The best Latin poetry loses nearly all its quality in translation and even the beginnings of its appreciation need a little knowledge of Latin. This is not entirely a truism, or universally applicable. Some poetry, like Homer and the Psalter, can be truly though partially apprehended through translations; but the spirit of Latin poetry, deprived of its own embodiment, eludes us. The Italian Camena, however wooingly the great translators approach her, ‘flies, plunges deeper in the bowering wood’, in that sylvan felicity of sound answering to sound, which links Latin poetry to the senses rather than to the intellect, and refuses to yield up its secret in any language except its own.

The social and economic life of the ancient world was reared upon a substructure of slavery. The commercial greatness of Carthage, Tyre, and Babylon had depended on the same principle. Amid all the variety of notions and dominant ideas current in classical civilization there was one point of agreement. ‘It was universally assumed’, as Dr. A. N. Whitehead expresses it, ‘that a large slave population was required to perform services which were unworthy to engage the activities of a fully civilized man.’

TheAb Vrbe Condita of Livy has been on many counts justly criticized as defective. The inaccuracy of his battle accounts, the vagueness of his geography, the occasional confusion caused by his failure to reconcile divergent accounts in his sources, the distortion of history through the excessive partiality shown to one or other of his ‘heroes’, and in general the highly rhetorical nature not only of his speeches but also of his dramatic narrations, which inevitably causes distortion—all these are formidable and justifiable criticisms. Some of these faults are, of course, attributable to the conventions of rhetorical history initiated by Isocrates, which dominated Roman historiography. Others have their cause in the fact that Livy was a book-scholar pure and simple; he seems not to have understood fully the tactics employed on the battlefield or the manifold devices used in sieges, nor to have visited many of the sites he describes. Now it is essential to expose these limitations, but in a sense it is unfair to condemn Livy for them, since they arise from human defects which would have required a heroic determination to repair.

One of the more interesting features of Terence's dramatic work is the evidence in it of frequent conflict between the dramatist and the dramatic conventions of his day. To some instances of this conflict, represented by criticisms, explicit or implicit, of convention, attention has been drawn by Sir Gilbert Norwood in his book on The Art of Terence. But even he has perhaps not followed up the fuller implications of Terence's critical attitude in determining the nature of his drama. My purpose in this article is to show that there was one convention against which, above all others, Terence consistently rebelled, namely, the convention of the slave who manages the action; and I would even go so far as to suggest that his success as a dramatic artist is, to a large extent, dependent upon the way in which he solved the problem of the slave.

In laying out the plot of the Aeneid there were certain features to which Virgil was committed. They were connected with plot, treatment, and theme. As to plot: the outlines of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Tiber were so well known that Virgil was bound to follow them fairly closely. They were to Virgil what Holinshed's Chronicles were to Shakespeare. As to treatment: by current literary etiquette, a writer of epic was obliged to follow established models, especially those of Homer, both in the larger design and in the shaping of notable incidents. As to theme: the essential purpose of the Aeneid was to show that Aeneas was a man of destiny, called by the gods to lead a chosen people to an appointed home in Italy.

Juvenal is here alluding to two passages of Horace's hexameter poetry in particular. First, by listing various alternative genres (epic, comedy, elegy, tragedy) before stating his own preference for writing satire (19 hoc campo), Juvenal recalls Horace's use of the same technique at S. 1.10.40ff. Second, Juvenal has borrowed several words, phrases, and ideas from Hor. Epist. 2.2.90–105

When we think of the philosophers of the first and second centuries of the Christian era the names that occur to our minds are almost certainly those of Stoics - Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. It would not occur to many to include Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom. Plutarch is generally regarded primarily as the author of Lives, while Dio Chrysostom is more often thought of as an orator. But these two have a philosophic approach also, which tends to be overlooked because it cannot be labelled as belonging to any one philosophical school. Both are eclectic and adhere to no single philosophical line; both adopt reasonableness and common sense as their guides. Their aim is to give useful, practical advice to men and communities on how to survive in the present world and to maintain moral principles. They are first and foremost moralists.

