It can be argued that there was no intellectual figure at work in Rome in the period of the late Republic who had more originality and influence than the Bithynian doctor Asclepiades, who founded an important medical school and was still being attacked nearly three hundred years after his death by Galen, and two hundred years later still by Caelius Aurelianus. His claims to originality rested both on his theory of the causes of disease, and on his methods of treatment. Turning away from the Empiricism recently fashionable, he argued that experience without λόγoς, theory or reason, was useless. His own theory was based on the scientific ideas of the late fourth-century philosopher Heraclides Ponticus, and seems to have postulated not ἂτoμα, tiny indivisible particles, but ὂγκoι, masses, which are continually in motion and splitting into innumerable fragments, θραύσματα, of different shapes and sizes, which re-form to create perceptible bodies. The particles were separated by invisible gaps, πόρoι or pores; friction between particles created the heat of the human body, but jamming of its pores was often the cause of pain and disease. This purely mechanistic doctrine was anathema to Galen because of its insufficient reverence for the doctrines of Hippocrates, and above all for the belief in the sympathy of the various parts of the body, the purposive character of Nature's creation, and her own healing effort; and also for the doctrine of the four, or more, humours.

In this paper I shall approach Hesiod's poetry from two, rather different, directions; consequently, the paper itself falls into two parts, the argument and conclusions of which are largely independent. In (I) I offer some observations on the vexed question of the organisation of Works and Days; that is, my concern is with the coherence of the poem's form and content. In (II) my attention shifts to the function of this poem and of its companion, Theogony; given the form and content of these two poems, what can we plausibly conjecture about the end or ends to which they were composed? In particular, I shall consider whether, and in what sense, these poems may be regarded as didactic in intent. Much of what I have to say in (I) I say with a measure of confidence; in (II), by contrast, my primary aim is to undermine unwarranted confidence — although I do, even here, reach some positive conclusions.

On many important aspects of the economic life of the rural population there is little that can be said. The complaint about the lack of secure data regarding the rural population of the ancient world has often been repeated, and there is no reason to restate the remarks about the lack of interest in the ancient sources for this topic. There is a danger, however, that absence of information may lead to an over-simplified picture of what actually happened. It is generally assumed that 80 or 90% of the ancient population was engaged in agriculture and that, conversely, only a small part of the population was engaged in non-agricultural work. Ancient historians have a tendency to treat the various sectors in the economy—commercial farming, subsistence farming, industries, and services (especially transport)—as strictly detached from each others. This is too simplistic a picture. We should not underestimate the importance of the employment of various economic strategies by the ancient farming population. This means that a peasant might also have been from time to time a charcoal maker, muleteer, or textile worker. If so, then agriculture and the non-agricultural sectors were indissolubly connected.

Allegorical interpretation of the ancient Greek myths began (as I showed in C.R. XLI., pp. 214–15) not with the grammarians, but with the philosophers. As speculative thought developed, there grew up also the belief that in mystical and symbolic terms the ancient poets had expressed profound truths which were difficult to define in scientifically exact language. Assuming that the myth-makers were concerned to edify and to instruct, the philosophers found in apparent immoralities and impieties a warning that both in offensive and in inoffensive passages one must look beneath the surface for the true significance of the tales. Thus allegory was originally positive, not negative, in its aim; its purpose was not so much to defend the poetic traditions against charges of immorality as to make fully explicit the wealth of doctrine which ex hypothesi the myths contained. Those who wrote to defend the poets could, if they chose, make some use of the results of the allegorical method; passages to which exception had been taken could be shown by allegorical treatment to be quite consistent with the view that the poets were wise and divinely inspired. But the first dim beginnings of allegory can be traced to another and a weightier motive—namely, the desire of speculative thinkers to appropriate for their own use some at least of the mythical traditions. Nor is there any reason to doubt that the same motive was the main driving force in the later history of allegorical interpretation. Objectionable passages were, indeed, regarded as among the richest in deeper meaning; but the leading allegorists applied their method to offensive and inoffensive passages alike.

