Discussions of otium in Catullus concentrate, naturally enough, on poem 51. The role of otium in poem 50 has, in consequence, been neglected. It is the point of this paper to show that 50 is far more than an amusing Gelegenheitsgedicht and that 50 and 51, whether or not intended by Catullus to stand in this order, shed light on one another through a complementary conception of otium.

Plato wrote two Utopian works, the Republic and the Laws. The second, written in the 350s and early 340s bc, describes a mythical city-state named Magnesia. It is often ignored as secondary, not only in terms of chronology, but also in quality – the work of the philosopher's declining years. Such a characterization is misplaced. The Laws may lack the optimism and brilliance of the Republic but it nonetheless reveals a still-powerful mind at work, sketching a more realistic societal project. Nor have its philosophic underpinnings changed: they are precisely those of the Republic. Instead of philosopher-kings, Plato now puts his trust in a code of virtually unchanging laws that cover every aspect of life in Magnesia – society, economy, politics, and family. It is this elaborate rule of law, in which the laws are the masters of those who rule and the latter in turn are the slaves of the laws (715d), which alone can produce a successful state and citizens that correspond to it.

In letter 4.14, Pliny the Younger remarks that he doesn't worry too much about criticism of his poetry since he's not planning to give up the day job (§10):

nam si hoc opusculum nostrum aut potissimum esset aut solum, fortasse posset durum uideri dicere ‘quaere quod agas’: molle et humanum est ‘habes quod agas’.

For if this little work were my chief or sole effort it might possibly seem unkind to tell me to ‘find something else to do’: but there is nothing unkind in the gentle reminder that I ‘have something else to do’.

O tomb, O bridal chamber, O cavernous dwelling, eternal prison to which I am journeying to meet my own, those perished in their great numbers and received by Persephone amongst the dead. I am the latest of them, and my descent the worst by far, before my allotment of life has reached completion. Yet, as I go, I boldly feed on hopes of proving dear to my father when I reach him, and dear to you, mother, and to you, dear brother. For when you died, it was I with my own hands who washed you and adorned you, I who poured your tomb-libations. But now for tending your body, Polynices, this is my reward.

Intertextuality in Classical Literature can operate on different scales. Even a single distinctive word or string of words may briefly conjure up an isolated phrase from another author. For example, when Tacitus says at Histories 2.12.2 that the Othonians approached northern Italy and ‘tamquam externa litora et urbes hostium urere vastare rapere’, ‘burned, devastated, and plundered as if they were attacking foreign shores and enemy cities’, the text may momentarily recall a fragment from Naevius’ epic, the Bellum Punicum: ‘transit Melitam exercitus Romanus. insulam integram urit populatur vastat’ ‘The Roman army crossed to Malta. It burned, ravaged, and devastated the whole island.’ If the Bellum Punicum had not been reduced to such a fragmentary state, then it doubtless would have been possible to detect further evocative Naevian phrasing in Tacitus and other authors. Alternatively, intertextuality can be more cohesive and sustained, as when Tacitus at Histories 3.84 invests his description of the capture of Rome by the Flavians with echoes from Virgil's account of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2. Of course this was not the end of the chain: Virgil himself probably describes the fall of Troy in terms which evoked Ennius’ account of the fall of Alba Longa in the Annales.

In our present-day secular society, which regards religion as an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing, it is trumpeted as a great discovery that, in classical Greece, religion was not an optional extra detached from the rest of society's working but was ‘embedded’ in the various workings of society. It is of course our society that is exceptional: religion has been embedded in most societies through most of human history. Christianity was far more effectively embedded in western societies in the past than it is now; there are still some links in England between the Church of England and the state, and there are rather stronger links in Norway between the Lutheran church and the state; some Christian festivals are still widely observed as public holidays; and, in other parts of the world (for instance, many countries in which Islam is the predominant religion), the links between religion and state are still much stronger.

The strategy of the Carthaginians, in the writer's opinion, must be regarded as an aggressive one that had been devised long before the outbreak of the war in 218 B.c. The view that their operations in Spain did not have an attack on Italy as their ultimate object is naïve. The truth is that they went to Spain after their defeat in the First Punic War precisely in order to build up a base. They hoped to make it the point d'appui for their planned war of revenge against Rome: the Iberian peninsula was to be for them a springboard for attack.

