Martial presents a critical problem. On the one hand, there was his undeniable popularity and literary influence on European literature from the Renaissance to at least the end of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, there is the obvious embarrassment he presents to modern literary historians.

The two viewpoints are easily contrasted. Pliny the Younger in the famous letter written about 102 had expressed doubts about Martial's literary survival, but gave him generous credit for his talent, sharp wit, candour, and mordancy. (Erat homo ingeniosus acutus acer, et qui plurimum inscribendo et satis haberet etfellis, nec candoris minus, Ep. 3.21.1.) Nevertheless Martial's work survived the wreck of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages handsomely, and with the Renaissance, he came into his own as a poet. Angelo Poliziano described him as ingeniosissimus, ‘very talented’, and argutissimus, ‘clever’ (Miscellan. 6); such judgements were echoed by Jovianus Pontanus (De sermone 3.18) and Julius Caesar Scaliger, who claimed that many of his epigrams were divina, praising their sermonis castitas, ‘purity of speech’ (Poet. 3.126). Festivissimus, ‘most witty’, and lepidissimus, ‘charming’, were the adjectives used by Adrianus Turnebus (Advers. 8.4; 13.19). Only a few critics, such as the censorious Andrea Navigero and Raffaele Maffei (Volaterranus), objected to him on moral grounds. His reception among English poets was equally enthusiastic. Sir John Harington stated firmly ‘that of all poems, the Epigram is the pleasantest, and of all that write epigram, Martial is counted the wittiest.’

Seneca's focus on comets in Natural Questions 7 concentrates our attention on a phenomenon that is in a sense familiar but so distant, known but so unknown; they are obscurities that ‘both fill and escape our eyes’ (7.30.4), and which challenge us to project the mind's eye beyond the limits of our ordinary vision as we seek insight into nature's mysteries. The broad aim of this paper is to argue that Seneca's treatment of comets shapes, and actively applies in inventive ways within the text, a mindset that moves restlessly from narrow, more ‘terrestrial’ ways of reflecting upon the universe towards an unfettered mode of investigation that looks daringly beyond the limits of the visible and known to speculate on what lies beyond. This mindset proceeds by conjecture and ‘neither with any assurance of finding [the truth] nor without hope’ (7.29.3), but it nevertheless follows the ‘right’ (Senecan) path even in possible error: it reaches dynamically beyond conventional confines—in this case, the zodiac—to engage with the universal immensity in ways that aspire to that main Senecan goal in the Natural Questions as whole, ‘to see the all with the mind’ (cf. animo omne uidisse, 3 pref. 10).

Scholars tend to agree that Aeschylus' choice of material for the Persae was overdetermined: the battle at Salamis and its lead-up constituted a moment of the highest trauma and pride for the Athenian demos, one that could be accommodated to a well-known narrative framework (that of great pride followed by a great fall) and exploited as an exploration of the relations between (Athenian) Greek and Persian other. But in this essay I propose to set aside the tragedy's ethical or ethno-political engagements. I want to focus instead on its auditory aesthetics—what it says about sound, and how it works with it. I think that the Persae is intensely and persistently engaged with sound; so much so, in fact, that at moments it comes closer than any other Athenian drama to a kind of ‘absolute’ music. In the final 40 lines of the play, for example, when extralinguistic cries increasingly predominate, the ‘script’ starts to read more like a score, prescribing the timbral and rhythmic part of a music whose pitches have been lost. Though I will not treat its engagements with the Persian ‘other’ directly, I do think that the Persae's interest in sound is related to its choice of setting and theme. Locating the action in Persia allowed Aeschylus to explore a poetic diction that could flirt with the thick edge of signification by invoking linguistic otherness; this facilitated a way of writing in which the materiality of language, that is, its status as sound, could become more palpable. In choosing to depict the Persian court as it learns the news of the defeat at Salamis, Aeschylus had the opportunity to represent an extreme form of lamentation, and by ideologically jacking up the stakes and transforming one military defeat into the fall of an empire, Aeschylus could go to the limits of language and beyond: the play ends with an extraordinary near-abandonment of signifying language in favour of non-verbal cries. Finally, Aeschylus' version of the battle of Salamis included the Greeks using sound as a psychological tactic; the story of the battle that is the kernel around which the play crystallised was itself a story of sound and its effects.

