In May of 1868, less than two years after Gerard Manley Hopkins left the English Church to become a Roman Catholic and after eight months spent teaching at Newman's Oratory School in Birmingham, the classical scholar burned nearly all of his poetry; he called the act ‘the sacrifice of my innocents’. Austin Warren describes Hopkins as feeling caught through his life between conflicting desires to be a pdet and to be a saint. This strain and the anxieties it produced appear in his later poems, such as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘Heaven Haven’, and in his journals and letters. In the latter he describes the emotional effect he wanted poems to have upon readers: some poems must, Hopkins asserted, ‘explode’ within the reader. Intensifying the psychological reaction of the readers of literature was one of Hopkins's aims when he created poetry, just as it was a goal when he wrote redactions of the speeches in Shakespeare's tragedies or when he chose from among variant readings for Greek drama. In September 1868, when he entered the priesthood as a Jesuit, Hopkins began a new life of personal intensity and, perhaps to his own surprise, a second poetic career. But a number of poems survived the destruction. One is his translation of Horace's Odes 3.1, the longer of the only two extant translations of complete Latin poems. As with A. E. Housman's sole surviving translation of a Latin ode, Horace's 4.7, this one reveals a profound identification with Horace, a subtle understanding of the original poem, and an intense revelation of the mind of the English writer during the period of translating. The emotional intensity, technical virtuosity and psychological richness of the translation make Hopkins's version of 3.1 a significant poem for scholars of English and classical poetry.

This discussion is concerned with the structure of Sophocles' Ajax, in particular with the question of why, following the suicide of the hero, the dramatist makes Teucer engage in successive debates with Menelaus and Agamemnon over the fate of the corpse. The aim is certainly not just to dust the cobwebs off old talking points. Rather it is to use these (the talking points not the cobwebs) as a means of exploring different attitudes to Sophocles' supposed aims, methods and achievements as a dramatist, in order to work towards the adoption of a balanced critical position in this regard. Work by H.D.F. Kitto provides a special stimulus for the treatment of the broader issue, while the discussion of the double debate develops mainly in response to a recent article by Philip Holt.

English shame and German scham derive from the Gothic schama, ‘to hide, cover, conceal’. German Hemd (shirt) and English and French chemise are other derivatives. In some languages the word for ‘shame’ and the word for ‘wound’ are the same. A wound exposes and can thereby advertise vulnerabilty and a cause for shame. Hiding or covering may seek to guard against wounding, humiliating exposure.

Shame is self-evidently an important human emotion. Insofar as animals are innocent of shame, experience of it is a mark of humanity. Much human behaviour is influenced by fear of shame and embarrassment. Living in the face and eyes, shame is very close to the experienced self. Self-image and self-esteem are heavily determined by one's susceptibility to shame. Experience of shame is impossible without a sense of individuation, without a sense of discreteness from the world and of being an object in the eyes of another. Study of shame sensitivity therefore offers many clues to an individual's or a culture's behaviour, sense of identity and relationship to the environment.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

I invoke the much-abused Eliot because here, at least, I believe he is essentially correct, especially when we consider Propertius as an individual talent working within and furthering a tradition. For Propertius wrote during what was perhaps the greatest flowering of the lyric spirit in Europe (I use the term ‘lyric’ quite generally here), along with that quite different age of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. Perhaps no other Latin poet had such an overt concern with his relationship to the tradition, past, present and future. Overlapping with late Vergil, early Ovid, and written after Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus and Catullus (to name but a few), it comes as little surprise that Propertius' work is fraught with allusions to and comments on other poets and poetry in general — especially his favorite poet, Callimachus. In this paper I will examine in particular poems 2.1, 2.34B and 3.1, where Propertius devotes considerable effort to the delineation of his thoughts on poetry and poets. I will argue that these poems form a group which presents a consistent and coherent argument which establishes Propertius in an elegiac and Alexandrian tradition.

No Greek of any calibre, at least in the fifth century, could remain intellectually or spiritually altogether unconditioned by a conscious feeling for, or awareness of, the tragic in human affairs. His poetry and his art, indeed his history, were saturated with the idea of the tragic. Thucydides is certainly no exception, and the most uninformed reader of his History will come away from the work with a keen sense of the immediately perceptible tragic coloration with which it is permeated. Interpreted from any leading, unifying thematic idea the explanation of Thucydides' work must include as central and dominant the tragic deterioration of Athens from the Periclean ideals so well expressed in the Funeral Oration, through the nadir of cynicism and moral decline of the Melian Dialogue, to the utter demoralization expressed through the catastrophe of the Sicilian campaign and its aftermath.

One has merely to examine the obvious and purposefully wrought antitheses throughout the History to determine the dramatic nature of Thucydides' work. The drastic metamorphosis in Athenian character that occurs between Books One and Five, for instance, points up such a tragic contrast. The Athenians of the first assembly at Sparta claim that they more than any others were the saviors of Hellas (1.74.2), fearless and self-sacrificing in the common cause of all allies, that they acted with sagacity of judgement (1.75.1), that the empire had not been acquired by force (1.75.2) but by necessity of circumstances, that they had been more observant of justice than actually required, the overwhelming balance of power being in their favor (1.76.3), that in the courts in Athens suits of allies are judged under the same laws (1.77.1). If we compare these same Athenians with the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue it becomes abundantly clear that a deterioration of character and moral standards has taken place and that Thucydides has linked the moral with the tragic. The earlier Athenians, in spite of their desire for imperial expansion, were at least concerned with a minimum of justice and fair play in their international dealings. The Athenians of the Melian Dialogue do not even make a pretence of upholding the commonly accepted nomoi which had from time immemorial been established among men to protect the weaker. Thucydides' strong editorial statements on the effects of anomia (‘lawlessness’) during and following the plague (2.52-53), and during the stasis on Corcyra (3.81ff.) also make firm the link between the moral and the tragic.