In describing a close political union Sallust observes haec inter bonos amicitia, inter malos factio est (BJ 31, 15). This remark may be taken as a text for a fashionable interpretation of amicitia in the late Roman Republic. Professor Lily Ross Taylor writes that ‘the old Roman substitute for party is amicitia’ and that ‘friendship was the chief basis of support for candidates for office, and amicitia was the good old word for party relationships’. Again, Sir Ronald Syme says that ‘amicitia was a weapon of politics, not a sentiment based on congeniality’ and he maintains that ‘Roman political factions were welded together, less by unity of principle than by mutual interest and by mutual services (officia), either between social equals as an alliance, or from superior to inferior, in a traditional and almost feudal form of clientship: on a favourable estimate the bond was called amicitia, otherwise factio’. On this view, if a Roman called a man amicus, it meant that he was a political ally, or a member of what in eighteenth-century England could have been described as the same ‘connexion’.

This is a subject of great relevance to the proper understanding of the Greek cities' economy. So far, however, it has scarcely been given the attention it deserves in modern discussions. There is, too, a curious ambiguity in the Greeks' attitude to this activity. On the one hand, temple architecture was a public art, and temple building a cultural activity of great importance to Greek society. The patrons of temple building—aristocrats, tyrants, oriental potentates, citizens, or devotees of a Panhellenic cult—all were concerned not only for the end product of temple building, but also in the process itself, for the opportunity it gave of showing to the rest of the community, or to the world, that they had taken part in so complex, unusual, and costly an undertaking. There was merit in the building of temples, as much as in being able to boast their existence, once built.

In the general revaluation of Ovid's poetry that began in earnest with the publication of Hermann Fränkel's book in 1945, and received a vigorous impetus from the celebrations attending the bimillenary of his birth in 1958, the poetry of his later years has not adequately shared. Even Mr Wilkinson's warm sympathies have not been moved to more than what, with great respect, I would call a somewhat perfunctory appraisal: for his chapter on the poems of exile, though not unjust, gives the reader no idea of how good some of the best of them are and—which perhaps is more important—why and how they are good. In a word, I do not believe that this poetry has yet been read with the critical attention that is its due, and a glance at the relevant pages of L'Année Philologique for the past thirty years or so reinforces this impression. Not that no opinions respecting it are on record. For instance, in the Preface to A. Scholte's edition of Book 1 of the Epistulae ex Ponto (Amersfurt, 1933) will be found a substantial section entitled ‘Iudicia de Epistulis ex Ponto’, in which are recorded the opinions of editors and readers ranging from Edward Gibbon to P. J. Enk. Such doxographies tend to recur in editions of classical writers: a recent example is to be found in Raoul Verdière's very disappointing edition of Grattius (Wetteren, [1964]). What value they have is not critical but historical—and also, indirectly, admonitory: for they ought to remind us of our obligation to read the poems for ourselves, looking for enlightenment not to the experience of previous readers but to our own experience in the light of the guidance provided by the poet.

Much valuable work on the Gortyn Code, which will be my chief source of evidence for this paper, was done in the 80's and 90's of last century, under the stimulus of the discovery of the complete inscription in the summer of 1884. The most extensive contributions were made by continental scholars, but one article appeared in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1892 which remains an essential guide in the exploration of the procedural technicalities of the Code. It was written by J. W. Headlam, who prefaced his study with some remarks which made his standpoint of interpretation quite clear:

The purpose of the following notes is twofold: to correct some current mis-statements about the text, dialect and metre (on which, to some extent, our judgement of the date may depend); and to draw from the text an inference about the status of Hybrias.

Athenaeus xv, 695 F seq.