This paper is concerned with the impact made on Mark Antony by Cicero's First Philippic. Although the speech outwardly maintains a conciliatory attitude, it certainly upset Antony. Scholars have noted criticism of Antony in the First Philippic, both political and personal in character, which would not have pleased him. The following discussion argues that there are numerous associations with the stock figure of the ‘tyrant’ which would have been displeasing too. Such a vein of criticism in effect bridges the personal and political dimensions in potentially devastating fashion.

The First Philippic was delivered in difficult circumstances. Brutus and Cassius sent a letter to Antony on 4 August 44 BCE and concluded with a stark warning: neque, quam diu uixerit Caesar, sed quam non diu regnarit, fac cogites (‘keep in mind not the length of Caesar's life but the short time he ruled [sc. as a tyrant]’, Cic. Fam. 11.3). On 1 September, the senate met to consider a proposal which would have seen an extra day in honour of the deified Caesar added to all public thanksgivings (Cic. Phil. 1.13, 2.110). Antony was angered by Cicero's failure to attend the meeting. He apparently left Rome later that day for Tibur. His consular colleague Dolabella summoned a meeting of the senate ‘for the next day, and this time Cicero attended. It was at the meeting of 2 September that Cicero delivered his First Philippic. In comparison to later speeches in the Philippics corpus, the First Philippic has seemed to many a moderate and polite speech that concentrated upon Antony's political behaviour and left the door ajar for future cooperation. It certainly contrasts greatly with the Second Philippic, which is well known for its bitter and sustained personal invective. Nonetheless, the First Philippic was enough to make Antony angry and it is worth re-examining the reasons for this reaction. In particular, allusions in Philippic 1 to Antony as a tyrant and to death as the fate of tyrants, especially in the wake of Caesar's assassination, were probably interpreted by contemporaries as more sinister threats than they have generally been recognised to be by modern readers.

In Tristia 2 Ovid claims that he has always been devoted to the emperor. It is mere that he defends both himself and the Ars Amatoria:

per mare, per terrain, per tertia numina iuro,
per te praesentem conspicuumque deum,
hunc animum fauisse tibi, uir maxime, meque,
qua sola potui, mente fuisse tuum.
optaui, peteres caelestia sidera tarde,
parsque fui turbae parua precantis idem,
et pia tura dedi pro te, cumque omnibus unus
ipse quoque adiuui publica uota meis.
quid referam libros, illos quoque, crimina nostra,
mille locis plenos nominis esse tui?
(Tristia 2.53-60)

Medea's awakening love for Jason is the great theme of the third book of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. At the opening of that book—that is to say, at the very centre of the four-book epic—the Hellenistic poet signals a programmatic redirection, invoking the Muse Erato to inspire his tale of Jason's winning of the golden fleece, aided by the love of the Colchian princess (Мηδείηϛ ὑπ' ἔϱωτι, Ap. Rhod. 3.3). This is the first mention of Medea in the poem. Writing a few centuries later, the Flavian poet Valerius Flaccus for the most part adheres closely to Apollonius' narrative outline. As we shall see, however, he manifests comparatively little interest in the love story between Jason and Medea, and takes a different approach to the problem of integrating Medea into the plot. Though, as with the earlier epic, she will not appear as a dramatis persona until the second half of the epic, she is mentioned at the very outset of the narrative (1.61-63), and a number of times thereafter in the early books. Thus by the time the Argonauts reach Colchis and Medea enters the narrative proper, she has already been presented to the reader in a number of ‘previews’.

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.

