The major puzzle which confronts readers of Odes iii. 14 is the relationship between the public celebration described in the first half of the poem and the private party proposed in the second. Both are responses to the one event—news that Caesar is not, as feared, dead, but has won a victory and is returning home from Spain—but they do not quite harmonize. It is not just that the one response is public and Roman, while the other is private and somewhat Greek, for there is nothing objectionable in this combination. Rather the disharmony lies in a number of contrasts which, taken singly, are slight, but together create an effect which is hard to define but hard to deny.

A study of the personality of Cato Censorius is both interesting and instructive because of the times in which he lived, a period which began with the Hannibalic War and included those fateful fifty years of the second century which ordered the destiny of Rome herself and indirectly of the whole world. In the shaping of that destiny Cato played a not unimportant part, and the interest of the man lies both in what he did and in his reactions to the events which confronted him. Such a study also throws light on ancient biographical methods. To the ancient mind the personal element was by far the most important for the understanding of history; the individual acquired a correspondingly higher value and importance in the interpretation of movements and events; and in a time when the State was confronted with many problems, the men who strove to deal with them in different ways assumed importance in men's minds as provoking those very problems which they were only trying to solve.

There are arid patches in Livy, as in most historians, but for these there is ample compensation in passages of brilliant description and characterization.

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

In terms of telling us what the poem is about, the first stanza of Odes i. 37 is rather nebulous. Nunc est bibendum, as a translation of νῦν Χρὴ μεθύσθην, could have been pregnant with meaning for an educated Roman but it could also have been a straightforward way of saying ‘it's time for a drink’, and the full significance comes out only in retrospect. The substance of the whole stanza can be briefly summarized: now, at last, has come the time for celebrations which will include drinking, dancing, and feasting, and the occasion is not without its religious significance. The transitions are carefully contrived: libero, besides suggesting the vigour of the dancing, has associations with Liber, the old Italian equivalent of Bacchus, while the Priests of Mars were notable as much for the excellence of their College Feasts as for their choreographic dexterity; nor is it surprising that a banquet fit for priests should be laid at the table of the gods.

The Project is working to produce a new course in Ancient Greek, directed at maturer students, and lasting one or two years. Its aim is to promote the fluent and intelligent reading of fifth- and fourth-century Greek, and Homer. The team, supported by a Steering Committee and Advisory Panel drawn from scholars and teachers in Great Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe, started work in September 1974. The first half of the course has been produced and is being tested in some 35 schools and universities in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; the second half is currently being produced and will be used for the first time in the J.A.C.T. Summer School 1976, and after that in the testing institutions. The Project is due to end in August 1977, but it is hoped to finance a fourth year. We hope that, when published, the course will be available in the American and Australian/New Zealand markets: discussions with publishers over the cheapest possible methods of publication are currently being held.

From the several references to the crews of ships in the Iliad and the Odyssey it can be seen that the complement of oarsmen is usually twenty. I assume that Homer is describing the Heroic ships, the ships of the Achaeans, and not necessarily the ships of the time in which he lived. However, naval specialists from the west of Greece, like the Phaeacians, were able to build larger ships; for they sent Odysseus home to Ithaca in a ship with a crew of fifty-two. The ship, too, in which Odysseus left Troy must have been about this size; by the time it had reached Circe's island its complement had been reduced to forty-six, including Odysseus and Eurylochus, but then there had been casualties. Each of the ships which originally left Troy with Odysseus had lost six men during the attack of the Cicones; had it not been for this loss, then, the crew would have been fifty-two. It is true that Odysseus' particular ship had lost six men to Cyclops as well; but it is likely that Odysseus' ship would have been made up to strength from the other ships after the incident. It is at any rate clear that Odysseus' ship had a crew of about fifty, and that the pentekontor, although Homer does not use the actual word π∊ντηκóντoρoς, was in use at the time of the Trojan War.

This deduction is supported by a Mycenaean vase decorated with a ship, found during the excavation of the Tragana Tholos Tomb at Pylos (Koryphasion) and dated by Furumark to 1230–1100.

The fame of Seneca rests on his work as a philosopher and a writer of tragedies on the Greek model. But he can also lay claim to be a humorist. For in what perhaps was an unguarded moment he wrote an amusing satire on the emperor Claudius with the strange title Apocolocyntosis.

