The large harvest of editions and monographs devoted to Seneca's Phaedra in recent years have done full justice to the influence on Seneca's play of the Greek tragic precedents, even exploiting the Latin play as a quarry for their recovery and restoration; at the level of individual motifs of dialogue, Seneca's debt to Ovid's fourth letter of the Heroides has been confirmed and detailed. But concern with the adaptation of the myth, and the obvious verbal resemblances to Ovid, have combined to distract students from the influence of another Latin work—the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid. The theme of Virgil's book, the quality of Virgil's portrayal of Dido and her passion, with its truly dramatic greatness (of which a distinguished editor has written ‘if Virgil had written nothing else … it would have established his right to stand beside the greatest of the Greek tragedians’), the acknowledged supremacy of Virgil's reputation as a poet in Seneca's generation, and Seneca's own fondness for quoting the Aeneid, are all strong arguments for expecting some reminiscence of Virgil's great queen in Seneca's delineation of Phaedra and her doomed passion for Hippolytus. Before Virgil only Catullus' Ariadne had approached the insight and sympathetic analysis which was achieved in Dido. After Virgil the lovesick heroines of Ovid's Heroides are rhetorically versatile but without the moral stature to give value to their sufferings, while their static portraits cannot offer the development of either action or emotion which is essential to drama. Unfortunately, because Ovid both in Heroides and Metamorphoses borrowed so much detail and imagery from Virgil, his dependence on the greater poet complicates and often frustrates attempts to distinguish the relationship of Senecan poetry to that of the two predecessors whom he admired.

Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.

It was towards the close of his life in 43 B.c. that Cicero wrote the three books of the de Officiis. The attractions of a philosophical treatise whose theme is moral duty are likely to appear slight to the modern reader, especially if that reader thinks its author to be merely the purveyor of second-hand ideas borrowed from Greek sources. Yet the de Officiis epitomizes, in an intensely Roman way, the political beliefs and ideals of the Senatorial order at Rome as the Republic finally succumbed to autocracy. The political philosophy of the ancients may be more immediately relevant today than their ethical speculation, for, while it is folly to interpret political activity as if the Roman Republic enjoyed a two-party system composed of left-wing populates and right-wing optimates, it is true that much of the turmoil generated during the last century of the Republic was related to proposals for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land; similarly, much of the debate currently being conducted between supporters of the rival ideologies is centred about the ownership of property and assets. Perhaps we may be encouraged to survey the de Officiis more sympathetically if we approach it as political scientists and as students of this subject mindful of the writings of another ancient, the historian Thucydides, and his opinion that, human nature being a constant, situations will repeat themselves in the same or a very similar form.

Studies of Horace's imitation of Greek lyric in his Odes have tended to concentrate on particular supposed echoes. Given that the surviving Greek texts are few and fragmentary, this method is bound often to lead to dubious and unsatisfactory results. A broader approach directed at the syntax, structure, and myths of the Odes produces, in my view, a clearer understanding of how Horace hoped to enter the canon of lyric poets (Odes i. 1. 35 f.). This paper expounds Odes iii. 11 exempli gratia as a serious Horatian attempt to write the Latin equivalent of an early Greek lyric. It shows some of the ways in which Horace has concentrated the characteristics he observed in his predecessors and composed an ode which is a close-knit complex of Greek lyric linguistic and conceptual mannerisms.

Until the last years of the Republic, Roman governors might officially see their wives present in their provinces only in the form of honorific statues. The chaos of civil war was to bring to a number of senatorial husbands, as they mounted their campaigns in the eastern provinces, the solace of their wives' companionship in the flesh. First in time amongst these refugee wives was Caecilia Metella, who was present with Sulla at Athens in 86 B.c. Later, and in less auspicious circumstances, Cornelia was to travel to Lesbos and then to Egypt to be with the doomed Pompeius in 49–48 B.c. Occasionally, such loyal wives joined their husbands over die latter's objections. They might, it seems, be expected to remain in Italy in order to avoid danger or even proscription, and not least to defend the family interests so far as this was possible.

Is Menander, in any sense of the word, ‘modern’?1 And if he is, what relevance does this have to the quality of his plays? Such questions will perhaps be asked more in our present age, when some of our critics appear to idolize modernity in art, literature, or music at the expense of quality; and they are questions capable of a wide variety of positive answers. In one way Menander is modern because a large section of his work—the Dyskolos, several hundred lines complete of the Aspis and the Samia, significant fragments of several other plays—has been discovered in Egypt and printed for the first time during the last sixteen years. Or again, Menander is modern because indirectly at least he has influenced the modern world's comedy of manners down to the time of Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse. He is modern, too, because he writes about the recurrent problems of families, young and old alike, as they wrestle with love and greed, worry about status and reputation, and flounder in a morass of misconceptions. But the aspect of Menander's modernity that interests me most of all is his apparent concern with certain dramatic and stylistic techniques which living writers deliberately apply in their novels and plays, techniques which our modern critics love to label as undisputedly modern.

