Theocritus, Idyll 26 is short, starkly dramatic, and highly puzzling. Gow (1952) and his predecessors generally regarded it as bad, or even un Theocritean; and many of its details remain obscure. Lines 27–32 in particular present acute problems; and, as Gow (1952) II.475 wrote, ‘no explanation of the poem as a whole can be satisfactory unless it accounts for these mysterious lines’. No ancient scholia survive (except for scraps in P3), and Idyll 26 in isolation offers scant indications of a cultural or social context. In consequence any new attempt to increase understanding of Idyll 26 must inevitably be speculative, particularly when it moves from text-based, literary aspects to more general questions about the idyll. Such an effort may, however, seem more worthwhile nowadays, when the characteristics of professional hellenistic poetry can more easily be recognised in Idyll 26.

The Georgics stand at the threshold of Augustan literature, the Fasti at its end, but despite Ovid's respect for Rome's first great didactic poem, Lucretius' De rerum natura, and despite all the intervening achievements of Augustan poets in incorporating national and aetiological themes into other poetic genres, Ovid's poem repeatedly acknowledges by echoes of form and theme the primacy of the Georgics as model for his aetiological work.

This paper attempts to measure Ovidian response to the Georgics at two levels, the level of formal, verbal allusion and the level of themes and values. I have been led to focus on Ovid's treatment of Ceres/Demeter (and less prominently Liber/Bacchus) because Ceres as teacher of agriculture and benefactor of men is central to Virgil's representation of evolving human culture. But Ceres is equally important to the Fasti (although her sober personality makes her unappealing as a candidate for interview by the poet) as a major deity in the largely rural Roman calendar, as a symbol of the didactic principle, and for her very centrality in the Virgilian poem that Ovid is emulating.

It has long been recognised that the Linear B archives from the Mycenaean palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece document ‘a massive redistributive operation, in which all personnel and all activities, all movements of both persons and goods … were administratively fixed’. Goods, land and services were transferred within the extensive territory of each palace without the equivalences of value between commodities which are a prerequisite of market exchange. The transactions recorded in the Linear B archives are thus unambiguously ‘redistributive’, an Aegean variant of a form of exchange widespread in the ancient civilisations, and as such have attracted the interest both of economic historians and of prehistorians concerned with the development of complex society. The term ‘redistribution’ embraces a range of possible forms, however, and in the case of the Mycenaean palaces poses a number of questions.

In classical tradition as well as in modern classical scholarship, the emergence of written law and the earliest conception of the very idea of legislation are inseparably connected with mythical figures of almost heroic status: the great ‘arbitrators’ (diallaktai, katartisteres or aisymnetai) and ‘lawgivers’ (nomothetai) allegedly appointed in many Greek cities during the seventh and sixth centuries. According to this tradition, they were men truly wise and just, who were chosen, sometimes from outside the city, to deal with political conflict and social strife, to mediate between hostile factions within the citizen body, to restore law and order and to establish eunomia in the polis community.

In the handbooks, it has been generally assumed that written law, legislation and ‘codification’ played a major role in this story in two respects. On the one hand, oppression, injustice, the arbitrary interpretation and distortion of traditional law and time-honoured custom by aristocratic judges – Hesiod's ‘gift-devouring kings’, handing down ‘crooked judgments’ – were, it is said, a major cause of social discontent among broad strata of the societies of these early cities.

The relation of Ovid's Fasti to Roman religion has been discussed many times, but has never been dealt with properly. Despite a radical re-evaluation, in recent years, of Ovid's literary sophistication, scholars of Roman religion still tend to offer a negative judgment on Ovid's value. Criticisms have been varied. Ovid's unseriousness – frivolous tales in a context so solemn–has been considered exasperating. He has been accused (for example by Fr. Altheim) of lacking any religious sense whatsoever and of destroying respect for religion. Others, like Wissowa, have judged him to possess neither wide scholarship nor even the capacity of bringing his analyses to any proper conclusion. And it is not just authorities of the past who talk in these terms of moral outrage. Even today many historians of religion ignore or even reject the Fasti as any kind of reliable ‘source’. His causae are, they say, incomplete and incoherent; and he is further criticized for being unable to make a final decision between all the explanations he offers. In the camp of the Ovidiomastiges, shocked by the poet's amateurishness, one also finds those interested in Rome's mythology: evidence earlier than the Fasti being missing in most of the cases, the mythologists deeply resent Ovid's elusive art which frustrates their expectations. I will not here reconsider all the criticism nor will I offer a final defence or condemnation of the author of the Fasti, I will simply claim that there is no case to answer.

The close association in the literature of antiquity of seeing with sexual desire inspired the tragic poet Agathon to pun on the similarity between the Greek verb ‘to see’ (ὁρᾶν) and the verb ‘to desire’ (ἐρᾶν), as suggested by a fragment preserved by Zenobius: ἐκ τοῦ γὰρ ἐσορᾶν ἐγένετ' ἀνθρώποις ἐρᾶν. As is the case with many fragments, it is difficult to identify the degree of irony (or seriousness) with which Agathon intended this isolated line, but the passage is repeated (without attribution) in a number of other ancient sources, and it perhaps lays some claim to a measure of ‘folk wisdom’: for human beings the source of erotic desire lies in an act of seeing. In his brief and pithy love-letter ‘To Nicetes’ (Epistle 52), which Nauck observes may well draw on the pun of Agathon, the third-century sophist Philostratus would similarly appeal to the association of ὀρᾶν with ἐρᾶν to refute, in an ironic way, two time-honoured maxims about erōs: that love is a ‘disease’; and that lovers are ‘blind’: οὐ τὀ ἐρᾶν νόσος ἀλλὰ τὸ μὴ ἐρᾶν· εἰ γὰρ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὁρᾶν τὸ ἐρᾶν, τυφλοὶ οἱ μὴ ἐρῶντες.

On the hideous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humourist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

In Propertius' reconstruction of the battle of Actium in 4.6 Apollo is pictured taking his place over Augustus' ship, braced for war:

non ille attulerat crinis in colla solutos

aut testudineae carmen inerme lyrae. (31–2)

In the opening couplet of the Ibis Ovid repeats the words carmen inerme at the same point in the pentameter:

tempus ad hoc lustris bis iam mihi quinque peractis

omne fuit Musae carmen inerme meae.

In Propertius Apollo lays aside the peaceful lyre and takes up his bow to begin the onslaught (55) which will bring Augustus easy victory (57). By echoing Propertius' words Ovid signals his own move into bellicose poetics. But whereas Apollo is equally adept with the lyre and the bow, Ovid is a stranger to war and no more equipped to take up figurative arms in his unaccustomed hands (cf. 10) than he is to take up real arms in self-defence against the marauding hordes of Pontic barbarians (cf. Tr. 4.1.71–4). So why does Ovid have no option but to make war when, on his own admission, he is so ill-equipped for the task? Why is he at such pains to stress his strangeness to arms?