The piece is so inconsistent with the high tone of his philosophical writings that it has received from critics almost universal reprobation. Seneca's admirers would be better pleased if his authorship could be questioned. But there is no ground for supposing that the satire is by another pen.

It might be thought that the writer who composed the funeral oration on Claudius could not be so base as to switch so quickly from eulogy to satire. But the formality of a graveside encomium need not preclude more honest sentiments when the funeral is over. It may well be that even in the panegyric Seneca had his tongue in his cheek, for Tacitus remarks that when the speaker (it was Nero) referred to the wisdom and foresight of the dead prince no one could refrain from laughter.

The title presents a problem, for there is no mention in the satire of the transformation of Claudius into a gourd or pumpkin. This has led some to the view that the work is incomplete. Others hold, with the support of Lewis and Short, that the word for a gourd, cucurbita, was used in the metaphorical sense of ‘fathead’ or ‘blockhead’, like the German Kürbiskopf, and thus it is assumed that the witticism is limited to the title.

InGreece and Rome, vol. xvii, No. 51, pp. 128–9, Mr. E. Laughton, referring to pp. 140 ff. of Mr. S. A. Handford's The Latin Subjunctive, put forward Cicero, Att. 3. 20. 1 (‘tibi venire in mentem certo scio quae vita esset nostra, quae suavitas, quae dignitas’) as an example of the imperfect subjunctive in an indirect question in primary sequence, where a preceding imperfect or pluperfect tense has not been employed in mitigation of the violation of sequence. In vol. xviii, No. 54, p. 138, Mr. Handford replies that esset probably means ‘would be’, as Tyrrell took it in Cicero in his Letters, and adds ‘so we are still without a clear example of imperfect subjunctive used in a primary sequence indirect question to express durative (or iterative) action’. In vol. xviii, No. 55, p. 18, Mr. Laughton ‘retreats fighting’, but hopes that ‘some day Mr. Handford's challenge may meet with an unequivocal response’.

In paragraph 3 of the Praefatio to book x of Seneca's Controversiae we read, of the brilliant, but casual declaimer, Scaurus, ‘ex his omnibus sciri potest, non quantum oratorem praestaret ignavus Scaurus, sed quantum desereret’ (‘all this goes to show, not how great an orator the lazy Scaurus was, but how great he missed being’). The variant scire posset in excerpt. Montepessulana can safely be ignored. Though I am sure we should all wish to see an example quoted from a more reputable author than the Elder Seneca, this sentence, occurring as it does in a carefully written preface, confirms Mr. Laughton's intuition that this ‘rational mode of expression’ is not impossible in Latin when the sense of the dependent verb is ‘obviously durative’.

Alexander's parents were both striking personalities. Olympias, a native of Epirus, whose family traced their ancestry back to Achilles, was jealous and possessive—and terribly passionate. Her emotions found an outlet in the wild orgiastic rites of Dionysus, and at Alexander's accession and again after his death her desire for vengeance erupted in acts of unbridled savagery. This streak of cruelty reappears in Alexander, especially when in his later years he was under increasing strain. Philip, too, was capable of great passion although he nearly always managed to control himself. It is scarcely surprising therefore that their son should occasionally be subject to volcanic outbursts. To call him, as Mithridates VI of Pontus has been called, a ‘barbarian varnished’ would be absurd; it is scarcely less so to expect from him the conduct of a Greek gentleman or the product of one of our public schools. He also reproduced some of Philip's most notable qualities. We see in him the same reckless, even foolhardy, bravery, the same dogged persistence, the same open-handed generosity. From his father he inherited too his capacity for managing men and affairs.

It is well known that many poets, from Callimachus (Anth. Pal. ix. 507) down to those mentioned by Rosamund Harding on pp. 38—9 of her book An Anatomy of Inspiration (Cambridge, 1942), have preferred to compose their works by night. It is perhaps less well known that some poems are or claim to be the result of involuntary insomnia. One example is Catullus 1. Catullus had spent a day composing poetry in the company of his friend, the brilliant young ‘new’ poet Licinius Calvus (lines 1–16):

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi

multum lusimus in meis tabellis,

ut convenerat esse delicatos:

scribens versiculos uterque nostrum

ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,

reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum.