In Propertius' reconstruction of the battle of Actium in 4.6 Apollo is pictured taking his place over Augustus' ship, braced for war:

non ille attulerat crinis in colla solutos

aut testudineae carmen inerme lyrae. (31–2)

In the opening couplet of the Ibis Ovid repeats the words carmen inerme at the same point in the pentameter:

tempus ad hoc lustris bis iam mihi quinque peractis

omne fuit Musae carmen inerme meae.

In Propertius Apollo lays aside the peaceful lyre and takes up his bow to begin the onslaught (55) which will bring Augustus easy victory (57). By echoing Propertius' words Ovid signals his own move into bellicose poetics. But whereas Apollo is equally adept with the lyre and the bow, Ovid is a stranger to war and no more equipped to take up figurative arms in his unaccustomed hands (cf. 10) than he is to take up real arms in self-defence against the marauding hordes of Pontic barbarians (cf. Tr. 4.1.71–4). So why does Ovid have no option but to make war when, on his own admission, he is so ill-equipped for the task? Why is he at such pains to stress his strangeness to arms?

The term ‘tragic history’ was coined in the 1890's by Eduard Schwartz. It was supposed to denote a certain Hellenistic type of historical writing with a twofold inspiration—tragic drama, for its scale, arrangement, and emotion, and literary criticism of the Peripatetic persuasion, for certain theoretical assumptions. The term was vague in the extreme, and being applied to works of writers no longer extant—from Duris to Posidonius—could not well be otherwise. Nor was it possible to prove, or else disprove, the alleged relevance of the critical works of the Peripatetic school, for there is no information on Theophrastus' De historia, and very little on Praxiphanes' work with the same title; and the master himself, Aristotle, seems to deprecate the course of action which his school is said to have commended. Vagueness and unfounded assertions remained awkward features of most subsequent discussions, whether they accepted Schwartz's original submission or not. In two recent papers F. W. Walbank has sought to break the spell. His result is radical: discard the term ‘tragic history’ altogether. This is not yet proven; but he has done much to rid the argument of mis-leading assumptions. In that process, however, he has perhaps discarded too much and, I think, has slightly mis-stated the most important piece of evidence we have—if tragic history is supposed to have a peripatetic nuance. Aristotle's Poetics is the only piece of evidence of which the context is known. But the context is notoriously difficult and the following remarks are concerned with these difficulties.

This article takes its starting-point from the intuition that, in some sense, the extant Aristotelian corpus was written in paragraphs. I hasten to explain. First – almost needless to say this explicitly – I do not suggest that the Aristotelian corpus was set out in the indented form we are familiar with from modern editions. Second, and more to the point, I do not have anything to say about the question, whether the text was formally set out divided by the paragraphē mark (a horizontal line used to signal divisions in ancient papyrus rolls). The paragraphē was certainly in use in Aristotle's time – he himself refers to it in Rhet. 1409a20 – although how widespread its use was, we do not know. Nor do we know with any certainty how the ancients themselves conceptualised this mark and its significance. It does seem, however, to have corresponded more to our concept of a full stop than to our concept of a paragraph. Be that as it may, my argument is not about how the text was set out on the space of the page, but about how the text was conceived: in the most general sense, how it was written and read. The Aristotelian corpus may well have been originally, in appearance, just a constant stream of undivided columns on papyri. Yet it had a certain discursive structure which, I suggest, is best approached as that of a paragraph. It is upon this discursive structure of Aristotle's works that I focus in this article.

No one can write an adequate commentary on a Greek play, or even edit it adequately, without producing it in his mind; that is to say, he must see in his mind's eye the exact location, movement and gesture of every character at every moment, arid must hear in his mind's ear the exact tone of every word. Admittedly, we do not know so very much about the appearance of the theatre in the fifth century B.C., or about the actors' costumes, or about Greek gestures; even our knowledge of the pronunciation of Greek at the relevant period is imperfect; and our ignorance of delivery and acting styles is total. Therefore, when we produce a play in our imagination we can hardly fail to import much which would be recognized as grossly erroneous if our evidence were suddenly to be increased. Yet, as so often happens in the study of the ancient world, we are confronted with a choice of risks. We can take the risk of an imaginative reconstruction which may be factually wrong but is at least reconcilable with all the evidence we have and is kept reconcilable, by modification, with whatever fresh evidence comes to light from time to time; or, alternatively, we can take the risk of missing the point of what the dramatist is saying and therefore of importing the wrong point. Even if we are not temperamentally disposed (as I am) in favour of the former risk, we are virtually forced to take it when we have committed ourselves to editing a text. The punctuation of a dramatic text is a matter for producers, not grammarians; a comma gives one instruction to the actor, a colon gives a different instruction—and few editors are likely to practise ars nescienti so pertinaciously as to refrain from giving the actors any such instructions at all.

