In later antiquity it was universally held that Aeschylus was the most given, of the three fifth century Athenian tragic poets, to lavish spectacular display. This view rested on three foundations: first, consistent misinterpretation of the many jokes which Aristophanes makes in The Frogs about the archaic grandeur of Aeschylean drama — jokes which on close examination revolve almost entirely around the style of Aeschylus' language; second, the practice of importing scenes of spectacle and crowds of extras into Hellenistic and Roman productions of classical Greek tragedy; and, third, the ascription to this author of the play, Prometheus Bound, which undoubtedly calls for elaborate scenic requirements. The authenticity of Prometheus Bound has been increasingly called in question during the twentieth century: and no scholar who is prepared to accept the arguments and comparisons to be found in Mark Griffith's recent study would now care to place the composition of Prometheus Bound less than twenty years after the death of Aeschylus.

If Prometheus Bound is not to be ascribed to Aeschylus, six of his plays survive. They are distinguished by their extreme theatrical economy; no device is used in them unless it bears close relevance to the playwright's purpose and theme. In his pioneering study, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oliver Taplin has drawn attention to a number of ways in which this feature is to be observed in the surviving plays; and his penetrating observations are by no means confined to the main subject of the book, which is the dramatic use made in Greek tragedy of the entrances and exits of the characters and of the chorus. But much remains to be done, before we can seriously claim to understand the genius of Aeschylus and his successors as theatre craftsmen. I want now to introduce and open up an area of debate which I find to have been seriously neglected in the work on Aeschylus which I have read.

The friendship between Horace and Maecenas quickly attained an almost mythical status as the ideal relationship of poet and patron. In addition to such material generosity as his gift of the Sabine farm, Maecenas seems to have given the poet a ‘spiritual’ patronage which was equally important. As a gesture of gratitude, the mature Horace dedicated to his patron the first three books of odes and addresses to him seven poems within that collection. Several of these take the form of invitations to symposia at the poet's Sabine retreat. Their primary interest for critics has been ethical: the poet suggests the value of his humble farm as a recreative, peaceful environment for the sophisticated urban dweller who is caught up in the busy world of Rome. Critics have shown how the invitations to this simple, private world involve the attainment of a proper attitude towards life, an awareness of human limitations. Recent studies have tended to explore more fully the poetic implications of Horace's invitations, by which the poet points beyond the ethical to the artistic principles associated with his Sabine farm. They have, for example, analyzed metaphors which link wine with poetry and Greek things with Italian as Horace's self-conscious expressions of his special contribution to the lyric genre.

Three extended dialogue or monologue passages, along with numerous brief references and two choral odes in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis talk about the past. As in many tragedies, the past is not altogether past because it is forced upon characters and audience alike by the pressure of tradition and by its likeness to the present situation.

Agamemnon begins the play by harking back to a previous time. Nor is his monologue a simple, ingenuous statement of historical facts. It is full of subtleties which clarify much of what subsequently occurs in the drama. Timing is important from his first utterance:

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid suppresses certain elements of the myth of Medea and supplements others. The focus of his alterations, it seems, is on language itself, and particularly on the relation of language to metamorphosis. He returns again and again to Medea's use of incantation. Whether in the story of Jason and the golden fleece or of Aeson's rejuvenation, Ovid emphasizes the efficacy of language. He suggests the relationship of words to transformation through Medea's exercise of magic, indeed literalizes the connection between ritual language and transformed phenomena in the metamorphoses that follow her magic rites. But magic functions also as a metaphor for imaginative power, since it possesses the capacity shared by poet and magician to transform. In the several depictions of Medea's magic art — and one can perceive the episodes of the myth structured around their connections with magic — Ovid develops an image for imagination itself. Jason's labors, for example, are affected by Medea's expertise in magic; they are also a vehicle for a self-conscious display of poetic power. Ovid asserts his imaginative superiority more clearly in the case of Medea, whose relation even to her own power is ambiguous. But let us first consider the portrayal of Medea as a teller of her own tale and the poet's nod in the direction of his predecessors.

