Just as there was a canon of three tragic dramatists, so the ancient world recognized a canon of three dramatists of Athenian Old Comedy: Aristophanes, of course, but also Cratinus and Eupolis. This article is chiefly concerned with Cratinus and Eupolis — a frustrating and unsatisfactory subject. Their plays are lost, and we have to rely on meagre fragments, preserved in quotations or on papyrus, and on various kinds of indirect evidence about their work. There is therefore very little that can be said about them, and even less that can be said with confidence. Nevertheless, the attempt to say something is worthwhile, in part because of the light that it may shed on Aristophanes' surviving works if we can discern something of the context in which he was working, but also because these men were evidently masters of their craft. One word of warning is in order: despite their mastery of the comic craft, uproarious entertainment is not to be expected from a paper on Cratinus and Eupolis; if jokes that have to be explained are notoriously unamusing, what can we expect of jokes that have to be reconstructed conjecturally before they are explained?

How significant are the Attic orators as sources for Athenian history? Their intrinsic importance is certainly very great, greater perhaps than that of any other comparable category of material. On the other hand, they have received surprisingly little direct and systematic attention from ancient historians. This is something of a paradox, and like many paradoxes it is worth examining in some detail: in this case, it has significant implications for the ways in which the orators have been and ought to be studied.

Some time early in 50 B.C. the two elder sons of M. Calpurnius Bibulus the Roman governor of Syria were killed in Egypt by milites Gabiniani, Roman soldiers left there by A. Gabinius – an earlier governor of Syria. What Bibulus' sons were doingin Egypt is a mystery, partly because we do not know how old they were; all we know about them is that they were outstandingly gifted or outstandingly beautiful, or both. The soldiers had been left in Egypt (basically as mercenaries) by Gabinius in 54 B.C. when hehad been bribed by Ptolemy XII Auletes to restore him to the throne from which he had been driven by his exasperated subjects. Why these particular troops took it into their heads to murder Bibulus' sons is another mystery, which we will touch upon, but our main concern here is the effect which the death of his sons had on Bibulus. Our contention is simply that the incident is part of a rarely documented example from the classical world of a clear mental breakdown in one prominent individual. In Bibulus' case it took the form of paralysing shock, followed by grief, depression, and a frenzy of sleepless activity in which he eventually wore himself to death. To understand how this operated in the way it did in this particular case, we need to understand Bibulus the man and his personal history.

In contrast to philosophy the study of language and literature always enjoyed in Rome an unqualified esteem. For experiments such as Plato undertook with Dion in Sicily a Roman would scarcely have had much sympathy. We recall too how disappointed and irritatedthe rhetorician Fronto was when his illustrious pupil Marcus Aurelius was converted to philosophy: ‘May the immortal gods forbid,’ he wrote years later to the emperor, ‘that the Comitium, the Rostra, and the tribunals, which resounded to the speeches of Cato, Gracchus, and Cicero, should fall silent in this very age of ours, that the whole world, which was eloquent when you received it, should through you lose its powers of speech!… [For if] someone should write using the language of the dialecticians, he would describe a Jupiter who sighs, or rather coughs, not one who thunders.’

My subject concerns the practicalities of finding one's way round an ancient city. What aids were there to guide a stranger in town? How did he trace a particular house or other destination? I propose to examine the problem with reference to one of the best known of all ancient cities, Pompeii.

The demands on a modern Latin course are formidable indeed: it must present all the requisite grammatical and syntactical material intelligibly and palatably to learners unfamiliar with the structure of even their native language, whet their appetite for the riches of Latin literature in the original, and allow them to graduate to it as quickly and painlessly as possible. University students, reared on nonlinguistic courses in ‘Classical Civilization’ (uel sim.), bulk large among today's consumers, and as one who has often in recent years had to teach them the Latin language, I wholeheartedly welcomed the appearance in 1986 of Reading Latin (hereafter RL), which expressly sets out to meet the aforementioned needs. Some brief reviews appeared shortly after its publication, but as the authors envisage the course ideally being spread over two academic years (Text p. v), now is perhaps the time for one who has so used it in a university department to appraise it again in the light of experience. Does it work? For some or for all? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How'could it be improved? In offering the following observations and suggestions, I am only too well aware of how easy it is to criticize such a project, and how hard to do better.