The eighth poem of Catullus is in many ways fundamental to our understanding of the poet; in it can be seen something not only of his methods but also of his approach both to his poetry and to the experience which he attempted to express through it. It is possible, by thinking in terms of ‘the Catullan experience’, to be led to overemphasize particular aspects of it at the expense of others and to attempt to find in one particular experience or set of experiences a clue to the man and his poetry. Such an approach may be fruitful; it may throw light on particular aspects of Catullus; but unless we remember that our results can only be partial, there is a danger that we may think we understand him when we do not.

The mysterious crise de profession which saw the painter Euphronios switch to potting in the heyday of his career is a worthwhile topic for discussion and one on which scholars have manifestly avoided committing themselves. That the pioneer red-figure artist should up and change professions quite unannounced and apparently without reason is a curious fact indeed and one which perhaps the optician alone can explain.

The fable as a form of story is characteristically Greek. It is true that fables are also found in early Oriental literature; but these are either imitations (and very feeble imitations) or parallel growths, which never reached the fine flower of the Greek versions. And from the earliest times fables have been associated with the name of one man: Aesop the slave.

The following text and translation is extracted from Joseph Addison's Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 (lines 96–132 and 167–end). The poem celebrates the peace of Ryswick in which William III and his continental allies had halted the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and France had recognized William as King of England. The poem describes, in general terms, William's unification of the allied forces against France, the siege warfare which distinguished the campaigns, and the coming again of agricultural prosperity to war-ravaged Europe. The first extract begins with William's return to England. The omitted lines describe the young William, Dukeof Gloucester, the eldest son of the future Queen Anne, and a firework display in London. The Duke of Gloucester shortly died, and the death of the King himself in 1702 coincided with the outbreak of even fiercer war to prevent the potential unification of the thrones of France and Spain (the War of the Spanish Succession) in which Louis XIV returnedto the support of Jacobite claims to the English crown.

In 1969 on a riverside near the Lenyardi caves (about 5 kilometres from present-day Junnar, in the Indian state of Maharashtra), Dr Satish Deshmukh discovered an alabaster object in the form of half an egg (longitudinally cut) with a young male child lying inside it (with small traces of red paint on the right side of the object). This high-quality oval object (figures 1 and 2) measures about 5 cm × 3.4 cm and is usually interpreted as an item that was originally manufactured in the Mediterranean world before being brought to India, rather than a piece of artwork produced in India itself. One possible, and largely accepted, interpretation is that this figure represents the birth of the god Eros. However, identification of the figure within the egg-like structure is not easily made. While the figure does bear similarities to the putto-style representation of Eros in instances of Greek and Roman art, it does not possess any clear identifying features (such as the wings with which Eros is often depicted). The figure's resemblance to Eros in some of his other iconographic depictions and the egg-like structure around him suggest a possible identification of this infant with Eros and the myth of his birth from an egg. However, without evidence from other iconography of a more clearly identifiable Eros in similar contexts, the figure cannot be said to be him with any certainty. As Dhavalikar notes, this object ‘is the only one of its kind among the classical antiquities so far found in the Indian subcontinent and perhaps has no parallel in the classical world’. Thus the identification of this sculpture as a depiction of Eros in the egg is possible, but not certain.

Seneca's shortcomings as a tragedian are a commonplace of literary criticism. On the one hand, the style of Seneca's plays is condemned for being excessively rhetorical; long, undramatic speeches, full of mythological references, alternate with bombastic utterances; or, as J. W. Duff states, comparing Seneca with his Greek predecessors: ‘in the Latin plays one has entered a new world where genius has been replaced by cleverness, and an eminently classic directness of expression by rhetoric.’ On the other hand, Seneca's detractors claim that extravagance of style is matched by a propensity for gory detail, such as the notorious piecing together of Hippolytus at the end of Phaedra. Thus, according to F. L. Lucas:

if only to make up for the unreality of his ultra-academic drama [Seneca] tries to be vivid by being lurid, to stimulate the jaded imagination of his public by screaming atrocity. Seneca does indeed recall the man in Plato who had a morbid desire to view the corpses in the city ditch; long ashamed to yield to such an impulse, at last he ran to the edge and uncovered his eyes with the cry, ‘There, you wretches, take your fill’.

The contrasts could hardly be drawn more boldly than in the speech On the Crown: from the majestic tone of the prayers that articulate the opening, the conclusion, and some transitions (18.1, 8, 141, 324) to the scurrility of the portrait of Aeschines' parents (18.129–30), from the noble conception of Athens' historical mission as leader in the fight for freedom (18.66ff., 199ff.) to the reading off of the names of the traitors of all the Greek states, a veritable muster-roll of infamy (18.295), from the portrait of the orator's own work in building a resistance to Philip (18.79–94,169ff.) to the depiction of his opponent's inertia, venality, obstructionism, and collaboration with the enemy. Black and white divide the canvas between them with very little room reserved for shading.

