As examples of the Roman poetry book composed of ten poems, Vergil's Eclogues, Horace's Sermones 1 and Tibullus' first book of Elegies are conspicuous for their similarity of form, all three containing poems of uniform metre and comparable length. Although we cannot be certain that these were the first or only ten poem books in the history of Latin poetry, we cannot help but notice the circumstances that draw them together: their close succession within the space of a decade, their identical positions as the first major publication of each author's career and the well-documented personal association between Horace as central figure of the succession and his two fellow poets, especially his close friendship with Vergil at the time he was composing the Satire Book. While inconclusive in themselves, these circumstances are an inducement to look closely at such similarities of compositional design as the books themselves may show.

A revision of attitude toward Propertius' Actium poem has been gathering way for some time. An impressive list of scholars who took it at face value (whatever that can mean now that a closer, more sensitive, reading has altered our directions) would include P. Grimal, for example, who contended that, ‘La pièce se présente comme un hymne à Apollon protecteur du Prince; elle a comme prétexte le temple dont la construction, projetée dès 36 av. J.C., ne prit toute sa signification qu' apès la victoire d'Actium'. R. Pichon selected a different emphasis as the real point of the poem, but he shared the notion of a political panegyric, ‘C’est donc bien la victoire impériale que veut chanter Properce, c'est l'établissement de la dynastie césarienne: pour lui, Actium est le monument de la gloire des Julii'. More recent acceptance of Propertius as the glorifier of Augustus is seen in H. Pillinger, ‘His poem then is as much a hymn to Apollo as a glorification of Augustus, or perhaps we should agree with the poet that it is a hymn to both at once, the glory of Augustus being prefigured in the brilliance of Apollo.’ W. R. Nethercut describes 4.6 as the centre of Book 4 representing ‘a moment of illumination surrounded by poems set in night … Poem IV.6 thus indeed provides the whole of Book IV with illumination'. In his dissertation of 1963, Nethercut points out that Grimal and Eisenhut consider 4.6 the high point of Augustanism, and goes on to discuss how ‘even Paratore felt the need to account for this poem’.

In 1948 Winnington-Ingram made what is still the most eloquent feminist evaluation of Clytemnestra. He concluded that the Oresteia is based on conflict between the sexes; that Clytemnestra hates Agamemnon for being a man and wants his power; and that in his strong portrait of Clytemnestra and purposely inconclusive trial scene of Eumenides, Aeschylus protests the ‘personal tragedy’ of Athenian women. In 1941, Thomson had claimed the opposite: that the trilogy proves Aeschylus' support for the status quo of economically based male superiority. More recently Jones has interpreted the trilogy as the tragedy of the (largely economic) wastage of the oikos, the House of Atreus, by the sexually deviant Clytemnestra, with Aeschylus favoring the status quo. And in a perceptive literary analysis Vickers concluded that Aeschylus ‘evidently shared the Greek attitude to the lesser sex’ and that his ‘exorcism’ of Clytemnestra in Eumenides is a ‘sustained concentration of moral disapproval rarely equalled in literature.

Language is among the most mysterious of man's attributes. Its power not only to communicate truths about reality, but also to compel assent in the face of reality has often appeared miraculous, magical, and also dangerous. The marvel that mere words could impel men to the most momentous actions, and the admiration or fear that this fact inspires, are recurrent themes in classical literature. To express and understand this power Greek myth early framed the figure of Orpheus, a magical singer, half-man, half-god, able to move all of nature by his song. How that myth shifts in meaning and emphasis in representing that power is the subject of this essay. Though primarily concerned with classical writers, I shall also consider how a few modern poets used and transmuted this mythic material. My reading of the myth is both diachronic and synchronic. I attempt to study some aspects of its historical development and also to interpret it (especially in part I) as if all of its versions, taken together, form a contemporary statement about the relation of art and life.

Orpheus is a complex, multifaceted figure. For the ancients he is not only the archetypal poet, but also the founder of a mystical religion known as Orphism, with a well-developed theology, cosmogony, and eschatology of which much survives in hymns and short epics, mostly of late date. The ‘poetic’ Orpheus inevitably overlaps with the founder of Orphism, but it is the Orpheus of the poetic tradition that this essay discusses.