The Aristaeus Epyllion is the finale and the climax of the Georgics. Although a radical departure from the poem's didactic formula, the distinction of a lengthy narrative affords emphasis as well as a certain fitness to the conclusion of a long and complex poem. The task, however, of relating the myth to an interpretation of the poem has taxed the imagination and ingenuity of scholars, undermining the confidence of not a few in the poem's integrity. The object of this paper is to examine Aristaeus' role in the epyllion and to show to what extent it suggests initiation into a mystery religion.

The epyllion is motivated by the beekeeper's loss of his hive; Vergil advises restoration through the bougonia. The epyllion, however, exceeds the needs of an explanation and acquires a meaning and function all its own, displacing the bees at center stage. The ostensible object of the epyllion is to recount the discovery of the bougonia: Arcadii memoranda inventa magistri (G.4.283), But in fact the bougonia plays only a small part in the epyllion, providing at the end, as the means of restoration of Aristaeus' bees, a sacrifice, which indeed proves anticlimactic after the drama of Aristaeus' quest and Orpheus' loss. Moreover, the early revelation of its formula removes any suspense about its details. The bougonia is in fact a structural device that introduces and concludes the myth; it is part of a complex of previously unrelated myths, cleverly manipulated by Vergil to formulate the epyllion.

After Athena announces his acquittal in the trial of the Eumenides, Orestes offers thanks to the three gods who have driven him from the house into the city to restore him once again to his house — Pallas, Loxias, and the Third Savior who accomplishes all things, Zeus Sōtēr (757-760). In the plot of the Oresteia, this triad has made Orestes the third savior for whom the Chorus of the Choephoroi pray (1073); he comes in the third generation, after Atreus and Agamemnon, to save his line from the extinction threatened by the atē working its way through the generational cycles of the House of Atreus. His trial, which establishes in the polis the precedent of Ixion (cf. 441, 717-718), brings it an unbeatable grip of salvation and victory against its opponents (776-777). The evolution he thus effects in the human ethical order is an unwitting imitation, with Orestes as a human counterpart to Zeus, of the evolution in the divine ethical order effected by the young Olympian gods in the Prometheia, for only in the third generation, after Ouranos and Kronos, does Zeus halt the lawless cycle of divine usurpation. Zeus proves triaktēr, victor in the third bout, in the struggle for control of the kosmos (cf. Ag. 168-172); likewise, Orestes overcomes the atē which Elektra describes as atriaktos (Cho. 339), and, having offered Aegisthus as a third libation (Cho. 577-578), he proves triaktēr in his agōn against the Erinyes, although they claim to have tripped him in the first of three bouts (Eum. 589). Human history is an imitation of divine history, accomplished under Zeus' command by the Olympian gods, who seek to bring man's ethical order into line with the new order of the kosmos; only by thus reconciling the Chthonic gods to the new order can the Olympians establish the harmonia necessary if Zeus' regime is to stop permanently the cycle of crime and counter-crime.

Language is central to homo sapiens and in literature is used in a special way to investigate the human condition. In poetry language is even more special and particular poets employ it in a highly individual fashion. ‘Style’ is the term that describes this individual use of language by a writer and style by definition implies choice: from a wide, indeed infinite number of sentences available in the language he uses, the writer selects particular sentences which best express what he wants to say. And in poetry he must also choose a particular metrical pattern into which he fits his sentences or else decide to write vers libre.

The writer's choice extends over numerous aspects of the finished work such as syntax, sound, vocabulary, metre and rhetorical figures like metaphor, metonymy and anaphora. In syntax the writer can use hypotactic or paratactic, long or short sentences and can alternate between the indicative and the subjunctive or optative moods; as regards sound he can make the words echo the sense; through his choice of vocabulary he can emphasize vital matters and adumbrate motifs central to his work; in his handling of metre the poet can use enjambment or end-stopped lines, vary the caesura and substitute long for short or vice versa; finally, the writer can employ the innumerable devices available to a self-conscious literary artist to add distinction and power to his work. A word of warning, however, Dylan Thomas rightly tells us that when all the technical aspects of a poem have been minutely analysed there is still something left that defies the scholar's annotating: the intangible, but ineluctable, impact of great poetry.

