Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.

It was towards the close of his life in 43 B.c. that Cicero wrote the three books of the de Officiis. The attractions of a philosophical treatise whose theme is moral duty are likely to appear slight to the modern reader, especially if that reader thinks its author to be merely the purveyor of second-hand ideas borrowed from Greek sources. Yet the de Officiis epitomizes, in an intensely Roman way, the political beliefs and ideals of the Senatorial order at Rome as the Republic finally succumbed to autocracy. The political philosophy of the ancients may be more immediately relevant today than their ethical speculation, for, while it is folly to interpret political activity as if the Roman Republic enjoyed a two-party system composed of left-wing populates and right-wing optimates, it is true that much of the turmoil generated during the last century of the Republic was related to proposals for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land; similarly, much of the debate currently being conducted between supporters of the rival ideologies is centred about the ownership of property and assets. Perhaps we may be encouraged to survey the de Officiis more sympathetically if we approach it as political scientists and as students of this subject mindful of the writings of another ancient, the historian Thucydides, and his opinion that, human nature being a constant, situations will repeat themselves in the same or a very similar form.

Studies of Horace's imitation of Greek lyric in his Odes have tended to concentrate on particular supposed echoes. Given that the surviving Greek texts are few and fragmentary, this method is bound often to lead to dubious and unsatisfactory results. A broader approach directed at the syntax, structure, and myths of the Odes produces, in my view, a clearer understanding of how Horace hoped to enter the canon of lyric poets (Odes i. 1. 35 f.). This paper expounds Odes iii. 11 exempli gratia as a serious Horatian attempt to write the Latin equivalent of an early Greek lyric. It shows some of the ways in which Horace has concentrated the characteristics he observed in his predecessors and composed an ode which is a close-knit complex of Greek lyric linguistic and conceptual mannerisms.

Is Menander, in any sense of the word, ‘modern’?1 And if he is, what relevance does this have to the quality of his plays? Such questions will perhaps be asked more in our present age, when some of our critics appear to idolize modernity in art, literature, or music at the expense of quality; and they are questions capable of a wide variety of positive answers. In one way Menander is modern because a large section of his work—the Dyskolos, several hundred lines complete of the Aspis and the Samia, significant fragments of several other plays—has been discovered in Egypt and printed for the first time during the last sixteen years. Or again, Menander is modern because indirectly at least he has influenced the modern world's comedy of manners down to the time of Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse. He is modern, too, because he writes about the recurrent problems of families, young and old alike, as they wrestle with love and greed, worry about status and reputation, and flounder in a morass of misconceptions. But the aspect of Menander's modernity that interests me most of all is his apparent concern with certain dramatic and stylistic techniques which living writers deliberately apply in their novels and plays, techniques which our modern critics love to label as undisputedly modern.

The trial (undoubtedly for maiestas) of Marcus Primus, former proconsul of Macedonia, is described only by Cassius Dio—and his account is unsatisfactory in more than one respect. According to Dio, Primus was accused of making war upon the Odrysae, a friendly Thracian tribe, during his governorship. His defence was that he had acted at the behest of Augustus, though sometimes he named Marcellus. When Augustus of his own accord came into court and, asked by the presiding praetor whether he had given the order, denied it, Primus' advocate Licinius Murena demanded what he was doing there and asked who had summoned him. Augustus' brief reply—‘the interest of the state’—won him the approval of people of good sense; but a considerable number of jurymen voted for Primus' acquittal all the same, and the trial was followed by the conspiracy of Fannius Caepio, in which Murena was alleged to be implicated.

Suetonius tells us that Nero's dying words were ‘Qualis artifex pereo’, and amongst English-speaking peoples he is generally known as ‘the man who fiddled while Rome burned’. Even if the ‘famous last words’ are legendary, there is a basis for the second story in Suetonius' account that during the fire of 64 Nero sang ‘the destruction of Troy’ in his stage costume. Yet despite the picture of Nero the performer which emerges from all our ancient sources, it is only in comparatively recent times that historians have given serious consideration to Nero's artistic pretensions. History it would seem is the propaganda of the victors, and that most hurtful remark of Vindex, that he was a bad lyre-player, has often been regarded as the appropriate verdict upon Nero.