The major puzzle which confronts readers of Odes iii. 14 is the relationship between the public celebration described in the first half of the poem and the private party proposed in the second. Both are responses to the one event—news that Caesar is not, as feared, dead, but has won a victory and is returning home from Spain—but they do not quite harmonize. It is not just that the one response is public and Roman, while the other is private and somewhat Greek, for there is nothing objectionable in this combination. Rather the disharmony lies in a number of contrasts which, taken singly, are slight, but together create an effect which is hard to define but hard to deny.

More that thirty years ago W. Arend decisively showed that in Homer routine operations such as sacrificing and arming conform to a regular pattern. When a warrior arms himself, first are mentioned his greaves, then his cuirass, sword, shield, helmet, and spear(s), invariably in this order; at a sacrifice, first comes prayer and barley sprinkling, then the slaughter of the victim and its flaying, the cutting of the meat, its preparation, roasting, and serving. The embellishing varies a good deal, I suppose in accordance with the pace of the narrative or other aesthetic considerations; thus the Opfermahl scene has 21 possible operations: in the Iliad A 447 ff. has 18, B 402 ff. 17, H 314 ff. 6, Ω. 621 ff. 4, and ψ 166 a mere ἔδερόν τε κα⋯ ἄμεπον.

The inculcation of techniques of persuasion by Greeks and Romans, i. e. rhetoric, in those days a highly necessary form of vocational training for top people, led eventually to the British classical education. But it is probable that few topics are more disliked by classical students of today than rhetoric; and examinees blench at the mere sight of questions in which the word ‘rhetoric’ appears. As E. R. Dodds remarks, ‘To the average modern Englishman “rhetoric” means a distastefully emotional or showy way of talking;… to the contemporaries of Socrates it meant the practical art of influencing men's will through the spoken word.’ Such an art is presumably still of some importance, and it is still worth considering what Plato/Socrates had to say about it. The enquiry is made the more piquant by the fact that Plato himself has been called e.g. ‘an orator himself in mocking other orators’ (Cic. De Or. 1.47), a ‘propagandist’,2 and most recently ‘[a man who] writes not as a scholar or scientist but from first to last as an advocate, an heir to the tradition of didactic poetry, a nursling of Attic drama and a product, no less than the politicians and litigants whom he criticized so articulately, of a culture which admired the art of the persuader’.

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

The fame of Seneca rests on his work as a philosopher and a writer of tragedies on the Greek model. But he can also lay claim to be a humorist. For in what perhaps was an unguarded moment he wrote an amusing satire on the emperor Claudius with the strange title Apocolocyntosis.

The piece is so inconsistent with the high tone of his philosophical writings that it has received from critics almost universal reprobation. Seneca's admirers would be better pleased if his authorship could be questioned. But there is no ground for supposing that the satire is by another pen.

It might be thought that the writer who composed the funeral oration on Claudius could not be so base as to switch so quickly from eulogy to satire. But the formality of a graveside encomium need not preclude more honest sentiments when the funeral is over. It may well be that even in the panegyric Seneca had his tongue in his cheek, for Tacitus remarks that when the speaker (it was Nero) referred to the wisdom and foresight of the dead prince no one could refrain from laughter.

The title presents a problem, for there is no mention in the satire of the transformation of Claudius into a gourd or pumpkin. This has led some to the view that the work is incomplete. Others hold, with the support of Lewis and Short, that the word for a gourd, cucurbita, was used in the metaphorical sense of ‘fathead’ or ‘blockhead’, like the German Kürbiskopf, and thus it is assumed that the witticism is limited to the title.

Servius in his note on Aeneid iv. 92 comments that Virgil uses the epithet Saturnia of Iuno only ‘when she is about to do mischief, for he knows that the planet Saturn has a baleful influence’. An astrological interpretation of Virgil is doubtless interesting, but if, as none will question, Virgil is a poet before he is an astrologer, the only satisfactory explanation of an epithet is one that elucidates its poetic significance. An examination of Virgil's use of the epithet Saturnia does, I think, make it clear both that the epithet has poetic significance and that its significance is intimately bound up with Iuno's role in the poem. Her intervention in the action of the Aeneid determines that action in a way that distinguishes it from the interventions of the various gods and goddesses in the actions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even from the interventions of other gods in the Aeneid itself. Venus behaves in the Aeneid in much the same way as the Homeric gods and goddesses do. She is at hand to perform little miracles for her son, as Athena was at hand to help Odysseus or Telemachus. Now it is a striking fact that the epithets used of Venus in the Aeneid have no special significance. On twenty-one occasions she is referred to as Venus without an epithet, once she is Venus aurea, and four times she is Cytherea. These are all conventional, and agree well with the conventional nature of Venus' intervention in the action.

