I Recently saw a film of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus containing some fine performances and some sensitive direction. One scene I particularly remember because it made clear a point which has usually been either shirked or muddled through both in production and in scholarly comment. When Oedipus was listening to locasta's speech about the oracle given to Laius, he followed her with close attention as far as the phrase ‘a place where three roads meet’. Then he started, turned away from her, and walked past her towards the camera with a brooding face. Behind him we saw locasta continuing the speech which Oedipus obviously was not hearing. The two lines 718–19 which Oedipus did not hear contain some scope for emotion on locasta's part (ἔρριψεν, and the rare tribrach in the fifth foot), but Oedipus was unaware of it, thinking about the road to Daulia, and heard nothing to remind him of what he knew very well, that he was standing on two scarred feet.

Gaudet cognomine terra. Virgil's stories of Palinurus, Misenus, and Caieta, the helmsman, the trumpeter, and the nurse of Aeneas, are aetiological: they are poetic fictions designed to account for the names of the promontories and towns which are landmarks on the periplus or navigation route along the west coast of Italy, between Lucania and Latium, or, more specifically, between Velia and Ostia. The object here is to examine the topography and archaeology of the three sites to determine whether any features of the terrain assisted Virgil to his three aetiological fictions, and to see whether recent archaeological finds may offer any additional insight into the three episodes.

In a particularly entertaining section of Metamorphoses i, lines 253–437, Ovid retells the old Greek version of the myth of the Flood, the survival on Mount Parnassus of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and their repopu-lation of the earth.

The Odyssey is principally the story of a return. A man has spent ten years fighting a war in a distant country and another ten years trying, against all sorts of obstacles and distractions, to get home to his wife and family. Will he make it?

The words ‘rhetoric’ and ‘rhetorical influence’ come readily enough to the tongue when people talk of Greek and Latin literature, but all too often a great vagueness hangs about them; one is seldom sure whether they are being used historically with reference to certain facts of ancient education or as terms of abuse for some ‘insincerity’ or ‘artificiality’ in literature which the speaker invites us to deplore. My object here is to supply a few facts about the ancient rhetoricians and their intentions, and then to add some observations about the relevance of what they were doing to our own understanding of the ancient writers. Most of what I say is about Greek rather than Latin rhetoric, but I shall of course draw on Latin material, which, for some parts of the subject, is both more abundant and more intelligent than what survives hi Greek. Richard Volkmann, on whose great book we still depend, confessed that the only way by which he came to understand what rhetoric meant to the ancients, and to feel that he had in his hands an ‘Ariadne's thread’ to the labyrinth, was by the repeated reading of Quintilian.

Calagurris, the modern Calahorra, is situated by the river Ebro about two hundred miles inland, in what in Roman times was the province of Hispania Citerior or Tarraconensis. Here Quintilian was born some time in the fourth decade of the Christian era. If it were not that his birthplace is recorded by later writers, we should be quite unaware of it. There is nothing in the Institutio Oratoria to suggest that its author was a Spaniard, and though there is no reason why he should have referred to his home country in a treatise on rhetorical education, his work includes just enough personal reminiscence to make it a little surprising that he did not. Moreover, on the rare occasions when he refers to Spain he gives no hint of any connexion with the country. It would be rash to assume that he was ashamed of his Spanish birth, but perhaps long residence in Rome had weakened his consciousness of provincial origin. At the same time we can perhaps see in him certain provincial qualities.

‘Few provincial industrial towns have anything much to recommend them, but Laurion has a sinister ugliness that is all its own.…’ so Osbert Lancaster; nevertheless the dusty little town has a certain extra interest for those who take the long road to Sunion and so pass through it. For it was there that the famous silver of Athens was mined. But for all that the area has been remarkably little examined. There has been much work devoted to the boundary stones and demes, but the mining itself has been largely ignored since the Compagnie Française des Mines du Laurion began to rework the old mines at the end of the last century. At that time (1896), E. Ardaillon published the only book on the mines that has as yet been written, and apart from a few all too cursory reports little has been done either to check his findings or to extend his work.

