Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum. 5
non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam: usque ego poster a
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex:
dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus 10
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnavit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica 15
lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.

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.

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.

The first lines of Vergil's Georgics make clear the literary debt:

Vos, o clarissima mundi
lumina, labentem caelo quae ducitis annum;
Liber et alma Ceres … (G.1.5-7)

The reader recalls immediately Lucretius' invocation to Venus:

Parallels of subject are obvious. Lucretius' famous pessimism about the earth's ability to renew herself, at the conclusion of his second book, is behind Vergil's insistence, in Georgics I, that the farmer prepare all his resources to bolster a faltering soil; the famous picture of rustic celebration and the pleasures of soft grass and jovial interchange with which Georgics II ends is an elaboration of Lucretius' spring-time, when men stretch at leisure on greening grass inter se prostrati (‘relaxing with each other’); the hideous account of Athens' plague in Lucretius, Book VI, is matched by Vergil's description of Noricum at the end of his third book.

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.

The first thing that the student of Vergilian pastoral may notice in turning to the pastoral Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus is the obvious symmetrical arrangement of the poems in the later book. While the multitudinous inter-lacings of theme and subject in Vergil's ten poems continue to tease and baffle investigations of the larger organizational pattern, the principles of Calpurnius' design are simple and clear. Instead of ten poems, an even number that causes Vergil's centrally oriented balancing of similar pieces to remain ambiguously off-centre, Calpurnius has seven, clearly divided by subject into two kinds: four rustic poems and three that critics have called court poems, allegorical poems, or, more rightly, political poems whose chief topic is the benefits of the Neronian golden age. The uneven number allows for a precise balancing of similar poems in the two halves of the book. A political poem, a contest poem and a rustic dialogue in the first half have their counterparts in a rustic monologue, a contest poem and a political poem in the latter half. The central poem is political. In devising this order, Calpurnius may well have aimed to remedy what to him seemed defective in Vergil's uncertain symmetry, but the pattern is also well adapted to his own themes.

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.’