Defining a space as landscape suggests that it is visually distinctive and interesting, that it attracts the eye, and engages the senses and faculties. Agriculture (or productivity) can be one important feature of what makes space into land and divides it up into -scapes and territories, but it is not always the main issue. Typically, classical texts featuring something akin to our ‘landscape’ showcase the natural environment supporting, threatening, or ornamenting human existence. So at the beginning of the Graeco–Roman tradition we see that the landscapes of Homeric epic, or pastoral verse (for example, the Hellenistic poets Bion and Theocritus), gain order and meaning from the inclusion of human figures, but they also contribute atmosphere and a distinctive sense of place that enriches the stories that play out against them. Chapter I introduced one particularly delightful and hugely popular topographic trope: an idyllic space where sensory and aesthetic qualities encourage harmony between humans and nature. The locus classicus or touchstone for this locus amoenus is Plato's dialogue Phaedrus. Famously, this dialogue riffs on a very specific landscape scene, one which was to have an intense and far-reaching effect on subsequent landscape discourse, and which provides an ideal point of departure.

Epigram: EPI-GRAMMA, a text written or incised upon something. ‘Inscription’ is one obvious translation of the root meaning, and epigram began with inscriptions: texts carved in stone to fix cultural memory. Epigram and epigraphy, the modern study of inscriptions, are two sides of the same linguistic coin. The classical Greek epigraphic habit manifested itself across many different contexts. Inscriptions broadcast the laws and decrees of the city-state, the polis, and secured the meaning of monuments and tombs against a forgetful future. Cut into trophies and statues, they celebrated victory in war and sport. Inscriptions were unavoidably costly in skilled labour, and competed for the attention of the passer-by with many others of their kind. Official decrees and honorific inscriptions were as long as their elaborate phrasing dictated, but for more personal messages these factors could combine to create a pressure to keep the text short and to the point. A small minority of these inscriptions were in verse.

On 30th January 1943, Adolf Hitler’s close associate Goering made a radio broadcast to the beleaguered Sixth Army at Stalingrad on the eastern front. He compared the German army to the Spartan soldiers at Thermopylae in 480 BCE when they stood, fought and died to prevent the advance of the Persians (‘the barbarians’) into Greece. Goering’s broadcast was not well received. The dispirited and starving listeners described it as ‘our own Funeral Speech’ and some officers joked ironically that ‘the suicide of the Jews’, besieged by the Roman army on the top of Masada in 73 or 74 CE was a more apt comparison. This episode raises a host of questions about the reception of classical texts and ideas in later cultures. In this instance, not only was the classical allusion used as a model to sanction expectations of behaviour but further allusions were used as a counter-text to challenge the rhetoric of the high command.

Although it is theoretically possible (and has been asserted) that the Iliad followed the Odyssey, or that the two poems were composed quite independently, with no influence from one to the other, majority opinion ancient and modern puts the Odyssey later, and assumes it to be in important respects a successor, even a sequel, to the Iliad. This position can be maintained in various forms: those who believe in a single master-poet as the creator of both epics may assign the Iliad to Homer’s youth, the Odyssey to his riper years (a position memorably expressed by Longinus); those who follow the ancient separatists can regard the Odyssey as a rival work, composed by a poet who immensely admired the Iliad but whose own poetic and moral concerns lay elsewhere. On the whole the latter view is now more common, though there are eminent advocates on both sides. In fact it is probably impossible, in a tradition which involved so much use of conventional themes and formulaic material, to decide firmly in favour of common or separate authorship. Whichever view one prefers, the important point seems to be that the Odyssey is later, and that it is conceived as a poem on the same scale as the Iliad, but differing strikingly in content and ethos.

The authoritative text of Menander is now Sandbach’s Oxford Text (1972), which unites in one volume all the extant papyrus remains, apart from a few of the tattiest scraps, from the seventeen plays of known or generally agreed title, and adds as a supplement several other papyrus fragments which have been attributed to Menander, together with the longer passages cited by ancient authors from Menander’s plays. This text is admirably complemented by the commentary of Gomme and Sandbach (Oxford, 1973). Many earlier editions, however, retain their value; Lefebvre’s 1911 publication of the Cairo papyrus includes photographs, Körte’s third Teubner edition (volume I: 1955, with addenda by Thierfelder) was standard in its day, Del Corno’s incomplete edition (Milan, 1966) contains a good introduction and useful analyses of the included plays. Noteworthy editions of individual plays include: Aspis and Samia, Austin (Berlin Kleine Texte 188a, 188b: text 1969, interpretative comments 1970); Dis Exapaton, Handley (BICS Supplement 22, forthcoming); Dyskolos, Handley (London, 1965: the standard commentary), Jacques (Budé: Paris, 1963), Lloyd-Jones (Oxford Text, 1960), J. Martin (second edition: Paris, 1972), Treu (Tusculum: Munich, 1960); Epitrepontes, Wilamowitz (Berlin, 1925: reprint 1958); Karchedonios, Kolax, Misoumenos, Austin (Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta in Papyris Reperta: Berlin, 1973); Samia, Dedoussi (Cairo fragments, with commentary in demoticGreek: Athens, 1965), Jacques (Budé: Paris, 1971); Sikyonioi, Kassel (Berlin Kleine Texte 185, 1965). The fragments quoted by ancient authors are collected by Körte in the second Teubner volume (second edition 1959, with addenda by Thierfelder). The monostichs which early in the Christian era were claimed to derive from Menander’s plays have been edited by Jäkel (Teubner, 1964), with amendments and supplementary material in Hagedorn and Weber, ZPE iii (1968), 15-50.

Memoria rerum gestorum (literally, ‘memory of deeds’) is yet another way of saying ‘history’, in the sense both of ‘collective memory, tradition’ and of ‘history-writing.’ Memory and time are important concepts in all three of the major historians whom we are treating, but perhaps most for Livy, whose history must have consumed all of his working life and, when intact, spanned the period from the sack of Troy through to the writer’s own day. He signals the importance of time from the start of his preface, which was published together with the first unit of his history: Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nec satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim . . . utcumque erit, iuuabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro uirili parte et ipsum consuluisse (Praef. 1, 3, ‘Whether I will do something worthwhile if I write a detailed record of the deeds of the Roman people from the origin of the city I do not really know nor, if I knew, would I dare to say so . . . However that may be, it will nevertheless please me to have taken thought, to the best of my ability, for the history of the greatest nation in the world’). The tenses of the sentences quoted (facturus . . . sim, erit, iuuabit) put Livy’s own potential literary achievement and resulting profit firmly in the future: this preface looks ahead, towards the moment of publication and beyond, to the reaction readers will have to his book. Yet the force of the past is felt here, as well: it is memory (memoria rerum gestarum) with which Livy concerns himself, and that concern is imagined as having already happened (the perfect infinitive consuluisse): the preface is written as if from the simultaneous vantage points of one looking ahead and of one looking back on a task already completed.