Callimachus was the Housman of antiquity. He had formidable learning, combative pugnacity, and a rare capacity to put both aside and write with exquisite simplicity. His learning is seen in the traditions about his pupils, who were reputed to include Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Apollonius of Rhodes, with whom he was later on terms of enmity. It is seen in his association with the library at Alexandria. A scholiast to Plautus says that he held the post of librarian. That he was not chief librarian is proved by the list preserved in a papyrus at Oxyrhynchus, but there is no reason to doubt that he served on the library staff, especially as his published works included a library catalogue. It is to be seen in his later reputation: thus to Philippus Callimachus is the main weapon of the dry-as-dust army of commentators (AP 11. 321) and to study him is an investigation in the dark (AP 11. 347). It is seen in the volume of his works which numbered over eight hundred, and their general character. They show a taste for curious learning; one may instance a series on Local Nomenclature which included a book on Local Month-Names, or another on The Rivers of the World with separate volumes for Europe and Asia, or a volume on Foundations and Name-Changes of Islands and States, or Geographical Wonders of the World.

The fourth-century painted ceiling at Trier, Germany was destroyed less than two decades after it was decorated, yet today it is one of the best-known monuments of Late Antique Gaul (figure 1). In excavations begun by Theodor Kempf in 1945, archaeologists collected the ceiling's fragments from the ruins of a Roman house beneath the city's Romanesque cathedral. Painstaking assembly of the plaster fragments into their original form was completed in 1980. Now displayed in the Trier Episcopal Museum, the ceiling is a rare example of Late Antique domestic painting. It comprises fifteen trompe l'oeil coffers which are outlined by red and green borders and a yellow guilloche. Each coffer contains an image of a different subject; bust-length female and male single figures alternate with pairs of putti in various active poses.

The ceiling's rarity, its mysterious, unidentified figures, and the possibility proposed by Kempf that it belonged to a palace built by the emperor Constantine have made it the subject of extensive scholarship. Because conservators assembled the ceiling over a thirty-five year span and individual scenes were published as they were completed, the first scholars of the ceiling studied sections in isolation from the whole monument. Attention first focused on the depictions of the woman with the mirror and the woman with the jewel box, because they were the first single figures to be restored and published. Many archaeologists and art historians concentrated on identifying the women as portraits of Constantine's family. Irving Lavin took a different approach and carefully addressed the painting's classicizing style. Scholars in the 1980s, with the advantage of the ceiling's completed restoration, have considered the ceiling as a thematic whole.

The reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years. Contributions range from Gonda Van Steen's ground-breaking Venom in Verse. Aristophanes in Modern Greece to Hall and Wrigley's Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, which contains contributions from a wide range of scholars and writers, a number of whom have had experience of staging Aristophanes' plays as live theatre. In Found in Translation, J. Michael Walton has also made strides towards marrying the theory of translation to the practice of translating Aristophanes (something I have myself also sought to do in print). And with the history of Aristophanic translation, adaptation, and staging being rapidly pieced together (in the English-speaking world at least, where Hall, Steggle, Halliwell, Sowerby, Walsh, and Walton, for example, have all made their own contributions), much of the groundwork has been laid for a study such as is attempted in this article. Here I aim to take a broad look across a range of translations in order to see how one particular text type within Aristophanic drama has been approached by translators, namely Aristophanes' lyric passages. The aim of this study will be to give both an insight into the numerous considerations that translators take into account when translating Aristophanic lyric and an impression of the range of end products that have emerged over the last two hundred years.

In the course of its history of the Athenian constitution, the Aristotelian Athēnaiōn Politeia describes Aristeides' leading role in organizing the Delian League, including his initial assessment of the contributions (phoros) paid by the League's members (Ath. Pol. 23.4–5). It then recounts his subsequent advice to the Athenians (24.1):

Roman charioteers had a reputation, and not just for living fast and dying young. Nor was their reputation solely based on the glamour of their occupation, although it is clear that some charioteers could achieve something approaching celebrity status. Roman charioteers (by which I mean charioteers throughout the ancient Roman world) had a reputation of a rather darker stripe. The violence of their occupation, reflected and enhanced by the riotous violence of their supporters, contributed to the perception of charioteers in general as rough, uncouth characters. The gulf between some charioteers' celebrity and their slave status did much to encourage this brutal reputation in the Roman mind.

Those of us who grope around in the mists of classical antiquity often come upon objects that remind us of the world we live in. There are analogies, always dangerous. There are many of the same words, or so it seems: arts, science, rhetoric, thesis, history, encyclopaedia. But they do not mean what we are used to. There are even historical continuities, but these also tend to be illusory.

TheAdelphi is Terence's best-known, though not necessarily his best, play. It tells how a timid young man, Ctesiphon, son of a strict and parsimonious father, Demea, falls in love with a slave-girl, Bacchis. His brother, Aeschinus, who has been adopted and brought up by his easygoing uncle Micio, abducts the girl on Ctesiphon's behalf, thereby causing much distress both to Pamphila, to whom Aeschinus is secretly betrothed, and to Micio himself, who is afraid that his indulgent attitude towards his adopted son's youthful escapades has encouraged him to go too far. However, the whole misunderstanding is sorted out: Micio gives his consent to the marriage of Aeschinus and Pamphila, and Aeschinus swears to Micio eternal gratitude, while Demea is persuaded to put aside his anger at the behaviour of the two young men and come in to the marriage feast. In the next scene Demea comes out and declares that he is going to change his attitude to life and do his best to win popularity by affability and generosity. He proceeds to put this idea into practice by a display of friendliness towards Syrus, Micio's steward, who had taken a leading part in the intrigue, to Geta, the loyal slave of Pamphila, and to Aeschinus himself, whom he encourages to break down the wall between Micio's house and Pamphila's to enable him to bring home his bride more easily; he then persuades the staunch bachelor, Micio, to marry Sostrata, Pamphila's mother, and to give a farm to Sostrata's old family friend, Hegio, in these two instances being stoutly supported by Aeschinus.

