Solon's fragments 9–11 (West) are preserved in three late authors: frr. 9 and 11 by Diodoros Sikelos (fl. 60–30 B.C.), 9.20.2, Plutarch (fl. A.D. 46–127), Solon 3.6 and 30.3 respectively, and Diogenes Laertios (fl. early third century A.D.), 1.50 and 1.51 respectively; and fr. 10 by Diogenes Laertios alone, 1.49. They are all quoted in the context of Solon's reaction to Peisistratos. Stories on this theme were circulating by the time of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (AP), and Rhodes' scepticism about them is well founded. Its author did not garnish (Rhodes' very apt term) his version of events with these poems, nor indeed with any Solonian utterance, and he explicitly states that myth-making on this subject had already resulted in two stories about Solon and Peisistratos which were chronologically impossible (17.2).

This paper addresses itself to two transitional passages in Pindar which are frequently misunderstood. In both we appear at first sight to have an awkward change of direction, with the myth terminated abruptly and the following item of praise merely juxtaposed. In reality, both transitions are effected smoothly, and the same technique is employed in both odes.

Malcolm Davies, CQ 37 (1987), 65–75, has argued strongly for the view, almost universally discarded since Fraenkel's Agamemnon appeared, that Aeschylus envisaged Klytaimestra as killing her husband with an axe. He succeeds in establishing a strong probability that, among the various pre-Aeschylean versions of the story of Agamemnon's death, those which had him killed in his bath with the help of an entangling robe always made Klytaimestra use an axe, not a sword, to strike the fatal blows; and Sophocles and Euripides when they specify the weapon invariably specify it as an axe. All that this proves, however, is that if Aeschylus did make Klytaimestra kill Agamemnon in his bath with a sword, he was innovating. We have still to determine whether he did in fact so innovate. It is fair to treat the pre- and post-Aeschylean evidence as establishing a presumption in favour of the axe, but a presumption only: if there is unambiguous evidence in the text of the Oresteia that the Aeschylean Klytaimestra used a sword, it must be taken as outweighing any amount of external evidence which can show only that other Klytaimestras, imagined by other poets and artists, did not use one.

These lines are the first reaction to the false news of the death of Orestes. Their attribution has been much discussed. What prompts my intervention is the recent development, on this important problem, of a confident unanimity which seems to me certainly mistaken. I have been unable to find a single translator, editor, or commentator in recent years who gives the lines to Electra. The case for Electra was best made by Headlam–Thomson in 1938, and a few extra points were added very hesitantly by Winnington-Ingram in 1946. From the wealth of detailed argument in Headlam–Thomson, which has been ignored rather than refuted, I will mention and briefly develop just two points, before going on to add some of my own.

A number of Democritean fragments may loosely be called ‘political’, concerned as they are with questions to do with the π⋯λις – with government, with the duties and dangers of public office, with justice, law and order. The majority of them (B 248–66) have been preserved in chapters of Stobaeus’ anthology entitled ‘On the State’ (iv 1), ‘On Laws and Customs’ (iv 2), ‘On Government’ (iv 5).

Recent discussions of Aristophanes' early career raise again the question who was recognized as a victor with the Babylonians and the Acharnians and his name officially recorded, Aristophanes the poet or Kallistratos his didaskalos. This old-new controversy has brought back into focus the City Victors' list (IG II 2325) and the reconstruction of' API [in the second column of the comic poets. The inscription itself has not been studied anew and the reader is referred to earlier examinations of it, especially to two articles of E. Capps and to the verdict of A. Pickard-Cambridge, who maintains that it is needless to follow the controversy in detail: ‘For the fifth century, the name of Aristophanes is restored with practical certainty in the list of victors at the Dionysia, between those of Hermippus and Eupolis, it now being proved that the first victory of Aristomenes, the other candidate for the place, fell much later. One can hardly blame Pickard-Cambridge and others for evading the intricate calculations and boring details. Yet, it seems that they deserve, or rather require a re-examination, for Capps, although a meticulous and distinguished epigraphist, had the tendency to jump easily to rash conclusions. Indeed, his frankness in readily admitting his mistakes and recanting untenable positions evokes admiration, but, since his work belongs to a period in which hypotheses were more easily advanced and less rigorously defended than today, an attempt should be made to take a look at his argumentations and see whether they are still valid.

One of the most striking features of Athenian laws regulating commercial activities is the absence of any concept akin to the modern legal notion of the partnership or corporation. Despite the presence in Athenian society of numerous koinoniai, groups of individuals cooperating for some purpose, be it commercial or otherwise, Athenian law concerned itself solely with individual persons and did not recognize the separate legal existence of collective entities. And just as Athenian law did not recognize the legal existence of partnerships or corporations, it also did not possess the notion of corporate liability. This meant that if someone entered into an agreement with a group of individuals and one of those individuals violated the terms of the agreement, the plaintiff proceeded only against the individual who acted contrary to the agreement, not against the group as a whole. If the plaintiff won his suit, he only had a right to receive compensation from the defendant's private property; he did not have a claim on all the funds held in common by the group.

