The Phaiakians' reception of Odysseus has long puzzled readers of the Odyssey; so, too, has the nature of life on Skheria. The view of Skheria as an untroubled, remote paradise has attracted many modern critics, yet recent scholarship has noted the Phaiakians' unfriendliness and the potential threat they pose to Odysseus. It seems, in fact, that Homer's narrative contains elements which are overtly contradictory: the Phaiakians are simultaneously friendly and hostile; they are able to traverse the sea without effort, while yet living in a hermetically closed society. These narrative contradictions are not mere illusions, the result of scholarly difference of opinion, but instead reflect a genuinely divided mythic reality. To understand the Phaiakians we should continue along the path marked out by Vidal-Naquet, Clay and Most, and examine not only the narrative but also the mythic elements of the Phaiakis.

Recent studies of the Hecuba have begun to allay doubts about whether its two disparate halves form a single plot. I shall approach this question from a different angle, finding the unity of the Hecuba in two areas: first, the similarity of the acts of sacrifice and revenge; and, second, the irresolution of the reason for Polyxena's sacrifice, the restraining winds, until Hecuba has avenged herself on Polymestor. Euripides' drama engages the emotional dynamics of sacrifice and revenge in order to explore the power of theatre to destabilise such societal activites and the ethical distinctions held by its audience. The Theatre of Dionysus thus bears witness to a drama that undermines ethical certitudes and makes problematic the types of institutions that the polis needs for stability. When a vote is taken on human sacrifice, when sacrifice fails to control violence, when revenge becomes the chosen recourse to achieve justice, how can a polis restore order? While the action of the Hecuba occurs beyond the realm of any recognisable polis, its war-time setting and the undercurrent of references to Athens and its institutions suggest that the Hecuba's answers could not have been reassuring to its audience.

The Germania, as its full title de origine et situ Germanorum implies, is about Rome. This is clearest from passages couched almost entirely in negative terms, as in chapter 19—

William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.