It is a commonplace of textbook treatments of mood and modality to point out that many languages employ ‘past tense’ forms to express not only temporal but also modal remoteness (i.e. unreality or potentiality) from the ‘here-and-now’, e.g. Lyons (1977: 809–23), Palmer (1986: 208–15). The same observation, mutatis mutandis, may apply to certain modal forms, which, given an appropriate context, can also refer to the past. The verb forms in English conditional sentences such as that in (1):

(1) If Mary went to the bar, she would drink too much.

provide an excellent example of both types of ‘extended’ usage; cf. the two possible readings of (1) given in (2):

(2)(a) If (ever) Mary went to the bar, she used to drink too much.

(b) If Mary were (ever) to go to the bar, she would drink too much.

The age of Nero is universally considered – even by its more circumspect modern historians – to be a zenith of decadence. This view is not simply the invention of modern writers. It is one point on which the ancient sources, not only historians from Tacitus to Cassius Dio, but also biographers such as Suetonius and poets like Martial, are agreed. One problem with the almost monotonous tale of vice, sexual and gastronomic excess, cruelty and murder, by which Nero's reign has been characterised, is that this is a story written by the winners in the turmoil which followed Nero's fall. It is hardly, in other words, an objective or unbiased account.

There is no agreement on the answer to this straight and modest question of textual history. As representative of one extreme I may cite Page's excursus in Actors' Interpolations: note ‘the prompt-copy must certainly have contained (among other notes) stage-directions’. He and his allies clearly imply that the original text, whether the dramatist's autograph or some contemporary fair copy, was covered with dozens – indeed hundreds – of stage directions, and that for some reason they were all but eliminated in the course of transmission. For the opposite view I quote David Bain's new book: ‘Such marginalia as we have are for the most part reader's additions and do not constitute part of the paradosis’. In favour of this side is the absence from our texts of all but a handful of the thousands of possible stage directions: on the other hand there is just that smattering in both tragedy and comedy, and they have to be explained.

The credit for inventing the scientific study of Greco-Roman sculpture still belongs to the German scholar, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The reason for this, the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums or History of the Art of Antiquity, was first published in Dresden in 1764 and supplemented in 1767 by the Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums or Further Remarks. So important was the project that Winckelmann was revising it when he was murdered a year later. This evolving version was published in Vienna in 1776. It is this amended Geschichte that formed the basis of influential French and Italian editions. These followed quickly, propelled perhaps by the interest generated by his murder. Though it was another hundred years before the text was translated into English, its impact has been extraordinary. Vestiges of the book are everywhere. Citations from the ‘final’ version permeate the literature. Even without opening it, we sense its influence on the field we call ‘Classical Art’.

Ancient ‘etymology’ is now such a well-established modern scholarly interest that a paper about it need no longer be prefaced by an account of its commonest forms or by a justification of its importance, especially in poetry – and that despite the pseudo-etymological nature of many ancient etymologies. For such matters it is sufficient to refer to what have already become the standard works on ancient etymologies and etymologising. If further explanation of the high intellectual status accorded by antiquity to etymologising seems necessary, it can be provided economically by reference to those ancient philosophical theories of language, e.g. that of the Stoics, which held that words are related to the reality (φύσις) of the things which they name, and to the close links which surviving ancient etymological treatises assert between etymology (i.e. derivations) and ‘semantics’ (i.e. meaning). The etymologies most familiar to older classical scholarship are those revolving around proper names; but even before the recent upsurge of interest in ancient etymology there was some awareness of the additional potential for common nouns, verbs and adjectives to be etymologised.

Oinoanda's chief claim to fame in Classical studies is philosophical, rather than architectural; it is the home of that Diogenes who had the name of a Cynic but Epicurean convictions, which he inscribed, ironically enough, on the walls of a stoa. In fact it was the repeated visits of M. F. Smith in connection with this great philosphical inscription that led to the British Institute of Ankara's survey project at Oinoanda under the direction of A. S. Hall. I am most grateful to Mr Hall for inviting me to participate in the survey and study of some of the city's buildings in 1975, 1977 and 1981, and for his support of my work on the site. We are all indebted to the Directorate of Antiquities at Ankara for permission to work at Oinoanda, and to a succession of most helpful simply representatives for their co-operation.

