This paper argues that one of the functions of the Roman ritual calendar – the sequence of religious festivals as they occurred throughout the year – was to define and delineate Roman power, Roman history and Roman identity; and that it did this by evoking events from different chronological periods of the Roman past and arranging them in a meaningful sequence of time, but not a sequence defined by linear, narrative, history. I am concerned principally with the practice of Roman ritual during the late Republic and early Empire; and my argument depends on taking seriously the discussions of the various festivals preserved in the writings of contemporary Romans and Greeks – men who practised or observed the rituals. I want to stress that we should take the rituals and the preserved exegesis together – and I emphasize together – as an important part of a symbolic, religious discourse that continued to be meaningful in the complex urban society of Rome in the age of Cicero, Augustus, Seneca or Hadrian.

In three earlier instalments of these ‘Horatian Notes’ (1969, 1971, 1982) I have tried to weigh the claims to truth of manuscript variants in the transmitted text of Odes and Epodes. In the Satires there is so much of that sort of thing that I have had to restrict myself to Book 1. Now, as well as earlier, disagreements with the decisions of all or most contemporary editors arise. I note, however, that this paper was written before D. R. Shackleton Bailey's edition appeared in 1985. Readers of the present notes will find that we have come, independently if perhaps unsurprisingly, to similar conclusions on a number of passages.

There is then much to say, and because of a plethora of evidence I do not propose to comment on the numerous cases where editors of the last half-century or so make what I regard as the right choice, yet, in one way or another, give rise to the suspicion that they do so for the wrong reasons. Thus at 1.1.38 very few editors now follow Keller and Vollmer, not to mention many of their early predecessors, in printing patiens to describe ‘the tiny ant’ in the animal fable designed to illustrate human failings. With Lambinus and Bentley, they do now print sapiens; yet a perusal of commentaries shows how right was A. Palmer, not usually a herald of Bentley's virtues, to refer to Bentley's note both in his app. crit. and his commentary. It is possible to print sapiens and yet to misunderstand it as ‘prudent, thrifty’; so e.g. L. Mueller. A reference to Bentley (and here also to Lambinus), which can be provided briefly in an app. crit. as much as in a commentary, is here and often elsewhere a reminder of good sense. Nevertheless, in order to save space I pass by such cases in this paper. Nor, as a rule, do I discuss cases where the quality of variants, whether preserved directly or indirectly, happens to be more or less balanced.

R.A. Bauman in his book Impietas in Principem takes at its face value the abolition of maiestas by certain emperors at the beginning of their reigns: he believes that the whole law of treason was suspended during those periods. Since executions and other criminal punishments are recorded, by Tacitus and other writers, as occurring during those same periods, Bauman is obliged to look elsewhere than to maiestas for the legal justification of what occurred. He assigns some cases to the workings of a domesticum consilium, and explains some as resting on accusations of magic and some on parricidium; but in four or five cases, particularly that of Claudius' wife Messallina, he asserts that the punishment was based on a ‘Doctrine of Manifest Guilt’ supposed to exist in Roman criminal law, whereby in the case of the criminal caught in flagrante delicto no trial was necessary and the public authority could proceed directly to inflict the penalty. Two things are to be stressed about Bauman's contention: first, he is talking about the criminal, not the civil, law; secondly, and much more importantly, he is talking not about a merely de facto proceeding, a mere exercise of naked power, but about a ‘Doctrine’, that is to say, a legally accepted rule capable of acting as a justification for the use of the power.

This paper surveys a selection of texts from the fourth century B.C. to the ninth century A.D. and considers the continuing repercussions of Plato's famous attack on art for the present as well as the past. I propose to treat the subject in five sections:

1. A brief consideration of the iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries A.D., to highlight the theory behind the iconoclasts' rejection of pictorial art from the Church (and effectively from society).

2. A general discussion of Plato's apparently iconoclastic argument in Republic 10, to suggest that it too, like the later iconoclasm, was rejecting certain implicit claims made about the value of representation as such.

3. A closer analysis of the arguments in Republic 10 to clarify precisely what theories of art are vulnerable to them.

4. A survey of some subsequent defences of art on the basis that it imitates nature, to show that Plato was right to say that a defence on those lines would not make art sufficiently important to justify the place we accord it in society (or the Church).

Der Rezensent dieser Ausgabe ist fast zu beneiden. Denn die Frage nach dem Werte eines neues Buches, sonst oft mit vielem Wenn und Aber zu beantworten, macht keine Beschwer, wo ein Meisterwerk vorliegt, noch dazu eines, dessen Gehalt an spontaner Lebendigkeit so stark ist, dass es als Ausdruck gewaltiger Intensität eines ganz eigentümlichen Forschens auch dann noch dauern wird, wenn seine einzelnen Ergebnisse bereits in die Arbeiten der Nachfolger aufgegangen sind.