‘Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.’ In an age of translations (I say nothing of unfaithful wives), Roy Campbell's mot is a salutary reminder that attractiveness in a version may conceal gross infidelity to the content and meaning of the original; and that even if by some miracle a translator should succeed in reconciling the demands of readability and accuracy, his work is necessarily ‘at best an echo’ of the ancient text, or—to use Platonic language—a copy reproducing its model only imperfectly.

The trial (undoubtedly for maiestas) of Marcus Primus, former proconsul of Macedonia, is described only by Cassius Dio—and his account is unsatisfactory in more than one respect. According to Dio, Primus was accused of making war upon the Odrysae, a friendly Thracian tribe, during his governorship. His defence was that he had acted at the behest of Augustus, though sometimes he named Marcellus. When Augustus of his own accord came into court and, asked by the presiding praetor whether he had given the order, denied it, Primus' advocate Licinius Murena demanded what he was doing there and asked who had summoned him. Augustus' brief reply—‘the interest of the state’—won him the approval of people of good sense; but a considerable number of jurymen voted for Primus' acquittal all the same, and the trial was followed by the conspiracy of Fannius Caepio, in which Murena was alleged to be implicated.

Optimates and Populares, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Whigs and Tories, Cowboys and Indians: the neat antitheses polarize views and enlist sympathies. Nor are they all misleading. What of ‘Julians and Claudians’? These labels were invented to distinguish ‘factions’ or ‘parties’ within the family of Augustus; the issue between them was the succession and the struggle continued until the end of the principate of Augustus' heir Tiberius. Thus comprehensible order is brought to the confused mass of information and opinion that the sources offer us. Moreover, the labels have a respectable pedigree in modern writing. They are constantly employed by F. B. Marsh in his authoritative work and survive as valid and useful in articles more recently published; where historians have trodden so boldly literary critics have not hesitated to follow. My purpose, at the cost of destroying neat and treasured theory, is to show that these terms are inapplicable to the two groups to which they have been applied, and therefore misleading. They are an impediment to serious inquiry into. complex and changing situations.

It is only in comparatively recent years that critics have come to realize the extent of humour that is to be found in Propertius. The view of Postgate (1881), ‘Occasionally he shows a vein of humour we should not have expected’, is still that of Butler and Barber in 1933: ‘It [iv. 8] is his one humorous poem, and surprisingly successful.’ But by 1966 Eckard Lefèvre could write a whole book on Propertius Ludibundus, who was in this respect, as in so much else, the inspirer of Ovid: ‘In accordance with the principles set out the present study is an attempt at a contribution to the understanding of Roman love-elegy, in that it seeks to establish the achievement of Propertius as the decisive step in the development of the humorous element in elegy before Ovid set that particular stamp on it’ (p. 20).

Suetonius tells us that Nero's dying words were ‘Qualis artifex pereo’, and amongst English-speaking peoples he is generally known as ‘the man who fiddled while Rome burned’. Even if the ‘famous last words’ are legendary, there is a basis for the second story in Suetonius' account that during the fire of 64 Nero sang ‘the destruction of Troy’ in his stage costume. Yet despite the picture of Nero the performer which emerges from all our ancient sources, it is only in comparatively recent times that historians have given serious consideration to Nero's artistic pretensions. History it would seem is the propaganda of the victors, and that most hurtful remark of Vindex, that he was a bad lyre-player, has often been regarded as the appropriate verdict upon Nero.

Both Herodotus and Aristotle record the first known contact between Athens and the Macedonian area. It occurs in the time of Peisistratus, specifically during his second (?) exile. Herodotus refers briefly to revenues which Peisistratus collected from the Strymon region, which helped him recover his power (i. 64. 1). Aristotle in more detail states: ‘Peisistratus joined with others in the settlement of Rhaecelus in the Thermaic Gulf area. From there he went to the Pangaion region from which he raised money …’ (A.P. 15. 2).

In spite of much sensible writing, by many scholars, on the real importance and significance of the literary convention, there remains among some students of the Classics a persistent folk-memory which asserts that speeches in the ancient historians are rhetorically decorative, deliberately deceptive, and historically inessential. That a speech can be one (or all) of these things is inarguable: but to assume that all speech in historical writing can be so dismissed is dangerous, because such assumption inhibits a full understanding of what a serious ancient historian may be trying to do with it. I should therefore like to look again at the convention, and at some of the ways in which it is used by the major Roman historians.