At 47e–53c of the Timaeus Plato presents his most detailed metaphysical analysis of particulars. We are told about the construction of the physical universe, the ways we can and cannot talk about the phenomena produced, and about the two causes – Necessity and Intelligence – which govern the processes and results of production. It seems to me that we are told too much and too little: too much, because we have two accounts of the generation of phenomenal particulars – one, the ‘formal account’, which makes use of the receptacle, Forms and form-copies, and a second, the ‘geometrical account’, which appeals to geometrical shapes, the Demiurge and, apparently, matter; too little, because there is insufficient guidance as to how to relate the two accounts.

Among the more peculiar literary papyri uncovered in the past century are numerous bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero, with the Latin original and a Greek translation arranged in distinctive narrow columns. These materials, variously classified as texts with translations or as glossaries, were evidently used by Greek-speaking students when they first started to read Latin literature. They thus provide a unique window into the experience of the first of many groups of non-native Latin speakers to struggle with reading the classics of Latin literature.

The characters in Plato's Socratic Dialogues and the sociocultural beliefs and assumptions they present have a historical dramatic setting which ranges over the last quarter of the fifth century b.c.—the period of activity of the historical Socrates. That this context is to an extent fictional is undeniable; yet this leaves open the question what the dramatic interplay of (mostly) dead politicians, sophists, and other Socratic associates—not forgetting Socrates himself—signifies for the overall meaning and purpose of individual Dialogues. Are we to assume, with a recent study, that Plato is entirely concerned with his contemporary world and is, as it were, borrowing his characters from the fifth century, or does the fiction reveal something of his real involvement in the values and debates of the recent past? The aim of this paper is to argue that a detailed study of the characterization and dramatic structure of one particular Dialogue, Laches, strongly suggests that Plato is using a perceived tension between past and present to generate not only a philosophical argument but also a commentary on the cultural and political world of late fifth-century Athens and in particular Socrates’ position within it.

In the first book of his History Thucydides shows ‘the Spartans and the Allies’, to give the Peloponnesian League its formal title, making the decision that Athens had broken the Thirty Years Peace. After receiving the complaints of various allies, the Spartans discussed in the assembly the conduct of Athens and what should be done about it (ch. 67ff.) and ended by voting that the treaty had been broken and that the Athenians were in the wrong (ch. 87). This decision they communicated to the allies who had come complaining, and declared that they wished to summon all the allies and submit it to the vote, ‘in order that after general consultation (κοινμ βονλενομενοι) they might make war, should it so seem good“ (87.3 & 4). Then, after the Excursus on the Pentekontaetia, Thucydides records the congress of the League in which the Spartans put to the vote whether it was necessary to go to war and the majority voted for war (119–125). Thus Sparta proposed and the allies disposed.

There is no general agreement among scholars that Aristotle had a unified concept of phantasia. That is evident from the most cursory glance through the literature. Freudenthal (p. 53) speaks of the contradictions into which Aristotle seems to fall in his remarks about phantasia, and explains the contradictions as due to the border position which phantasia occupies between Wahrnehmung and thinking. Ross, in Aristotle (ed. 5, London, 1949), p. 143, talks of passages on phantasia in De Anima 3. 3 which constitute ‘a reversal of his doctrine of sensation’ and perhaps do not ‘represent his deliberate view’. This is a serious state of affairs, since De Anima 3. 3 is Aristotle’s main discussion of phantasia. Of passages on phantasia, appearances and images in De Anima 3. 3, Hamlyn says: ‘There is clearly little consistency here’. Even Schofield, who is more optimistic about saving the unity of Aristotle’s concept than the last two scholars, grants that ‘some of the inconsistencies of Aristotle’s account seem more than merely apparent’.1 He thinks of Aristotle’s phantasia as a ‘loose-knit, family concept’ (op. cit., p. 106). My purpose here is to suggest that Aristotle is more consistent in his use of phantasia than his critics will allow him to be. The translation of the term as imagination frequently adds unnecessarily to the confusion, so I shall avoid it and use transliteration instead.

I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).

What have the following in common: Epimetheus, Paris, Anchises, and the suitors of Penelope? The ready answer might be that it must have something to do with women, for it requires no great thought to see that the attractions of femininity proved the undoing of three of them, while for Anchises life was never to be the same again after his encounter with Aphrodite. But suppose we add to our first group such figures as Zeus, Priam, Polynices, and Eumaeus? The fates of all these characters as they, appear at certain points in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and others give expression i to a network of interrelated sexual and economic anxieties that seem to underlie a { great deal of what the Archaic poets say about the female sex. In this article I 1 propose to explore a particular part of that network, which I have called the ? ‘Pandora complex’, since it is Hesiod′s version of the Pandora myth which provides the classic statement of the male dilemma over women, poised between the conflicting desires for sexual gratification and domestic stability.1

Of all the themes treated by the mimes, perhaps the one that gave the most delight to their audiences throughout the centuries was that of adultery. References to it, from various parts of the ancient world, are found from the first century before Christ to the sixth century of the Christian era, and in many cases it is spoken of as a theme typical of the mime as a whole. There does not seem to be satisfactory evidence of its existence in a genuinely dramatic form at an earner date. It is reported that the μαγῳδoί, among other impersonations, mimicked the behaviour of μoιχoί, but their performance, so far as can be discovered, was purely a piece of imitative buffoonery. When the theme of adultery was treated by Greek mimes of a later date, the approach seems to have been rather a psychological study of the adulteress than an attempt to bring out the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation. This is certainly the case with Herondas' fifth mime, which portrays a lady jealously in love with a slave. Evidence from sources bearing a close relationship to the mime is equally negative. Thus a well-known Egyptian papyrus contains a song, written perhaps in the third or second century B.C., in which Helen complains of Menelaus' indifference to her after bringing her back from Troy; but this is far from constituting a variant on the adultery theme. The wall-song in Marissa, which was composed in the middle of the second century B.C., does indicate a situation in which a woman is trying to keep her lover's presence outside the house from the knowledge of another man with whom she is consorting inside.