This epigram of Callimachus is one of the best known poems in Classical literature, but it suffers more than most from the misfortune of having to live permanently in the shadow of its own translation. It may no longer be the case that every schoolboy knows ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’, but it is certainly true that Cory's English version is much more widely known, and much more widely quoted, than Callimachus's Greek original. One result of this has been that a good deal of attention has often been given to comparing the two poems, but little time has been spent on examining the Callimachus as a poem in itself in an effort to see what its virtues are. One may occasionally find a few remarks on the restraint or simplicity of the Greek, as opposed to the English, or a note suggesting that Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, the poet to whom the verses are addressed, wrote a volume of verse the title of which was actually Aēdones (‘Nightingales’) — hence the ‘nightingales’ of the second last line. Occasionally a commentator will go a little further. K. J. Mckay for instance remarks: ‘The high respect in which this epigram is held is fully justified. The way in which the thoughts spill over their barriers in the first four lines, the magic of katedusamen (suggestive of a communion of uncommon power), the skilful location of key thoughts (teon moron, katedusamen, aēdones), the pathos of an unknown grave and an abiding grief cannot but move us. Above all, the suggestion of unfathomable sorrow.’

Unusual things are to happen to Lucius in Hypata. Since he finds himself lodged at the home of the town's foremost miser, he tactfully refuses hospitality and sets off to procure his own food for dinner. After a little bargaining, he manages to purchase some fish at a reasonable price – but life is not going to be that easy. He is spotted by an acquaintance from Athens who has confirmed the ‘Peter Principle’ by rising to the position of public overseer of the market. Pythias is wonderfully officious: when he learns how much the fish have cost his friend, he is outraged and immediately drags Lucius back to the fish-seller, scolds the miscreant merchant, and as a curious climax to his absurd performance:

One of the most valuable keys to an interpretation of the Antigone lies in a proper understanding of the role of the Chorus, and this in turn depends on a close attention to its characterization, its personality, attitudes and feelings, its relationship to the principal characters, the way in which it is involved in and affected by the actions of those characters, and how it responds to their actions. Any overall view of the play must take account of these matters, not only in order to appreciate the many dramatic effects which are created by, for example, the ironic tension between what the Chorus believes and the words in which it expresses that belief, but also hecause the handling of the Chorus and its responses to the action may direct our attention to a more adequate and satisfactory interpretation of the play.

For several years Horace had lived a regulated and retiring life dedicated to philosophy, and had written poems of an avowedly ethical nature embodying the fruits of his contemplation. These poems are letters addressed to his several friends, and of course to his patron, and are as MacLeod defined them: ‘ethical poems in which the epistolary form led to the presentation of moral matters.’ These poems were in the fulness of time collected and, after well-documented literary custom, were arranged in a significant order. A final poem was written (as was usual) in which unequivocally Horace set his seal (his sphragis) on his latest collection, identifying himself as the writer. He indicated his parentage, his achievement (which belied his humble origins) and, finally, stated his age.

In the opening lines of his signature poem, Horace suggested that his book wanted only to go whoring in Rome. He does this by writing of his book in words which apply equally to a young slave who yearns for the bright lights of a free life in the world at large. The book/slave imagery is sustained throughout and seems to organise the poem along an orderly (and limited) progress from beginning to end. But the poet's attitudes are so complex, his stance about poetry is so provocative (in the poem he seems to create a conflict of interest between the poet and his poems) and, for all the tour de force of his imagery, so single-mindedly fierce and uncompromising that, though we particularly relish the fine verbal control, the poem opens up new horizons of perception.