The death of T. S. Eliot removed from the world of English letters a staunch and resolute advocate of the Greek tradition in our modern literature. The precise interaction between this tradition in which the poet believed so firmly and his own five verse dramas therefore deserves some consideration.

The part of Aeneid ii which deals with the death of Priam has something in common with the murder of Duncan in Macbeth. Against a background of treachery and darkness, fitfully illumined by the flare of torches and the fiercer glare of fire, we witness the brutal murder of an old and kindly king. To the audience in the classical world, who knew the story of Ilium's fall in its every detail, the scene in which Sinon plays false must have been, like the opening act of Macbeth, top-full of dramatic irony.

Horace is a professional; and professionalism is not a marked feature of English lyric poetry: we think of Blake rather than Ben Jonson, of Shelley rather than Tennyson, and look less for perfection of form than individuality of content: personal revelation, a message of revolt, or esoteric symbolism. Moreover we tend today to distrust formality, in poetry as elsewhere, and to identify it with insincerity. ‘Scilicet vere quod placet ut non acriter elatrem!’ Provided sincerity is present, we are prepared to endure any amount of tedious revelation of the inmost trivialities of uninteresting minds, and the cruder the expression, the firmer the guarantee of sincerity. Strict and complex forms impose restrictions on a poet's utterance, and thus render his thought suspect.

On 14 December 1968 the following report from New York appeared on the front page of the Guardian: ‘An American-Italian team of archaeologists has found the long-lost site of Sybaris, known throughout the ancient world for its wealth and the luxurious life of its citizens. The discovery of the city was announced last night at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. F. G. Rainey, director of the University's museum, and Professor Giuseppe Foti, superintendent of antiquities at Calabria, said that the city, which disappeared around 510 B.c. after a civil war, had been found “beyond reasonable doubt”…’ When the excavation of Sybaris starts in earnest, it is expected to produce material of the first importance for the study of Greek colonial history in the archaic period. In view of the general interest that the excavation will arouse, it is worth summarizing what is known about Sybaris, to explain both the considerable efforts that have been made to find the site of the city, and the potential importance of its discovery.

How old was Propertius when he wrote the Cynthia? It makes a difference to our understanding and appreciation of the poems. The poet's handling of language, and the lover's relations with his mistress, will be differently viewed if we guess his age at the date of publication as twenty-five or twenty-six, and if we calculate it at fifteen or sixteen, as seems to me more probable. The date of his birth is unknown; topical allusions in the poems indicate a date before which a poem would not have been written, but do not indicate how much later it was published as part of a book. ‘The Augustan poets—and, probably, other poets in other ages—when they published a book did not trouble to bring every detail in it “up to date” or to eliminate from it everything that had been appropriate at the time of writing but proved less appropriate at the moment of publication’ (E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford, 1957), 287). Nor have we any assurance that a poem published in Book Two or Book Three was written later, whether in its original or in its final form, than any poem in Book One. A poem rejected, for whatever reason, from an early collection, may fit quite well, perhaps after reworking, into a later one.

The Romans were oriented toward warfare and their highest honour was the iustus triumphus of the successful general. For the commanders glory, but the soldiers in the legions were subject to severe discipline and rarely received mention in the literary sources. This was natural because of the numbers involved, but the aristocratic nature of the Roman Republic made even more striking the difference between the treatment of aristocratic officers and the men in the line. After Cannae, Varro, the general responsible for the disaster, and Cornelius Scipio, tribune of the soldiers, both escaped death. Varro was publicly thanked quod de re publica non desperasset (Liv. xxii. 61.14). He was not given an army command again, but Scipio was given the highest commands and lived to gain the cognomen ex virtute Africanus. The fate of the common soldiers who survived was very different: various penalties, including service to the end of the war (xxiii. 25. 7), and service without pay in 215 (xxiii. 31. 2), Later their plea for remission of punishment was met with chill haughtiness by the Senate (xxv. 5. 10–7. 4).

The only suggestions which attempt to deal with the reading of the manuscripts are that of Clodachzh (‘in search of spices’, which in addition to its improbability uses propter in a causal, and not in a local sense; the latter alone appears to be the Lucretian usage) and that of Ellis, ‘which does preserve most of the letters but shuffles them up in an impossible manner’ (Bailey) and for this reason has not found acceptance. Common ground for emendation is the need to provide a substantive with the meaning ‘ships’ for velivolis. It follows that if this is to be done, and if at the same time anything resembling the manuscripts' propter odores is to be retained, then a lacuna containing navibus must be presumed. (There is no help to be obtained from ii. 417, which does no more than record the existence of propter odores, words which there fit the context.)

In a recent article on Menander, Professor Arnott acknowledges his debt to the conclusions of the late Armin Schäfer with regard to the construction of the Dyskolos. Schäfer's theory, briefly stated, is that Menander was faced in this play with the problem of combining two different themes—the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon. Menander comes near to a solution, argues Schäfer, but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action. In the following pages I shall try to show that the conflict between the two sides of the play is an imaginary one (created in our minds, perhaps, by our knowledge of the lines along which ‘comedy of intrigue’ and ‘comedy of manners’ subsequently developed), and that the carefully integrated plot reflects a unity of theme in the comedy as a whole.

The Emperor Justinian, who succeeded his uncle Justin to the throne of Byzantium in A.d. 527, probably never intended to mark an epoch. Not, at least, the epoch which the modern historian must assign him. For his reign is in a sense a watershed; he was the last Roman emperor and the first Byzantine one. The reality of a Roman Empire embracing the whole Mediterranean had suffered a little before Justinian owing to circumstances. Among the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths in Spain, it was more fiction than fact, but it was a fiction which was still cherished, and not merely in Constantinople. After Justinian, the concept was not dead; but it was clearly losing force.