In the Ajax of Sophocles Ajax, deprived of his intended revenge over the Greek leaders who deprived him of the arms of Achilles, has resolved on suicide. Tecmessa has sought to dissuade him, appealing to the need to care for their baby son; Ajax has rejected her, saying that he is too old to be taught lessons. But suddenly all is apparently changed. He re-enters and talks of the changes brought by time and seasons; he himself has learnt his lesson, and will purify himself, bury his sword, and seek reconciliation with his enemies. The speech is a very vexed problem in the interpretation of the Ajax, especially since, when he next appears, Ajax seems to have forgotton all about it, and proceeds with his suicide without any reference to his previous change of mind, if such it was. But this is a complex problem, requiring full discussion elsewhere.

The plays of Sophocles were written for performance, indeed primarily for one performance only. If their author intended them to produce any particular effect then that effect had to be conveyed in performance. This truism leads to another. In order to understand the function of any incident or utterance in the plays of Sophocles, one must examine it in context; one must consider the position it occupies within the play. The performance of a play is a linear experience. Events occur and information is transmitted in a strict temporal sequence. To understand a play one must respect that sequence.

Sophokles’ Elektra has been the subject of considerable interpretative debate this century. Is it a tragedy that ends on a note of clear and unequivocal triumph for the two children engaged in avenging their father and recovering their rightful heritage? Or are we to detect a much more ambivalent attitude to the matricide and to perceive a thread of darkness and ruin running through the play as we see the disintegration of Elektra as a person? The divine element is an important aspect of every one of Sophokles’ extant plays; and for Elektra that means Apollo above all. Other gods are invoked in prayers or alluded to occasionally — especially Zeus at 1095-7 — but Apollo is the deity most frequently in our minds throughout this drama.

Hecuba and The Trojan Women have much of their material in common. Both plays have a chorus of captive Trojan women who are waiting at or near Troy just before they sail with their new masters to Greece. Both groups sing at some length about their slave condition, about the question of where precisely in Greece they will be taken and about the night of Troy’s fall. Hecuba is the protagonist of both plays and they are largely concerned with the destruction of her family. In Hecuba Polydorus is killed before the play’s opening (though Hecuba does not know this) and the cruel killing of Polyxena engages our attention for a considerable time; in The Trojan Women Polyxena is killed before the play’s opening (though Hecuba does not know this) and the cruel killing of Astyanax engages our attention for a considerable time. In both plays Talthybius is the sympathetic announcer of brutal Greek decisions and Odysseus (whether on or off the stage) is the cynical politician whose pressure is held responsible for the deaths of Polyxena and Astyanax respectively.

Our greatest blessings come to us through madness, Plato tells us in Phaedrus 244 A, and his examination of this particular form of madness has had a commanding influence in the history of Western philosophy and literature. The Symposium, which is the major concern of this paper, is one of Plato’s most ironic and yet most serious dialogues and has been repeatedly reinterpreted and repeatedly used as a source of inspiration and ideas from ancient times up until the 20th century. Some of its key phrases are echoed by the neo-Platonists, and its combination of the erotic and the mystical provided a fertile soil for the development of the Christian idea of love, despite the existence of a rival notion of love within Christianity, designated by the term agape. The classic attempt to distinguish between Christian and Platonic love was made by Nygren in his book, Eros and Agape, and this author draws a distinction between the two with glaring simplicity. Agape is (on this view) the quality of caritas, of feeling that bond with one’s fellow man which causes one to attend to his needs and wants, whilst eros is the more self-centred drive for personal fulfilment. The Patristic writers did not feel the difference between the two to be as decisive as that outlined by Nygren, and as John Rist notes in his Eros and Psyche, Origen was one Christian writer who failed to observe the sharpness of the distinction between them. It is not my intention however to dwell on this distinction, since the original Christian notion of love is more a matter of behavioural than philosophical or literary significance. However the debate is instructive since it tends to produce caricatures on both sides, with Christian love losing its mystical aspect, and Platonic love losing the emphasis on self-transcendence. In fact it is arguable that Platonic love is more concerned with need and lack, than it is with self-indulgence and with wallowing in some romantic vision, and this paper will argue that the idea of love as ‘lack’ is a most important, yet often overlooked ingredient, in the account of love which is given by Plato and Plotinus.

