When Fielding fathered the modern English novel in 1742, he left his readers in no doubt about his intentions. The Preface to Joseph Andrews states clearly enough that his purpose was to ridicule affectation. The ancient Greek novelists were generally less explicit about their aims: of the five novels which survive complete, four are without any sort of preface, and we can only guess from the text what the authors were trying to do. Probably their sole object was to entertain. But the man who wrote the fifth, Daphnis and Chloe, was evidently a highly conscious artist with clear ideas about the purpose of his art, and he has left us a preface explaining them—or rather hinting at them, for the full meaning of his words is not immediately apparent. The aim of this article is to bring out the deeper implications of the preface, and to interpret the text in the light of them.

James Joyce was the first reader of Washington Irving's famous tale of Rip Van Winkle to have noticed that Rip is ‘a lazy Odysseus’, as Andrew Burstein has more recently described him. Rip leaves home for twenty years, just as Odysseus did; however, unlike Odysseus, Rip spends this time not heroically fighting and adventuring but sleeping away his mature years. When he finally returns home, then, it is no surprise that the dog in front of his house ‘has forgotten' him, unlike Odysseus’ dog, who greets his master with a tail-wag of recognition. Irving creates in Rip Van Winkle an ironic and humorous embodiment of an Odysseus/Ulysses who, as quoted above, was ‘more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements’.

Two scandalous passages in Tacitus and Suetonius seem to hint at a project for a marriage between Nero and his mother Agrippina. There seems reason, as will be seen, to suppose that there was policy rather than a much lower motive behind the manœuvres recorded in these passages, if indeed they actually occurred. But whereas Tacitus, quoting Cluvius as his authority, represents the overtures as coming from Agrippina, Suetonius, giving the story according to Fabius Rusticus, makes Nero responsible.

Alcestis not only contains an unusual mixture of serious and comic elements, but the plot itself seems to be pulling in two quite different directions. There is a happy ending in that Alcestis is restored to Admetus, and Admetus contributes to this by his hospitality to Heracles. But much of the play seems to deal with failure: Alcestis is shown to have more to lose by her death than other characters in Euripides who sacrifice themselves, and her sacrifice does not even seem to succeed, in that the life which it gains for Admetus comes to seem worse than death to him. Admetus himself has been criticized for having accepted the sacrifice in the first place, for being concerned with his own suffering rather than feeling genuine grief for Alcestis, and for offering inappropriate hospitality to Heracles.

Two men meet on a battlefield; it is getting late, towards the close of a long day's fighting, the first since Achilles deserted the Greeks. The catalogue of this day's deadly confrontations, which has filled much of Books 4 and 5, looks as if it is about to get another victim's name appended to it. Homer introduces the episode at 6.120 by setting the scene as if for a duel, but ends it not only without a fight but with what appears to be a reconciliation, when they finally (6.232) leave their chariots to shake hands. This, if nothing else, has made the meeting of Glaucus and Diomedes famous; with its amiable, irenic outcome, and its unique emphasis on mutual understanding, the scene is widely regarded as an oasis of common decency amid the war-ethos of the surrounding books.

Fragments and summaries are all that survive of the two primary epics which originally covered the fall of Troy: the Little Iliad of Lesches and the Iliou Persis of Arktinos. I shall also be referring to the late Post-Homerica of Quintus Smyrnaeus. Certain details in Virgil's narrative imply that he and Quintus knew the same source material, though for my purpose here Quintus is chiefly used to indicate another possible mode of narrative treatment, particularly of the relation between the Sinon and Laocoon stories.

ProfessorParatore, in a book that I suspect is too little known to students of Lucretius, has called the Fifth Book of the De Rerum Natura ‘perhaps the richest in poetic inspiration’ in the poem. No part of his subject, it seems, fired the poet's imagination more; and it is the quality of Lucretius' imagination as it is seen in his account of the early history of mankind that I have chosen to discuss. The role of the imagination in the work of the historian is reviewed by Professor G. R. Elton in his book The Practice of History: ‘The discovery of truth requires not only the equipment already discussed–acquaintance with the available evidence and scholarly assessment of it—but also imaginative reconstruction and interpretation. Evidence is the surviving deposit of an historical event; in order to rediscover the event, the historian must read not only with the analytical eye of the investigator but also with the comprehensive eye of the story-teller. The truth is the product of this double process.’ For a good deal of what he says about the history of early man Lucretius had very little evidence as we account it. He had some previous scholarly literature at his disposal, but most of that was theoretical: neither he nor his sources had access to the archaeological and geological record. Yet in certain parts of his subject, as we shall see, this enforced ignorance did not hamper him as much as might be expected, even in comparison with a modern investigator.

