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.

It is widely known that in the first two chapters of his Greeks and the Irrational E. R. Dodds borrowed the terms ‘shame-culture’ and ‘guilt-culture’ and applied them to early Greek society. According to Dodds, the society depicted by Homer knew nothing of guilt or the sanction of guilt: what acted as a motivating force was aidōs, ‘shame’ or ‘sense of shame’, of which the sanction was nemesis, ‘righteous indignation’. In other words, the warriors of the heroic caste were impelled to certain courses of action, or were restrained from others, by aidōs: they were ashamed of ‘losing face’ among their equals or inferiors, and this fear of public indignation kept before the mind of the heroes where their duty lay. As the Archaic age advanced (Dodds contends), the sense of guilt became manifest, without however displacing entirely the assumptions of the earlier ‘shame-culture’.

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.

In the eighth and ninth books of the Republic Plato describes the four inferior or corrupt types of government – timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny – and the four related types of human personality – the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical man (544dff.). Closest to the ideal, and first therefore in sequence of decline, is the timocratic state, the term timocracy being employed not in the Aristotelian sense of a polity demanding a property qualification of its ruling class but with ‘the peculiar meaning of government by the principle of honour (τιμ). The timocratic state, it is claimed (545cff.), develops when its members no longer live in harmony but come into conflict as the guardians join brides and bridegrooms ‘inopportunely’ (παρ καιρν, 546d), so that their offspring are neither well-born nor blessed by fortune. The result is a form of government which retains some of the features of its good predecessor, anticipates some of the features of its worse successor, and also boasts some features unique to itself, such as a preference for the ‘spirited’, men better suited for war than for peace. Above all else such a state will be distinguished by a cultivation of competition and a passion for honour: διαϕανστατον δ’ ναὐστν τι μνον… ϕιλονκαι κα ϕιλοτμαι (548c).

It would be possible to say, perhaps, that madness is a fundamental aspect of Greek tragedy, for the excessive act is committed when the tragic figure is in the grip of some passion larger than himself. Euripides, however, presents characters actually mad, acting under the influence of this affliction. The two plays I discuss here, the Herakles and the Orestes, show two very different aspects of μavia, and develop very disparate conclusions.

Simon Goldhill's Reading Greek Tragedy is a welcome publication – not for its originality but because it makes available an important and eclectic body of critical approaches to Greek texts. Goldhill gives no quarter to the idea that the Greekless reader cannot deal with complex theoretical arguments. The (post-)structuralist revolution in modern thought, associated with Derrida, Foucault, and above all Barthes, mediated for the most part through classical scholars such as J-P. Vernant, Froma Zeitlin, and Charles Segal, has here found its way into a book targeted at the undergraduate market. I welcome Goldhill's book as one which demonstrates, without mystification, both the complexity of Greek tragedy, and the contemporary relevance of the questions which Greek tragedy poses. At the same time, as one who teaches students of Drama, I cannot but feel frustration.

The subject of the so-called ‘veristic’ portraits of the late Republic holds a special fascination for the classical art-historian, especially on the vexatious question of the origins of the style; a question which still remains, essentially, open and unsolved. Yet despite the thoroughness with which the topic is debated, one possible influence upon the emerging veristic style, that of the ancestral portrait, continues to receive inadequate consideration.

When I first began to study Greek art, back in the mid 1950s, a book on Greek sculpture had recently been published in Germany and in England that did much to encourage my interest. It was Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer's big picture book, Greek Sculpture, since enlarged and running into three German and two English editions. Its basic idea was not totally novel but was rare for its time and never previously done so well. It presented large, clear photographs of original Greek works (by Hirmer) with a scholarly commentary to each piece (by Lullies); it omitted anything that was known, or considered, not to be original. In doing so, it provided a strong contrast to the sort of book with which I had already come into contact, the sort best characterized perhaps by Ernest Gardner's Six Greek Sculptors of 19252which contains not one single original piece by the six chosen sculptors and in which all the photographs are seen through a glass darkly. Gardner's title and approach, with heavy emphasis on literary evidence and Roman copies, accompanied by a sprinkling of original, unattributed pieces for ballast, was typical of a traditional line of study-that of Kopienkritik, an approach not dead yet by any means and in fact one which must continue to be pursued, though nowadays it is tackled with more caution than earlier. But until one incontrovertible example of a named sculptor's work is found, all attributions must be arguable approximations.

Little of the ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid is devoted to actual combat: two-fifths of books 7–12, on a generous count. Modern scholarship largely avoids the topic; certainly, Virgil has not yet found his Fenik. This paper grew from a desire to know just what determined victory in Virgilian combat, and though the actual answer may prove simple and unexciting, the question itself sheds new light upon the structure and personalities of the later books. The issue is vastly more complex in Homer's huge battle-scenes: there the ‘serious and grim Achaeans’ are more frequent victors and it is clear that the outcome of many duels will have pre-existed the creation of the Iliad and could not be altered. In Homer too, the vastly greater number of heroes developed into figures of individual interest results in the establishment of what is in effect an unofficial ‘rating’ system: not only is ‘The minor warriors of the Iliad' substantial and valuable study, but within that group, further clear discriminations of ranking apply: Idomeneus, Antilochus, Helenus, Deiphobus, for example, stand in mid-scale and Homer's system of ‘seeding’ excludes unexpected or improbable winners: thus when Aeneas meets Diomedes in Il. 5, he is clearly outclassed, but also, traditionally, survives the battles against the Achaeans. An honourably drawn fight would be too good a result for Aeneas' talents and a divine rescue is an alternative fortunately open to Homer. What then happens in the Aeneid?