It is commonly held that Plato died in 348/7 b.c. during the archonship of Theophilus or in the first year of the 108th Olympiad. According to a widespread and almost universally accepted tradition, which has found a place in our current books on ‘The History of Greek Philosophy’, Aristotle departed from Athens soon after Plato's death, repairing to Atarneus (or Assos) in Asia Minor, where he stayed with Hermias. Thus, it would appear that the death of Plato was the prime if not sole reason for Aristotle's journey in 348/7 b.c. It has been conjectured, however, that Plato actually died in the spring of 347 b.c., probably in May. Though this is by no means certain, it properly requestions the causality of the Stagirite's flight.

This paper is an investigation of the rise to power of P. Clodius in the last years of the Roman Republic. Its purpose is to form a judgement on Clodius' own policies and to estimate the political significance of his career. This involves many detailed historical problems. Though I shall suggest solutions to some of these, my main aim is to seek a general interpretation of Clodius' political persona.

Classical Association branches hold yearly Latin reading competitions: J.A.C.T. sponsors records of eminent scholars reading Latin in the way that their learning and sensibility direct them. They recognize that, with the knowledge of Latin speech rhythm for ever lost, they run the risk of disturbing Virgil's ashes and rousing unseemly laughter in Hades' realm; but, ungrateful to the late Professor Beare for his agnostic warning, they read up accurately and hope for the best.

These revolutionary conceptions of metre which were encountered in Ennius by his first audience served in the Annales, his most influential work of all, to elevate to a new plane the history of Rome. The word ‘history’ here is important. It is difficult to say in what precise sense the ordinary Greek accepted Homer as history. Certainly Thucydides discusses the Iliad as history, but that is only half of Homer, and even accepting the Iliad with all its gods and goddesses as a literal account of what took place at Troy the listener would be conscious that it was all a very long time ago. But the subject-matter of the Annales was far from being all a very long time ago. Scholars have pointed out that there was precedent in Hellenistic epic for the treatment of historical events in verse, but this is not a subject on which easy generalization is permissible.

In all parts of the world primitive men have always been aware that death and life are indissolubly linked, that the growth of the seed depends on the death of the fruit. Of course this conception is by no means limited to primitives, it is fundamental to a number of world religions, not least to the Christian faith. The evidence that ancient peoples regarded death as a necessary source of life is massive. It is contained in all those stories about dying gods and divine kings which Frazer collected in his monumental Golden Bough and in the more recent studies of Joseph Campbell. Similarly, human sacrifice, voluntary or otherwise, was usually performed to propitiate or gain the support of the gods, especially those of the underworld, and the spirits of the dead. The same is true of many animal sacrifices and offerings of fruits. Unless the needs of the nether powers were satisfied, Death would naturally claim perhaps even more than his due, the living would then suffer, animals and crops would perish—an everyday notion poetically expressed by Horace in his Ode to Faunus.

In Book iv of the Georgics, Virgil prescribes the beginning of spring as the time for producing bees abiogenetically: hoc geritur Zephyris primum impellentibus undas,

ante nouis rubeant quam prata coloribus, ante

garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo. (305–7)

German life and letters in the earlier eighteenth century were dominated almost exclusively by French influences. The fragmentation of the German-speaking world within the clumsy and largely imaginary framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the appalling devastation of the Thirty Years War, and the consequent dearth of a living autochthonic cultural tradition had led German intellectuals to look to the impressive achievements of Versailles as the only alternative to barbarism. Leibniz, the greatest philosopher of the German Enlightenment, wrote in Latin and French; Gottsched, an ardent admirer of the Grand Siècle, translated Corneille and Racine and urged imitation of their style upon his fellow countrymen; Frederick the Great, whose indifferent French verse Voltaire had the irksome privilege of correcting, possessed at his palace of Sanssouci (itself an imitation of Versailles) a magnificent library which contained not a single work in German, and though he is said to have had an eloquent command of German expletives, spoke only French at court.