Is Menander, in any sense of the word, ‘modern’?1 And if he is, what relevance does this have to the quality of his plays? Such questions will perhaps be asked more in our present age, when some of our critics appear to idolize modernity in art, literature, or music at the expense of quality; and they are questions capable of a wide variety of positive answers. In one way Menander is modern because a large section of his work—the Dyskolos, several hundred lines complete of the Aspis and the Samia, significant fragments of several other plays—has been discovered in Egypt and printed for the first time during the last sixteen years. Or again, Menander is modern because indirectly at least he has influenced the modern world's comedy of manners down to the time of Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse. He is modern, too, because he writes about the recurrent problems of families, young and old alike, as they wrestle with love and greed, worry about status and reputation, and flounder in a morass of misconceptions. But the aspect of Menander's modernity that interests me most of all is his apparent concern with certain dramatic and stylistic techniques which living writers deliberately apply in their novels and plays, techniques which our modern critics love to label as undisputedly modern.

We read and hear so much about our debt to Greece and Rome in the worlds of literature, law, and language that we are apt to forget that included in the legacy of the Ancient World to us is, to mention only one instance, the problem of the Franco-German frontier. Ought we to be glad the Romans stopped at the Rhine? Would things be better if they had gone farther? It was the defeat of Varus at the Teutoberger Wood that settled the frontier for the Romans; and Augustus with his plaintive cry of ‘Varus, Varus, give me back my legions’ determined once and for all to stop at the Rhine, and so left the Romanized Gauls and Germans in France and the free Germans across the Rhine as a thorny problem for all future time. Where the future is unknown, the present so uncertain, it is to the past we must turn for some definite foundation on which to build.

Early Roman education had been based on the mos maiorum rather than on reason, the guiding light of Greek education. It had been education not so much for intellectual achievement as for a clearly envisaged type of character, summed up in the word gravitas. A Roman, learning a way of life rather than a body of formal knowledge, was ‘usu … et domesticis praeceptis multo magis eruditus quam litteris’. This training was conducted largely by the father and was entirely un-supervised by the state, hi contrast with education in Hellenistic cities, whence, by 100 b.c., many new ideas had come. Such training, however, though suitable for a rural community, was bound to change when Rome became a city and when foreign campaigns during the expansion of her empire took fathers away from home for months on end. Moreover the influence which had been exerted from an early date by the near-by cities of Magna Graecia began to increase after the capture of Tarentum in 272 b.c., and the result of Rome's successive conquests of Sicily, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia during the third and second centuries was so great an increase of Greek culture in Roman life that Horace was finally able to say ‘Graecia capta ferum captorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio’.

In his last days, after his defeat at Actium, M. Antonhis sojourned in solitude by the sea declaring that he was going to live like Timon, since the injuries and ingratitude which he hadsuffered from his friends had taught him, like Timon, to distrust and detest all mankind. So both Strabo (17.1.9) and Plutarch relate. Plutarch explains that this man Timon was a citizen of Athens who lived at the time of the Peloponnesian War, to judge from plays of Aristophanes and Plato Comicus, in which Timon was held up to ridicule as a surly misanthrope who repulsed all friendly advances but displayed unwonted cordiality towards the brilliant young politician Alcibiades, because he divined, and gleefully predicted, that Alcibiades would do infinite mischieftoAthens (Ant.69–70; Alc. 16). The reference to the ingratitude of Timon's friends is illumined by Lucian's dialogue Timon, or the Misanthrope, in which Timon, identified as son of Echecratides and demotes of Colyttus, has lavished his patrimony on flattering friends who abandon him once his funds are exhausted, and in consequence he has been reduced to labouring in the fields. Luckily he digs up a crock of gold, and when his former friends reappear one by one in the hope of battening on him again, he repulses them with blows and clods of earth.

Very few critics have ever admired the structure of Euripides' Andromache. The enigmatic comment of Aristophanes' hypothesis, τò δε δρﾶµα τωv δεvτερωv has almost invariably been taken as meaning that the play is second rate, not that it came second in the trilogy or in the competition, and this is largely blamed on the structure. Most critics admire the first portion of the play dominated by Andromache, some are willing to tolerate the middle section concerned with Hermione, and many find the last portion, the sorrows of Peleus, effective, but almost no-one likes the combination of the three. It takes a rugged individualist like A. W. Verrall to say: ‘[The story is] in dexterous combination and moral interest one of the best among the extant remains of Attic tragedy.’

