The purpose of this article is to examine the belief that Cleon, the fifth-century Athenian demagogue, was not only violent and relentless but also venal and dishonest, and made money out of politics by taking bribes and misappropriating public funds. This view of his character had by the second-century a.d. become almost a commonplace of literature. To give only two examples, Aelian mentions the story (citing Critias as his authority) that Cleon was in debt when he entered politics but died worth 50 to 100 talents, and the scholiast on Lucian described Cleon as being ‘venal to excess’. The interesting point about this second comment, however, is its inappropriateness to the context, which calls for a reference to Cleon's rapacity rather than to his venality; this indicates to what an extent Cleon's reputation for bribe-taking had come to predominate over all his other qualities.

The town of Gadara, on the eastern shores of Galilee, was as famous in the Hellenistic Age for its culture as it afterwards became for its swine. Among its sons were Menippus the Cynic, hero of Lucian and model of Petronius, Meleager, also a satirist but better known as the charming weaver of the Garland, Theodorus, the candid tutor of Tiberius, and lastly, Philodemus. If these four have any quality in common, it is nothing oriental, but rather a certain realism and common sense—Cynicism purged of Cynic squalor by contact with the Seleucid courts.

Aeneas is leading the shattered remnants of the Trojans to their new home in Italy. He calls at Actium, the scene of the battle which in 31 B.C. made his descendant Augustus master of the Mediterranean world. How does Virgil seize this opportunity to praise his patron Augustus?

About two years ago the papyrus of Menander's Dyskolos was seen in Alexandria, and was afterwards sent, in two instalments, to the library of M. Martin Bodmer, the famous collector, in Geneva. There it was decisively identified and its authenticity was established by Professor Victor Martin. This unique papyrus of a complete play by Menander, which was hitherto known only from the scanty fragments to be gleaned from anthologies, forms a beautifully preserved codex which may be dated around a.d. 200. (See Plates III–V.) At the time when this article was being written, the Dyskolos was about to be published by Professor Martin in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana series, with the requisite textual reconstruction, translation, and notes, to which I have had the privilege of contributing. As will be seen from the editto princeps, out of a total of about 969 verses, there are only about 9 verses missing—in two places in the fourth act; but about 30 verses in the first and second acts are incomplete, and approximately 200 require some sort of emendation, usually to compensate for the scribe's metrical inaccuracies.

The heroic age of Greece, like the heroic age of western Europe, practised trial by combat. For a combat to be judicial (a) it must be single combat, (b) it must be of numinous import, as evidenced among the Greeks by a connexion with divination in the form of oracle or prophecy, and (c) there must be a dispute the issue of which is to depend on the result of the combat. Not all single combat is judicial, for such a combat may be fought simply for honour and not to decide a dispute, as when Hector and Ajax fight on a challenge of Hector's to the best of the Achaeans to decide which shall have the honour of killing the other and bearing his arms away in triumph (Iliad H 77–83).

The institution of judicial combat is illustrated by a golden passage in the Iliad in Book Γ describing the duel between Menelaus and Paris. The Achaeans and the Trojans agree, after a challenge by Paris, that Menelaus and Paris shall fight in single combat, the terms being that if Paris kills Menelaus he is to retain Helen and her possessions, while if Menelaus kills Paris, then the Trojans are to return Helen and her possessions and pay the Achaeans a proper recompense. After performing the due rites Agamemnon formally recites these terms and threatens to fight to the end if the Trojans should break their word. Hector and Odysseus mark out a space and settle by lot which of the two combatants is to throw his spear first, while the Trojan and Achaean spectators pray to Zeus for death to the man who is responsible for bringing all the trouble on them.

It has been the fate of the Jewish people to spend most of their history under foreign rule, and Rome, who governed Palestine during the period of the New Testament and for centuries after it, was only one of a series of powers who throughout the ages became masters of the country for varying lengths of time and controlled it with varying success.

In 1883 M. Patin published his Études sur la poésie latine, and devoted his seventh chapter (pp. 117 ff.) to Lucretius under the heading ‘Du poëme De la Nature. L'anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce’. His theme was that behind Lucretius' poetry one can detect a deeply divided personality, a man dedicated indeed to the doctrines of Epicurus, but revealing in his language and imagery a naturally religious spirit chafing, perhaps unconsciously, against the constraints of his philosophy. On reading this chapter one becomes aware of a certain apologetic undertone. M. Patin is preoccupied with justifying his almost excessive enthusiasm for a pagan poet to a Christian audience. Two of the pitfalls confronting the literary critic are that he will identify himself in his own imagination with the author whom he is criticizing, and that he will be so identified by his readers. In his eagerness to avoid the second M. Patin slips into the first; for all its brilliance, his chapter illuminates the personality of its writer rather than of Lucretius, and might almost be entitled ‘L'anti-Patin chez Patin’. Yet his chapter, and especially his chapter-heading, have set the tone for much subsequent criticism of Lucretius. Taking up his main thesis, critics have arbitrarily broadened its terms of reference, drawing attention to such apparent inconsistencies as the contrast between the picture of Mars and Venus as lovers and as open to be moved by prayers for suffering humanity (i. 29 ff.), and the picture of the gods living a life of untroubled contemplation in the interstellar spaces, remote from our world and uninterested in its affairs (iii. 18 ff.). And the tensions and contradictions of the poem have been linked by some with the story of the poet's madness and suicide.