All editors and translators that I know of render the first part of this passage along the lines of ‘They changed the usual meanings of words‘. Thus Weil and Romilly talk of ‘le sens usuel des mots’,1 Stahl of ‘usitatam vocabulorum significationem’,2 Bloomfield of ‘the accustomed acceptation of names’;3 the most popular modern English translation gives ‘words... had to change their usual meanings’,4 and the best-known modern commentary the phrase in my title – ‘the customary meanings of words were changed’.5 The passage is widely quoted, not only by ancient historians but also by sociologists and philosophers; and one suspects the excitement of this translation to be at least a part-cause of the passage's fame. Comparisons are made with modern propaganda, Orwell's 1984, and so on. But this translation must be wrong; unfortunately for generations of believers, though fortunately for the reputation of Thucydides, who would otherwise be saddled with a nonsensical piece of writing.

C. Cornelius Gallus requires brief introduction or none at all. A poet in his own right, the friend of Virgil and of Pollio, Gallus is enshrined for ever in literature—and in literary legend, for the inept fictions of Servius and his tribe will survive the most damaging of revelations, remembered even when refuted. Not only that—Gallus is a conspicuous figure in the social and political history of the revolutionary age.

The work of many scholars in the last hundred years has helped us to understand the nature and origins of the treatise which we know for short as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The present state of knowledge may be summed up as follows. The work in its extant form dates from the Antonine period, but much of it was taken over bodily from an earlier source, thought to be the Movaelov of Alcidamas. Some of the verses exchanged in the contest were current even earlier, and some scholars have supposed that the story of a contest went back to the fifth, sixth, or even eighth century; but this is now much doubted.

The literary criticism of the Greeks and Romans furnishes some of the most baffling documents which have come down to us from antiquity. Nor could it be otherwise. Few elements of language can be at once so ephemeral and so elusive as the overtones of words used in aesthetic contexts; even in our own language it is only with a conscious effort that the appropriate overtones of words used by quite recent critics can be recalled. Such recall must be much more difficult where the reader is concerned with a dead language; in the case of some terms it may well be virtually impossible; but where the ancient critic is discussing ethical criteria for literature, as Aristotle does in Poetics 13, the modern interpreter is in a somewhat better position, for ethical terms are used in wider contexts, contexts which involve action, and there is more opportunity for studying their usage and endeavouring to recapture their elusive overtones

They used to believe that mankind began in 4004 B.C. and the Greeks in 776. We now know that these last five thousand years during which man has left written record of himself are but a minute fraction of the time he has spent developing his culture. We now understand that the evolution of human society, its laws and customs, its economics, its religious practices, its games, its languages, is a very slow process, to be measured in millennia. In the case of Greek religious usage it is now appreciated that it has its roots not in Mycenaean but in Palaeolithic times. As for Greek poetry, comparative studies have shown that it goes back by a continuous tradition to Indo-European poetry.

Bruno Snell has made familiar a certain thesis about the Homeric poems, to the effect that these poems depict a primitive form of mindedness. The area of mindedness concerned is agency, and the content of the thesis is that Homeric agents are not agents in the fullest sense: they do not make choices in clear self-awareness of what they are doing; choices are made for them rather than by them; in some cases the instigators of action are gods, in other cases they are forces acting internally on the agent and over which he has no control. Homeric heroes act in the way Descartes thought an animal acts: agitur, non agit. Such agents ‘handeln nicht eigentlich (d.h. mil vollem Bewuβtsein eigenen Handelns), sondern sie reagieren’. The model of the agent which we nowadays have is roughly of a self which determines, rather than is determined to, action; the self arrives at this determination by considering available reasons for action in the light of its overall purposes, and it moves to action in full self-consciousness of what it is doing, and why. This model of action, Snell claims, is not met in Greek literature before the tragedians. I think anyone ought to concede that there is some difference between the way Homer portrays decision-making and the way it is portrayed in tragedy (with further differences among the tragedians themselves); but has Snell located the difference in the right place? I shall argue in this paper that he has not.

’Aυαγυώρισις γàρ διόλov, says Aristotle of the Odyssey,2 and throughout the poem's second half, with which we are here concerned, there is indeed a series of progressive recognitions as Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachos, Eurykleia, Eumaios, the suitors, Penelope and finally Laertes. So the importance of the opposite is not surprising; without concealment and deception there could be no eventual recognition. Concealment is of course necessary if Odysseus is to survive in the face of so many enemies, as Athena tells him (13. 307–10). But in addition, in any work of imaginative literature, so long as the reader or audience is aware of the truth, concealment and unperceived identity open the door to all sorts of half-truths and ironies – possibilities most obviously explored in tragedy and later comedy, but also made use of in the Odyssey. The irony which may be inherent in the arrival of the ‘nameless stranger’ has been most thoroughly explored by Fenik;3 here we examine a further implication.