One day in 79 b.c., when he was studying at Athens, Cicero and a group of friends took a walk along the same road as Lucian's Philosophia, but in the opposite direction. They had listened, as usual, to a lecture by Antiochos, who was then head of the Academy, delivered in the gymnasium called Ptolemaion, which was in the middle of the city; and they resolved to take an ambulatio postmeridiana (Latin for Περίπατος δειλινός) in the Academy, which at that time of day would be quiet (and comparatively cool). Forgathering at Piso's, they traversed the six stadia from the Dipylon, and reached the justly famous walks (non sine causa nobilitata spatia) of the Academy. There Piso remarks, ‘Whether by a sound instinct or by an illusion (natura an errore) when we set eyes on the very places frequented by great men, we are more deeply moved than when we merely hear of their deeds or read their writings. Plato used to hold discussions here; I can almost see him walking in those little gardens near by (illi propinqui hortuli). Here taught Speusippos and Xenokrates and Polemon, who used to sit on the very seat which we can see over there. The power of suggestion which places possess is indeed great (tanta uis admonitionis inest in locis).’ Quintus Cicero is more attracted to the Kolonos near by, with its Sophoklean associations.

It is a commonplace that Roman religion was less concerned with the spiritual well-being than with the political success of the nobiles. The gods were the symbols and guarantors of varying, aspects of Roman power; keeping them content was of paramount importance, and it was the nobiles who were in general credited with the ability to ensure the continuation of this state of affairs.

In the twentieth century the content of historiography has been expanded to envelop a very broad range of studies. But in a popular sense History retains familiar associations. Although theoretically its subject-matter can be as wide as the range of human activities and the life of all God's creatures, popular history deals mainly with the past of ruling groups: the weak are historically insignificant and touch upon History only by their contact with the great. The powerful make History: the weak endure and illustrate it. History appears as a retrospect on human activities organized around the theme of power—its origin, use, misuse, and consequences.

The casual reader, on seeing these lines, might be forgiven for the thought that Lord Byron had the crossword puzzle in mind when he wrote them. In an uncertain world nothing is more certain than that this was not the case. Byron died in 1824. The crossword puzzle was born, at least in its popular modern shape, almost precisely a century later. Its history begins suddenly. Neither in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1921, nor in the twelfth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1922, does the crossword appear at all. But from the year 1923 references to it become increasingly frequent. In 1924 a popular work entitled The Crossword Puzzle Book was published. In 1925 there was a reference to crosswords in Punch. In 1926 the thirteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica had a short article on it. In 1928 the crossword puzzle was mentioned in Galsworthy's Swan Song. From that time every good standard dictionary or work of reference has included it. These facts document its emergence as a literary phenomenon in Great Britain. The history of the crossword in the United States is very similar, except that it would appear to have achieved stardom in the popular firmament a few months earlier in that country than in this.

In the Choephoroi and the Eumenides Aeschylus has described curious and repellent characters, composite beings who partake of the nature and appearance of old women, dogs, Gorgons, Harpies, and aged children, creatures of a compound well able to fright and amaze the original audience. But if a modern theatrical director were to ask, ‘What did they look like? How shall I dress them and have them masked?’, it might be too easy to allow his wardrobe mistress a gallop into phantasy, whereas it is almost as easy to give a simple, if less exhilaratingly imaginative, answer. Aeschylus describes the Erinyes as follows:

Choephoroi

like Gorgons, 1048; φαιοχ⋯τωνες, 1049; wreathed about with snakes, 1049–50; with blood dripping from their eyes, 1058.

On the coast of southern Italy, just before the coastline changes its direction from south-west to south-east, there was in ancient times a place where the high mountain range stood back a little, and in front of these mountains a series of semicircular terraces formed a kind of giant's amphitheatre looking out to sea on to the Gulf of Tarentum. At this spot two rivers flowed close together into the sea; their alluvial deposit had built up a small fertile plain, and the route taken by the larger of them down from the mountains pointed to a short cut to the sea on the other side, the Etruscan Sea. Here, in the latter half of the eighth century b.c., a band of settlers from Achaea built a town between the two rivers, which they named, as colonists tend to do, after a river and a spring in their home-land: the larger river they called Krathis, ‘the Mixer’, and the smaller Sybaris, ‘the Gusher’. The newly-built town took its name from the Sybaris. Both these rivers are there to-day; the Krathis is still called the Crati, and the Sybaris, which now flows into the Krathis, is called Coscile.

There are features in both the logical and the dramatic structure of the Crito the interest of which has not, I think, been sufficiently appreciated. They are worth discussion; and this will lead further to a consideration of the dialogue as μίμησις in the sense in which Aristotle uses the word in the Poetics.

In spite of the high reputation which Solon enjoyed in ancient times as a conciliator, the record shows the collapse of his plans for social stability in his own lifetime. This collapse was perhaps caused by events beyond his control or influence, and if it was social and economic change in Attica subsequent to his reforms that brought about a new revolutionary situation, and opened the way for the tyranny, the question is, What changes of such a nature took place in this period? In this connexion it would be well to review very briefly what evidence we have about Peisistratos' following in Attica.