Through the example of Magnus Maximus (383–8) and his commemoration in Rome and Constantinople during the reign of Theodosius I, this article considers how memory sanctions could be generative of historical material and how emperors used oratory, ceremony and triumphal architecture to memorialise their fallen enemies.

‘Le fondateur du Lycée était à Athènes un métèque; cette position marginale est pour quelque chose dans son détachement et sa lucidité.’ Thus a recent and stimulating commentary upon the economic and social structure of Greek society, in a formulation of the obvious difference between Plato's participation in and Aristotle's observation of contemporary political phenomena. In one area, however, it was Aristotle rather than Plato whose experience was the more direct – that of life, over a prolonged period, as a resident alien. In this brief παίγνιον I shall pursue the Aristotelian side of this contrast along three paths: (a) Aristotle's exact juristic status in Athens; (b) the feelings aroused by his presence there; and (c) what he himself has to say on the subject of metics and foreigners. I advise the reader to derive what satisfaction he may from the journeys themselves, for no startling revelations await him ἐν τριπλαἴς ἁμαξιτοῖς.

The relation of Ovid's Fasti to Roman religion has been discussed many times, but has never been dealt with properly. Despite a radical re-evaluation, in recent years, of Ovid's literary sophistication, scholars of Roman religion still tend to offer a negative judgment on Ovid's value. Criticisms have been varied. Ovid's unseriousness – frivolous tales in a context so solemn–has been considered exasperating. He has been accused (for example by Fr. Altheim) of lacking any religious sense whatsoever and of destroying respect for religion. Others, like Wissowa, have judged him to possess neither wide scholarship nor even the capacity of bringing his analyses to any proper conclusion. And it is not just authorities of the past who talk in these terms of moral outrage. Even today many historians of religion ignore or even reject the Fasti as any kind of reliable ‘source’. His causae are, they say, incomplete and incoherent; and he is further criticized for being unable to make a final decision between all the explanations he offers. In the camp of the Ovidiomastiges, shocked by the poet's amateurishness, one also finds those interested in Rome's mythology: evidence earlier than the Fasti being missing in most of the cases, the mythologists deeply resent Ovid's elusive art which frustrates their expectations. I will not here reconsider all the criticism nor will I offer a final defence or condemnation of the author of the Fasti, I will simply claim that there is no case to answer.