Readers of Martial may be struck by the frequency with which one-eyed people make their appearance in the epigrams. Sometimes the deformity is satirized in conjunction with a moral failing, as for instance in the case of the one-eyed drunkard (6.78) who prefers his wine to his eyesight (and so, by continuing to imbibe against medical advice, loses the vision of his remaining eye). On other occasions, the physical defect itself gives rise to a witticism which forms the focal point of the poem. A striking example is the neat couplet 3.8: ‘“Thaida Quintusamat.” “Quam Thaida?” “Thaida luscam.” /Unum oculum Thais non habet, ille duos’, where the erotic commonplace of the lover who is ‘blind’ to his beloved's faults is given a novel twist by the suggestion that Quintus must be literally blind to love the repulsive Thais.

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?

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.

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).

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.

The past thirty years have brought us much closer to the meaning of many puzzling terms employed by Aristotle in the Poetics. But there are still many whose meaning may never be established with any certainty, partly because of inconsistencies or deficiencies in the argument and partly because of our own ignorance of the dramatic and critical terminology of the fourth century. For example, it is reasonable to assume that the terms used by Aristotle to describe his three μ⋯ρη of tragedy—пεριп⋯τεια, ⋯ναγνώρισις, and п⋯θος—were all part of the technical vocabulary of the contemporary theatre, and that if only we were familiar with that vocabulary, we should not find Aristotle's vagueness and carelessness in explanation such a hindrance to understanding.

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 natural desire to know how the performance of Greek athletes compared with those of today has caused a great deal of attention to be paid to one of the very few pieces of evidence we possess, the anonymous epigram which speaks of a long jump of 55 feet and a discus throw of 95 feet:

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.

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.

Where ought we to begin the story of the Trojan War? If we follow Homer, we shall begin with Paris and his mad folly or ate in abducting Helen (Iliad 24.28; cf. 3.100 and 6.356, and contrast 5.62–64 and 22.115–16). But the rape of Helen was a direct consequence of Paris awarding the prize for outstanding beauty to Aphrodite, when, while tending animals on Mount Ida, the prince was approached by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite and required to adjudicate between their conflicting claims to be thought the fairest.

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.

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.

There are seventy-four catalogued examples of figured art painted on Pompeian façades, almost all of a religious or talismanic nature. This street art appeared near compital altars and entrances to shops and houses, and contributed to a vibrant street aesthetic. Exterior figured paintings have not received a great deal of scholarly attention, however, with studies tending to focus on iconography rather than considering how street art may have functioned in its original setting. The potential value of painted façades as evidence for religious, commercial, and civic values, for which there are scant literary sources, has consequently been overlooked.

The concept of intermediality arose in the theoretical discourse about the relations between different systems or products of meaning, such as the relations between music and art, or image and text. The word gained currency in the 1980s in German- and French-language studies of theatre performance, and in scholarship on opera, film, and music, in order to capture the notion of the interconnections between different art forms. For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art. The term has entered the field of classics especially via the study of the relations between the narrative and inscriptional modes in literary epigram.

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 article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the particularities of specific tablets or groups of tablets. This article argues that, if human and object agency are taken into account, it is possible to explain both the discontinuities in the history of curse tablets and also the shape of their thousand-year history. Curse tablets emerge as a technology the affordances of which allowed it to be put to many uses in many different social locations formed by the complex and shifting cultural contours of antiquity.

(a) Origin and Development. The public games at Rome had their origin in religion. Thus the earliest games of which we have any account, those distinguished for the rape of the Sabine women, were in honour of the god Consus, and another very ancient festival, the Equirria, was in honour of Mars. That something of their religious character was felt even in the last days of the Republic is shown by a passage of Cicero: ‘An, si ludius consistit aut tibicen repente conticuit … aut si aedilis verbo aut simpulo aberravit, ludi sunt non rite facti?’ For Roman religion was marked by a love of formality and ritual: if, therefore, the slightest hitch occurred in the ceremonial procedure, the games were regarded as having failed to satisfy the gods, and it was necessary to start them afresh. So we meet in Livy such notices as ludi in unum diem or in biduum instaurati: sometimes the second performance was no more successful than the first, in which case we find ludi ter, quater, or even septies instaurati. Claudius, suspecting that these hitches were occasionally manufactured in order that the games might be prolonged, decreed that at the second performance chariotand horse-races should be finished in one day.