There can be little doubt that the extant remains of Persius form the whole of his writings. In his boyhood he had indulged in the literary exercises of the classroom, and these immature efforts included a tragedy, a book of travels, and some lines on the elder Arria, whose Non dolet1 was an appropriate subject for a young Stoic to commemorate. These experiments had little merit, otherwise they would not have been destroyed on the advice of Cornutus, his friend and teacher and literary executor.

It was towards the close of his life in 43 B.c. that Cicero wrote the three books of the de Officiis. The attractions of a philosophical treatise whose theme is moral duty are likely to appear slight to the modern reader, especially if that reader thinks its author to be merely the purveyor of second-hand ideas borrowed from Greek sources. Yet the de Officiis epitomizes, in an intensely Roman way, the political beliefs and ideals of the Senatorial order at Rome as the Republic finally succumbed to autocracy. The political philosophy of the ancients may be more immediately relevant today than their ethical speculation, for, while it is folly to interpret political activity as if the Roman Republic enjoyed a two-party system composed of left-wing populates and right-wing optimates, it is true that much of the turmoil generated during the last century of the Republic was related to proposals for agrarian reform and the redistribution of land; similarly, much of the debate currently being conducted between supporters of the rival ideologies is centred about the ownership of property and assets. Perhaps we may be encouraged to survey the de Officiis more sympathetically if we approach it as political scientists and as students of this subject mindful of the writings of another ancient, the historian Thucydides, and his opinion that, human nature being a constant, situations will repeat themselves in the same or a very similar form.

As an ethical principle, philia represents a continuum of attachment that extends in a stable system of relationships from the self to one's immediate family and friends and then outwards to one's polis and one's race. Furthermore, shared attachment or philia also involves shared hostility or echthra, which can be as permanent as philia. But already in Sophocles' Ajax the idea of such fixed relationships is seen as old-fashioned and incompatible with practical life. In his pretended transformation from a rigid adherence to the principles of permanent philia and permanent echthra (particularly the latter) to the flexible morality of an ‘organization man’, the hero realizes that ‘we must hate our echthros only so far, since he may become our philos again later, and I am only ready to do so much to aid and assist aphilos, since he may not remain a philos forever…’ (672–81).

Olympus as an idea pervades Greek literature: Olympus as a mountain of earth and stone seems to have been little considered. Unlike Delphi, it was neither a Mecca to which pilgrims travelled nor a Jerusalem for which they would wage a Holy War. Apparently it did not occur to Greeks to climb mountains unless they wanted to get to the other side. Pausanias in his comprehensive wanderings mentions Olympus only to say that lions from Thrace used to roam there, and that an athlete once unarmed slew a lion, a great and mighty beast, on the mountain. The successor of Pausanias, Herr Baedeker, omits Olympus entirely: Le Guide Bleu to Greece informs us that ‘l'exploration méthodique de l'Olympe ne remonte pas au delà de la fin du XVIIIe siècle et début du XIXe’, and recommends Marcel Kurz, Le Mont Olympe, as the best book on the subject.

The Corpus of Attic Orators is one of the richest legacies which has come down to us from antiquity. It is invaluable from many points of view. It provides us with unique material for tracing the evolution of Greek prose style; it illustrates the administration of public and private law at Athens; it supplies important evidence for Greek history; and, since the private orations deal with the personal affairs of ordinary citizens, it throws a flood of light on everyday life at Athens. It is with the last point that I shall attempt to deal.

The private orations were composed by professional speech-writers for delivery by clients who were obliged by law to plead their own causes in the courts. Being concerned with real or alleged crimes, they naturally do not show human nature at its best.

I propose to take as examples two speeches dealing with murders, one with an accusation of falsely claiming a dole, and one with a charge of assault and battery.

Two Murder Cases.

Antiphon, the earliest of the Attic Orators, who was also well known as a politician and took a prominent part in the establishment of the Four Hundred in 411 B.C., was head of a school of rhetoric which was attended by Thucydides. Fifteen of his speeches have survived, all of which deal with murder cases, three having been written for actual delivery and the rest as specimen speeches on fictitious themes.