In 29 B.C., at the ludi Actiaci held to celebrate the victory of Octavian over the forces of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome witnessed the first performance of one of the most celebrated of Roman tragedies, the Thyestes of Varius Rufus. Later critics are in agreement as to the quality of the piece: Curiatius Maternus in the Dialogue on Orators of Tacitus rates it equal to the Medea of Ovid; Quintilian describes it as comparable to any Greek tragedy; Philargyrius in a note to Eclogues 8.6 goes as far as to dub it the greatest of all tragedies (omnibus tragicis praeferenda). More intriguingly, at least one contemporary was extremely taken with the play, for a note in the eighth-century Codex Parisinus 7530 and the ninth-century Codex Casanatensis 1086 indicates that Varius was paid one million sesterces for his efforts. That that contemporary was the organiser of the Actian games, either Octavian himself or a close associate acting as intermediary, is not in dispute. What is at issue is the political and ideological significance of a tragedy on the theme of Atreus and Thyestes which could make it so valuable a part of the celebration of the victory of the new regime. It is to this problem that this paper is addressed.

The status of the first twenty-five lines of De rerum natura 4 has been a matter of critical controversy since the appearance of Lachmann's edition of the poem in 1855. The lines are repeated almost verbatim from book 1 (926–50), and Lachmann refused to believe that Lucretius himself could be responsible for the duplication of such a long passage in such a prominent position. He condemned the repetition magisterially as a sign pauperis ingenii et nullius iudicii. The majority of subsequent editors and critics have followed him in attributing the repetition either to an editor or to an interpolator, or supposed that the poet intended eventually to delete the passage from one of the two locations, but was prevented from doing so by his premature death. The problems raised by the repetition are compounded by the transitional section (26–53): the transmitted text is cumbersome and repetitive, and most critics accept Mewaldt's theory that the passage consists of a ‘doublet’, in which two alternative versions of the usual summary and ‘syllabus’ (26–44 and 45–53) have been imperfectly integrated. Mewaldt himself argued that the doublet was the result of a change in the order of books 3 and 4: book 4 was originally intended to follow 2 directly, and lines 1–25 and 45–53 (which summarize the contents of books 1 and 2 only) date from this phase of composition. When the poet decided to insert book 3 between 2 and 4, he substituted the longer summary (26–44) and transferred 1–25 to a new location in book 1; but the posthumous editors of the poem failed to carry out the necessary deletions.

Beckett's verbal duel is reminiscent of Aristophanic routines between two characters in which the name of the game seems to be to cap the boast, threat or insult hurled by the opposing character. Several recent studies have pointed to the importance of capping to the character and meaning of Aristophanic comedy. Ian Ruffell shows that verbal routines in which a joke is elaborated and capped by another are integral to Aristophanes' comic mode. He has also argued that Old Comedy is partly constituted through a generic requirement that each play deploy an intertextual rhetoric of innovation in which the playwright parades the way in which he has ingeniously capped the plots, routines and conceits of a rival's previous offering. Derek Collins has demonstrated that some of the social and stylistic dynamics of Aristophanic stichomythic and antilabic capping routines have been misunderstood due to a lack of awareness that such routines are part-and-parcel of a wider, cross-generic tradition of performed verse capping. He also shows that this central mode of poetic competition in archaic, classical, Hellenistic and Roman imperial Greece can be usefully illuminated by ethnographic and anthropological comparisons.

Private letters written on lead sheets in antiquity are rare, but not unknown; the publication of a new example found on the island of Berezan near Olbia in the Black Sea is remarkable as offering an early specimen of the Ionic dialect. Its Russian editor admitted that all its problems had not been solved, and the present article is an attempt to improve the readings and offer some suggestions for a better interpretation.

The document is completely preserved and legible without difficulty; it was found rolled up with the address written on the reverse. As Vinogradov suggests, it seems likely that it never reached its addressee. Vinogradov puts its date as the second half of the sixth century B.C. Dr L. H. Jeffery has kindly confirmed that on grounds of letter-forms the date would appear to be not far from 500 B.C.

Horace once described Tibullus, in a letter addressed to the elegiac poet, as ‘silently strolling through the healthy woods, pondering on the problems that matter most’ (Ep. 1. 4. 4–5 taciturn silvas inter reptare salubris ∣ curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est), and this is a view of Tibullus which underlies, in some form or another, most modern approaches to his poetry. After all, Tibullus is singularly dedicated to his concerns of love and the countryside, expressed with directness and simplicity in a style which is, as Quintilian says (x 1. 93), particularly ‘polished and elegant’ (elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus).

