The plot of the Medea concerns infidelity, a woman discarded by her husband for another younger woman and a more ‘suitable’ match. Infidelity by the husband was not an unusual occurrence amid the material of Greek myths. In Sophocles' play The Women of Trachis the heroine Deianeira, and wife of Heracles, must reluctantly take into her household Iole, a beautiful slave-girl whom her husband has taken as his concubine. Although she is made to give voice to her regret and to her jealousy, she has no thought of harming the girl or her husband. That Heracles is finally injured is not the result of an intentional act of revenge on her part but a mistake set in train by the malevolence of someone else.

Physiognomy (φυσιογνωμονία), the systematic diagnosis of a man's character from his bodily features, originated as a branch of Greek medicine. True, it had antecedents in Babylonia, but the Babylonian science was more concerned with the prediction of the vicissitudes of a man's life than with deciphering his mental and moral qualities, and even deliverances dealing with such qualities were couched in the omen form. Prophetic physiognomists or metoposcopi held their ground throughout classical antiquity, but it was recognized that there were two classes of physiognomist, the seers and the physicians. The medical science of physiognomy was an attempt to extend the idea of treating a man's visible conditions as signs or symptoms of his invisible state, and to produce a list of signs such that the mind's construction could be inferred when it was not transparent. According to Galen this science was invented by Hippocrates himself, which is likely enough, for physiognomical observations occur in probably authentic Hippo-cratic treatises, and there seem to be none in earlier Greek authors. It was introduced into Athens about the time of Socrates, for the philosopher Antisthenes devoted a treatise to it, and there was a story of a visiting expert's diagnosing Socrates as stupid and fond of women.

In a well-known passage in the Apology, Socrates says that if the court release him on condition that he give up questioning the views of his fellow citizens, he will refuse to obey:

… If you say to me, ‘Socrates, this time we will not follow Anytus but will let you go on condition that you no longer spend your time on this inquiry and stop philosophizing; if you are caught doing this again, you shall die’—if you were to acquit me on this condition, I would reply: ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you and as long as I breathe and have the capacity I shall never cease philosophizing …’ (29 c 6–d 5.)

The imposing and romantic remains of the Tiberian palace on the eastern heights of Capri are now visited by relatively few people, and it is often possible to wander among the ruins for an hour or more without meeting another soul. Yet for about a decade, from A.D. 27 to 37, this villa seems to have been the principal residence of the emperor of the Roman world, and Capri, together with Rome, the administrative centre of that world. As imperial residence, as administrative centre, and as a typical Campanian villa, this and the other imperial buildings on Capri must have been thronged with people, from the emperor's family and friends to the palace staff to administrative personnel. It is the purpose of this paper to consider Tiberius' stay on Capri in various contexts, especially that of the people who were on the island with him, in order to understand more clearly what his life there was like.

Every country has its heroes, legendary or historical, who are remembered for some noble action that has caught the popular imagination and made their names immortal. Among the Romans, just as Fabricius was the type of incorruptibility, Decius Mus of devotion to country, Regulus of faith to the pledged word, so the name of Lucretia was proverbial for chastity. The story of her suicide after she had been violated by Sextus Tarquin is recounted by the historians Livy, Dionysius, and Diodorus, and alluded to by many Roman poets and prose-writers. But apart from such allusions, it is curious that of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us none save Ovid has treated her story at any length; moreover, there is apparently no representation of her among the extant remains of Roman art. To painters and poets of later times, however, she made a strong appeal. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, for example, there is the famous painting by Titian; and in our own literature Chaucer sang the praise of ‘the verray wyf, the verray trewe Lucresse’ in his Legend of Good Women, Gower included her in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare in his youth composed that highly coloured arabesque The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood turned the story into a tragic drama, and most recently Benjamin Britten has made it the subject of an opera.

That Ovid found in Lucretia an attractive figure is evident from the detailed manner in which he treats her story in the second book of his Fasti.

I should like to begin like a preacher in his pulpit, by citing two texts. In a lecture given at Harvard University in 1950 on the subject of ‘Poetry and Drama’ T. S. Eliot said: ‘I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something should happen; that the audience should be kept in the constant expectation that something is going to happen; and that when it does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect.’ My second text comes from the paper that has most effectively influenced my own ideas on the subject of Euripides' clever exploitation of the unexpected in his plays: R. P. Winnington-Ingram's ‘Euripides: Poietes Sophos’, published in the second volume of Arethnsa. Winnington-Ingram ends his paper with these words: ‘It makes me wonder whether, in the words of Oscar Wilde, Euripides was not capable of resisting everything except temptation—the temptation to be clever.’

In the Aeneid actions are consistent with character and psychology, indeed indicative of character and psychology. This statement has, I think, general if not universal truth. At any rate, one should not hastily assume otherwise.

It must occur to anyone who reads Plutarch's account of Marius' flight and exile to wonder how much of this thrilling and romantic tale is historically true. There is indeed much to cause disquietude. Historiography of Plutarch's day had no distinct genre for the romantic novel, as Perrin so well points out, and consequently included much that history proper would exclude. Incidents in the flight and exile have in fact been described as ‘fairy-tale-like’ and ‘out.of the Arabian nights’. The debating points of the schools of rhetoric have had their influence too, involving Marius in several dilemmas which seem to have been invented for suasoriae (e.g. Marius and the slave-herdsmen, 36. 3; and the shipowners, 37. 2; and the old fisherman, 37.4; and Sextilius' envoy, 40. 3–4; the deliberations before the grove of Marica, 39. 4, are another example).