When Anthia was imprisoned in the robbers' cave one of her guards, Anchialus, a spirited man and one of the most prominent of the band, fell in love with her. At first he tried to win her with words, hoping that she would be given to him as a present by the leader. But Anthia repelled his every attempt, dismayed by nothing, not the cave, nor her chains, nor the robber's threats. She wanted to keep herself for Habrocomes, even though she thought him dead, and often when no one was there to hear her cried: ‘I want to stay Habrocomes' wife and his alone, even though I die, though I suffer worse than I have suffered yet!’ This cast Anchialus into worse torment, and the daily sight of Anthia inflamed his love. Unable to bear it longer, he laid violent hands on her; one night when the robbers and their leader were away, he threw himself on Anthia and tried to violate her. Anthia, in desperate straits, seized a sword that lay to hand and struck Anchialus a mortal blow, for as he was on the point of embracing and kissing her his whole body loomed over her, and she thrust the sword upward into his breast. He had paid the penalty for his wicked passion.

The infant community of Rome grew up with neighbours who conceded a fairly high place to women. Etruscan sepulchral art suggests as much; the tomb paintings of early Campania show the womenfolk spruce, dignified, and house-proud; the authoritarian rule of the Sabine mother was traditional. Granted that in certain places and at certain times women were taboo, in a sense ‘infectious’, to use Warde Fowler's word, yet in the home the Roman wife had never been banished to a gynaeceum. The Atrium, the heart of the Roman house, was the wife's territory as much as the husband's. Though every Roman household was a monarchy with the paterfamilias as king, the womenfolk were no more, if no less, his subjects than the sons. When the Roman husband carried his wife into the Atrium, and she spoke the sacramental words ‘ubi tu Gaius ibi ego Gaia’, she made a claim that, in its due sphere, was admitted. In this sphere the Roman husband was more at home than the Greek, who hated not to be out of doors in the daytime. In a speech which Tacitus writes for Valerius Messalinus there is the truly Roman phrase ‘revertentibus post laborem quod honestius quam uxorium levamentum?’—‘the relief of a wife's society’—a society, that is, to quote another phrase from the same passage, ‘consortium rerum secundarum adversarumque’. When Lucretius writes:

iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor optima nee dulces occurrent oscula nati praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent the adjectives carry a weight of feeling.

The Περὶ Ἀλυπίας (‘On Consolation From Grief’, henceforward PA) of Galen, recently rediscovered in a fifteenth-century manuscript in a monastery in Thessalonica, contains a wealth of information for the scholar of Roman libraries and books. The work, a treatise on the avoidance of the grief contingent upon loss and suffering, begins by listing the losses suffered by Galen himself in the fire of AD 192. The fire destroyed the Templum Pacis, a series of warehouses and storerooms, and the libraries on the Palatine hill. As Galen had spent much effort copying books from these libraries, and had then deposited his copies in the warehouses that also burned, his work was lost beyond the possibility of recovery.

Since antiquity the Aeneas—Dido episode has generally been recognized as the most powerful and memorable part of the Aeneid. During the past several decades there has been a considerable amount of argument as to whether it shows Aeneas' mission in a favourable or unfavourable light. Yet this problem has not been studied systematically. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate systematically that Vergil deliberately protrays Aeneas' mission as brutal and destructive.

Between the ‘home’ territory of the Roman people in the Italian peninsula and the tribes of Gaul and Germany lay two provinces – Cisalpine Gaul, most of whose population were actually already Roman citizens or in possession of Latin rights, and Transalpine Gaul, a province only since 121 B.C., but already in Caesar's time displaying a developed urban civilization based on the Greek model, under the influence of Massilia. By the end of the first century B.C. well-to-do Romans considered the schools of Massilia an acceptable alternative to those of Athens for their sons' higher studies (Strabo 4.1.5). On the fringes of the Province, however, and beyond in Gaul proper were the ‘long-haired’ Gauls (hence Gallia Comata) and beyond them the German tribes. Only occasionally had these presented any real and immediate threat to the security of the Italian peninsula. Nevertheless, they were present in Roman consciousness as a kind of bogeymen. In 44 B.C., the founding charter of Urso, a Julian colony in southern Spain, included a provision that certain minor public officials should be exempt from military service except tumultus Italici Gallicive causa (ILS 6087). Events of this nature were hardly likely to necessitate conscription in southern Spain, but this clause was clearly taken over from the standard charter of an Italian municipality, where these were seen as possible emergencies.