My aim in this paper is to reconsider a number of aspects of Aristotle's thinking on comedy in the light of the acknowledged Aristotelian corpus. I shall have nothing to say about the Tractatus Coislinianus, an obscure and contentious little document which must (despite Janko's energetic attempt to restore its credit) remain an inappropriate starting-point for discussion. There is still, I believe, something to be learnt from the extant works.

Euboulos' 'αγκελ⋯ων is represented by only four fragments (frr. 1–3 frr. 1–4 Hunter), all culled from Athenaeus, which tell us nothing about the plot of the play or about the identity of its titular character. R. L. Hunter, in his recent commentary on Euboulos, discusses at length the name 'αγκελ⋯ων and concludes that it could belong to either (1) a humble and poor man; (2) ‘a character from folklore notorious for sexual relations with his mother’ ; or (3)’ a wily slave such as those foreshadowed in Aristophanes and familiar from New Comedy'. In view of our ignorance of the play's plot, each of these possibilities has an equal claim to our consideration. I believe, however, that the context in which the fragments are embedded in Athenaeus allows us to refine our understanding of the name even further.

Illusions play a central part in Epicurean philosophy. One of its fundamental assumptions is that men are the victims of a certain grand illusion and, as long as they remain so, can never aspire to a happy life. This is the illusion that pleasures can be increased in intensity without limit. It is as a result of this that men go to enormous lengths to enlarge their capacity to procure more pleasure, struggling in pursuit of goals that can rarely, if ever, be achieved. But here mankind has made a disastrous mistake: the limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of pain, and after that point it cannot be increased, only varied. The illusion has therefore led to a tragic state of affairs, a sad history of fruitless war, struggle and ambition and it is a vital part of Epicurus’ programme to rid men of this evil by teaching them the true limits of pleasure.

In Philip of Macedon (1978) (pp. 150f.), as part of a general survey of the development of the art of war in Classical Greece, I briefly adumbrated a view of the nature of hoplite fighting. It was not the conventional one, of which the following statement of Adcock in The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (1957) p. 4 is fairly representative:

The effectiveness of the phalanx depends in part on skill in fighting by those in the front rank, and in part on thephysical and moral support of the lines behind them. The two opposing phalanxes meet each otherwith clash of shield on shield and blow of spear against spear. Their momentum is increased by the impetus of the charge that precedes their meeting. If the first clash is not decisive by the superior weight and thrust of the one phalanx over the other, the fighting goes on. The laterranks supply fighters as those before them fall. At last one side gains the upper hand. Then the other phalanx breaks and takes to flight and the battle is won and lost.

That the theme of trickery and deception plays an important part in the comedies of Plautus is obvious. Although by no means absent from the comedies of Menander and Terence, it is not nearly so prominent in them as in Plautus. One reason for this difference may be Plautus' choice of Greek models, but there are good grounds for believing that changes made by Plautus to his models also served to emphasize the theme. E. Fraenkel showed that Plautus elevated the scheming slave into a comic hero in a manner alien to Menander and Terence. He identified as an important factor in this heroization of the slave certain features of style, notably the recurring use of military metaphors which equate the slave with a victorious general. He also showed that Plautus probably greatly expanded certain slave roles, this expansion being most evident in elaborate polymetric monodies such as Chrysalus' Troy canticum, Bacch. 925ff. These stylistic effects and the increased bulk of the roles give greater emphasis to the Plautine scheming slave and ipso facto to the element of intrigue in the plot. The omissions which naturally went together with Plautus' insertions could also distort the emphasis of the Greek play in favour of the element of intrigue; a probable example is the Casina, in which it is generally agreed that Plautus cut the original anagnorisis ending. Recent writers have stressed another aspect of Plautus' style which helps to give a particular prominence to the theme of intrigue in his plays, his liking for metatheatrical effects, which remind the spectators that they are watching a stage performance not real life; these effects are pervasive but particularly cluster around scenes of deception, emphasizing that the deception is in a special sense a performance, a play within a play.

The Erfurtensis (E), now lat. 2°.252 in the Staatsbibliothek Preuβischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin (West), was assembled by Wibald of Corvey in the mid twelfth century, and is the most comprehensive medieval manuscript of Cicero, containing nearly half of what was eventually to survive. The manuscript as it exists today has lost one or more folios at several different points, but in some of these places readings were recorded by sixteenth and seventeenth-century scholars before the mutilations occurred. There is, however, only one lacuna where early collations survive and where, also, E is a manuscript of primary importance for the reconstruction of the text. The omission in question, caused by the removal of folios at some unknown date between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, comprises the end of pro Caecina (beginning after vincula, § 100) and virtually all pro Sulla (ending before- tundis Catilinae, §81). No readings are known to have been taken from the end of pro Caecina, but from the bulk of pro Sulla, before the manuscript as we have it resumes, a sizeable number of readings has fortunately been preserved. The tradition of pro Sulla takes the form of two branches, one consisting of Munich, Bayer. Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18787, olim Tegernseensis, (T) and all the deteriores (to), the other consisting of just two manuscripts, E and its twin, Vatican, Pal. lat. 1525 (which will be referred to as V). V comes to a halt at §43; the early collations of E are therefore of the highest importance for pro Sulla until §81, especially from §43 onwards where they comprise our only record for one of the tradition's two branches.