In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound (assuming that it is by Aeschylus) might seem to be an exception, since all but one of its characters are gods. But nonetheless the intervention of the gods in the life of the one human character, Io, brings pain and trouble as well as promise of benefit. Io has been driven mad because she has refused to obey the dreams that tell her to go to the meadow where Zeus wants to have intercourse with her. The god does not make his request in person, and it is only in the course of her wanderings that Io learns how Zeus will bring a gentle end to her sufferings. Her informant is another god, Zeus' adversary Prometheus, who answers her questions, at times grudgingly (778), and in ways that are not immediately clear to her (775).

Propaganda and history are often inseparable. Most governments are in a position to control the dissemination of evidence, and if an event is embarrassing or damaging, the relevant evidence is certain to be distorted or withheld. Moreover the writers of history, however innocent their motives, cannot disregard the official apologia of their rulers. One notes with interest that the learned authors of the official Soviet history of the world portray the invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 as a crusade of liberation. Of course it might be true that the people liberated by the Red Army were glad to be rid of ‘the arbitrary despotism of the Polish Pans’ and that in the subsequent elections there was absolute freedom of choice and overwhelming support for union with the Ukraine, but the fact remains that it was impossible for membersof the Moscow Academy to contradict their government's justification of the invasion.

In recent years the general view of the theology and morality of Aeschylus which we still find expressed in the most popular handbooks of Greek tragedy has come under fire; fire which its defenders have so far been unwilling or unable to return. That Aeschylus was a bold religious innovator propounding advanced doctrines can no longer be assumed without argument; neither can one take for granted that his outlook on morality in general and on justice in particular was as advanced as it was once usual to maintain.

Few years pass without an attempt to interpret Theocritus, Idyll 7. The poem's narrative and descriptive skill, dramatic subtlety and felicity of language are mercifully more than adequate to survive these scholarly onslaughts, so I have less hesitation in offering my own interpretation.

The poem's chief problems seem to me to arise from uncertainty as to:

(a) Who is the narrator, and why are we kept waiting until line 21 before we are told that he is called Simichidas?

(b) Who, or what sort of man, is the goatherd Lycidas, whom he encounters on his way from town to the harvest festival?

Answers to these questions fundamentally affect our interpretation of their exchange of songs, which occupies almost half the idyll, and of Lycidas' gift of his stick to Simichidas; and these interpretations will go far towards interpreting the poem as a whole.

Open any history or hand-book of Greek literature in general, or Greek lyric in particular, and you will very soon come across several references to monody and choral lyric as important divisions within the broader field of melic poetry. And the terms loom larger than the mere question of handy labels: they permeate and pervade the whole approach to archaic Greek poetry. Chapters or sub-headings in literary histories bear titles like ‘Archaic choral lyric’ or ‘Monody’. Indeed it is possible to write a whole book and call it Early Greek Monody. Diehl's Anthologia Lyrica Graeca was structured around this distinction, which it adopted in preference to the chronological arrangement that is the obvious alternative. Indeed, it went so far as ‘to invent Greek titles “μονωιδίαι” and “χορωιδίαι” (sic)’. Most scholars would now agree that this is to go too far. But most would also continue to accept the validity and importance of the division, which a scholar has recently termed ‘the most fundamental generic distinction within ancient lyric poetry’

Although the view dies hard that the poetry which Ovid wrote during his years in exile at Tomi consists largely of the ‘querulous and sycophantic’ complaints of a weak man unable to come to terms with a personal disaster, it has been recognized for many years that the Tristia and the Epistolae ex Ponto are not mere expressions of emotion but are as well thought out and constructed as any other of the doctus poeta's products. Of these poems, Tristia 2 must be placed in a category by itself-if only because of its length (578 lines—four times the length of the next longest of the poems from exile) and because it purports to be a plea by Ovid to Augustus, the man responsible for his exile, on the very practical matter of mitigating the sentence.