I Recently saw a film of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus containing some fine performances and some sensitive direction. One scene I particularly remember because it made clear a point which has usually been either shirked or muddled through both in production and in scholarly comment. When Oedipus was listening to locasta's speech about the oracle given to Laius, he followed her with close attention as far as the phrase ‘a place where three roads meet’. Then he started, turned away from her, and walked past her towards the camera with a brooding face. Behind him we saw locasta continuing the speech which Oedipus obviously was not hearing. The two lines 718–19 which Oedipus did not hear contain some scope for emotion on locasta's part (ἔρριψεν, and the rare tribrach in the fifth foot), but Oedipus was unaware of it, thinking about the road to Daulia, and heard nothing to remind him of what he knew very well, that he was standing on two scarred feet.

In a particularly entertaining section of Metamorphoses i, lines 253–437, Ovid retells the old Greek version of the myth of the Flood, the survival on Mount Parnassus of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and their repopu-lation of the earth.

The words ‘rhetoric’ and ‘rhetorical influence’ come readily enough to the tongue when people talk of Greek and Latin literature, but all too often a great vagueness hangs about them; one is seldom sure whether they are being used historically with reference to certain facts of ancient education or as terms of abuse for some ‘insincerity’ or ‘artificiality’ in literature which the speaker invites us to deplore. My object here is to supply a few facts about the ancient rhetoricians and their intentions, and then to add some observations about the relevance of what they were doing to our own understanding of the ancient writers. Most of what I say is about Greek rather than Latin rhetoric, but I shall of course draw on Latin material, which, for some parts of the subject, is both more abundant and more intelligent than what survives hi Greek. Richard Volkmann, on whose great book we still depend, confessed that the only way by which he came to understand what rhetoric meant to the ancients, and to feel that he had in his hands an ‘Ariadne's thread’ to the labyrinth, was by the repeated reading of Quintilian.

‘Few provincial industrial towns have anything much to recommend them, but Laurion has a sinister ugliness that is all its own.…’ so Osbert Lancaster; nevertheless the dusty little town has a certain extra interest for those who take the long road to Sunion and so pass through it. For it was there that the famous silver of Athens was mined. But for all that the area has been remarkably little examined. There has been much work devoted to the boundary stones and demes, but the mining itself has been largely ignored since the Compagnie Française des Mines du Laurion began to rework the old mines at the end of the last century. At that time (1896), E. Ardaillon published the only book on the mines that has as yet been written, and apart from a few all too cursory reports little has been done either to check his findings or to extend his work.

This paper is an investigation of the rise to power of P. Clodius in the last years of the Roman Republic. Its purpose is to form a judgement on Clodius' own policies and to estimate the political significance of his career. This involves many detailed historical problems. Though I shall suggest solutions to some of these, my main aim is to seek a general interpretation of Clodius' political persona.

Classical Association branches hold yearly Latin reading competitions: J.A.C.T. sponsors records of eminent scholars reading Latin in the way that their learning and sensibility direct them. They recognize that, with the knowledge of Latin speech rhythm for ever lost, they run the risk of disturbing Virgil's ashes and rousing unseemly laughter in Hades' realm; but, ungrateful to the late Professor Beare for his agnostic warning, they read up accurately and hope for the best.

In all parts of the world primitive men have always been aware that death and life are indissolubly linked, that the growth of the seed depends on the death of the fruit. Of course this conception is by no means limited to primitives, it is fundamental to a number of world religions, not least to the Christian faith. The evidence that ancient peoples regarded death as a necessary source of life is massive. It is contained in all those stories about dying gods and divine kings which Frazer collected in his monumental Golden Bough and in the more recent studies of Joseph Campbell. Similarly, human sacrifice, voluntary or otherwise, was usually performed to propitiate or gain the support of the gods, especially those of the underworld, and the spirits of the dead. The same is true of many animal sacrifices and offerings of fruits. Unless the needs of the nether powers were satisfied, Death would naturally claim perhaps even more than his due, the living would then suffer, animals and crops would perish—an everyday notion poetically expressed by Horace in his Ode to Faunus.