The influence of Seneca's tragedies is now a commonplace: it was Seneca, not Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Euripides, who provided the classical models for Renaissance and Elizabethan Tragedy. To quote the considered judgement of a distinguished English scholar, the late H. B. Charlton: ‘Seneca's influence on the serious drama of most of Western Europe is almost immeasurable.… In effect, the Latin dramatist founded a tradition which at least until the 19th century passed through Europe in secure and often undisputed triumph.’ The precise extent of his influence and the ways in which it was exercised are matters which are still in dispute, and I cannot hope to say anything new about them in the space at my disposal. What I hope to do, however imperfectly, is to try to look at Seneca through the eyes of those on whom he made his first impact in England and to examine in retrospect the sources of his appeal to dramatists in the second half of the sixteenth century: why was it that he came to be described as ‘our Seneca’ even by one who was able to recognize the superiority of the Greeks, as those who were most influenced by the Roman were not?

Juvenal's Fourth Satire has not attracted the critical attention to which its interest and literary merits entitle it. It has a further claim to extended discussion inasmuch as it is precisely those features that make it an untypical specimen of Juvenal's work as a whole which throw light on his technical resources and, paradoxically perhaps, on some of the distinctive qualities of his own particular brand of satire.

In the ten years between 1929 and 1939 three remarkable books were produced in a tiny Irish-speaking community of less than one hundred and fifty people living on the Great Blasket, an island off the south-west coast of Kerry. The authors, two men and a woman, were peasants, eking out a scanty living by farming and fishing. They were technically literate in that they had acquired the rudiments of reading and writing at the island school, but for all practical purposes their culture was oral. They certainly had neither opportunity nor inclination for book-reading. Yet out of the resources of their oral culture they produced works of a high literary standard, one of which has (in translation) achieved the status of a ‘World's Classic’.

This article, which makes no claim to scholastic profundity, arose from a discussion as to whether the use of a supine to translate a purpose clause after misit was admissible in G.C.E. ‘A’ level Latin Prose.

This construction, which describes action as a goal of motion, is explained in probably all syntax books used in schools: e.g. North and Hillard, Latin Prose Composition, has a note (p. 110) in which the following examples are given of ways to express purpose:

Legates misit ut pacem peterent

qui pacem peterent

ad pacem petendam

pacis petendae causā

pacem petitum

It is also noted that the future participle (pacem petituros) occasionally occurs in this sense. This use is so rare that I do not propose to consider it.

Pliny the Elder, enumerating the different varieties of chalk, writes, ‘Vilissima qua circum praeducere ad victoriae notam … instituerunt maiores’ (NH xxxv. 47. 199). The Loeb translator gives: ‘The most inferior kind is the one which our ancestors made it the

practice to use for tracing the line indicating victory in circus-races.’ If Pliny meant no more than ‘to mark out the winning-line in the circus’, he seems to have used a curiously clumsy way of expressing it, ‘to mark out the circus at the winning-line’. Elsewhere he uses praeducere more straightforwardly. When he is describing how channels were constructed in mountainous country to bring water to mines, he says that workmen, hanging in cradles from the top of precipices, ‘lineas itineri praeducunt’, ‘mark lines for the route’. We might then have expected him to write, ‘In circo praeducere victoriae notam’, had that been his meaning. If, however, lanes were marked on the track from the carceres to Cassiodorus' ‘break-line’ (Fig. 1), Pliny's expression is justified, ‘to mark out the circus near the winning-line’. The winning-line may have been the same as the break-line, or it may have been level with the meta (A–B, Fig. 1). Pliny's words are equally suitable in either case, as the lanes were at the same end of the circus as the winning-post and near it.

This is the somewhat surprising moral drawn by Horace, in the twelfth poem of the fourth book of Odes (lam verts comites), from an idyllic description of spring, which includes the nesting of the unhappy bird that weeps for Itys and goes on to an Arcadian scene of shepherds with their pipes. In this ‘thirsty season’ Vergilius, who is addressed as iuvenum nobilium cliens, is invited to join the poet in broaching a jar of wine (but to earn his drink with a gift of perfume) and to forget for a while his usual preoccupations:

verum pone moras et studium lucri,

nigrorumque memor dum licet ignium

misce stultitiam consiliis brevem:

dulce est desipere in loco. (25–8)

The private life of one of the great figures of history, indeed, as a discerning judge has recently put it, ‘perhaps the most civilized man who ever lived, attracts and deserves attention. A considerable, though subordinate, part in the life of a Roman of the upper classes was played by his servants, who ministered to his comfort, supported his dignitas, and were essential agents in his political work. In the case of Cicero these servants are known to us from his letters, while the staffs of other republican magistrates are much less completely revealed. An investigation of his more trusted and important servants, that is his freedmen, should cast light both on Cicero's private character and on the extent to which he relied, in his political and private life, on his subordinates.

The Μελιταῖον κυνίδιον, as the very word κυνίδιον or its Latin equivalent, catulus, suggests, was a little lap-dog. It was so small that Aristotle compares it with an ἴκτις or marten and Aelian with the Indian Phattage. People commonly called it νανούδιον—a little dwarf. It was a well-proportioned, flat, long-haired dog with a bushy tail and a sharp nose of the type of the Spitz or Pomerian. We are also informed that it barked in a squeaky voice.

During the period of the Roman Republic incense from Arabia, ivory from East Africa, pepper from India, and perhaps an occasional consignment of silk from China had reached Roman markets, having passed through the hands of many eastern merchants. The trade had remained small, for such wealth as Rome possessed was in the hands of a small number of landowners or financiers, and the unsettled conditions in the eastern Mediterranean were not conducive to a free flow of trade.