The winning of the ultimate military honour of spolia opima, spoils taken personally from an enemy commander killed by a Roman commander, traditionally occurred only three times in Roman history, the winners being Romulus in the legendary period, A. Cornelius Cossus in either 437 or 426 and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 B.C.1 The dedication-place of these special spoils was the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, traditionally founded by Romulus for the purpose, and considered the oldest temple in Rome (Livy 1.10.7): the god was said to draw his name either from the fact that the spolia opima were carried (ferre) up to the Capitol by the victorious general in person, or from the fact that the general had to strike down(ferire) his opposite number before such spoils could be won.

The most recent edition of these books is that of R. M. Ogilvie (Oxford, 1974), which should be read in conjunction with his Commentary on these books (Oxford, 1965). The other modern edition to which I have referred is that of W. Weissenborn and H. J. Müller (Berlin, 1894–1908) = W.-M.

The relationship between the choruses of Seneca's tragedies and the action of the plays in which they occur is one of the least understood and most controversial aspects of the Roman dramatist's work. It is often asserted that Seneca's choral odes are mere act-dividers, that their relationship with the play's action is loose and unconvincing. I would not care to assert that the handling of the chorus is flawless in all instances in Seneca's tragedies (or indeed in the works of any ancient tragedian), but in his best works it is, I believe, masterly. In this paper I propose to illustrate the close and complex interconnection between ode and action in Senecan tragedy through an analysis of the choruses of Thyestes.

[Lichas] ‘videbatur mihi secundum quietem Priapus dicere: “Encolpion quod quaeris, scito a me in navem tuam esse perductum”.’ exhorruit Tryphaena et ‘putes’ inquit ‘una nos dormiisse; nam et mihi simulacrum Neptuni, quod Bais <in> tetrastylo notaveram, videbatur dicere: “in nave Lichae Gitona invenies”.’ ‘hinc scies’ inquit Eumolpus ‘Epicurum hominem esse divinum, qui eiusmodi ludibria facetissima ratione condemnat.’ <*> ceterum Lichas ut Tryphaenae somnium expiavit: ‘quis’ inquit ‘prohibet navigium scrutari, ne videamur divinae mentis opera damnare?’

(Petr. Sal. 104.1–4)

Priapus and Epicurus have frequently been claimed to be major influences, each in their particular way, on the plot and composition of the Satyrica.

In recent times, a previously unchallenged and longstanding communis opinio concerning the extant manuscript tradition of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica has been shattered by Prof. W.-W. Ehlers in his revelation that the fifteenth-century Laurentianus plut. 39.38, L, written by the Florentine scholar, Niccolò Niccoli, is independent of the much exalted oldest witness, Vaticanus Latinus 3277, V, copied in Fulda in the second quarter of the ninth century. With equally silent subservience to the hazardous and now discredited principle, vetustissimus et optimus, second place in the tradition had commonly been given to a manuscript of similar age to that of V, namely S, discovered in 1416 at the monastery of St. Gall by three humanist scholars, Poggio Bracciolini, Cencio Rustici and Bartolomeo da Montepulciano, and subsequently lost, except through reconstruction from six extant fifteenth-century apographa, each instantly recognizable from the fact that they contain only 1.1–4.317. Between V and S, however, as Ehlers and others before him have argued, a common exemplar, a, must be deduced to exist.

Certain proximities between two distinguished but very dissimilar contemporaries, Quintilian and Tacitus, may be stated. Contemporary they were, though the former, born probably a little before A.D. 40, was older by about twenty years. Both were from outside Rome, Quintilian certainly of provincial, Spanish, origin, Tacitus very probably from one of the Galliae, yet both exemplars of Romanitas.

Plutarch's essay de fortuna Romanorum has attracted divergent judgements. Ziegler dismissed it as ‘eine nicht weiter ernst zu nehmende rhetorische Stilübung’. By Flacelière it was hailed as ‘une ébauche de méditation sur le prodigieux destin de Rome’. It is time to consider the work afresh and to discover whether there is common ground between these two views. Rather than offering a general appreciation, my treatment will take the work chapter by chapter, considering points of interest as they arise. This method will enable us to compare what Plutarch says on particular subjects and themes in de fort. Rom. with what he says or does not say about them elsewhere. We shall thus be able to see clearly that for the most part the ideas he presents in the essay correspond with his thoughts about the rôle of fortune expressed in more serious writing, and that, where there is no correspondence, this is attributable to the rhetorical background. I do not intend to address directly the frequently discussed but insoluble question of whether we have in de fort. Rom. only one of two original works, that is whether there was once a de virtute Romanorum which Plutarch composed or answered. De fort. Rom. itself in fact gives almost as much prominence to άρετή as to τúχη, and their competing roles will be carefully evaluated. Nor do I look at the dating of the work (an early date has been suggested on grounds of genre, a later one on grounds of the essay's familiarity with Rome, but there is not enough evidence for a firm conclusion).