Of his own activity as a poet, and how he saw himself in relation to other writers, he says very little. At 2. 4. 13 ff., in one of love's despairs, he exclaims:

Galen, in the second century A.D., refers to Antiphon three times in his commentary on Hippocrates. On the first occasion, Gloss. Hippocr. Prooem. V, 706 Bas., XIX, 66, 77 K., he says (after mentioning Aristophanes' Daitaleis): . A conversation follows between a son who has just acquired a city education and his father. The son keeps using new words, which are identified by the father each time as borrowed from Lysistratus, ‘the rhetores’, Alcibiades, and Thrasymachus. On the second occasion, in Hippocr. de offic. XVIII, B., 656 K., Galen cites two fragments from the first book of Antiphon's Truth (). And on the third occasion, in Hippocr. epid. XVII, A., 681 K., he refers to a passage in the second book of the same work, which explains how hail is formed in the atmosphere.

In a recent article published in the CQ I argued the likelihood that in comparable underworld scenes Vergil modelled Charon's challenge to Aeneas in Aeneid 6.388–97 on Aeacus' challenge to Heracles in a surviving fragment of the tragedy Pirithous composed by either Euripides or Critias, and I took the episode to be a reinforcement or a possible modification of E. Norden's suggestion that Aeneas' descent into the Underworld is modelled on a catabasis of Heracles. In the play Aeacus sees a figure approaching him and demands to know of the stranger both his identity and his business in coming. Heracles responds by giving his name and explaining that he has come hither at Eurystheus' command to fetch Cerberus alive from Hades and bring him to Mycenae's gates. Heracles must then have overcome Aeacus. for we next find Theseus and Heracles conversing in the Underworld about Pirithous. Earlier in the play Pirithous had lamented that he still languishes in Hades for having attempted, with Theseus as his accomplice, to carry off from the world below the goddess Persephone to be his bride. In the usual version both heroes are caught and punished in the world below and only Theseus is rescued by Heracles. In this play, however, Heracles now heaps praise upon Theseus for his loyalty in electing to stay with his friend Pirithous in Hades. Heracles then rescues both heroes.

Three main views have been put forward as attempts to answer the question what were the political affiliations of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. According to one view Callicles is seen as the very archetype of the tyrant and the oligarch, a man prepared to indulge in himself an unbridled lust for power, the absolute antithesis of the democrat and all that democracy stands for, giving expression to a doctrine, in the words of Grote, ‘not simply anti-popular – not simply despotic – but the drunken extravagance of despotism’. This view was associated with repeated attempts to identify Callicles with one or other of the known oligarchs in the fifth century – Critias being the favourite. Such attempts are now generally abandoned. But the overall view of Callicles' doctrine probably remains the orthodox one, at least in the English-speaking world, and the comparison with Nietzsche and Carlyle has become commonplace.

According to a second view, however, the opposite is the case – Callicles was not aristocratic, oligarchic or tyrannical in his views, rather he was a democrat, indeed even ‘the typical Athenian democrat’. Finally it is possible to distinguish a third view, according to which initially Callicles is presented as a champion of absolutism but is shown as undergoing ‘a strange transformation’ in the course of the dialogue to a position more in accord with ‘the growing love of equality’.

This paper investigates differing forms of attention entailed by the ecphrastic gaze in epic and epigram as a way of considering issues of time and narrative as crucial elements of ecphrasis. Its first section focuses particularly on Paulinus of Nola, who has been almost wholly ignored in recent discussions of ecphrasis, but who not only provides the first example of an ecphrasis of an ecphrasis – the description of an ecphrastic inscription attached to a work of art – but also provides a set of poems which construct the viewer's experience of visiting a church. This is taken as exemplary of a new development of a Christian gaze, a new form of attention. The second section looks specifically at temporality in ecphrasis (through Pliny, Virgil, and epigram), to see how different ideas of time and the experience of looking are inscribed in different genres – which in turn expect and create different forms of knowing. The third section looks particularly at later Greek epigrams, Callistratus and Achilles Tatius, to see how different authors play with ideas of temporality and narrative explored in the first two sections of the paper. Together, these interrelated arguments demonstrate how investigating forms of attention and modes of temporality allows us to develop a more nuanced comprehension of ecphrasis as a historical and aesthetic expression.

This article examines the character and identity of Seneca's Medea. Focusing on the recognition scene at the end of the play, I investigate how Medea constructs herself both as a literary figure and as an implied human personality. The concluding scene of Seneca's Medea raises crucial questions about self-coherence and recognisability: in contrast to other moments of anagnōrisis in Greco-Roman drama, it confirms the pre-existing facets of Medea's identity, rather than revealing new ones. This concept of recognition as self-confirmation is also integral to Seneca's Stoic view of human selfhood, and Medea's use of Stoic principles in this play reinforces her dual status as textual entity and quasi-person.