Perhaps happiness can be attributed only to the dead because they are beyond the reach of fortune: but that security is denied to one's reputation. The case of Socrates makes this clear, and it is his reputation which is this paper's theme. For since his death Socrates has been the object of such competing assessments that some have despaired of ever finding the real person executed in Athens in 399 B.C. Although that search need not be fruitless, this study is concerned not so much with the sources of our knowledge of Socrates as with the ways in which Plato's Socrates has been represented and assessed. On the one hand are interpreters who hold him up as a model for life and thought, an ideal figure approaching sainthood if not divinity; and on the other more sinister hand are those who claim to discern under the saint's clothing the sly fox, the devious devil whose major aim is to destroy other people's beliefs and arguments. Socrates has been praised and condemned with fervour since his original trial, and although we will not reach yet another final verdict here, perhaps by canvassing a little of the evidence we may come to understand not only something of his reputations, but also how they find their sources in Plato's own writings.

When the Virgil Society did me the very high honour of asking me to lecture to-day, there was little doubt in my mind as to what my subject should be. For Mr. Jackson Knight had been constantly spurring me to develop three ideas which he saw in embryo in my notes to The Singing Farmer—the sources of Virgil's agricultural lore, how he used them, and points in Roman farming which might be of scientific interest to-day. To deal adequately with these subjects would require a volume of imposing proportions: all that can be done in the short space of an hour is to state, and attempt to solve, a few of the problems, and thereby to indicate lines on which further profitable research may proceed. A good deal of accurate research work on Virgil's botany, animal husbandry, and natural history has already been done by the late John Sargeaunt and by Canon Royds; and Professor T. J. Haarhoff has done much to demonstrate the modernity of our poet in his searching study, Vergil in the Experience of South Africa, and will, I understand, be doing still more in a forthcoming volume, to be entitled Vergil the Universal. I can only pray, therefore, that my exiguous mouse, born to-day after mountains of labour, will not abstract anything from your grain-heaps of knowledge but add to them; for it is in this hope that I have tried to be, during the two and a half years since my release from captivity, a picker-up, not merely of learning's crumbs, but of unconsidered trifles.

We have all suffered in the company of a bore who cracks jokes so obscure that they demand a laborious explanation, for, in order to raise a laugh, humour must have an immediate impact, and obscurity is seldom a hallmark of the good joke. A captive audience can be terrifyingly unresponsive, and anyone who has read an Aristophanic comedy with students soon learns for himself that a scholarly exposition may destroy any joke, irrespective of its qualities. Yesterday's joke is stale and last year's joke dead; to resurrect a joke more than two thousand years old is no easy task. In an attempt to make the ancient writer of comedy more vital, we may have recourse to a contemporary analogy: twenty years ago we might have compared the technique of Aristophanes' comedies with that of the comedy series currently successful on radio; today the medium as well as the show has changed, and we refer to the art of television humour, and this indeed is a better parallel, since television comedy depends upon visual as much as upon verbal effects. Both radio and television number their audience in hundreds of thousands, and, what is more important, their audience represents as fair a cross-section of the total population as did the audience attending the theatre in fifth-century Athens. The fact that Athenian drama was staged at festivals organized by the state proves that it was entertainment designed to please everybody and not just a select few, that is, it was designed for a ‘popular’ and not an élite audience. The colossal size of the Greek theatre (the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens accommodated some 14,000 spectators) offers further confirmation. But the modern theatre is no longer a source of mass entertainment, and even the long-running farce, however many parties up in town for the day may patronize it, hardly suggests the type of audience and atmosphere which Aristophanes and his compatriots would have known and been anxious to exploit. Some idea of this atmosphere may be gained if one thinks in terms of a frequently quoted modern parallel, the emotionally charged football match. The intimacy of the smart revue, an analogy favoured by some, makes it a poor basis for comparison. If it is the English stage and our own experience of the theatre which must provide us with our illustration, the most evocative comparison, I suggest, is one between the audience packed into the Theatre of Dionysus and the audience which jostles its way into the seats at the Christmas pantomime, for this is an audience mainly composed of children as unsophisticated and uninhibited (and as determined to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from what for them also is an annual treat) as those who witnessed the original performance of Old Comedy. The audience at the pantomime, joining in the choruses of the songs and booing the villain, can be unrestrained one moment, but sit spellbound a minute later as the spectators gape at the spectacular ‘set’ which precedes the intermission and announces the finale. The frequent address to the audience made by Aristophanes' characters argues for the same degree of audience participation, while the entry of the chorus—my personal favourite is the parodos of the Birds—would be greeted by an attentiveness in keeping with its solemnity and splendour.

This Note is a supplement to J. C. Davies's discussion of the Republic's declaration that when the philosophers of the kallipolis have been trained in dialectic, they must be compelled to forsake pure contemplation of the forms and return to the Cave to rule (519 c–520d).

Studies of Horace's imitation of Greek lyric in his Odes have tended to concentrate on particular supposed echoes. Given that the surviving Greek texts are few and fragmentary, this method is bound often to lead to dubious and unsatisfactory results. A broader approach directed at the syntax, structure, and myths of the Odes produces, in my view, a clearer understanding of how Horace hoped to enter the canon of lyric poets (Odes i. 1. 35 f.). This paper expounds Odes iii. 11 exempli gratia as a serious Horatian attempt to write the Latin equivalent of an early Greek lyric. It shows some of the ways in which Horace has concentrated the characteristics he observed in his predecessors and composed an ode which is a close-knit complex of Greek lyric linguistic and conceptual mannerisms.