The speech On the Murder of Herodes was composed for a certain Euxitheus and is concerned with an incident which took place on the island of Lesbos off the coast of Asia Minor.

The physical shape of Attica has not altered appreciably since ancient times; Attica is far too well founded for that in the remote geological structure of the Aegean. But Attica is a promontory, an akté, plunged in the sea at the far end of the main watershed of peninsular Greece; and filled also with abrupt and lofty mountains, which prevent it from being ‘easy to oversee’ (eusynoptos) in the sense prescribed by Aristotle for his ideal city-state. Consequently the ground-plan, the ‘shape’ of Attica on a map of Greece, has been differently interpreted by different observers.

On the modern map, based on ‘trigonometrical’ measurement of angles subtended by bases of exactly measured length, Attica appears as a wedge-shaped promontory, one side of which lies between Piraeus and C. Sunium, the other between Sunium and the bend of the coast south of Rhamnus. The angle between these two coasts is about 45 °, or half of a right angle. West of Piraeus, the island of Salamis, seen from the sea, not only looks like part of Attica, but conceals the great ingression of the Saronic Gulf into the Bay of Eleusis. And north of Rhamnus, even on the modern map, few people realize that the coast runs much more nearly west than north—bearing about 300° from Rhamnus to the Euripus Strait; so completely does Euboea insist on its immemorial connexion with Attica, and disguise the fact that from Parnassus east-ward into Attica the Greek mainland is an isthmus, lying nearly east and west, and only about 24 miles broad between the bays of Livadostro (anc. Creüsa) on the Corinthian Gulf, and Skroponeri on the Euboean channel, on the border between Boeotia and Locris.

No army leader has become more famous in history than Alexander. He has been praised and admired as well as blamed and cursed. But even if blemishes can be found in his career and character, no one can deny his ‘daemonic’ strength of will and leadership, which alone are sufficient to mark him out as one of the greatest generals history has seen. Opinions may, however, differ as to whether he was more than that.

There can be no student of Roman history who has not, at one time or other, pondered the significance of the emperor Caligula's (A.D. 37–41) alleged command to his soldiers to gather seashells for transportation back to Rome as the spoils of war. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I dare to offer yet another interpretation of an event which, as we shall see, has not lacked commentators.

Every literary language differs more or less from the spoken language. Most of the ancient Greek that is studied today is written in a literary language. Yet the student should not ignore pronunciation. In a society that did not practise silent reading sound mattered for prose as well as for verse. Accentuation deserves as much attention as any other feature, if the attempt is made to accustom the ear to the sound of a language. Blass, Postgate, and others have discovered a great deal about the accentuation of ancient Greek. More recently the evidence has been collected and the main conclusions stated by E. H. Sturtevant in The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin.

In an essay published in a recent issue of Greece & Rome, P.G. Walsh examines the views of the American scholars Gilbert Highet, Helen Bacon, and William Arrowsmith and comes to the very sensible conclusion that they are wrong in believing that Petronius Arbiter had any moral purpose in writing the Satyricon. While ultimately it may prove impossible for one side in this debate to convince the other, Walsh's arguments, and the way he goes about propounding them, can provide us with some illuminating hints as to why the Petronius controversy arose in the first place. And there are unexplored aspects to the terms on which the argument is being conducted which, when examined and carefully considered, may point the way toward a possible resolution.

In the first months of 44 ce, the Roman emperor Claudius, after spending as few as sixteen days in Britain, returned to Rome to celebrate his triumph. On his journey back to Rome, he stopped near the mouth of the Po river to take a cruise, as Pliny the Elder describes:

Scholars have always tried to find plausible explanations why certain sorts of error have occurred in manuscripts, and much progress has recently been made in trying to analyse such sources of corruption. However, it is not always remembered that scribes were usually monks and that their minds may often have been on higher things than copying Livy's history for the umpteenth time. Over the last few years I have been collating the primary manuscripts of the first five books of Livy and so large a number of revealing corruptions came to light that it seemed valuable to collect them together as evidence of subconscious or unconscious preoccupations of scribes. The result is important, because it means that editors must not be over-mechanical in their approach to the transmission of texts.