The Heracles as Euripides' other middle plays has not escaped censure for its faulty structure. From Swinburne's judgement of it as a ‘grotesque abortion’ one comes to Norwood who says of Gilbert Murray's view ‘A great Hellenist who is the last man to hunt for blemishes in Euripides has rightly called Heracles “broken-backed”’, and he adds himself that the play ‘at best must be called ramshackle work’ or ‘The action falls into 2 halves visibly separate though tied together. In each instance a champion of the poet if ingenious and resolute enough can devise some statement that will force unity of action upon his recalcitrant material, but the mere fact that he must so labour refutes him’.

The following is the sixth of the series which began in G & R 20 (1973), 38 ff. and 155 ff. and was continued in volumes 21 (1974), 165 ff., 25 (1978), 70 ff. and 125 ff., and 27 (1980), 48 ff.

The supernatural forces at work in Vergil's epic narrative are succinctly presented in the opening lines – ‘Italiam fato profugus Lauiniaque uenit | litora … iactatus et alto | ui superum saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram’: far more prominently too than in Homer. If the Stoic overtones that fatum carried in Augustan Latin were remote from the notion of a divine autocrat's arbitrary will, the wrath of Juno takes us back uncompromisingly to the Homeric world in which the seafaring Odysseus is perpetually harassed by Poseidon (Od. 1.20 etc.) and Hera is implacably opposed to Trojans (Il. 1.536 etc.), on account of the judgement of Paris and the abduction of Ganymede, which are explicitly mentioned in Aen, 1.26–8.

There appeared in Greece & Rome during the 1960's three articles devoted to aspects of the Athenian Silver mines in the Laurion district of southern Attica: a visitor's brief observations in C. Macdonald's ‘The Ancient Mine-workings of Laurion’ (vol. 8 (1961), 19–21, pis II–IV) and a scholar's description of the area and the history and organization of the mines in R. J. Hopper's ‘The Mines and Miners of Ancient Attica (ibid., 138–51), and then again an account of the geology of the area and the ancient methods of mining and ore-processing in C. J. K. Cunningham's, ‘The Silver of Laurion’, published six years later, but founded on visits made in 1962 (vol. 14 (1967), 145–56).

‘He is the surgeon of old authors, and heals the wounds of dust and ignorance. He converses much in fragments and desunt multas.’ This was the typical classical scholar, as described by John Earle in 1632; nowadays, the words would apply most readily to the papyrologist. Papyrology's business is with the papyri, the books and papers of the Greek-speaking settler-class which ruled Egypt for ten centuries (300 B.C.–A.D. 700). The Greek Egyptians dumped their waste-paper; and the Egyptian climate has preserved it – dirty, tattered, and worm-eaten – for our study. This vast rubbish-dump provides, and will go on providing, a whole range of new evidence for historians of Greek literature and Roman government. This paper sets out to survey some recent contributions.