Conduct in human relationships, in amicitia (‘friendship’), is a prevalent theme in Horace's works, and was of considerable interest to ancient philosophers. The extent to which such aspects of human behaviour should be regarded as philosophical is a question that has been discussed both in relation to ancient philosophical texts and to Horace. My concern here, however, is not primarily to argue for their philosophical nature but to illuminate certain influences in the Satires and Epistles that draw on philosophical texts pertaining to conduct and amicitia, and in particular those of Horace's near contemporary, Philodemus.

In the Gorgias (463aff.) Plato makes Socrates say to Polus that rhetoric is not a skilled art (technê) at all, but one of a number of occupations collectively described as ‘flattery’ (kolakeia) and said to be based on experience. The other examples given are sophistry, cosmetics, and cookery. These practices have no understanding of what they do, or as Plato puts it they can give no account of it (465 a).

This passage has suggested that it might be interesting to collect, as far as possible, the passages dealing with the use of dogs in ancient warfare and make a comparison with modern practice. The references which I have discovered, and which seem mainly to refer to Greek warfare, are numerous, but no doubt there are others which I have failed to trace.

It used to be said that, as far as schools were concerned, Roman history ended at 31 b.c. Nowadays it ends at a.d. 180. No doubt that date is a convenient stopping-point; but the later centuries have in them just as much as the earlier to instruct our generation and to thrill the imagination. The events which this paper describes justify, I think, that contention.

Sixty years ago, on 25 April 1953, probably the most influential scientific article of the twentieth century appeared. Its uninviting title, ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid’, concealed the revolutionary discovery by the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick of the structure of what became known as ‘the molecule of life’. The ‘radically different structure’ that they proposed for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) had ‘two helical chains each coiled round the same axis’. ‘Both chains’, they wrote, ‘follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions.’ When Bruno J. Strasser asked in the same journal fifty years later ‘Who cares about the double helix?’, he answered that it marked ‘an age of (lost) innocence, when youth, intelligence and self-assurance were sufficient to make great discoveries in science’.

In any history of Greek mythological writing, the longer Homeric Hymns deserve a place of honour. They are the almost unique vehicle of a distinctive and important form of narrative about the divine world. As a prooimion to a discussion of the Hymn to Demeter, it may be worth sketching some general characteristics of the genre, to bring out its special interest for the historian of religion, and indeed for anyone who cares for the imaginative world of the Greeks.

Poliziano's theory that the sparrow of Lesbia in Catullus 2 and 3 is none other than the phallus of the poet has not fared well in recent years. H. D. Jocelyn has mounted a spirited attack against it, taking most effective aim against the arguments of E. N. Genovese and G. Giangrande, whose articles, as he points out, ‘seem to have no nineteenth or twentieth-century predecessors’. This attack has been facilitated by the tendency of both Genovese and Giangrande to dilute their arguments with extravagant claims. Thus Genovese would have the passer stand not only for the poet's phallus, but for an actual pet of Lesbia, a fascinum charm around her neck (with bells on it!), and a human rival, possibly named Passer, as well. Similarly, Giangrande spends too much of his time attempting to attach poem 2b to 2 by means of a tortuous interpretation of the Atalanta myth, just as he develops a convoluted argument about the tension between topoi of Totenklage um Tiere and impotence at the end of 3. Even Jocelyn gets too far away from the poems themselves with detailed examinations of masturbation and fellatio among the ancients (pp. 429–33) and a careful footnote on the missionary position (pp. 433 n. 65). There are only two ways to establish the probability of an obscene allegorical interpretation of Catullus 2 and 3: to examine the usage of passer in the poems themselves, and to see whether Catullus' imitators in antiquity – especially Martial – were aware of and exploited Catullus' double entendre. In defending Poliziano's theory, this paper will argue these two points in more detail than they have been treated in the past.

‘And so,’ said Appius, in Varro's De Re Rustica, ‘in the matter of farmyard-feeding we come to the third act, which is about fishponds.’ ‘Third act be hanged!’ said Axius; ‘do you suppose that, because you were so very economical when a young man as not to drink wine and honey at home, we are going to neglect honey ?’

We know that Cicero successfully defended Sextus Roscius on a charge of parricide in 80 B.C.; we know that Vespasian became emperor after the civil wars of A.D. 69, and founded the Flavian dynasty which ended with his son Domitian's death in A.D. 96.

The adjective ωἷνοψ in the phrase translated ‘the wine-dark sea’ is normally regarded as a formulaic epithet, a meaningless romantic flourish evoking the colour or texture of wine. Homer's wine is elsewhere only red or black (⋯ρυθρός, Od. 5.165, 9.163; μέλας,5.265, 9.196, 346; αἶθωψ, Il. 1.462, 4.259), and thus, we assume, the colour of modern Mavrodaphni. Cattle of this colour (Od. 13.32, Il. 13.703) are probably dark red.

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?