Plato's so-called ‘middle period’ saw the composition of what are generally agreed to be his finest philosophical dramas, and of these the Symposium is usually singled out for special praise. Yet it is only recently that serious attempts have been made to approach the Symposium as a work of literature rather than a philosophical treatise. Those who employ the work as a source-book for Platonist doctrines rarely venture beyond Socrates' dialectical refutation of Agathon and his report of what Diotima told him (199c-212b); and if they do, it is to point out the logical or perceptual fallacies — i.e. the philosophical deficiencies — of the other five encomia and to find in Alcibiades' contribution a glowing tribute by Plato to that most remarkable of human personalities, the philosopher Socrates. This, however, is not the way to arrive at a real understanding of the Symposium. The author clearly intends the reader to respond to this work not as a philosophical treatise on the subject of Eros but as a work of literature which portrays a group of thinking human beings engaged in appraisal of an issue which is of fundamental importance in their lives. His primary purpose in dramatising this intellectual event is thus not to expound the philosopher's conception of Eros or to expose our minds to auto to kalon (‘the beautiful itself’). Rather the true subject of the work is man the intellectual animal, whose logoi (‘speeches’) demonstrate his capacity for analysing, evaluating and idealising his feelings and aspirations. It depicts ‘philosophy brought down from the sky and located in the cities and homes of men’; we are shown how, and how successfully, philosophy can function as a vital constituent of human life, rather than a barren and essentially irrelevant dispute about the mechanics of the universe.

Near the mid-point of his aristeia in Iliad 5, Diomedes crushes the hip bone of Aeneas with a great boulder (302 ff.). Before he can administer the coup de grâce, however, Aphrodite intervenes and attempts to protect her son by covering him with the folds of her garment (311 ff.). Not to be thwarted, Diomedes attacks the goddess herself, wounding her on the wrist (334 ff.). She immediately abandons Aeneas and returns, in pain, to Olympus.

At the beginning of the Lysis, Socrates is walking from the Academy to the Lyceum (a good route for any Western philosopher), when he meets some young men who lure him into a new palaestra with the promise of logoi and kaloi. The dialogue which follows has been fairly generally felt to be charming, early, and not very well unified. Most scholars would call the subject of the discussion ‘Friendship’, but the inconclusive discussion of friendship does not apparently begin until the dialogue is almost half completed.

I believe that the Lysis is unified, and that this unity can be most readily seen in two areas: (1) the role and character of the boy Lysis and (2) the simple and consistent use of repeated images or references drawn from three areas of life. These three categories of images, I think, are all related to each other and to the eponymous ‘hero’ of the dialogue, and an understanding of their use can help us to see that the subject of the dialogue is more complicated than ‘what is friendship?’, and that Plato's position is a good deal less inconclusive than the ending of the dialogue would lead us to believe.

Almost as soon as Odysseus sets sail from the terra firma of Troy in the direction of Ithaka, once the sacred citadel has been burnt to ashes, he seems to enter a Never-Never land of giants, monsters, witches, demigods and demigoddesses, strange beasts, fabulous kingdoms, and the dead. One adventure follows on the heels of another in a sequence as bewildering as any which ever occurred in the murky woods of Arthurian legend. Odysseus travels south, north, east, and west to the limits of the known earth. He spends seven years languishing on the island of Ogygia ‘at the navel of the ocean’ (1.50). At different moments he is threatened with tempest, armed attack, cannibalism, dismemberment, sorcery, and several sorts of seduction. He captures magnificent booty, receives fabulous gifts, enjoys the love of two goddesses, and is offered the hand of a king's daughter in marriage — and by the time that he finally arrives on the shore of Ithaka and sets out to reclaim his kingdom, he is utterly alone, bereft of all companions, his appearance that of a ragged beggar.

The Theogony is a poem about the creation of a cosmos, that is, an order. This order is created through the interaction of sexual beings, and the essentially sexual nature of the creative act eventually comes to structure and organize the space of the universe. Sexuality, moreover, implies a fundamental source of tension or conflict between opposites. Paradoxically, conflict in the Theogony is not destructive; rather, conflict enhances and expands the creative potential of sexuality by ensuring that the end product of sexual interaction, new being, will be able to act upon the world.

Conflict arises in the first two divine generations when a divine being attempts to contravene the telos of sexual movement by preventing his already conceived and fully gestated offspring from coming into the world. Conflict thus works against the destructuring of the world. The consequence of each conflict is a world which is more ordered and structured, as the offspring first of Gaia and Ouranos, and then of Rheia and Kronos, are permitted to assume their appropriate places in it, or as Zeus is able to turn his attention from the suppression of his enemies to the establishment of a fixed moral order. Thus conflict decreases the entropy of the world and tends toward creation and new order.