There is no novelty in suggesting the importance of Roman coins as a source for the study of Roman history; a considerable number of works have explored the possibilities of the subject. The chief problem, however, has always lain in appreciating how far they can take us in an understanding of events: the coins are after all often as tendentious as the literary sources are sometimes alleged to be–or even more so. Further, when the historian moves from attempting to explain the legends to such matters as interpreting features of the portraiture, he is moving on to very subjective ground: for example, what may be the significance of the fact that on Nerva's Divvs Avgvstvs coins, the portrait of Augustus begins to look uncannily like that of Nerva himself? Or again, what are we to make of the fact that the obverse portrait on early coins of Trajan bears a resemblance to that of Nerva?

The unusual personality of Alexander the Great is reflected in an extraordinary number of portraits. They begin in his early youth, and do not end with his death. They continue during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and all subsequent periods down to modern times. The portraits of Alexander not only reflect the different phases of his short life but become an artistic motif for all following periods.

It is perhaps worth while to collect three striking cases where the history of music impinges on that of classical scholarship. My sources are not recondite, but I find that, for I the obvious source, the ‘Bach Reader’, is misleading; for II the evidence is mostly to be found in Grove; for III the only fairly detailed account I know is in Nieck's Robert Schumann (1923, pp. 47 ff.), now difficult to find, which I supplement from the preface to the 1828 Forcellini.

I. From a (Latin) note on Quintilian (i. 12.3, ed. 1738: not in the later editions) by Gesner, a first-rate scholar and lexicographer, who was Rector of the Thomasschule when Bach was Cantor. It is interesting to contrast Gesner's enthusiastic appreciation with his successor Ernesti's contemptuous indifference—which suggests that there is more to be said for Bach in his quarrel with Ernesti than we are sometimes led to suppose.

Quintilian is speaking of the brilliant performances of musicians; Gesner comments: ‘All this you (sc. Quintilian) would think of little consequence if you could return from the other world and see Bach playing with both hands and all his fingers, on an instrument which seems to combine many citharas in one—the organum organorum, running over it hither and thither with both hands and swiftest motion of the feet, eliciting many varied passages and sounds diverse yet unified—if you could see him, I say, doing a thing which several citharists and innumerable tibicines could not do, and not, like a citharoedus, playing only his own part, but equally watchful of all the symphoniaci, to the number of 30 or 40; calling this one to attention by a nod, another by a stamp of the foot, a third by a warning finger; giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it.

Much of the imagery of Aeschylus' plays is vivid and startling. It runs through his tragedies like a thread of bright colour, setting the mood and atmosphere of the drama. Yet often the playwright creates his effects by hints, by a subtle use of a pictorial word here or an unusual verb there. His words are like the quick close-ups of a film which stimulate the imagination to see more, and often it is by a series of visual ideas that he creates the effects he is aiming at.

Servius in his note on Aeneid iv. 92 comments that Virgil uses the epithet Saturnia of Iuno only ‘when she is about to do mischief, for he knows that the planet Saturn has a baleful influence’. An astrological interpretation of Virgil is doubtless interesting, but if, as none will question, Virgil is a poet before he is an astrologer, the only satisfactory explanation of an epithet is one that elucidates its poetic significance. An examination of Virgil's use of the epithet Saturnia does, I think, make it clear both that the epithet has poetic significance and that its significance is intimately bound up with Iuno's role in the poem. Her intervention in the action of the Aeneid determines that action in a way that distinguishes it from the interventions of the various gods and goddesses in the actions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even from the interventions of other gods in the Aeneid itself. Venus behaves in the Aeneid in much the same way as the Homeric gods and goddesses do. She is at hand to perform little miracles for her son, as Athena was at hand to help Odysseus or Telemachus. Now it is a striking fact that the epithets used of Venus in the Aeneid have no special significance. On twenty-one occasions she is referred to as Venus without an epithet, once she is Venus aurea, and four times she is Cytherea. These are all conventional, and agree well with the conventional nature of Venus' intervention in the action.

Readers of Professor E. S. Forster's paper in Greece and Rome, x, 1941, pp. 114–17, may be interested in some of the passages which he does not quote or mention. He refers to Aelian, Varia Historia, xiv. 46, but not to Pollux, v. 47, who speaks of Paeonians as well as Magnesians: Μάγνητας μὲντοὺςἐπὶ Μαιάνλρῳ τρέΦειν φασὶ κύνας πολέμῳ ύπασπιστάς τοιοũτοι Δ̕ἦσαν καὶ Παίοσιν οἱ σύνθηροι κύνες. We hear of a Paeonian and a Perinthian dog in Herodotus, v. I μουνομαχίη τριφασίη έκπροκλήσιός σφι έγένετο καί γάρ άνΔρα ἀνΔρὶ καὶ ἵππον ἵππῳ συνέβαλον καὶ κύνα κυνί.