One of the most important achievements of recent Horatian scholarship has been the rediscovery of structure — not the mechanical dissection of poems into component parts, but an awareness of how form is inseparable from content and how unity proceeds from design. Although the individual ode has by now received sufficient attention, the structure of the first lyric collection remains problematic. On the one hand, elaborate visual and numerological schemes have been proposed to account for the poems' placement. But such patterns could only be discovered by very selective handling of the evidence, and their neatness and level of abstraction raise doubts about their likelihood and significance. Partly as a corrective to these excesses, some recent scholars have gone to the other extreme, denying any extensive design. But while no single principle is likely to account for the disposition of all eighty-eight poems in twelve different meters, several considerations suggest that Horace had at least some concern for design. These include the well-documented interest in poetry books among Hellenistic and Roman writers; the aesthetic implications of the book roll, the physical format of which necessitates sequential reading; the existence of certain undisputed signs of arrangement in Odes I-III such as the frame of Odes I.1 and III. 30 or the grouping of Parade Odes (Odes I.1-9) and Roman Odes (Odes III. 1-6); and, finally, the relatively restricted thematic repertoire which facilitates the discovery of connections among odes by poet and reader alike. Since controls can be applied to this, as to all other literary study, the existence of larger structures and their relevance to an appreciation of the poetry is a legitimate subject for inquiry.

In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotima's equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of the Symposium I wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.

It is essential to observe that Euripides' dramatization of the tragedy of Hippolytus is such as to reveal a striking disparity between word and action, between the values or motives professed by the leading characters and their actual behaviour, between the secondary characters' assessment of the events of the drama and the events themselves. At the basis of such an observation is the noticeable emphasis which Euripides accords to the fact that all the participants in the drama, including the chorus, are most concerned to proffer explanations of the situations and behaviour which confront them. Yet it becomes most apparent that all of these explanations fall far short of a proper assessment of the circumstances with which the play is concerned and the conclusions to which a responsive audience is directed by Euripides' particular organization of the constituents of the traditional story. The following paper is concerned with an examination of the nature and extent of this disparity between statement and performance, and with a determination of its function.

legere enim et non intellegereneglegere est.
(To read and to misread is to miss a reading of one's world.)
Prologue to Dicta Catonis 1 (3rd Cent. CE)

The concept of otium (peace) is central to Vergil's pastoral vision in the Eclogues. Not only is it a necessary condition for the well-being of the shepherd poets but also an ideal whose realisation would transform the world into a more joyous, more peaceful and less deceitful place. As well as pastoral, otium has philosophical associations for it is a key concept in the philosophy of Epicurus. It is not in the Eclogues, however, but in the Georgics that Vergil's most mature examination of otium is to be found.

Having depicted in the first book the farmer's life of unrelenting toil and the horrors of Rome's civil wars, Vergil turns in the second book of the Georgics to a world in which the necessity for work is balanced by the land's natural fertility, and the martial quality of the Italian peoples by their land's potentiality for peace. Whereas in Book I the farmer is represented as a military figure, in Book II he is presented under two aspects: as the embodiment of both military and pastoral ideals. Since it is with the farmer as the expression of pastoral ideals that we are primarily concerned let us turn to the classic description of the life of otium, the conclusion of the second Georgic.

Ovid tells us everything in the first poem. Love poetry requires a lover. Experience and involvement are essential ingredients of this poetry. The subjective nature of elegy is critical.

Cupid poises his bow: the picture is breath-catchingly drawn. After the crisp unfolding of the earlier part of the poem, these lines hang in suspense. We feel the suspended moments as the bow bends and the string tightens, as the arm steadies, takes aim and lets fly:

questus eram, pharetra cum protinus ille soluta
legit in exitium spicula facta meum
lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum
‘quodque canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus.’

There is also the careful selection of the correct arrow and Cupid's statement, its effortful staccato imitating his physical tensing and swift release.

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.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Henry James, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.

W.C. Sellar & R.G. Yeatman, 1066 And All That

As history Tacitus' Annals pose problems. On the one hand meticulously researched — on the other obfuscatory; self-avowedly unprejudiced and conspicuously prejudicial; evocative more than discursive; necessarily reliant upon the flawed historical tradition which they set out to correct. As historical epic they evidence rhetorical mastery and greatness of vision; a sense of dramatic moment and vivid rendering of character; a sense of history as dramatic process, seen through the eyes of contemporary and later observers. Moreover they engage the reader narratologically; point the distinction between Tacitus' insights and those of his occasionally self-deceived, subjective persona, ‘the historian’; signal a mechanism for interpreting the seeming distortions and inconsistencies of the text. This essay looks at six interrelated apsects of the Tiberian Annals, which elucidate Tacitus' purpose and vision as historical epicist, and which fix the rules by which the whole of the Annals are to be read and understood.

