‘It's my PARTY…;’

The Cambridge Museum of Classical and General Archaeology opened on 6 May 1884 with – what else? – a PARTY. Distinguished guests turned out, the University meeting the Aristocracy, Arts and Politics: H.R.H. Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Queen's son, then an undergraduate), Sir Frederick Leighton (President of the Royal Academy), the painters Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter, the American Ambassador, Sir Frederick Burton (Director of the National Gallery), George Scharf (Director of the National Portrait Gallery), and other assorted dignitaries rubbing shoulders and sharing the fun with Richard Jebb (Regius Professor of Greek), E. B. (Primitive Culture) Tylor, S. H. Butcher (of Butcher and Lang's Odyssey), as well as (in the usual formula) ‘the Heads of Colleges, Doctors and Professors, the officers of the University’ … and their ‘ladies’. ‘Luncheon’ was taken in the hall of Gonville and Caius College at one o'clock. A great feast, no doubt, but a bit of a sprint. By two o'clock the assembled company had already finished the pudding and was proceeding to the lecture room of the new museum in Little St Mary's Lane.

The age of Nero is universally considered – even by its more circumspect modern historians – to be a zenith of decadence. This view is not simply the invention of modern writers. It is one point on which the ancient sources, not only historians from Tacitus to Cassius Dio, but also biographers such as Suetonius and poets like Martial, are agreed. One problem with the almost monotonous tale of vice, sexual and gastronomic excess, cruelty and murder, by which Nero's reign has been characterised, is that this is a story written by the winners in the turmoil which followed Nero's fall. It is hardly, in other words, an objective or unbiased account.

‘If I were to waste your time with a long conversation (si longo sermone morer tua tempora), I would be damaging the public interest.’ So Horace begins his Epistle to Augustus, typically selling himself short. He does not pause for breath for 270 lines. Equivocations like this about the sound of his own voice had been a particular characteristic of Horace's earlier books of ‘Conversations’, the Satires or Sermones, a teasing mixture of seemingly directionless rambling and forceful short cuts. Nowhere is this mixture more evident than in the fifth satire of the first book, a short story which apologises for being a long one, where Horace compensates his readers for a long haul with an ending that must leave them feeling short-changed.

Who is that man with the handshake? Don't you know …

He is an onlooker, a heartless type,

Whose hobby is giving everyone else the lie.

Laudatur et alget. The Fifties had faith: ‘This satire is nowadays the most popular of all and still read in many classical sixth forms where one otherwise shuns the Sermones.’ The Sixties knew: ‘This poem … will always be a general favourite’; yes, I bear witness, who lent an ear to the L. A. Moritz track for J.A.C.T.'s showcase of Latinitas back in the golden age of vinyl (I still do: ego uero oppono ∣ auriculam, 76f.). (…) The Nineties wonder. ‘Perhaps the most straightforward and immediately appealing of the ten poems, and perhaps the most delicious example of Horace's brand of ironic humour.’

In the closing chapter of his Greek tragedy in action Oliver Taplin writes:

Understanding, reason, learning, moral discrimination – these things are not, in my experience, incompatible with emotion (nor presumably in the experience of Gorgias and Aristotle): what is incompatible is cold insensibility […] our emotions in the theatre, far from driving out thought and meaning, are indivisible from them: they are simultaneous and mutually dependent.

On the other hand, Malcolm Heath's work inveighs against Taplin's suggestion of a balance between reason and emotion, and proposes

a third possibility: intense but ordered emotion, controlled not by intellectual interests, but by the coherence of the whole simply as an emotional experience, by the aesthetic satisfaction which the audience receives through its experience of the emotions as an ordered sequence.

Few of the many treatments of this famous preface seem to recognise the need for close reading of the text. The present paper sets out to remedy this deficiency in the hope of achieving three main aims: (1) to demonstrate the coherence and power of Livy's argument, as well as the subtlety of its exposition and the richness of its language; (2) to resolve certain specific problems; (3) to further the continuing debate on important general questions in ancient historiography.

Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nee satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim, (2) quippe qui cum ueterem turn uolgatam esse rem uideam, dum noui semper scriptores aut in rebus certius aliquid allaturos se aut scribendi arte rudem uetustatem superaturos credunt.

‘The modes of music are never disturbed without disturbance of the most fundamental political and social nomoi’. This dictum of the influential fifth-century musical theorist Damon, friend and adviser of Perikles, reflects the deep-seated relation that was felt to exist between the modes of music and the fundamental conventions governing social and political life in ancient Greece. This relation deserves much further exploration. Our present thesis is that elaborate linguistic and semantic play between the registers of the musical and the social order is to be found in the Oresteia far more than in any other surviving work. It is, perhaps, not surprising that in this trilogy, where the claims of conflicting nomoi are powerfully dramatised, the musical order is also exploited in complex and subtle ways to reflect upon the social and political order; and that disruptions or distortions in the social order find their counterpart in the musical order. Though some have noted the operation of this interpenetration of registers, it has not been studied in the depth it deserves.