In the vast literature centering on the Itinerarium Egeriae (IE) there is a serious lacuna. No attempt has been made to analyse the circle of readers to whom this remarkable document was addressed and for whose sake Egeria recorded so faithfully every detail of her journey. Yet if a full understanding of the IE is to be achieved, some definition of the circle of Egeria and of its relations with the pilgrim is essential. In other words, who in the West at that point in the late fourth century, would have been so interested in Holy Land pilgrimage as to read attentively such a personal account as the IE? The following is a tentative essay to gauge the concerns, expectations and cultural background of Egeria's immediate circle of readers through her own emphasis on various aspects of her pilgrimage. In addition, the investigation will try to assess the place of pilgrimage in the life of western communities and the value of communications between the pilgrim on the road and the society back at home.

In cod. 212 of his Bibliotheca, Photius provides some information of great importance for our scanty knowledge of Pyrrhonian scepticism between Timon and Sextus

The purpose of this article is to explain what I believe to have been the nature of the relationship between Aristophanes and the producer of his earliest plays, Kallistratos. My view was indicated in my edition of Wasps (pp. 124, 263–4) without full explanation. It is much the same as the view taken by Rennie in his edition of Akharnians (pp. 11–21), but I think that it can be given more cogent support than Rennie gave it. Recently the whole matter has been discussed afresh by G. Mastromarco (QuadernidiStoria 10(1979), 153–96)andS. Halliwell (CQ n.s.30(1980),33–45).1 This has enabled me to make my article briefer; I need not repeat the full bibliographical references to other views which Mastromarco and Halliwell have given, and I can, for the most part, confine my comments to the points on which I disagree with them.2 Everyone accepts the statements of the Hellenistic scholars that the earliest plays of Aristophanes (Banqueters, Babylonians, Akharnians) were produced δι⋯Καννιστρ⋯του. Consideration of what this meant may begin from his own justification of the arrangement, given in the parabasis of Knights.

The word Eὐμεν⋯δες occurs six times in our texts of Greek tragedy (four times in Eur. Or., twice in Soph. O.C.) and once as a play title (Aesch. Eum.). This may make ‘Eumenides in Greek tragedy’ sound like a restricted subject, but it is one that has seldom been discussed as a whole, and scholars have tended to consider each of the three plays in question in the light of unargued assumptions about the other two, and about the nature and affinities of Eumenides in general. I shall begin with some introductory remarks on cults, since not all the information is readily available in reference books, and then discuss the three plays in turn, starting for convenience with the Orestes.

All drama is meant to be heard by an audience, so that there is a sense in which any utterance in a play may be called audience address. It is possible, however, to draw a distinction between on the one hand the kind of drama in which the presence of an audience is acknowledged by the actors—either explicitly by direct address or reference to the audience, or implicitly by reference to the theatrical nature of the action the actors are undertaking, or by a combination of some or all of these elements—and on the other hand the kind of drama in which such a presence is not acknowledged, where the actors maintain the pretence that they are enacting a real as distinct from a theatrical event.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the works in which Ausonius of Bordeaux and Libanius of Antioch, writing within a few years of each other, recall their long and varied careers is that there is so little resemblance between them; the impressions given by these experienced and successful teachers could hardly be more disparate. The reader of Ausonius finds in his Protrepticus (Ep. 22 Peiper) a familiar enough picture of the terrors of the schoolroom; his Professores offer at first sight a series of bland commemorations apparently deficient in the interesting information which might be expected from such an archive. Libanius' many volumes, on the other hand, compared where appropriate with the Vitae Sophistarum of Eunapius, present a situation which is well summarised by the following sentences from Walden's work The Universities of Ancient Greece (still valuable seventy-five years after its publication): ‘There was, among the sophists of the fourth century…little, if any, of that spirit of brotherhood… that usually exists in a community of scholars at the present day. Instead there were jealousy, spite and often unrelenting hatred’. This striking divergence between Ausonius and his Eastern counterparts is unlikely to reflect a basic difference between East and West, or between Latin- and Greek-speaking milieux; the complaints of Augustine about his problems in Africa and Rome warn against such a simple answer. When one adds the evidence provided seven centuries later by the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose plaintive Historia Calamitatum — an account of the disasters he suffered, not those which he caused — is remarkably similar to the prickly self-justification of Libanius in its account of bitter scheming and almost military manoeuvres in the educational world, one is forced to consider whether the evidence of Ausonius is not a serious anomaly, and to seek an explanation.

I have devoted a separate study to the question of how far the account in the Alexander Romance of Alexander's meeting with the Naked Philosophers, later known as Brahmans, rests on genuine information about India. My conclusion was that the author of the Romance knew the Alexander historians but did not add any genuine knowledge; and that he incorporated a separate text of Cynic origin, the series of ten questions and answers.