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.

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.

If recently feminist writers have placed too much emphasis on the restrictions and limitations of ancient women's lives, at least they have provided some compensation for the apologetic and uncritical estimations made before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These earlier studies had tended to single out the accomplishments of certain exceptional women; they tended also to leave the impression that since most ancient women did not appear to have complained about the kind of lives they led, they regarded the customs and laws that governed their lives as equitable and natural. It is easy (at least now) to see that neither premise is acceptable.

Bertold Brecht's wonderful poem Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters (Questions from a Reading Workman) begins by posing (or making his ‘reading workman’ pose) a number of awkward questions:

Wer baute das siebentorige Theben?
In dem Büchern stehen die Namen von Königen.
Haben die Könige die Felsbrocken herbeigeschleppt?
Und das mehrmals zerstörte Babylon –
Wer baute es so viele Mal auf?

Who built seven-gated Thebes?
In books one only finds the names of kings.
Did the Kings haul the blocks of stone all the way up?
And Babylon, the much-destroyed city –
Who was it built it up again so many times?

It is well known that Alexander the Great offered inspiration to successive monarchs and autocrats. Few of these, however, could claim to match the affection shown by the Roman emperor Caracalla (198–217 ce). Caracalla is said to have been an almost pathological aficionado of Alexander, constantly promoting a public association between himself and his idol. One aspect of Caracalla's imitatio Alexandri was allegedly the levy of a peculiar phalangite formation based on the arms and equipment of Alexander's time. For years it was impossible to gauge whether this was a real development or a hostile literary fabrication, but the discovery of funerary remains at Apamea in Syria, which appear to memorialize phalangites and lanciarii, confirmed to some the historicity of Caracalla's bizarre levy. This article argues, however, that the apparently convincing combination of evidence is illusory, and that Caracalla's ‘phalanx’ was rather a convenient label applied to an inherently Roman formation.

In September 46 bc, Cicero delivered a speech in the Senate, praising the dictator Caesar for the clemency and wisdom he had shown in pardoning M. Marcellus. The forgiveness of a man who had been, in Caesar's own words, characterized by particular acerbitas seemed all the more magnanimous, and Cicero recalls the occasion in a letter sent to his friend, S. Sulpicius Rufus. He was so overwhelmed by Caesar's generosity, he adds, that he broke a period of self-imposed silence and spoke at length when he was asked to give his opinion. The words he delivered apparently extempore were later written down and published, probably quite soon after the event of their delivery. It has come down to us as the Pro Marcello, and in this speech Cicero does not just praise the dictator but also attempts to influence Caesar, and steer him towards a more republican attitude.

The basic principles of successful narrative presentation are simple to state, if difficult to achieve. Selection and organization of material to make the desired point; sufficient variety of tone and pace to hold the audience's interest and to emphasize the point; and a proper appreciation of the context in which the point has to be made: these requirements seem to be valid, whether the narrative being presented is a literary history, an imaginative novel, or an archetypal story which starts with ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman …’ For each of these narrative forms implies intellectual judgement by the narrator on his material, artistic judgement about its presentation, and assumptions about the audience for whom it is intended. I should like to consider some aspects of Tacitus' art of narrative presentation, and the connection of that art with his historical judgement.

There is general agreement that from Homer onwards references in Classical writers to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians are almost never to modern Ethiopia or to the highland peoples who were the ancestors or predecessors of present-day inhabitants of the Ethiopian plateau. Homer's Ethiopians are indeed almost in the realm of Märchen; gods visit them, or are reported among them when they absent themselves from Olympus; they are ἔσχατοι ἀνδρν, and without fault or blame; and their only human visitor is Mene-laus. But they are not perhaps wholly fairy-tale. Some Ethiopians fought on the Trojan side in die war (under their king Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos), and the lost Aethiopis, from the Epic Cycle, will have dealt with this. The notorious disjunction of Eastern and Western Ethiopians has a factual ring about it; and Ethiopians might be found in West Africa as well as in East, as Hanno discovered in his voyage in the early fifth century B.c., and in India as well as Africa; for the name, it seems, may be applied to dark-skinned people generally.