In a recent contribution to Greece & Rome, Thomas Harrison illustrated how the conceit of the United States as the ‘New Rome’ colours our knowledge of both the ancient world and our own. His deceptively light-hearted approach and examples illustrated that the transhistorical approach is certainly one that can be used for fun; however, at its core, the article poses a much more serious question – can the transhistorical approach to imperialism be used for profit? Or, as Harrison posed the question, ‘Can an understanding of ancient imperialisms cast light on contemporary experience?’ Acutely, Harrison points to the symbiosis between interpretations of the past and the present, illustrating the abundance of what might be termed ‘palimpsestic’ readings of modern empires, which are generated by writing through the history of past empires.

Satyric drama introduced athletics much more regularly as an activity than either comedy or tragedy. Many of its villains defeated hapless travellers in a boxing or wrestling bout before murdering them. Satyr-plays were often set at athletic contests where the satyrs of the chorus encountered athletes or tried to be competitors themselves. In one of his plays Euripides provided the most detailed critique of athletes in any genre of classical Athenian literature.

The patera (‘drinking-bowl’) of King Pterelas that Amphitruo brings back as a trophy of his victory over the Teleboeans plays a central role in Plautus' Amphitruo. Amphitruo and Sosia plan to show it off to Alcumena to impress her and to aggrandize their triumph, and this military bragging characterizes Amphitruo as a modified miles gloriosus (‘braggart soldier’). Jupiter steals it and, in disguise as Amphitruo, gives it to Alcumena, wooing her and further solidifying her belief that she has just spent the night with her husband. After Amphitruo accuses his wife of lying when she states that she has slept only with him and that he gave her the drinking-bowl, he commands Sosia to open their box containing it to prove otherwise; of course, it has vanished, and its disappearance leads to more confusion and accusations. The drinking-bowl thus also serves as a physical token that might establish a character's identity, just like the cistella (‘box’) of Plautus' Cistellaria or Rudens, but with the twist that Jupiter's manipulation of the token intensifies misunderstanding rather than dispels it, per the usual model of comic anagnorisis. In short, this prop contributes greatly to Amphitruo's characterization, narrative development, and metatheatrical play.

As a contribution to the study of ‘Latin in use’, we focus in this article on the ways a writer indicates what s/he wants to emphasize within the sentence; the specific linguistic signs s/he uses to that end; and the range of effects that these may have for an alert reader. We have used, on the one hand, recent developments in the study of narrative, discourse and general linguistics and, on the other, the work of earlier pioneers in the field of word order in Latin.

In the first poem of Tristia 1, Ovid claims me mare, me uenti, me fera iactat hiems (‘the sea, the winds, the savage winter storm harass me repeatedly’, 1.1.42). This is no mere rhetorical flourish: the immediacy of the present tense becomes apparent in the second poem in the collection, which purports to be the poet's words as he faces a storm at sea. Critics tend to treat this poem as a literary exercise, focusing upon Ovid's exploitation of epic descriptions of the sea as a vast elemental force, subject to the machinations of the gods. In particular, interest has centred upon Ovid's debt to the storms which face Aeneas and Odysseus in Aeneid 1, 3, and 5 and Odyssey 5, as well as the relationship between this poem and Ovid's own version of an ‘epic’ storm in the story of Ceyx and Alcyone at Metamorphoses 11.410–748.

However, this poem contains much more than the sum of its various epic models: 1.2 is programmatic for the rest of Tristia 1, not least because it can be seen as the first ‘proper’ poem of the collection, given that 1.1 is addressed to Ovid's new book of poetry as he sends it to Rome, and as such, self-consciously stands apart from the rest of the book.

The political significance of Ephialtes’ reforms as a constitutional watershed in Athenian history is a theme stressed in much of the later source material. He is presented as a man who significantly changed the nature of the existing, Cleisthenic, constitution in the direction of a more radical form of democracy.

Just as(pace Blaydes and Dawe) ὒβριζ φυτει τ⋯ραννον, Sophokles' Oidipous continues to beget misunderstanding. One can guarantee that any conversation about the play will soon produce any one of at least four large-scale misconceptions regarding it. One of these is discussed here, not so much for the purpose of dispelling it, as in the hope that such discussion will lead to some general conclusions about the dramatic technique of the Greek tragedians.