In 1925 Miss J. R. Bacon wrote concerning Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica: ‘If the centre of the story is sought, that feature which above all others is indispensable, it must be found in the Argo. It is Argo—sea-adventure—that differentiates the Argonautica on the one hand from pure fairy-tale, the six soldiers of fortune and the like, and on the other from the stories of great human appeal like the Homeric poems. The Odyssey, as its name implies, is the story of a man: the Argonautica too is well named—it is the story of a ship and of a voyage.’ It was no doubt because he shared such feelings that Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Tanglewood Tales (1853) made so much of the ‘personality’ of the ship, or, more exactly, of its figurehead, ‘the daughter of the Speaking Oak of Dodona’, which in his version of the story of the Golden Fleece so often advises Jason in his difficulties.

Various attempts have been made, over the years, to assess the character of Dido, and explain her presence in, and extraordinary influence on, the Aeneid. Some critics have seen her as the heroine of an Aristotelian tragedy; others believe that Virgil emulated Pygmalion, and fell in love with his own creation; the most perverse of all call her a digression, a fatal flaw in the construction of the poem, and one which irretrievably weakens our view of Aeneas himself.

Herodotos in Book V tells us how in 499 b.c. came to Athens the smooth-talking political adventurer, Aristagoras, formerly tyrant of Miletus; he was seeking support from that city, under its democratic government now a mere decade old, for the revolt of the Ionian states against the rule of the Persian King. Aristagoras had it seems initiated the revolt (though its basic causes naturally had nothing to do with individuals), and it had in theory, if not in actual fighting, clearly broken out. The Milesian ex-tyrant explained to the Athenian demos, meeting in their sovereign assembly, the great economic advantages that would flow from this participation by subsequent exploitation of the rich domains of the king. He also, as is customary in these matters, belittled the military prowess of the Persians (despite the fact that they had in half a century overthrown all the great empires of the known world); also (what may have been slightly more effective) he appealed to national sentiment, since Miletus, and some of the other coastal settlements of Ionia, claimed to be colonial offshoots of Athens herself. With these and other (unspecified) inducements Aristagoras succeeded in getting a promise of support for the Confederates—which shows, observes Herodotos, how much easier it is to fool thirty thousand people than one man. The one man, of course, was Kleomenes king of Sparta, whom Aristagoras had narrowly failed (the story went) to induce to provide support from Sparta. That the story of Aristagoras at Sparta has many implausible features does not affect the situation. Athens sent help to Ionia, Sparta did not, and whatever the hidden policies concerned, Herodotos chose the occasion to make a criticism of direct democracy.

Juvenal's sixth Satire begins with a prologue describing the Golden Age which, for the light it sheds both on ancient attitudes to the Saturnian myth and on the Juvenalian concept of satire, is sufficiently important to justify extended analysis, an analysis that may begin with a reference to a discussion by Professor W. S. Anderson, who sums up the meaning of the first twenty lines of the satire: ‘Juvenal represents man's degeneracy through a double withdrawal: that of mankind from direct relation with Nature, that of the goddess Pudicitia from the earth.’ The age of Saturn, therefore, represents a moral ideal from which civilized man has degenerated. However, Anderson sees a certain ambiguity in the satirist's attitude to the Golden Age, particularly to the women of the Golden Age: ‘The attitude toward the aboriginal woman was ambivalent. She was morally upright, physically uncouth.’ There is respect for her ‘stern moral attitudes’ but a realization that her ‘stern dishevelled aspect is not at all alluring’

‘If, almost a hundred years ago,’ writes the critic Martin Esslin, Walter Pater could sum up the then prevailing trend in his famous epigram, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, the dominant tendency of our own age might be described as an aspiration of all the arts to attain the condition of images' Certainly it is true that the study of imagery has been a fashionable method of literary criticism for some time and, employed with the proper blend of caution and imagination, has proved itself of service in the interpretation of a number of poets, most notably perhaps Shakespeare. It has long been recognized that Aeschylus is a poet who often works through ‘key’ or ‘dominant’ images; indeed, I suspect that classical scholarship may take some modest pride in having been the first in this field of study, even if it has yet to reach the dizzy heights (and sometimes the excesses) achieved by the Shakespearians.