Two highly unusual vase paintings, which may be more or less direct representations of Aristophanes, have been first published recently. They have received little attention to date, and yet both bring with them intriguing problems, which are not, in my opinion, resolved in the original publications. This double accession is all the more remarkable since up till now there has been so little that might be claimed to illustrate pictorially the golden age of Old Comedy (say 435 to 390 B.C), however loosely or tightly the debatable term ‘illustration’ is used (see note 24). The best known has probably been the attic oenochoe with a squat, near-naked figure prancing on a low stage before an audience of two. He is usually taken to be burlesquing Perseus; but presumably his stage model, if indeed the genre is comedy at all, did not really perform naked and without mask. Closer to representation of actual performance may be the four unglazed oenochoai with polychrome decoration from towards the end of the fifth century, found in the Athenian Agora in 1954. For example the two porters, who are alleged to be carrying a large Dionysiac loaf, and who may be slaves or members of a chorus, have masks which are fairly grotesque, but their bodies are not particularly so (unless the one on the left is supposed to have a long but sketchy phallus pointing diagonally down?).

‘Lord Proteus: the saviour of the Hellenes, this watchman of Pharos, was built by Sostratos, son of Dexiphanes, a Cnidian. In Egypt there are no mountain-peaks, as in the islands: but low lies the breakwater where ships may harbour. Therefore this tower, cleaving the sky straight and upright, shines in the daytime countless leagues away: and all night long the sailor who runs with the waves shall see a great light blazing from its summit. And he may run even to the Bull's horn, and yet not miss the god of safety, O Proteus, whosoever sails this way.’

So, in Denys Page's translation, runs the contemporary commemoration by Poseidippos of Pella of the Pharos of Alexandria, the lighthouse which formed one of the wonders of the ancient world. So too, choosing as a continuing theme the most striking monuments of the new Ptolemaic regime in Egypt, the same poet commemorated the temple of Arsinoe-Aphrodite on Cape Zephyrion, east of the city ‘midway between the beach of Pharos and the mouth of Canopos’, whence the lock of Queen Berenike was soon to disappear.

Greek poets and painters of all archaic and classical stages actively used the Bronze Age as their major medium of expression. Their plots are made of legends they attribute to Bronze Age places, their characters are heroes, often royal, who contest those places and thrones, and fight at home and overseas for small quantities of metals, horses, cattle, women. The heroic figures of the classical imagination, especially in tragedy, are isolated and highlighted before general backgrounds of palaces, battlefields, sacred shrines, altars and groves, or tombs. The characters often take on aspects that seem to emanate from these settings – kingly, quarrelsome, acquisitive, enemies or puppets of the gods, exposed to and angry at death. The heroes often seem like dead divinities, sentient watchers inside the earth, contemplating contemporary life, like Amphiaraos watching from some breathing cave near Harma in Boiotia, while an image of them is projected on the stage to walk and talk through their remembered, familiar pathea.

How do women enter the discourse of Augustan love poetry and become elegiac? Studies of the representation of women in antiquity generally suggest that women enter its literatures doubly determined. Broadly speaking, literary representations of the female are determined both at the level of culture and at the level of genre: that is to say by the range of cultural codes and institutions which order the female in a particular society and by the conventions which surround a particular practice of writing. I propose in this paper, therefore, to explore the place of the elegiac woman in the literary landscape of Augustan Rome through an examination of the interplay of her cultural and generic determinants. The phrase ‘the elegiac woman’ which appears in the title of this paper should make clear at the outset that my concern will be not with the realities of women's lives in Augustan society but with a poetic genre of the female.

‘The absence of Roman comedy … from the influences which the [Augustan] poets like to name proves only that they were not creditable, not in fashion, not that they had made no contribution.’ So Jasper Griffin in his recent book on the Roman poets. Griffin observes that scholars have been deterred from postulating Roman comic influence on the Augustan poets merely by the ‘magisterial pronouncements of the great scholars’, and he amasses considerable circumstantial evidence to support his theory that the Augustan poets, and especially the elegists, were indeed indebted to Roman comedy. He observes, for example, that Cicero provides evidence for the continuing popularity of Roman drama; that (a very important point) Horace complains of the popularity of the Roman comedians whom ‘powerful Rome learns by heart’ (Epist. 2.1.60-1); that the same poet, despite his denigration of Roman comedy, obviously knew and referred to it; that Roman comedy seems to be the source, or a source, for the ‘naughtiness’ of elegy and the rejection of traditional Roman values (with the comic amatores distressed by contemporary mores and the elegists flouting them); that if the elegists do not acknowledge their debt to the Roman comic poets, then no more does Horace in the Odes acknowledge his manifest indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry, claiming instead to be following Sappho and Alcaeus.