In the Iphigeneia at Aulis role and role inversion are paramount concerns. Indeed it could be contended that in this play we find Euripides' clearest and best defined account of human (and divine) variability. Agamemnon, Menelaos, Achilleus, Iphigeneia, and even, in the final analysis, Artemis, all take positions and attitudes diametrically opposed to those initially adopted. Moreover, the basic thrust behind these movements in position and attitude is the same for each of these characters. All are concerned, in one way or another, with the saving or destruction of Iphigeneia, a situation which most emphatically includes Iphigeneia herself. For on the one hand she wildly supplicates to be saved, while on the other she gladly offers her body to the blade. In addition, Iphigeneia plays a crucial role in greater destructions. If she is destroyed by Agamemnon's and the army's actions, then Greece is destroyed in turn by her (Agamemnon's and the Greeks' final triumph is a ‘Pyrrhic’ victory at best), a situation made all the more ironic by her affected stance of saviour to the fatherland. In Iphigeneia's case, however, the discrepancy between intention and the consequences of action is innocent enough. The play gives no hint that she is at all aware of the irony implicit in her actions. But such lack of awareness is not postulated with regard to Agamemnon, Menelaos and Achilleus. The duplicities and hypocrisies of these three have been the subject of much analysis, and it is at least a critical commonplace to observe that they are characterised in a way more reminiscent of the sour end of everyday life than of the due proprieties associated with heroic, or Homeric, behaviour.

The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.

In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.

Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)

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.

One of the commonest clichés in the study of ancient and modern democracy is the claim that the former is ‘direct’, the latter ‘representative’. A few scholars have recently explored areas in which the Classical Athenian democracy had representative features, particularly the magistracies. These studies continue, however, to understand ‘political representation’ according to the definition proposed by the political scientist Hanna Pitkin, that is, as ‘acting [on the part of the political representative] in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them’. In this paper I introduce the insights of the recent ‘constructivist turn’ in studies of political representation to the analysis of Athenian politics in the hope of suggesting, in what will necessarily be a brief and incomplete exercise, how productive this exciting new paradigm can be for understanding the dynamics of ancient democracy. I first lay out the basic tenets of constructivist representation, particularly the notion of the ‘representative claim’ as developed by the political theorist Michael Saward, and argue for their suitability for studying ancient Greek history and political thought. Next, I adapt the model of the representative claim to two episodes of Athenian democratic deliberation, showing how it illuminates processes of demotic will- and identity-formation. I conclude by briefly underscoring how approaching Athenian politics in terms of constructivist notions of representation restores an aesthetic dimension to ancient democratic debate, one that allows us to compare more productively the ‘demos’ of symbouleutic oratory with its counterparts in poetry, sculpture, and other media, namely as a represented object fashioned for creative and rhetorical purposes.

The first stasimon of the Antigone is widely and justly acknowledged to be one of the finest of Sophocles' extant lyrical compositions. The praises of the achievements of man are set forth in language whose sheer power of diction and imagery imparts to the ode a tone of sincerity and conviction which is perhaps rivalled only by the praise of Athene in the first stasimon of Oedipus Coloneus. Just as that ode shows that Sophocles felt a real and abiding love for his native city, so too from this ode in Antigone we can see that he was deeply and genuinely impressed with the picture of the cultural progress of man as expounded by Protagoras. The power and the achievements of man made a great impact upon him, which is reflected in this ode. But just as the praise of Athens is not to be regarded in this light alone, as an independent song (for it has an intimate connection with the drama arising from its immediate response to the situation and from its wider implications for the action of the play as a whole), so also here, the praise of man in Antigone must not be treated as independent of the action of the play. For the choral ode stands, in the first place at least, as a response to the situation by a character involved in that situation, and as such it has an important contributory part to play in the total effect of the drama.