One of the most primitive and genuine elements of Roman religion was the feeling that some mysterious power haunted the dark wood. Germany was pre-eminently the land of dark woods in which the practical-minded Roman faltered and lost his way. There were the woods along the banks of the Rhine, in which we sometimes walked in our student days at the University of Bonn. There was the wooded Taunus range, where we visited the reconstructed Saalburg, a fort belonging to the limes or line of entrenchments constructed to protect the Roman territory in south-west Germany. There was Abnoba, the Black Forest; there was the Hercynian Forest; a vague term applied to the vast range of wooded hills stretching a thousand miles from the Rhine along the Danube and around Bohemia to the Carpathians; there was the Saltus Teutoburgiensis, where in A.d. 9 Quintilius Varus and his three legions had been wiped out by the Cherusci under their leader Arminius in a battle which had turned the tide of history; there was the unknown island wood where our grim ancestors, the Anglii and the Saxones, performed the gloomy rites of the goddess Nerthus from which none of the slave ministrants was allowed to come away alive. Beyond lay even wilder regions and more savage peoples: the Aestii or Esthonians, who wore boars' heads and lived on the Baltic shore, from which they gathered amber and were astonished to receive a price for it from the traders; the nomadic Sarmatae of central and southern Russia, who lived in wagons and ate horse-flesh; the ferocious Fenni, or Finns, who had no home at all, but slept on the ground and lived on herbs and any animals they could shoot with their bone-tipped arrows, hunting with the bow being the life of both the man and the woman, while the babies were left with no protection against weather and wild creatures except a sort of hovel made out of interlaced branches; and further still the Hellusii and the Oxiones, who had the faces of men and the bodies of animals; to the north the dead seas of the midnight sun, the frozen Arctic Ocean, where every morning could be heard the noise of the sun rising from the waters, and the horses drawing his chariot could be seen.

If you lived in Reading in 1821, you might be tempted by the advertisement in your local newspaper for forthcoming attractions at the neighbourhood's commercial theatre. Should your taste encompass Greco-Roman themes, you might want to see ‘Monsieur DECOUR, the renowned FRENCH HERCULES!! Who will perform… FEATS AND EVOLUTIONS…’. If you preferred oriental stunts, you would choose ‘The Chinese JUGGLERS from the Court of Pekin!!’ Such exhibitions are fairly typical of the popular entertainments enjoyed during the late Georgian era in any fast industrializing provincial town not too far from London. But what is surprising is that the same newspaper offers a review of a production in the town hall of Euripides’ little known tragedy Orestes.

In most branches of classical study, in the interpretation of history, in criticism, whether textual or literary, and most noticeably in archaeology, the present generation knows more than its parents did; that a similar advance has not been made in the strictly linguistic studies is perhaps due partly to an unexpressed assumption that we already know all that we are likely to know about the classical languages, but is certainly due even more to a love of tradition for its ownsake; what was good enough for Kennedy is good enough for us.

It was a natural and well-established usage in antiquity that works of literature might readily be referred to by their opening words. Aristophanes accidentally lends the ‘Παλλάδα περсέέολιν δεινάν …. ’ ‘Pallas the awful city-sacker …’ of a certain Lamprocles or maybe of Stesichorus and the ‘Τηλέπορον τι βόαμα …’, ‘Some far-reaching shriek …’ of one ‘Kydidas’ a pale and partial immortality this way (Nub.967), and in the imaginary world of Theocritus an imaginary poem the ‘τὸν ἐμὸν Λύκον….’ ‘Lycus my lover…’ by an imaginary ‘Larisaean fellow’ is thus evoked (Id. 14.30). Cicero refers to Ennius' Medea as the ‘Vtinam ne in nemore….’ (Fin. 1.5), and we even find him casually referring to an evidently near-definitive draft of his Cato maior de senectute which he had sent to Atticus as the ‘O Tite si quid …’ (Att.16.3.1) and ‘O Tite …’ 9 Att. 16.11.3): here an opening citation of a citation (of Ennius) is identifying the book, clearly doubly unsuitable as an official title; as if for Atticus the publisher and his clerks in the scriptorium this was a normal practice, mechanically applicable regardless of appositeness. In one of the less gloomy passages in Tristia (2.261) Ovid has a girl broaching Lucretius in not quite the right spirit: sumpserit ‘Aeneadum genetrix …’ ubi pritna, requiret Aeneadum genetrix unde sit alma Venus, and further on (2.534) alludes to the Aeneid in the same way: contulit in Tyrios arma uirumque toros; cf. Persius 1.96 ‘arma uirum’, nonne hoc spumosum etcorticepingui utramale uetus uegrandi subere coctum?, Martial 14.185 accipe facundi Culicem, studiose, Maronis, ne nucibus positis arma uirumque legas. Virgil himself had alluded in the closing signature to the Georgics to his own Bucolica with Tityre, tepatulae cecini sub tegmine fagi (G. 4.566); Ovid elaborates on that at Amores 1.15.25 Tityrus etfruges Aeneiaque arma, though without wanting just mechanically to insist specifically on first line allusions; after all, he could have written segetes instead of fruges in recollection of Ge orgies 1.1. Lastly in this little survey, which is merely illustrative, there is the point that it seems to have been standard Alexandrian practice in cataloguing works to refer, e.g., to ‘The Brothers of X of which the first line is …’, ‘The Phoenissae of Y, the first line of which is …’, presumably to resolve potential ambiguities within and between the canons of particular authors.

Most modern studies of Roman agriculture have concentrated on the methods used for farming on a large-scale and on a commercial basis. This is not surprising since the classical writers on agriculture in Latin, Cato, Varro, and to a lesser extent Columella and Palladius, are mainly concerned with this aspect. And naturally so, since only the gentleman farmer could read them and profit by their advice. There is, as has been remarked by K. D. White, a serious lack of evidence about the life and work of the peasant farmer. This was, however, considered to be of great importance by the Romans themselves:

hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,

hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit,

scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma.