Genealogy was important in early Greece. One thinks readily of aristocratic lineages proudly recited by Homeric heroes, and the family lore carefully recorded by epinician poets; but passing remarks are even more revealing. In the seventh book of the Iliad Nestor tells of an embassy he once led north to Phthia, where he hoped to enlist the aid of Peleus' mighty son in the coming campaign. Welcoming his Argive guests, Peleus asks eagerly about their ‘ancestry and descent’, and hears the answers with much pleasure:

In Peleus' part of the country southerners were not often seen. He seeks by his questions to relate the unknown to the known; he is hoping that somewhere in the pedigree a familiar name will turn up to give him a point of reference. Genealogy gives him his bearings. For those within the system a genealogy is a map. They can read its signs. To the names are attached stories, thousands of them; collectively they gave the listeners their sense of history and their place in the world. Hence Peleus' great pleasure in hearing the answers. Centuries later, the Greeks were no different; the sophist Hippias says that the crowds at Olympia like to hear nothing better than his recitations of genealogies.

Athenian tragedy is a ‘representation of élite practice …’, focusing primarily on the actions of ‘people superior to us’ in their moral and social station. Although it is debatable exactly what Aristotle means by σπουδαῖος in the context of a tragic plot, and to what degree his theory of tragedy is wedded to a belief in the social, as well as ethical, ‘superiority’ of the leading characters, there is no denying the obvious fact that the surviving plays draw a sharp line between the ‘serious’ (or ‘better kind of’) characters, whose decisions, actions, and sufferings form the core (or ‘soul’) of the plot, and the minor characters (‘us’) who form the socio-political context for those decisions and actions, and whose attitudes and desires tend to be affected by, but never to cause or determine, the key crises and reversals of that plot. The ‘serious’ characters are invariably royal or noble, while the minor characters are of markedly lower status. Thus, while it may be correct to describe Athenian tragedy as ‘polyphonic’ and ‘egalitarian’ in its form, in so far as it gives generous opportunities for female, servile, foreign, and lower-class voices to be heard, along with – and even in opposition to – the voices of the aristocratic main characters, the trajectory of the plots, along with the costumes and spatial arrangements of the theatre itself, nonetheless tend to reassert very strongly the differences between high and low, ‘superior’ and ordinary.

2 Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,

cui primum digitum dare appetenti

et acris solet incitare morsus,

cum desiderio meo nitenti 5

carum nescio quid lubet iocari,

et solaciolum sui doloris,

credo ut tum grauis acquiescat ardor;

tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem,

et tristis animi leuare curas! 10

***

2b tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae

pernici aureolum fuisse malum,

quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.

Robin Nisbet, whose masterly article on the text of Catullus it is a particular pleasure to be able to salute in a piece appearing in the same journal twenty years later, adduced an important parallel for verse 5, πόθωι στίλβων (Anacreon, PMG 444), and thus demonstrated that the probable sense is ‘the woman shining with longing for me’.

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.

The complex patterns of repetition and reversal in the Heracles have been carefully and convincingly explored. Whether dividing the play into two, three, or even four major scenes, scholars have shown that it is not simply imagery or language, but whole actions or plot-elements which recur from scene to scene, and indeed from generation to generation. A consensus has developed that the play's violent disruptions and juxta-positions of opposites work together with near-obsessive repetitions of language, plot, and myth to stage Euripides’ vision of epic valour savagely mutated into a new, moral heroism contained by a new, democratic philia.

It is appropriate that repetition, and repetition-as-reversal, should figure so largely in this drama, whose action depends on a doubly-fathered hero and whose centrepiece is the triply repeated description of an action which is itself a play within a play. In a prominent ode the chorus long for a second youth as a sign of goodness (655-72), a desire apparently realised by Heracles' reappearance from the dead. Nor is he the only one to be reborn: in the last act, Theseus' appearance, also – ultimately – from Hades (1170), redoubles Heracles' first entrance: another hero with two fathers, another monster-killer, another rescuer from the dead.

I wish to argue primarily that Propertius 2.12 introduced the poet's original third book, ‘Book 2b’, (Section III). On the way I examine Propertius' use of his various addressees (Section I), and I discuss strategies in his indisputably introductory poem 1.1 (Section II). Similarities of strategy discernible in 2.12 head my argument that 2.12 was like 1.1 an introductory poem. The question of addressees in introductory poems raises the topic of Propertius' social status and his relations to great men, and this is briefly surveyed.

Vegetius wrote his Epitoma rei militaris between 383 and 450. It survives in at least 220 witnesses designed to be complete, perhaps a dozen of them written in the ninth century. The earliest editions were all printed from inferior manuscripts, and later printers largely followed what is in many respects the worst of them, published at Rome in 1487. In the eighteenth century none of the older and better manuscripts happened to be preserved in the place that would have given it the best chance of making a mark, namely Leiden, and only G, which had reached Wolfenbüttel, seems to have been collated, first by G. Kortte, then by Wernsdorf for N. Schwebel's edition (Nürnberg 1767); not until Friedrich Haase in 1847 reported the outcome of a preliminary exploration, undertaken because he planned a corpus of ancient military tracts, did most of the others emerge. Carl Lang used several for his Teubner editions of 1869 and 1885, such a milestone that for critical purposes the earlier editions seldom repay consultation. The new Teubner edition of Alf Önnerfors, which appeared in 1995, has a fuller apparatus, but his preface sheds less light on the nature of the tradition than might have been expected; indeed, it restores darkness to areas where Lang shed light.

§1. The Homeric case form in -ϕι corresponds to the Indo-European instrumental plural morph *-bhi(s)2 which roughly corresponds to the senses of the English preposition with, expressing both the instrument of verbal action (‘He killed Dr Black with the lead piping’) and the notion of comitativity (‘He was with Col. Mustard’): yet Homeric -ϕι seemingly stands as a generic oblique case marker in all numbers. Except for literary dialects in which it may be regarded as an epic feature, it was unparalleled in Greek until the decipherment of Linear B demonstrated that Mycenaean knew a case form spelled -pi, which may be taken as standing for /-phi/ (the Linear B script making no distinction between the voiced, voiceless and aspirated stops), functioning probably only as a plural, and in declensions other than the thematic. While -ϕι and -pi have a certain degree of overlap in their function and formations, the Homeric and Mycenaean forms also show significant differences; this paper examines and attempts to explain those differences.

In memory of Volkmar Schmidt

Even before Homeric -ϕι reappeared as Mycenaean -pi, much thought had been given to its origin, number, and case. Here are some conclusions that had been drawn about its case and functions:

The independent uses [uses without a preposition] are instrumental and locatival … The next step is the most critical, to explain its extension to the functions of the Greek genitive … -ϕι = Greek genitive is almost always combined with a preposition … The ending was first thought of as instrumental … The locatival use is only rarely independent.