Most of the city's buildings have simply collapsed where they stood and been left undisturbed since the city's a bandonment, so that it is possible to study their fallen upper parts in some detail; but is should be remembered that the terms of our survey permit do not allow any excavation, and since the lowest part of almost all remain hidden, many question of plan and date remain invitably unanswered.

Euripides uses a variety of strategies to draw attention to the novelties in his dramatic myth-creation or mythopoiēsis. He does so, for example, through multiple allusions to earlier poets, distinguishing himself from predecessors by acknowledging their influence while simultaneously producing something distinctive. Euripidean novelties are legitimized in several instances through cultic aetiologies. These aspects of Euripidean drama have long been acknowledged. More recently, Matthew Wright has shown how the characters in several Euripidean plays discuss their own myths in a self-conscious manner, a process he terms ‘metamythology’. A technique which has been less studied, however, is Euripides' exploration of the motif of writing and its connection to the act of mythopoiēsis within his work. Scholars who discuss writing in Euripides have done so either within the general context of inherent tensions between oral and written communication in Greek tragedy (or Greek literature), or have focused on the use of letters as dramatic devices. This paper argues that Euripides exploits the motif of writing in a way which is entirely different from the other tragedians, and puts forward the central thesis that writing in Euripides is associated self-consciously and metapoetically with plot construction and authorial control.

I would like to consider the Greek poet Machon, whose extant fragments pose a problem of genre that opens out to a historical problem. At issue is the historical – or at least historicising – reading of literary texts. Machon, who hailed from Corinth or Sicyon, wrote comic dramas and Chreiai, anecdotes and witty sayings of Athenian musicians, parasites, and courtesans. All that we have of Machon, and almost all that we know about him, comes from Athenaeus in his discursive, encyclopaedic Deipnosophistai (written in the 2nd or 3rd c. CE). Athenaeus quotes nearly 500 lines of Machon's verses – almost all of it from the Chreiai, as well as two very brief fragments from his comedies. As a writer entirely preserved in another author's work, Machon has languished in almost complete obscurity, although his fragments have been scrupulously edited and annotated by A. S. F. Gow.

Many societies have a normative preference for close-kin marriage of one or another variety. Whether this was true of any part of the Roman world has been hotly debated in recent decades. Earlier scholarship suggests that marriage between close kin may have been considerably more common in some parts of the Roman world (e.g. Egypt) than in others (e.g. the Latin West). This paper assembles the evidence for close-kin marriage throughout the Asia Minor peninsula during the Roman Imperial period, and concludes that close-kin marriage – particularly in the form of FBD (father's brother's daughter) first-cousin marriage – may have been unusually common and/or normatively desirable in Lykia and neighbouring regions.

Juvenal's First Satire is programmatic, a statement of why he proposes to write satire and what kind of satire he proposes to write. Obviously it is important for our understanding of Juvenal as poet and satirist to interpret it correctly. Much of what I have to say on the subject is not new, and I do not flatter myself that I am advancing a ‘solution’ in die sense of an answer that has eluded all other interpreters. My purpose is to suggest fresh emphases that may lead to a more just and satisfying appreciation. In particular I believe that the concluding section of die satire, vv. 147–71, stands in need of more careful appraisal, and it is my primary purpose to discuss that section. That I am considerably in the debt of previous writers on the subject will become clear as the discussion proceeds.

First, a few preliminary (and I fear somewhat polemical) remarks on method and principles.

Caedicus Alcathoum obtruncat, Sacrator Hydaspen (Aen. 10.747)

A fine line, with resonant names! It occurs at the beginning of a general list of killings, what in Homeric studies is called an androktasia, one of the few such found in the Aeneid. Perhaps the resonance of the names suggests to us that these are real people; but who are they? The answer is that we have not the faintest idea. Indeed, we are probably uncertain which side each of them is on, Trojan or Latin.