The existence of the great ‘palace’ which the Emperor Diocletian built for his retirement on the Dalmatian coast near his birthplace of Salona and which forms the nucleus of the present city of Split has been well known for over two hundred years. It was in 1757 that the celebrated Scottish architect Robert Adam visited Spalato, as it was then known; several years later he published his famous book of beautifully executed engravings of the ruins which, quite apart from its importance for the development of European neo-classical architecture in general and of the so-called Adam style in particular, first widely publicized the details of the palace in Europe. Since then the remains have deservedly been the subject of several complete studies and have featured prominently in many books on Roman architecture and on Dalmatia. With such a large amount of literature available in a comparatively accessible form, it is not my intention in this short article to provide either a complete historical account or a complete description of the place; it is rather to look briefly at its history from the time of Diocletian up to the point at which it stopped being a palace and started being a town, and to consider certain aspects of its architecture.

If punctuation there must be, should I place the comma before or after piger? Our Wickham–Garrod Oxford Text has no hesitation in assigning the epithet piger to caballus. Let us turn therefore to E. C. Wickham's note on the passage: ‘piger is best taken (as Bentley) with caballus. There is no point in making the motive the same in both cases.’ ‘Criticism’, wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow, and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.’ I am not setting myself up as a criticus criticorum, for The Preacher's warning ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it’ is hard to forget. This little note hopes it will underline the lesson that a poet is often the best judge of poetry. My poet is, as the title implies, Lord Byron, my critic Richard Bentley, whose suggested improvements of Paradise Lost are not apt to be regarded as his monumentum aere perennius.

The subject of this article is the appearance in archaic Greek literature of the two basic principles of aristocracy as a form of government—republicanism and noble rule—and how they were upheld, augmented, qualified, idealized, and justified against the alternatives of monarchy and the aspirations of non-nobles either to join or disestablish the nobility as the ruling class. When Greek states emerged from the Dark Ages into the clearer light of history in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c., monarchy had almost everywhere given way to aristocracy. More or less exclusive groups of noble families had learnt, in Aristotle's phrase, ‘to take turns in ruling and being ruled’. The formation of the first republics required no change in the ideological climate of the unquestioning acceptance of the noble monopoly of wealth and privilege which we find in Homer and Hesiod, and similarly no change in this climate was required before republican governments were likely to be challenged. The Homeric nobleman's primary obligation, simply expressed in Hippolochus' parting injunction to his son ‘always to be best’, runs contrary to the principle of equals taking turns in ruling and being ruled, and it would not be surprising if many a Greek aristocrat acquiesced in being equal best only because he lacked the opportunity to make himself single best. And where there were narrow aristocracies which by their exclusiveness made permanent political inferiors of noble families which were the socio-economic peers of the politically privileged, as in Corinth under the Bacchiads or Mytilene under the Penthilids, there was likely to be a greater incentive for an ambitious nobleman to usurp for his own family the corporate constitutional superiority of his privileged rivals; and there might be correspondingly less ideological opposition from noble republicans so far as other politically unprivileged nobles would be constitutionally no less deprived under a tyrant, and might have much to gain in power and wealth from supporting the overthrower of the exclusive regime. The disappearance of Dark Age kingship of the Homeric primus inter pares type is nowhere likely to have generated all at once an ideology which made monarchy an anathema. The Homeric king is not even distinguished from the other nobles by a title which is not also enjoyed by the heads of other great houses, and the lack of traditions about the disappearance of kingship suggests that it was undramatic. On the other hand, because tyranny (in the basic sense of an autocracy established in a state which had been a republic) necessarily meant permanent constitutional inferiority for social equals, acquiescence in even a benign and initially popular autocracy was likely to wane once the possibility of constitutional equality had been discovered (however narrow the ruling circle of equals had been).

In a well-known passage in the Apology, Socrates says that if the court release him on condition that he give up questioning the views of his fellow citizens, he will refuse to obey:

… If you say to me, ‘Socrates, this time we will not follow Anytus but will let you go on condition that you no longer spend your time on this inquiry and stop philosophizing; if you are caught doing this again, you shall die’—if you were to acquit me on this condition, I would reply: ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you and as long as I breathe and have the capacity I shall never cease philosophizing …’ (29 c 6–d 5.)