The status of the first twenty-five lines of De rerum natura 4 has been a matter of critical controversy since the appearance of Lachmann's edition of the poem in 1855. The lines are repeated almost verbatim from book 1 (926–50), and Lachmann refused to believe that Lucretius himself could be responsible for the duplication of such a long passage in such a prominent position. He condemned the repetition magisterially as a sign pauperis ingenii et nullius iudicii. The majority of subsequent editors and critics have followed him in attributing the repetition either to an editor or to an interpolator, or supposed that the poet intended eventually to delete the passage from one of the two locations, but was prevented from doing so by his premature death. The problems raised by the repetition are compounded by the transitional section (26–53): the transmitted text is cumbersome and repetitive, and most critics accept Mewaldt's theory that the passage consists of a ‘doublet’, in which two alternative versions of the usual summary and ‘syllabus’ (26–44 and 45–53) have been imperfectly integrated. Mewaldt himself argued that the doublet was the result of a change in the order of books 3 and 4: book 4 was originally intended to follow 2 directly, and lines 1–25 and 45–53 (which summarize the contents of books 1 and 2 only) date from this phase of composition. When the poet decided to insert book 3 between 2 and 4, he substituted the longer summary (26–44) and transferred 1–25 to a new location in book 1; but the posthumous editors of the poem failed to carry out the necessary deletions.

Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find his puella Cynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situation has been pointed out in previous accounts of the poem; this treatment takes a closer look at the text, especially at the mythical analogues for Cynthia applied at the beginning of the poem, and argues that part of the wit and amusement of the poem derives from its articulation of the poet's suspicions of Cynthia's infidelity. This is not a tragic or dramatic effect, but rather a clever and amusing comedy; the amusing self-characterisation of the poet as a drunken bumbler racked with lust and suspicion is fully consistent with the kind of elegist envisaged by Paul Veyne, who rightly stresses that Roman love-elegy has much more to do with literary entertainment than with the intense analysis of passion. The scene is being narrated by the poet with retrospective wit and irony against himself; to use the convenient terms employed by Winkler in his book on Apuleius, the poet as auctor (writer of the poem) provides an entertaining view of the poet as actor (character in the poem's story).

The strategic aim of the set of studies I have embarked on in collaboration with the sinologist Nathan Sivin is to examine Greek and Chinese philosophy and science afresh. Limiting our main inquiries to the period down to about A.D. 300, when Christianity came to be a major factor in the Graeco-Roman world and Buddhism began to be an important influence in China, we aim to ask questions concerning the differences in the ways in which philosophy and science were done in ancient Greece and China, why there should have been such differences, and what the philosophy and science done owed to the social, political and institutional background of the circumstances in which they were produced. It is high time that historians of Greek and Chinese science stopped treating their subjects principally as happy hunting grounds for point-scoring, chalking up anticipations of modern science, and especially priority claims as to who did what first. For they could clearly not have been a preoccupation of the ancients themselves.

P. Vidal-Naquet, en une série d'articles a construit, ou inventé, une figure composite, qui sous-tend les représentations mythiques des jeunes dans la Grèce ancienne, aussi bien que les pratiques réelles (rites d'initiation, éphébie, kryptie, “régiments” d'élite) gouvernant le statut des jeunes dans la cité: il s'agit du fameux “chasseur noir”. Cette représentation des tensions et des ambiguïtés qui entourent le moment du passage de l'enfance à la maturité permet d'éclairer bon nombre de faits de société et de textes; le dossier, bien connu, en a été pleinement assimilé au cours des années depuis le premier article publié en 1968. Cependant, il existe un cas très intéressant et dont on parle peu, bien qu'il mérite sa place au dossier.

1. If I had to sum up as concisely as I possibly can the subject matter of this paper, I would probably say that it was originally stimulated by the attempt to understand how Lucretius articulated his didactic plot. What is the plot of a poem that presents itself as analysing nothing less than ‘the nature of things’? It is safe to assume as a starting-point that a didactic poem which intends to revolutionize each and every principle of perception and evaluation of reality cannot remain unaffected by the theoretical views it tries to prove, and that the persuasive impact of those theories on the reader will inevitably be strengthened or weakened by the way the text situates itself in respect to those theories: the poem itself will be the most effective or the most damning example of its own theories.

All students of the Poetics can see that Aristotle's theory of tragedy sometimes resembles a handbook on dramatic composition. The scope of this ‘resemblance’, however, is rarely acknowledged in modern times. ‘Aristotle's approach to tragedy’, writes Stephen Halliwell, is ‘au fond, a system of theoretical premises and reasoning.’ This, from the author of the most comprehensive, and most significant, discussion of the Poetics in recent years, sounds authoritative. It is none the less misleading.

The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization … in general what was specifically Latin in the common civilization of the empire made little impact in the east’, the exceptions being the influence of Roman law and the popularity of gladiatorial games. That verdict endorsed the view that ‘the emperors made no attempt to romanise the Greek speaking provinces’, which saw the foundation of cities as a continuance of Hellenistic royal practice, and which regarded the establishment of the rare eastern colonies as motivated by practical considerations rather than any attempt at encouraging cultural assimilation. More recently, a fuller survey of exceptions to this general rule nevertheless concluded that ‘On the one hand, the culture and identity of the Greek east remained fundamentally rooted in the Classical past. On the other hand, the visible presence of Rome, outside those zones where the legions were stationed, was extremely slight.’