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.

The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.

Interpreting the Aeneid in terms of symbols is nowadays a fashionable and respectable procedure. It can also be highly dangerous, as some of its practitioners frankly admit. For example, Michael C. J. Putnam writes: ‘Any attempt, however sympathetic and careful, to delineate or clarify a poet's special, often private, symbolism, is subject to many hazards. I am not unaware of the difficulties of moving over a terrain wherein the already subtle boundary-line which separates critic from creator grows dimmer still.’ A sterner warning comes from Robert A. Brooks at the beginning of his article on the Golden Bough: ‘The oak-spirit and the King of the Wood, the mistletoe and the Queen of the Dead are all impressive concepts. But if the “real meaning” of the golden bough lies in these or near them, then Vergil must be considered an artist after the fashion of the late David Belasco, who painted the back of his stage sets as well as the front. What is happening on the stage or in the poem we may suspect to be illusory or subsidiary; the real action may be taking place in the carefully prepared but invisible recesses of the scene, approachable only by those who have a pass backstage. This is not Vergil's method …’ The warning should be heeded, even though the writer is citing an extreme case.

As a goddess Eris or Strife plays no role at all in Greek religion and an extremely restricted role in Greek literature. In èpic she briefly appears in the preliminaries to the Judgement of Paris, but is normally confined to emblematic appearances in mass battle scenes. As a concept Hesiod gives her some importance by distinguishing between a good and an evil Eris. Generally, though, whether as a goddess or a concept, eris remains inconspicuous until Euripides gives the word a thematic importance in a number of his works. This is most obvious in Andromache and most impressive in a nearly unbroken series of plays starting with Helenand ending with the posthumous Iphigeneia in Aulis.

Classical literature abounds with references to natural phenomena which have no obvious counterparts in the present day; and it is always difficult to know how to interpret such references, whether they should be dismissed forthwith as the excesses of overwrought imaginations, or whether they should be classified as poetic licence, or whether they should be taken more seriously still and explanations sought in terms of subtle or uncommon natural processes which occurred in ancient times as well as modern.

The economic role of the state is controversial, even after the collapse of communism and the election of New Labour. The demand that governments get off the backs of wealth-creators has barely diminished since the 1980s; but some still urge control of private and corporate greed in the public interest. There is no sign of such controversy in Greek antiquity; but I shall suggest that the practice of the cities depended on political considerations which reveal comparable principles. All governments, whatever their complexion, now accept some responsibility for general economic well–being, even if their actions may amount to little more than a claim that prosperity will ‘trickle down’ from top to bottom. Numerous functions which would now be identified as economic were performed by Greek cities; after brief preliminaries to set the economic scene, I shall explore them, and try to determine why they were undertaken.

The purpose of this paper is an examination of the metaphors of life as warfare and life as a journey in the prose writings of the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The discussion will centre on the essays and letters; the tragedies will not be directly considered. The philosopher's use of these metaphors will be related to a review of the teachings of Seneca and of the Stoic school on death and on certain other central Stoic concepts.

In Dio's debate on constitutions, set in 29 B.C., the speech favouring democracy occupies chapters 2–13 of book 52, and the speech urging monarchy runs from 14–40: most of this speech, indeed the main content of the whole book, is a detailed set of proposals for the administration of the Roman Empire, written with a view to being applicable in the writer's own time, more than two hundred years after the dramatic date of the debate. the dramatic date of the debate. Millar calls these chapters ‘a political pamphlet’, and suggests that Dio abandoned an earlier plan to fit them in to book 52. There is evidence, though, that the book was planned in its present form, but for the lacuna between chapters 13 and 14, and that the relatively brief speech of Agrippa was composed not as part of what was intended to be a balanced debate (balanced in terms of length, with point answering point in the rival speeches), but as a brief preliminary piece in explicit and implicit contrast and opposition to the ideology of the speech which forms the main thesis of the book; in a coherently planned debate, Dio states first the case for democracy in order to provoke the reader to question whether it could have been put into action – whether it is realistic.

Tacitus, in a famous passage of the Annals,2 comments: ‘Older men who had leisure to compare the present with the past noted that Nero was the first of our rulers who had need of borrowed eloquence. The dictator Caesar could hold his own with orators of the first rank; and Augustus had a ready and fluent mode of speaking which well befitted his imperial position. Tiberius had a rare skill in weighing out his words; he could express his meaning forcibly or conceal it as he chose. Even with Gaius, the disorders of his mind never interfered with his powers of speech; and when Claudius delivered a prepared discourse, his style left nothing to be desired.’