Virgilian battle scenes may properly be compared with those of Homer. In the Iliad, the descriptions are extraordinarily precise; and it is wholly possible, if one is interested, to understand exactly what is being described by the poet. There are certain conventions, which were without doubt fully understood by Homer's audience. Any lack of understanding on our part is not Homer's fault. The conventions, and implications of what happens in the battle scenes, are most clearly set out in the work of Dr Franz Albracht, Kampf und Kampfschilderung bei Homer (1886 and 1895). It is abundantly clear that Virgil not only knew Homer from beginning to end, and used his own personal technique of ‘creative imitation’ in putting together the Aeneid with one eye on Homer, both in the large scale and in detail, but that he also knew the Alexandrian commentaries on Homer. The former of these facts has recently been demonstrated at great length, but still not exhaustively, by G. N. Knauer in Die Aeneis und Homer (1964); the latter in a more selective way by R. R. Schlunk in The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid (1974). There can thus be little doubt that in deciding how to present the fighting scenes in the ‘Iliadic Aeneid’, as Brooks Otis calls it – the necessary second half of the epic, which engages in the maius opus of establishing Aeneas and his people in Italy – Virgil would pay very close attention to the action of the Iliad.

Greek poets of the archaic period, though often characterised as amateur aristocrats, could also seek to present themselves as professionals – regular practitioners of a specialist skill (τέχνη). In this capacity, the poet is understood to work primarily for the benefit of the community (either his own or, more commonly, those through which he travels). In return for these services, he expects to receive both a special status and material rewards (though financial gain is not presented as his main motivation). The poet's professional status thus forms one part of his identity and is a source of respect in the ancient city.

In a paper published nearly fifty years ago, Piero Scazzoso traced what he took to be a pattern of mystery allusions in the Georgics. Reflections of telestic initiation and allied concepts of resurrection and salvation were then identified in the Orpheus and Aristaeus episodes in Book 4. Later studies in this area focused variously on the first proem, on Eleusinian references in the ‘farmer's arma’ (1.162–8), on the role of Proserpina, and on the ‘mystic’ beatitudes at the end of the second book. Most recently, Llewelyn Morgan has offered an analysis of the relevance of mystery cult to understanding Vergil's conception of the physical universe and its underlying principles, again with particular reference to the fourth book.

With the benefit of this considerable body of work, we are well placed to ask whether Roman readers' understanding of the poem could have been enriched by acquaintance with telestic concepts and procedures. Christine Perkell detected the ‘primacy of mystery’ in the tension between the poet's didactic praecepta and his aspiration to god given knowledge, a reading which might encourage more extended enquiry into the revelatory character of the Georgics.

Lecture one: Reading Horace, or L'homme et l'oeuvre

All criticism is also biography: and telling a story about a text is also telling a story about oneself. This is particularly true of Horace. When one writes about Horace, one is constructing a Horace, making the man: and constructing a Horace is inevitably also constructing oneself. Consider for example, Colin Macleod, whose last graduate class before his suicide was on Horace's Epistles, and who wrote extensively on Horace. Macleod's Horace was complex, often contradictory, morally serious – which fits Macleod of course.

‘Choice of metre is never arbitrary’ is a useful rule of thumb for critics of any poetry which conforms to a regular rhythmical pattern. The rhythm of a poem is plainly as much a product of the poet's creative choice as any other aspect of the composition, and consequently a fully integral element of the literary project. Out of all the components of a poem, in fact, metre has a claim to a certain priority, since the choice of metre determines to a significant degree the content of a poem as well as its form. That said, to speak in terms of ‘the straitjacket of traditional metrics’ is of course misconceived: the wealth of ancient metrical forms was an enabling rather than restrictive factor in literary composition–an idiom in itself, offering its own expressive possibilities. Like the classical orders of architecture, metres were not merely structural devices but ‘bearers of meaning’ in their own right, perceived, like Vitruvius' Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders (De arch. 1.2.5), to have their own individual characters, and thus particular uses to which each of them might appropriately be put. To what extent these perceived characters, either of metres or of orders, arose from any intrinsic property they possessed, or merely from associations more or less accidentally accruing with usage and theory over time, is perhaps debatable.

