There is hardly any scene in Euripidean tragedy which is as baffling as the debate between Hecabe and Helen in the Troiades. So far, I have found no really satisfactory explanation of this scene. Of those who have dealt with it, Kitto recognises that ‘it interrupts the plot’. The reason for the interruption, according to him, is that it illuminates part of Euripides' thought, namely that ‘this war too was misconceived — its basis the worthlessness of a woman’. I doubt whether I could agree that the scene proves the worthlessness of Helen. But let that pass. There is a more important point to be raised. Would Euripides have interrupted his plot to illuminate part of his thought unless the part illuminated had some bearing on the theme of his play? Admittedly Euripides does love a debate and does sometimes wander from the point to make a point that is not very relevant. But that he has done so in this scene I find it very hard to believe. The scene is altogether too important to be brushed aside in that way. It is, in the first place, the longest scene in the play. In the second place, it interrupts the plot at a point when the interruption is most distracting because it occurs at the very climax of the tale of horrors inflicted by the Greeks upon the Trojans — the decision to kill Astyanax. Talthybius has just announced the decision to Hecabe and Andromache and has come to take Astyanax away.

For classical antiquity the division between history and poetry is often arbitrary and misleading. The history-writing of antiquity not only subsumes what we would call political science, sociology, and psychology, but is also linked to epic poetry and to moral speculation on the good life and the good community. Just as Herodotus is not fully intelligible without Homer nor Thucydides without the tragedians, so not only Livy, but also Tacitus cannot fully be understood without reference to Virgil.

Like Gorgias or Apuleius, Tacitus also reminds us that the division between poetry and prose is more fluid in ancient than in modern literature. Scholars have long recognized Tacitus' debt to Virgil, especially in vocabulary and expression. Yet there is another, more elusive quality in Tacitus which is ultimately traceable to the influence of the great epic poet. This is the creation of an atmosphere around events which confers on them a weight, penetration, and richness of suggestion which the bare facts could not possibly convey.

Hunting is a frequent and thematically important activity in the Aeneid. Aeneas hunts in book one then meets his mother who is dressed like a huntress. He hunts along with Dido and Ascanius in book four and the latter precipitates a war by hunting in book seven. Similes in books two and twelve present Aeneas in the guise of a hunter. Similes in books one and four compare Dido and Aeneas respectively to the huntress Diana and the hunter Apollo. Aeneas is compared to a hunting dog in book twelve. There has been no lack of scholarship on the problem of the hunting motif in the Aeneid. In this criticism there seems to be general agreement that Vergil intended the hunting motif to be symbolic. The repeated use of this motif urges the reader to look for a significance beyond the literal and for crossreference among the occurrences of the motif. As Hornsby has written citing the motif of hunting as an example: ‘We have come to see that motifs, themes and ideas are repeated in a variety of ways and in each repetition a new aspect of the motif, theme or idea is illuminated. But, further, each occurrence reflects on the previous ones, so that we have a series of crosscurrents created in the work, which … reveal not only how the Aeneid is organized but what it signifies.’ However, despite previous scholarship's recognition that hunting in the Aeneid is symbolic, there has not been an attempt to analyze the meaning of the symbol itself.

It has long been customary to stress the artificial and conventional character of the Homeric language. The coexistence of aeolic and ionic forms, for instance, the metrical lengthenings, the so-called diektasis of contract verbs, the glosses have been studied and used to posit the theory of a language that was never spoken by anybody on earth, composed rather than developed on its own strength. More recently Milman Parry has further enhanced this view. He has stretched the same principle of conventional composition to cover the whole syntax and phraseology of Homer. The traditional language which he postulates is again far removed from the sources of living speech.

There have been few works of literature so widely known, so persistently traduced and so little understood as the Odes of Horace. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries his defamation has been little less than wanton outrage. Landor's sweeping criticisms are well known. But consider also Tyrrell (1895) on Horace's style: ‘The runnel is exquisitely smooth, but its shallow waters flow where they will, from their natural channel, and end in a puddle’; or Pound (1930) on the question of emotional strength: ‘Against the granite acridity of Catullus’ passion, against Ovid's magic and Ovid's sense of mystery, Horace has but the clubman's poise and no stronger emotion than might move one toward a particularly luscious oyster’; or Nisbet (1962) on artifice and artificiality: ‘His [Horace's] high standards of technical perfection brought a loss of spontaneity; only those who write fast can express all the shades and subtleties of thought.’