The editors wish to outline the current policy endorsed by the journal's Board of Management, in the hope that they may attract appropriate contributions from a wider range of contributors:

The journal publishes notes and articles on major authors and topics, not on the excessively technical or exotic;

It is a commonplace of contemporary classical scholarship that in the classical period the political and social status of Athenian women was deplorably low. Relegated to the ranks of slaves and children, scholars suggest that they were even much worse off than the women of earlier and later periods of Greek history. This paper proposes not to challenge this global judgement as a whole, but simply to focus upon one aspect of women's lives which has played an important role in such scholarly discussions.

The Andromache of Euripides has not had a good press. Sandwiched between more immediately attractive plays such as Medea and Hippolytos and the more controversial dramas such as Elektra and Herakles, it has for the most part languished in obscurity with the other less appealing plays of the 420s (e.g. Herakleidai, Hekabe). More than one critic has been overtly hostile, and what interest has been shown has tended to focus on its odd tripartite structure, the elegiacs unique to tragedy in Andromache's lament (103–16), 1 the possibility of its production other than at Athens (Σ ad v. 445, evidence of a most doubtful kind), and the two well-known anti-Spartan diatribes (445–63, 595–604).

Vergil has an accurate eye for visual detail, and describes much as an artist might each cameo of his narrative. It is for this reason that we are shocked by images that cannot be easily translated visually. Perhaps the most arresting of such passages is the description of the monstrum Fama at A. 4. 173ff., which defies any reasonable attempt to convert it into a visual or narrative image.

In an excellent article on ‘The Philosophy of the Odyssey’ Dr. R. B. Rutherford draws renewed attention to the need to ‘distinguish between the poet's statements and the words of his characters’, and adds: ‘This principle also affects the view we take of the gods’ concern for justice in the Iliad: the Greeks, believing themselves in the right, sometimes declare that the gods must think likewise… But the scenes on Olympus which the poet allows us to witness do not generally bear this out.’

The Eclogues, Virgil's earliest work, are also in some ways his most puzzling, and of these enigmatic poems the sixth is perhaps the most baffling. Since it clearly assumes a considerable knowledge of the contemporary literary scene, much that would have been clear at least to Virgil's fellow poets must remain opaque to us. But it would be over–pessimistic to suppose that we can make nothing of the poem; nor have modern scholars been slow to construct the most varied hypotheses. In this article I shall not be attempting a comprehensive survey of the most recent contributions even in English. Like Michael Winterbottom in his illuminating piece on Eclogues 1 and 9 (in G&R23 [1976], 55–59), I am trying to set down, as simply and concisely as possible, some considerations which, in the light of teaching and reflection, seem to me to contribute to the interpretation and enjoyment of the poem.

The therapeutic value of laughter is a commonplace of psychology; it is recognized that one of the functions of comedy is to exorcize our fears by causing us to laugh at them. This is one possible meaning of Aristotle's generalization, with ‘many more than one facet’, that comedy represented people as ‘inferior’ to ‘men as they are now’ (Poetics 1448a 18). So, in comedy, we should not expect to find realistic portrayals of people as they actually are, but rather stereotypes, embodying the fears and anxieties, the mild, underlying paranoia about what might happen, of the audience for whom the author is writing. Aristophanes was writing for an Athenian male audience, and he had to strike a chord in them, if his plays were to be successful and win prizes. What, on the evidence of Aristophanes’ plays, were Athenian men worried about?

Within the last fifty years, there has been a dispute among scholars as t whether or not Aeneas' character undergoes development. Did Aeneas learn anything during his trip to Italy and then change his attitude and behaviour or did he already have, from the beginning of the Aeneid, the same character and personality as he has at the end?

Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, is subtitled ‘Aspects of working–class life with special reference to publications and entertainments’. He writes of industrial west Yorkshire before and after the last war. If we look for progress on similar topics elsewhere, in Italy Armando Petrucci – whose stimulus I gratefully acknowledge – has undertaken notably stimulating analyses of popular publications and low-level education, for instance in his exhibition catalogue ‘Scrittura e popolo nella Roma barocca’. For the Roman Empire – where some at least of the necessary evidence does exist – not only very little progress, but, I suspect, several steps in the wrong direction.