Modern Aristophanic scholarship is based on the belief that Aristophanes' plays are funny. Such a belief has not been universal; in antiquity, his characters and their language were regarded, at times, with strong distaste. Aristotle, for one, was not amused: indeed, he would have thought Aristophanophiles scarce gentlemen, since only an ⋯παίδευτος (an uneducated man) could relish the Old Comedy's γέλοια (E.N 1128 17 ff.). The pleasures appropriate to ignorance and learning could be seen (he contended) by comparing the old comedies (whose laughter was raised by α⋯σχρολογία, ‘obscenity’) and the new (which, achieving this same goal by ὑπόνοια, was fitter for gentlemen and scholars). Old Comedy's adherents, in fact, countenance buffoonery, and that is vastly different from wit (E.N. 1128a 15; Rh. 1419b 8).

When the first edition of the Metamorphoses appeared in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city. His literary début, the Amoves, immediately established his reputation as a poetic Lothario, as it lured his tickled readers into a typically Ovidian world of free-wheeling elegiac love, light-hearted hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery. Connoisseurs of elegiac poetry could then enjoy his Heroides, vicariously sharing stirring emotional turmoil with various heroines of history and mythology, who were here given a literary forum for voicing bitter feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing their strong hostility towards the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei, and once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition à la mode Ovidienne, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos presented in his Ars Amatoria, his (male and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true Barthian jouissance in the act of reading a work, which is, as a recent critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’. And after these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, his readers, having become hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote Ovid offered in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris, a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid.

The indebtedness of the Aeneid to Homer in terms of plot and structure has been analysed in minute detail, and the hunt is indeed by no means at an end. Here and there, notably but not exclusively in Aeneid 4, long narrative sequences have been followed back to Apollonius Rhodius. Isolated episodes have been identified as owing much to Greek tragedy. But the pursuit of Virgil's principal narrative sources, already undertaken with furious critical acerbity in antiquity, is perhaps too heavily committed to a limited quantity of likely literary models and to certain patterns of enquiry, though these last have changed a good deal in recent years. If I seem to grumble about a narrowness of outlook that becomes at times oppressive and about the danger of conclusions ever more forced and improbable if we continue barking up the same few trees, it is because (i) I have worked on and off for nearly twenty-five years on Aeneid 7, where Virgil's sources are as mixed, complex and anomalous as they ever become and because (ii) I published recently a study (Vergilius 35 (1989), 8–27) of narrative sequences in Aeneid, which seemed to point strongly towards Virgil's attentive reading of Greek colonization stories. This is not the place to continue my one-man pursuit of Herodotus and Pindar in the Aeneid? but it is high time that we looked at certain large narrative structures in the epic and asked whether we have really been framing the right questions about them.

Is Aeneas right or wrong to kill Turnus at the end of the Aeneid? Virgil himself has raised the issue by creating Aeneas' dilemma. In the equivalent scene of the Iliad the first wound which Hector receives in combat with Achilles is fatal, and so the possibility of sparing his life does not arise; but Turnus is not mortally wounded, he asks for mercy, begins to be successful, and then is killed after all. About this moral question all the logically possible opinions have been recently asserted by scholars: that the killing is right, that it is wrong, and that it is morally neutral. One of these must, of course, be right.

The Cassandra scene in Aeschylus' Agamemnon occupies over 250 lines, yet scholars and critics, preoccupied with such large issues as the changing conception of justice in the Oresteia and the male/female and Chthonic/Olympian conflicts, have tended to give it relatively little attention. In a sense this is understandable: the scene in no way Advances the action of the drama, and critics who have learned from Aristotle that the ‘plot’ is the ‘soul’ of a tragedy might well feel that it is unnecessary to bother about a scene which could be omitted with no effect on the movement of the story. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Aeschylus would have inserted so long and unexpected a scene in his play, just at the point when the audience would expect Agamemnon to be murdered, if it did not have an important dramatic purpose. Furthermore, in actual performance, Cassandra frequently rivets our attention more than any other character; on stage her scene can be the most gripping and affecting part of the play. In this essay I shall try to account for the powerful effect that the Cassandra scene has on the audience; then I shall discuss its place and function in the Agamemnon and the trilogy as a whole.