Important contributions to the study of the sarissa and its use in combat have been made recently by Minor M. Markle, III. He has shown clearly that the sarissa proper, a pike varying between fifteen and eighteen feet in the fourth century B.C., was held in action fairly near the butt-end and was wielded with both hands by the infantryman. When the phalanx was in close order, as many as five pike-points might project in front of a front-line man towards the enemy. The front man himself had a reach of some twelve feet with his pike, and he could put his full strength into a two-armed thrust. On the other hand, a Greek spear-man wielded a seven-foot spear with a reach of some four feet (as he held it near the middle) and he thrust only with the strength of one arm (the other arm carrying his large shield, some three feet in diameter). Thus when a pike-phalanx engaged a spear-phalanx, the spear-man was at a great disadvantage; he could not reach his opponent at all until he had himself passed through some three or four pike-points, and even then he could not put as much strength into his thrust as his opponent was able to do.

In the history of Philip II’s conquest of Greece the part played by Boeotia must weigh heavily. Recently the view has been urged that in 346 B.C. Philip intended to bring Boeotia low by breaking the predominance of Thebes within the Boeotian federal state but was prevented from having his way by the successful scheming of his opponents in Athens, who persuaded their countrymen to frustrate Philip’s plans by withholding their co-operation, so that Philip was compelled to treat Thebes favourably. As a corollary to this view it is thought that Demosthenes, the foremost of Philip’s opponents at Athens, aspired from the time of the Peace of Philokrates on, if not earlier, after an alliance between Athens and Boeotia as the only realistic way of resisting Philip. At the same time Philip is believed to have preferred, if only he could have had his own way, to have Athens as some kind of partner and to make Thebes alone his enemy. Rebuttal of this view of Philip’s policy in 346 has been prompt and telling and no more may need to be said about it now that G.T. Griffith’s magisterial account of Macedonia has shown, amidst so much else, how Philip’s relations with Greek states are to be understood in the light of Philip’s own changing views of his interests.

In a recent note in Historia Léonie Hayne has written the following:

Partly on the basis of this she suggests that Cn. Servilius Caepio, cos. 141 and eventually censor in 125, may have suffered a repulse in the censorial elections of 131, having stood in tandem with Q. Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus. Those elections, of course, produced the first all-plebeian censorial college.

Hayne, therefore, has used data on censors arranged in an extensive chronological framework in the middle of which stand the elections in question. My own attempts to present patterned data which may help to elucidate the phenomena of Roman politics have made me particularly aware of the necessity to arrange such data in compartments of defensible significance. So here I must object to the use of ‘after 218’ as a proper time reference for the evidence. The plebeian college of 131 would seem to present one significant point of division. This was in fact realized by Suolahti, who uses two periods, not one, namely 218-133 and 133-30, and who is much more cautious and much less specific about patricians. Yet, even so, one must be careful about assembling or describing the data in convenient periods. Perhaps this is especially so with the censorship, a position only filled once every five years in normal circumstances, so that to have a reasonable number of censors on which to base statistical conclusions, one must necessarily encompass a considerable span of time.

Asconius believed he had access to two published editions of Cicero’s defence of Milo. The first purported to be a record of the speech as delivered at the trial, in which Cicero was not at his best. The second edition was regarded by Asconius as Cicero’s supreme achievement in oratory. This edition is that which we still have; the first has perished, and it has even been suggested that Asconius — and Quintilian — were duped by a forgery. Even so Asconius’ knowledge of Cicero’s line of defence in the trial cannot have depended on the text of this supposed verbatim record alone, but rather on an ample historiography on which he drew for the long and circumstantial argumentum to his Milonian commentary. (A forger, for that matter, who could impose on Asconius and Quintilian must also have been historically well informed about the case.) Any indication by Asconius, therefore, of a divergence between the original defence and the extant version is likely to rest on specific knowledge.