Like ‘crossing the T’, the diekplous can sometimes seem a manoeuvre ‘more honour'd in the breach than in the observance’, for there are, perhaps, only three battles in which it is said to have been successfully used – Lade (Herodotos 6.15.2), Chios (Polybios 16.4.14), and Side (Livy 37.24.2) – and mostly what we hear about are reasons why it was not or could not be used. Nevertheless, it seems to have been regarded as at least a potentially effective tactic from at least the fifth to the second century: Thucydides has Phormio declare (2.89.8), for example, that diekploi and anastrophai ‘are the marks of bettersailing ships’ (νɛν ἄμɛινον πλɛουσν ἔργα στν), and Polybios (1.51.9) refers to the diekplous as ‘the most effective manoeuvre in sea-fighting’ (ὅφɛρ ν τῷ ναυμαχɛîν στι πρακτικᾡτατον).

The naval tactic, the periplous, referred to by both Thucydides and Xenophon has yet to be convincingly identified by any scholar. πɛρπλους and πɛριπλω are widely used in their non-tactical sense to mean ‘a voyage round a stretch of coast’, and ‘to sail round’. The only passages in which we can be certain that Thucydides and Xenophon are writing about the naval tactic are not accounts of battles but passages setting the scene for naval battles, theorizing about sea warfare. The problem then is to separate and identify the tactical from the normal usage. If we study the nature of the theoretical periplous referred to by Thucydides and Xenophon, and then look for a battle manoeuvre of a similar nature, we may be able to make that distinction.

The political unification of the Mediterranean world in the last epoch of the Roman Republic doubtless provided the stimulus for the composition of world histories. One of these is the only universal history written in Latin, under the title Historiae Philippicae, by Pompeius Trogus in the time of Augustus. The original work is lost, but we have an Epitoma produced around the year A.D. 200 by Iustinus. The prologi, which contain summaries of the original work, have been preserved, but there is no indication of authorship.

A striking feature of the speeches in Tacitus' Histories is their responsion to one another. Previous discussions have centred round responsions of theme and argument between speeches given by different speakers. So Galba's advocacy of adoptive versus hereditary monarchy (1.15–16) is balanced by Mucianus' speech urging Vespasian to seek the throne for himself and his son (2.76–77), while Piso's attack on Otho's vicious character (1.30.1) is matched by Otho's criticisms of Piso as a deutero-Galba, harsh and avaricious (1.38.1). In this paper, I shall explore a different kind of responsion, hitherto unnoticed, between four speeches delivered by the same speaker. Tacitus binds Otho's first four speeches (1.21; 37–38; 83–84; 2.47) together through the consistent application of traditional motifs from the general's harangue before battle, although none of them is in fact a cohortatio. The topoi of the battle harangue form a remarkably stable repertoire through ancient historiography and epic and they would have been very familiar to the ancient reader. He would, therefore, have been sensitive to any changes rung on these tropes by the author. An examination of Plutarch's versions of the speeches suggests that Tacitus may well have added these exhortation motifs to express his distinctive point of view. In closing, I shall suggest a possible antecedent for this particular technique.

Is Aeneas right or wrong to kill Turnus at the end of the Aeneid? Virgil himself has raised the issue by creating Aeneas' dilemma. In the equivalent scene of the Iliad the first wound which Hector receives in combat with Achilles is fatal, and so the possibility of sparing his life does not arise; but Turnus is not mortally wounded, he asks for mercy, begins to be successful, and then is killed after all. About this moral question all the logically possible opinions have been recently asserted by scholars: that the killing is right, that it is wrong, and that it is morally neutral. One of these must, of course, be right.

In the Agricola … Tacitus amalgamates biography and historical monograph. But the success of the combination is questionable. He gives roughly two thirds of the work to Agricola's governorship of Britain, and treats the climax of Agricola's campaigns at length, providing direct speeches for the two leaders, almost as if he were experimenting with full-scale history. Such extensive development of a part, albeit an important part, unbalances the whole. Again, most of what he tells us about Agricola's personality is conventional and unrevealing.… Some contend that Tacitus exaggerated Agricola's achievements and wilfully misconstrued his relations with Domitian. We cannot be sure, but certainly many matters in the Agricola are unclear or, like the insinuation of poisoning against Domitian, ill substantiated. There is, however, a case for the defence. Tacitus probably found little else worth relating about Agricola except the governorship, and hence made the most of it. In thus concentrating on military and administrative achievements, he followed a hallowed Republican tradition.… A Roman aristocrat should possess and display virtus, above all in warfare: to this pattern Agricola conformed. Thus one old-fashioned attitude underlies a work somewhat novel in conception.