One of the most striking dramatic features of the climax of Homer's Odyssey is the lengthy postponement of the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. The sequence of scenes which lead finally to recognition begins at 17.508, when Penelope asks the swineherd Eumaios to summon the disguised Odysseus so that she may question him about her husband. But it is only at 23.205, after many diversions, that she breaks down in tears at the final realization that Odysseus is really home.

It may be argued that some inconsistencies in Thucydides are due to impartiality, to the prevalence of straight reportage based on available evidence, whereas narrative guided and coloured by opinions and judgements would more probably be consistent. The present writer, however, is more impressed by the view that many inconsistencies are due to imperfect integration into continuous narrative of different or even opposing attitudes.

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

Scholars have long recognized that the story of Dido in the Aeneidis structured like a Greek tragedy and that several of Aristotle's concepts in the Poetics can profitably be applied to it. Here I return to an old question, to which no answer yet given has commanded general assent: if Dido is a tragic heroine, what, in Aristotelian terms, is her hamartia? I shall argue that Aristotle's model of tragedy provides a useful blueprint for gauging both Dido's moral responsibility for her downfall and the moral and emotional response to it which Virgil expects from his readers. These matters have indeed been very extensively discussed by very distinguished scholars, but in many areas of classical literature – and nowhere more than in the Aeneid – modern criticism has become so sophisticated and so attuned to the detection of subtleties such as irony, ambiguity, and ambivalence that it sometimes misses the significance of what is simple and obvious. Aristotle's model of tragedy, while not a refined critical tool, helps us to isolate some basic truths about the tragedy of Dido.

The relationship between Tiberius and the senate as a corporate body has attracted frequent attention. That between Augustus and the senate, on the other hand, has suffered comparative neglect. Explanations of the contrast quickly suggest themselves. Not only did Tiberius prove the more willing of the two emperors to participate at sessions; his relationship with the senate is also much better documented, since it forms one of the principal themes of Tacitus' account of the reign in his Annals. But although the relationship which Tiberius determined to establish did have its own distinctive character from the outset, it is important to recognize that it was developed from a foundation painstakingly laid by Augustus. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to trace the nature and growth of Augustus' relationship with the senate, and to assess briefly the significance for the corporate body of Tiberius' different attitude.

The Bellum Civile is a poem great enough to appeal to readers in different periods for different reasons. Thus Dante hugely admired Lucan (quello grande poeta) while not sharing his political views, since he himself favoured a universal monarchy in which the Emperor in possessing all would be free from all appetite, and, therefore, just. Lucan's portrait of Cato so impressed him that in the Convivio, in an allegorical exposition of B.C. 2.326ff., Cato is taken as a figure for God, and in the Divine Comedy he is the guardian at the foot of Purgatory, although he had been a pagan, a suicide, and an opponent of Julius Caesar whom Dante favoured (Brutus and Cassius are with Judas in the mouths of Satan). Nevertheless it is likely that many of Lucan's admirers have been attracted above all by the poet's espousal of libertas and hatred for autocracy. This must account for Shelley describing the Bellum Civile as ‘a poem as it appears to me of wonderful genius, and transcending Virgil’, a judgement that he conceded would be ‘no less unpopular than some of the others I entertain’, and may also help to explain Milton's interest in Lucan. However, in this century the idea has been widespread that the Bellum Civile is not in any real sense a ‘Republican’ poem. There are signs that this view may be hardening into something like an orthodoxy, according to which the poem, if properly understood, and at least as originally conceived, is in no sense a poem of political protest or opposition, and contains no serious criticism of the Principate as such, even if parts of the later books are coloured by Lucan's personal resentment of Nero (it is sometimes even argued that Lucan intended to finish his epic with praise of the imperial peace and of the Principate as a restored Republic). Lucan's political views are thus taken to be (behind the rhetorical fireworks) approximately the same as those of his uncle Seneca. I shall here consider the principal arguments adduced in the debate, and shall indicate briefly why the question is an important one, even for readers primarily interested in the Bellum Civile as poetry.