In 395 BC, after just under a decade of (nominal) peace between Athens and Sparta, the Corinthian War broke out, and, for the first time since the end of the Peloponnesian War, forces of Athenian cavalry were despatched to fight on behalf of their own city. The surviving historical narratives of the events at Haliartus in that year, and at Corinth and Coronea the next, are often incomplete, inconsistent, or both; the detail of what contribution – if any – was made by the cavalry to the campaign is no exception to that pattern. My aim in what follows, however, is not to attempt to reach the truth of what really happened in those engagements, but rather to look at a small group of material produced by and about members of the cavalry forces involved in the campaign, and to explore some of the ways in which the military exploits of this stereotypically rich and élite section of Athenian society are represented in the city – especially in contexts with particularly democratic associations. In doing so, I want to investigate the idea that Athenian attitudes to the cavalry undergo a significant, and hostile, shift at the end of the Peloponnesian War: the claim, that is, that the cavalry had always been a distinct group in Athens, but, in the 390s, that distinction comes in the form of infamy rather than fame. But I also hope to demonstrate the necessity of adopting a more nuanced approach to the study of the formation of these (positive or negative) attitudes: the image of the cavalry is shaped by the views of those outside that class, but also by the cavalry themselves; moreover, the cavalry are not necessarily simply reactive in their self-presentation, but can be allowed a more proactive role in the shaping of their own self-image.

1. If I had to sum up as concisely as I possibly can the subject matter of this paper, I would probably say that it was originally stimulated by the attempt to understand how Lucretius articulated his didactic plot. What is the plot of a poem that presents itself as analysing nothing less than ‘the nature of things’? It is safe to assume as a starting-point that a didactic poem which intends to revolutionize each and every principle of perception and evaluation of reality cannot remain unaffected by the theoretical views it tries to prove, and that the persuasive impact of those theories on the reader will inevitably be strengthened or weakened by the way the text situates itself in respect to those theories: the poem itself will be the most effective or the most damning example of its own theories.

It has been suggested that the so-called tool analogy passage of Plato's Cratylus presents us with a moderate linguistic naturalism that can stand or fall independently of the more unpalatable etymological and mimetic theories advanced later in the dialogue. This paper offers a reading of the tool analogy which argues that Socrates' employment of Forms (and in particular Species-Forms), together with a careful distinction between the types of knowledge associated with making and using tools, aims to establish a radical linguistic naturalism that constrains the intrinsic properties of names. This should be clear if we take Socrates' claim seriously that names are tools: tools in general can only function successfully if they exhibit the relevant structural, compositional and (to some extent) material properties. Since Socrates claims that names are a class of tools and not merely like tools in some respects, as many have supposed, then what holds for tools in general must also hold for names.

Going through the literature of late antiquity, of, say, the third and fourth centuries A.D., one is likely to discover very easily three different concepts of Indian geography.

(1) In literary—not in scientific—texts which belong to the classical tradition, India is usually thought of as the country of two big rivers, namely the Indus and the Ganges. This India does not include the region south of the Vindhya mountains, in spite of the fact that the commercial relations between South India and the Roman empire had been particularly close during the first and second centuries A.D. India, according to this literary tradition, was accessible by land, by following the course of Alexander's campaign, whereas Indian trade in the Roman period actually followed the passage provided by the monsoon, which had been discovered in the late Hellenistic period. Many details of that classical or rather classicistic conception of India can be gathered from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, written early in the third century A.D., as well as from the History of Alexander, falsely attributed to Callisthenes.

The strategic aim of the set of studies I have embarked on in collaboration with the sinologist Nathan Sivin is to examine Greek and Chinese philosophy and science afresh. Limiting our main inquiries to the period down to about A.D. 300, when Christianity came to be a major factor in the Graeco-Roman world and Buddhism began to be an important influence in China, we aim to ask questions concerning the differences in the ways in which philosophy and science were done in ancient Greece and China, why there should have been such differences, and what the philosophy and science done owed to the social, political and institutional background of the circumstances in which they were produced. It is high time that historians of Greek and Chinese science stopped treating their subjects principally as happy hunting grounds for point-scoring, chalking up anticipations of modern science, and especially priority claims as to who did what first. For they could clearly not have been a preoccupation of the ancients themselves.