Until the fifth century B.C. all Greek poets made their poems for hearing not for seeing, for the ear and not for the eye. Poetry was social rather than private being usually sung, recited, or performed at religious ceremonies, festivals, feasts, or entertainments. Even when the Greeks began to read poetry privately for themselves – Euripides is the first known possessor of a private library – they read it aloud, not silently as we generally do. Silent reading of literature – as distinct from business documents – is not clearly attested until the fourth century A.D.

In a previous paper (Greece & Rome 26 (1979), 21–31) I began to consider how Horace in the Odes gives poetic shape to moral philosophy, or reflections on how to live. This article tries to take the same topic a little further. The poems considered there were close to the teachings of Epicurus; the ones treated here are less markedly so. But Horace's ethics, like his poetic imitatio as a whole, are not a slavish reproduction, but a re-creation. They are, moreover, as is proper, related to his life and work as a poet: Odes 1.31 is the most overt expression of this, but by no means the only one. It is strikingly true of Odes 1.7 and 2.9 because both echo in a significant and original way the aesthetic programme of Callimachus, giving it, as Horace often does, an ethical dimension.

In Dio's debate on constitutions, set in 29 B.C., the speech favouring democracy occupies chapters 2–13 of book 52, and the speech urging monarchy runs from 14–40: most of this speech, indeed the main content of the whole book, is a detailed set of proposals for the administration of the Roman Empire, written with a view to being applicable in the writer's own time, more than two hundred years after the dramatic date of the debate. the dramatic date of the debate. Millar calls these chapters ‘a political pamphlet’, and suggests that Dio abandoned an earlier plan to fit them in to book 52. There is evidence, though, that the book was planned in its present form, but for the lacuna between chapters 13 and 14, and that the relatively brief speech of Agrippa was composed not as part of what was intended to be a balanced debate (balanced in terms of length, with point answering point in the rival speeches), but as a brief preliminary piece in explicit and implicit contrast and opposition to the ideology of the speech which forms the main thesis of the book; in a coherently planned debate, Dio states first the case for democracy in order to provoke the reader to question whether it could have been put into action – whether it is realistic.

We begin with an obvious but not simple question: Who are, or were, the elderly? There is, of course, a vague biological boundary-line, but the ‘concept of ageing is a statistical one, and no valid means ofmeasuring it in the individual are available'. Statistically, today as in antiquity, the agreed points at which to draw the line in general terms seem to be either sixty or sixty-five. In concrete terms, however, there are many lines, determined by social, economic, and political considerations, for which biology provides no more than crude limits. For example, in England today a woman qualifies as an old-age pensioner at sixty, a man at sixty-five. Retirement is normal in the civil service at sixty, compulsory in the universities at sixty-five or sixty-seven, depending on a vote taken in individual institutions more than twentyfive years ago, but in Scotland at seventy. Members of parliament and until recently judges, in contrast, are allowed to go on until they drop if they so choose, and many do so choose. That these variations are directly linked with political influence, pensions, the desire to spread employment, access to lucrative post-retirement employment, ideology, and so on, not with biology, is self-evident.

The quarter century from 500 to 475 B.C. saw the supreme masters of red-figure vase-painting working in Athens. The matching of design to shape, the clarity of contour in the figures, the vivid sense of life expressed in the compositions were the hallmarks of such painters as the Berlin and Kleophrades Painters who mainly decorated large vases and such painters as Onesimos and the Brygos Painter who specialized in the smaller. It was a time too when the heavy reliance on myth that had been the staple of the sixth-century painters, was being lightened by the increased popularity of scenes from contemporary life: from the life of men there were athletics, parties, religious rituals, and manual labour, from that of women weddings, mourning the dead, and the daily tasks of the household.

Controversy about the evaluation of Euripides' Electra still rages as fiercely as empty tigers or the roaring sea. ‘Euripides’ play is a singular instance of poetical – or rather unpoetical – obliquity … perhaps of all Euripides' extant plays the very vilest'; ‘as a drama of character, Electra is supreme … in its own genre, this is undoubtedly Euripides' masterpiece'; it contains ‘a power of sympathy and analysis unrivalled in ancient drama’; its characters are ‘involved in a persisting interpenetration of merit and status which accords some measure of tonal unity to this indifferent play.’ When a play earns judgements as contradictory and incompatible as these, one important stimulus to the verdicts is usually the critic's subjectively emotional response to a play whose views about society and society's values are provocative; more reliable (because less subjective) criteria of literary merit, such as the interplay of plot, character, structure, imagery, and ideas, are then subordinated or comparatively neglected as elements in the evaluation. Euripides' Electra is just such a play. It attacks, both openly and implicitly, some of the traditional values still held by many Athenians in 413 B.C., the probable date of the play's production, with a commitment that has engaged a great deal of scholarly attention. The techniques which Euripides deploys in his attack, however, have not been adequately studied. They provide the rationale, as well as the title, of this paper. Before the ‘double vision’ can be explained, however, it will be as well to outline briefly those traditional values subjected to the Euripidean vitriol.

Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate – even a woman undergraduate – reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear (Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denunciation of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement – a decade late – got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholarship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask. What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race?