Critical assessments of the effectiveness of the characterization of Ofellus in Horace, Satires 2.2 have varied from time to time. However, there has been something of a consensus on the question of Horace’s attitude towards Ofellus. It has generally been believed that Ofellus is intended to be the mouthpiece of admirable sentiments. I believe, however, that a reassessment of Ofellus’ character is overdue and may facilitate a correct re-evaluation of Ofellus’ role within the poem and, thereby, of the meaning of the poem itself.

Modern historians of Rome have expended much care and ingenuity in discussing the constitutional basis for the Augustan principate. Ancient historians had a much simpler view — it was a monarchy. And they were right, even if it was a monarchy within a constitution so that as monarch Augustus contrived to govern with the consent (and support in many cases) of the traditional governing classes without constantly having to invoke the reserve powers of a monarch whose will is ultimately sovereign.

Was there a slave-freedman ‘cursus’ or career structure in the Imperial administration? And if so, on what criteria was advancement within it based? Did promotion depend on seniority or merit or both together? How impersonal and rational was the regulation of the system, i.e. what degree of bureaucratization was reached, or, on the other hand, what was the extent of patronage inside the slave-freedman service? These are all important and difficult, even impossible, questions for the student of the Roman Imperial administration.

In this paper I argue that Panegyric VIII (V) was delivered on 25 July 311, at the completion of the celebration of Constantine’s Quinquennalia, and that Constantine always regarded 25 July as his dies imperii.

The purpose of Panegyric VIII (V) is to thank the Emperor Constantine for benefactions to the speaker’s civitas Autun. It adheres closely to its theme, offering few allusions to events unconnected with these benefactions, unlike, for example, Mamertinus’ Panegyrics II (X) and III (XI), which retail the recent achievements of his Emperors. What is the occasion and date of its delivery? The answers to these questions will be seen to have a wider significance.

When in A.D. 378 Ammianus Marcellinus fails us we have for the rest of the century and, indeed, for the whole history of the Theodosian house in the East a considerable amount of varied documentation. But, lacking ‘an accurate and faithful guide’ like Ammianus, for a coherent picture of the political and military activity of the period we must have recourse to the inferior and derivative New History of Zosimus, partisan ecclesiastical histories, and late and skimpy chronicles. In these circumstances the fragments of the History of Eunapius, preserved mostly in the Excerpta of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, but also in some notices of the Suda, have considerable value. For, despite Eunapius’ clear inferiority to Ammianus as an historian, he was a contemporary of the events which he described. The fragments have been underused, which is probably due to the common, though not wholly accurate, opinion that Zosimus, being nothing more than a slavish copier of Eunapius, faithfully preserves what his source wrote. Yet (ignoring the problem of the degree of Zosimus’ dependence) he greatly condensed his source, and thus there is much in the Eunapian survivals that is not in the New History. The final fragments (80-88), to which I wish to address myself, are especially important because much of their material corresponds to a lacuna in Zosimus’ text, and the ecclesiastical historians,who make some use of Eunapius, appear to have deserted him here, probably because they found his version of events, especially those involving John Chrysostom, unpalatable.

De Die Natali is an obscure little treatise on human life, the influence of the planets and the divisions of time, written by the Roman grammarian Censorinus and dedicated to Q. Caerellius for his forty-ninth birthday in A.D. 238. It was not a very popular work before the fifteenth century, and there is no reason why it should have been. Even its Italian revival was probably due to its brevity, which encouraged its copying as an adjunct to the larger, more interesting works which accompanied it in the earliest manuscripts. The increasing popularity of astrology may also have influenced its dissemination during the Renaissance. It was not, however, completely lost from sight during Europe’s first millennium. The study of its early transmission and use throws some interesting light upon the revival of classical literature in that period, though it is unlikely to improve the state in which the text has come down to us.