The history of classical scholarship bears the traces of many a violent battle over the theory and practice of translation. It is not surprising therefore that today, when translations are in more common use than ever before, not only as aids to reading the original but even as sole texts for pupils in schools and universities lacking the classical languages, their function and quality should be subjects of considerable discussion and disagreement. The demand is greater than ever, and a Penguin version of Homer can become a best-seller; but it is also harder than ever to satisfy oneself that the translation one has recommended is not misleading students nurtured in a culture and attuned to an idiom so different from those of the Graeco-Roman world. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the provision of good translations is a matter no longer of theoretical discussion but of immediate practical importance, if our students are to have the remotest possibility of reaching understanding of what classical writers were trying to say.

One of the many stimulating ideas put forward by Gordon Williams in his book Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968) is the suggestion that Propertius planned and wrote his first three books as a single entity and published these simultaneously as a unified collection, the fourth book being a later addition. This is contrary to the usual view that all four books were written separately and published successively at intervals. It is obviously salutary that conventional views should be challenged, especially if they can be shown to rest on unproved assumptions, and two at least of the reviewers of Williams's book regarded his theory with some favour. E. J. Kenney writes of an ‘important discussion of the thesis that the first three books of Propertius were planned as a whole’, and D. Henry begins his discussion of the theory with the words ‘He argues plausibly that…’. The only dissentient voice that I have noted is that of E. Courtney, who in an article on the structure of Propertius' third book refers in passing and without further explanation to the hypothesis of unitary publication as one ‘which is surely to be rejected’.

Throughout the ages the undersides of earthenware vases have been the home for all manner of cryptic abbreviations and signs. The importance nowadays placed on such marks varies considerably according to the date and origin of the material, though generally it is greater when the signs refer in some manner to the potter, decorator, or producing factory, especially when considerations of the mark may affect the value of the piece.

When the quaestor C. lulius Caesar began his aunt's funerary laudatio with these words in 69 B.c., he was not claiming any unique glory appropriate only to ‘imperial Caesar’, but indulging a form of family pride shared by many aristocrats in the late Republic.

The following is the second of a series which began in G & R xx (1973), 38 ff. and 155 ff.

The mysterious crise de profession which saw the painter Euphronios switch to potting in the heyday of his career is a worthwhile topic for discussion and one on which scholars have manifestly avoided committing themselves. That the pioneer red-figure artist should up and change professions quite unannounced and apparently without reason is a curious fact indeed and one which perhaps the optician alone can explain.

Saul bellow's book Mr. Sammler's Planet documents contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster of homo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.

The question of what actually happened on the Ides of March, 44 B.c. is merely incidental to most ancient historians, concerned as they are with Caesar's intentions and the assassins' motives. On the Ides more varied and abundant information survives, I believe, than on any other day in Roman or Greek history. But this evidence is full of obscurities and inconsistencies, largely unexplored; nor has it been examined specifically for the light it sheds on the public life of the late Republic. The outline of the day's events is easily discovered; in this paper I shall examine some of the details, with the aim of showing, above all, why the conspirators settled on the Ides of March and the Curia Pompei as the time and place for their deed.