At some time in the second quarter of the second century AD, the controversial sophist–philosopher Favorinus seems to have delivered a speech in Corinth, complaining about the removal of a statue which had previously been erected there in his honour. In doing so he was addressing the inhabitants of a city which occupied an unusual – in many ways unique – position between Greek and Roman identity: Corinth had been sacked by Roman forces in 146 BC, and then refounded as a Roman colony more than one hundred years later, and even in the second century AD it was still sometimes represented as a Roman intrusion within the Greek world, even though it had been strongly influenced by the Greek populations surrounding it in the intervening years. My aim in this article is to examine Favorinus' Corinthian Oration in the light of the cultural ambiguities of its setting. Despite increasing interest in Favorinus in recent years, and despite an increasing volume of archaeological evidence for Corinthian life in the second century, there have been very few detailed readings of the speech's complexities, and even fewer which have recognized the way in which it is crucially anchored within its Corinthian context.

Almost everything we know of Michael Marullus – Greek exile, Neoplatonist, mercenary soldier – is mediated by his poetry, much of which seems positively to invite biographical decoding. The poet tells us he was conceived in the year Constantinople fell to the Turks (1453), after which his family fled, via Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), to Italy. Here he grew up under the Iliadae … tecta Remi (Siena?), received an excellent education, and from an early age was frequenting the humanist academy of Giovanni Pontano at Naples. Marullus reports that when just seventeen, fate tore him away from his studies and plunged him into a military career (Epig. 2.32.71–3). Between wars, both abroad and within Italy, he composed Latin poetry – including four books of controversial ‘pagan’ hymns –, edited Lucretius, and fraternised with such prominent figures in the literary and intellectual culture of the day as Jacopo Sannazaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Severed from an eventful life by a fittingly dramatic death, Marullus drowned in an attempt to cross the river Cecina in full flood. His poetic talents were much appreciated in his own time, for example by Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas More. The love lyrics to ‘Neaera’, though perhaps stiff and conventional to modern taste, inspired Ronsard. His untimely death drew Latin epitaphs from all over Italy.

It remains an open question what sort of structure, or what kind and degree of unity, the reader may legitimately expect to find in the Homeric epics, or in oral poetry in general. More specifically, when critics identify long-range correspondences, symmetrical patterns and precise correlation of speeches, scenes, similes and events, they are often confronted with considerable scepticism. Here it may be that excessively schematic attempts, such as those of the late Cedric Whitman, have shown such patent weaknesses that the whole approach has fallen into undeserved disrepute. Yet it is not unreasonable to suppose that any story-teller, oral or literate, improvising or premeditating, should desire and be able to connect his ending with his beginning, to develop themes in a recognisable and coherent sequence, and to draw attention to related scenes by direct repetition or allusive resemblances. Homeric scholarship has not been blind to such considerations, but they have yet, I think, to be systematically and sensitively applied. Much remains to be done, especially perhaps for the Odyssey.

In this paper I intend principally to argue that there is a significant resemblance (embracing equally important differences) between the finale of Odyssey 8 together with the opening of book 9, and the finale of book 21 and opening of 22. The situation in the later scene is modified, indeed reversed and distorted; the earlier scene presents the norm, the later scene the unusual and extraordinary; and these differences are stressed in such a way as to reinforce the development of major themes which run through the poem: themes such as hospitality, feasting, self-revelation, and the hero's status as both man of action and poet.

The text of Catullus is notoriously corrupt, and though much has been healed, something remains to be done. An article may still be useful if it encourages scepticism and speculation. I have found Baehrens the best commentator for this particular purpose; for information about the manuscripts I rely on Mynors. The text printed is that of V where I wish to discuss it, but it is sometimes silently altered where I do not. Textual variants are mentioned only where they are relevant to the argument.

The idea of examining law as a cultural phenomenon seems surprisingly underappreciated – especially by legal scholars. Black-letter law, sociology of law, Eigentum und Besitz, law and life, life and law (which of you imitates the other?), all rank among the usual suspects in professional discourse, to the evident exclusion of law as culture. This is of course potentially a broad topic, even if we limit it to the assumptions or assertions about law found in literary discourse, an area of study that naturally requires no small degree of non-legal expertise. That may be the difficulty. A few exceptions, whom I admire and hope to emulate – for their ambitious, pioneering spirit, have spied an opportunity here. Perhaps the best-known example of this approach is John Crook, who writes:

… legal talk and terminology seem rather more frequent and more at home in Roman literature than in ours. Legal terms of art could be used for literary metaphor, could be the foundation of stage jokes or furnish analogy in philosophical discussion. And a corollary of this is that many a passage of Latin belles lettres needs a knowledge of the law for its comprehension.

Crook, disappointingly, lets it go at that, failing to fulfil the promise of boundless opportunity expressed in the last sentence.