I have been invited to write an article on the subject of the pronunciation of Latin. I put this fact in the forefront, for I do not wish it to be supposed that I am a fanatic who seeks every opportunity of bombarding an unwilling audience with his one fixed idea. As a matter of fact, my main feeling in the matter is that a completely undue importance has been attached to the question, and that it is the so-called reformers and not their opponents who are responsible for this tedious discussion. Having made this apology I will state my case with what brevity I can.

Horace's Soracte Ode is a difficult poem. It begins in winter, apparently in the countryside, and concludes with the sketch of an urban incident in summer (or spring). This seeming inconsistency has provoked widely divergent critical comment. E. Fraenkel sums up one approach:

We like the Ode because it contains several passages of great beauty, among them some happy adaptations of Alcaean motifs. But we have to admit that as a whole the poem falls short of the perfection reached by Horace in many of his odes. Its heterogeneous elements have not merged into a harmonious unit. Line 18, nunc et campus et areae and what follows suggest a season wholly different from the severe winter at the beginning. This incongruity cannot be removed by any device of apologetic interpretation.

Heracles' image in antiquity is notoriously kaleidoscopic. Comedy represented him as a gluttonous buffoon, and myth made no secret of the brutal violence of many of his exploits. On the other hand, Pindar exalts him as a superlative figure who enforced the nomos of the gods, while Prodicus in a famous myth makes Heracles a supreme example of commendable conduct, a youth who chooses the path of Virtue over the path of Vice out of his own free will. This image of a moralized Heracles soon took root in the Greek imagination, and a whole host of Greek thinkers (Isocrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes the Cynic, and Plutarch, to name but a few) found in him a perfectly malleable exemplum for their various courses in moral edification. After undergoing a large number of transformations in Roman literature and the Church Fathers, Heracles resurfaces unscathed in the early Renaissance, when we find him again as an already established exemplum virtutis, now a man of letters, now a Christian. It would appear that, despite his multifarious metamorphoses, Heracles remained throughout the centuries essentially what he had been since Prodicus' day: an exemplary figure who undertook extreme toils and gained supreme recompense.

The historical evidence yielded by the coins of Greece and Rome is abundant, concise, essentially practical, and easily assimilated. Comparison of this evidence with what is provided by other branches of historical research is out of place, and seldom profitable: it is enough to point out the fundamental difference between coin-evidence and that which is furnished, for example, by works of art or inscriptions. A people's artistic or literary achievement is mainly a free expression of individual tendencies: though Phrynichus offended an influential section of public opinion with his play on the Sack of Miletus, and though Pericles was able to yoke Pheidias to his imperialist policy, it is true to say that such achievement was generally the result of free minds working their will. Artistic evidence for history is therefore ‘unofficial’, or informal. It is, of course, all the better for that; yet it must lack the precision which we look for in inscriptions—let us say, in an Athenian list of tribute-payments, or in a municipal charter under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions, indeed, are very often the product of private enterprise—the wish to record family honours, to mourn the dead parent, wife, or child, or to bless the emperor of the day; but they include a large class in which the information given is official in its purpose, and therefore full and accurate.

Stage properties in Greek tragedy are used economically, a fact which enhances the significance of their dramatic function. Oliver Taplin has amply demonstrated how their appearance on stage is not an adventitious means of lending life to a character or situation but rather a device by which the dramatist underlines some essential aspect of the scene in which they occur or theme in the play as a whole. Economy of props in tragedy is in marked contrast with their multiplicity in Aristophanic comedy. When it comes, therefore, to interpreting the poet's artistic intention in a particular tragedy, the props list may prove a useful critical instrument, as I hope will be evident from this study of their use in Euripides' Electra.

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.

How to begin is not the least of the dramatist's problems. It is essential, in the construction of any play, not only to establish at the start a suitable mood, but to make clear, without undue delay, the place, personalities, and general antecedents of the plot. Of the two methods of doing the latter that offer themselves—that by which such information is contained in a ‘prologue’ or set speech, and that by which it is introduced in the course of the action—the former is simpler for the author, and, for the spectator too, it may be more convenient to have these details given once and for all. But it tends to artificiality, and the impression is often created that here is something outside the plot, a mere introduction to the play rather than a part of the play itself. In Greek tragedy the method was of course much used by Euripides, and he has perhaps been over-criticized for it, both in his own time and since. But later writers have not shunned it, and its final development is found in the splitting-off of the initial ‘address’ and its assignment to an extraneous speaker dubbed ‘Prologue’ or ‘Narrator’. This has at least the merit of logical clarity. But, while a definite line cannot be drawn between them, the more informal method must be accounted artistically superior. This was especially that of Sophocles, and his opening scenes (or ‘prologues’ in the technical sense), in both their informational and other aspects, are worth attention in themselves, as well as being indicative of his general approach to his art.

quotiens magni alicuius <viri> mors ab historicis narrata est, totiens fere consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio redditur. hoc, semel aut iterum a Thucydide factum, item in paucissimis personis usurpatum a Sallustio, T. Livius benignus omnibus magnis viris praestitit; sequentes historici multo id effusius fecerunt.

This article argues that Aelius Aristides adapts the word atopos (‘strange’, ‘out of place’) as figured speech in his Embassy Speech to Achilles, meaning something that is either illogical according to rhetorical topoi or inconsistent with the text of Homer's Iliad. By doing so, he not only expands the semantic range of atopos but also comments on the rhetorical, intertextual, and pedagogical relationship between oratory and the Homeric tradition.