The quarter century from 500 to 475 B.C. saw the supreme masters of red-figure vase-painting working in Athens. The matching of design to shape, the clarity of contour in the figures, the vivid sense of life expressed in the compositions were the hallmarks of such painters as the Berlin and Kleophrades Painters who mainly decorated large vases and such painters as Onesimos and the Brygos Painter who specialized in the smaller. It was a time too when the heavy reliance on myth that had been the staple of the sixth-century painters, was being lightened by the increased popularity of scenes from contemporary life: from the life of men there were athletics, parties, religious rituals, and manual labour, from that of women weddings, mourning the dead, and the daily tasks of the household.

‘A prodigious memory, a facile talent for versification, a cheerful and kindly optimism, and an avoidance of all that was serious or profound or disquieting’ – so Professor Robert Browning not unjustly sums up the poetic character of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. He was a professor of Latin, and it shows in his work. That is not surprising, since it was on his professional and professorial skill as teacher and rhetorician that his whole career was founded. It was by displaying proficiency in Latin Prose and Verse Composition that he rose to provincial governorships and to the consulate, and to the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian. It is to this last circumstance that we owe his best poem, the Mosella, a celebration of the beauties of the river Moselle. In A.d. 367 the Imperial court had been established at Trier in Gaul; and Ausonius was required to accompany the Emperor Valentinian, with his pupil, on his German campaigns. These, continuing a policy inaugurated by Valentinian's predecessors, were directed towards the consolidation of a Roman presence on the German bank of the Rhine, with the ultimate object of incorporating the Germans in the Empire and setting up a bulwark against further barbarian encroachments. It is against this political and military background that the Mosella must be read. It was clearly intended as propaganda. ‘The purpose of the poem was to inspire the Gauls with confidence in the renewed peace and security.’ They stood in need of such reassurance, for the recent past in Gaul had been far from secure.

Calagurris, the modern Calahorra, is situated by the river Ebro about two hundred miles inland, in what in Roman times was the province of Hispania Citerior or Tarraconensis. Here Quintilian was born some time in the fourth decade of the Christian era. If it were not that his birthplace is recorded by later writers, we should be quite unaware of it. There is nothing in the Institutio Oratoria to suggest that its author was a Spaniard, and though there is no reason why he should have referred to his home country in a treatise on rhetorical education, his work includes just enough personal reminiscence to make it a little surprising that he did not. Moreover, on the rare occasions when he refers to Spain he gives no hint of any connexion with the country. It would be rash to assume that he was ashamed of his Spanish birth, but perhaps long residence in Rome had weakened his consciousness of provincial origin. At the same time we can perhaps see in him certain provincial qualities.

A good supply of water was rightly regarded as one of the essential commodities for the maintenance of urban life in the ancient world. One of the major problems with which city authorities had to deal was the maintenance of adequate supplies of water to satisfy the domestic, public, recreational, and industrial demands of the inhabitants. The Romans were particularly renowned for their hydraulic technology in general and the construction of aqueducts in particular, often bringing water from great distances. The geographer Strabo praised the engineering skills of the Romans, maintaining that veritable rivers of water flowed by means of aqueducts through the city of Rome. Close on a century later the first curator of Rome's water supply and one-time military governor of Britain, Sextus Julius Frontinus stated the same, if a little more pointedly, when he compared the achievements of the Romans in the field of water supply with the ‘idle pyramids of the Egyptians or the glorious but useless monuments of the Greeks’.

InThe Twelve Lays of the Gipsy, one of the masterpieces of modern Greek poetry, Palamás puts into the mouth of his Gipsy these words, addressed to the Beautiful Immortals, who symbolize the achievements of ancient Greek civilization:

What if you are immortal ? Your life is over,

The full life that you lived in full bodily vigour

In the sun and air of the blissful country of your birth.

Now there is another sun, another air, and you are only

Apparitions.

Odysseus, with Herakles, was a favourite character in that mythological type of comedy which we know only in titles and fragments, though it was well liked in antiquity. The purpose of this article is to collect these stray pieces, to present Odysseus as he appears in this tradition, and to suggest reasons for his popularity on the comic stage.

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.