It is perhaps worth while to collect three striking cases where the history of music impinges on that of classical scholarship. My sources are not recondite, but I find that, for I the obvious source, the ‘Bach Reader’, is misleading; for II the evidence is mostly to be found in Grove; for III the only fairly detailed account I know is in Nieck's Robert Schumann (1923, pp. 47 ff.), now difficult to find, which I supplement from the preface to the 1828 Forcellini.

I. From a (Latin) note on Quintilian (i. 12.3, ed. 1738: not in the later editions) by Gesner, a first-rate scholar and lexicographer, who was Rector of the Thomasschule when Bach was Cantor. It is interesting to contrast Gesner's enthusiastic appreciation with his successor Ernesti's contemptuous indifference—which suggests that there is more to be said for Bach in his quarrel with Ernesti than we are sometimes led to suppose.

Quintilian is speaking of the brilliant performances of musicians; Gesner comments: ‘All this you (sc. Quintilian) would think of little consequence if you could return from the other world and see Bach playing with both hands and all his fingers, on an instrument which seems to combine many citharas in one—the organum organorum, running over it hither and thither with both hands and swiftest motion of the feet, eliciting many varied passages and sounds diverse yet unified—if you could see him, I say, doing a thing which several citharists and innumerable tibicines could not do, and not, like a citharoedus, playing only his own part, but equally watchful of all the symphoniaci, to the number of 30 or 40; calling this one to attention by a nod, another by a stamp of the foot, a third by a warning finger; giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it.

From the several references to the crews of ships in the Iliad and the Odyssey it can be seen that the complement of oarsmen is usually twenty. I assume that Homer is describing the Heroic ships, the ships of the Achaeans, and not necessarily the ships of the time in which he lived. However, naval specialists from the west of Greece, like the Phaeacians, were able to build larger ships; for they sent Odysseus home to Ithaca in a ship with a crew of fifty-two. The ship, too, in which Odysseus left Troy must have been about this size; by the time it had reached Circe's island its complement had been reduced to forty-six, including Odysseus and Eurylochus, but then there had been casualties. Each of the ships which originally left Troy with Odysseus had lost six men during the attack of the Cicones; had it not been for this loss, then, the crew would have been fifty-two. It is true that Odysseus' particular ship had lost six men to Cyclops as well; but it is likely that Odysseus' ship would have been made up to strength from the other ships after the incident. It is at any rate clear that Odysseus' ship had a crew of about fifty, and that the pentekontor, although Homer does not use the actual word π∊ντηκóντoρoς, was in use at the time of the Trojan War.

This deduction is supported by a Mycenaean vase decorated with a ship, found during the excavation of the Tragana Tholos Tomb at Pylos (Koryphasion) and dated by Furumark to 1230–1100.

There is no novelty in suggesting the importance of Roman coins as a source for the study of Roman history; a considerable number of works have explored the possibilities of the subject. The chief problem, however, has always lain in appreciating how far they can take us in an understanding of events: the coins are after all often as tendentious as the literary sources are sometimes alleged to be–or even more so. Further, when the historian moves from attempting to explain the legends to such matters as interpreting features of the portraiture, he is moving on to very subjective ground: for example, what may be the significance of the fact that on Nerva's Divvs Avgvstvs coins, the portrait of Augustus begins to look uncannily like that of Nerva himself? Or again, what are we to make of the fact that the obverse portrait on early coins of Trajan bears a resemblance to that of Nerva?

Readers of Professor E. S. Forster's paper in Greece and Rome, x, 1941, pp. 114–17, may be interested in some of the passages which he does not quote or mention. He refers to Aelian, Varia Historia, xiv. 46, but not to Pollux, v. 47, who speaks of Paeonians as well as Magnesians: Μάγνητας μὲντοὺςἐπὶ Μαιάνλρῳ τρέΦειν φασὶ κύνας πολέμῳ ύπασπιστάς τοιοũτοι Δ̕ἦσαν καὶ Παίοσιν οἱ σύνθηροι κύνες. We hear of a Paeonian and a Perinthian dog in Herodotus, v. I μουνομαχίη τριφασίη έκπροκλήσιός σφι έγένετο καί γάρ άνΔρα ἀνΔρὶ καὶ ἵππον ἵππῳ συνέβαλον καὶ κύνα κυνί.