The late Professor H. A. Harris, who made many contributions to this journal, has added much to our knowledge of Greek and Roman athletics. Like Gardiner before him, he valued highly the opinions of modern athletes and was proud to be considered in their ranks; but it is difficult for a scholar (even when athlete) fully to understand all the intricate fields of sporting endeavour. Harris is so clearly right in his discussions of many fields of athletics that one is reluctant to take issue with his interpretations in a few areas, but he was unfortunately not fully versed in some of the ‘heavy’ events, as discus throwers have seen. In the case of weightlifting Harris discounts many of the ancient achievements without an adequate discussion of their feasibility. Since it has become almost fashionable for modern scholars not to take seriously these recorded feats, it is worth while to review them in the light of modern weightlifting—a comparison which has not been closely examined before—and to discuss the various lifts and training techniques of the ancients.

Herodotus' reputation as a critical historian has been increased by such a wealth of articles and papers recently that it might seem superfluous to add to the bulk of material already available. There are, however, some radical notions embodied in Herodotus' treatment of the Trojan War to which further attention should be drawn.

Critics are always reminding us that character-drawing in Greek tragedy was a very different thing from what we meet in the modern theatre, different and (it is implied) perhaps more limited or rudimentary. But this contrast between ancient and modern is too vague to be illuminating: we need to define exactly what kind of difference it is before we can decide whether it is important. In drama meant for live performance it can hardly be a difference of technique, since every playwright is limited to two basic means of character-drawing, what his figures say and do and what other people say and do to them and about them. Nor can there be much significance in differences of convention. Of course convention counts for something: a dramatist writing for three masked male actors, who must take all the speaking roles in his play, male or female indiscriminately, using a highly formal and declamatory style of acting in a large open-air theatre, will create characters which can be rendered in these circumstances. But there is no reason why the particular conventions of his time should limit his portrayal of character in any serious way: Lady Macbeth, after all, was written to be played by a teenage boy. Surely the differences that really demand attention are those of attitude.

History as we know it (I mean historiography, the writing of history) may in a very real sense be said to have been invented by the Greeks, and it was a creation of the fifth century B.c. The earliest historian whose works we possess–indeed, the earliest of all historians in the proper sense–is Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who wrote during the third quarter of the fifth century; and the greatest of all Greek historians, Thucydides the Athenian, wrote in the next generation, roughly in the last thirty years of the fifth century.

The basic principles of successful narrative presentation are simple to state, if difficult to achieve. Selection and organization of material to make the desired point; sufficient variety of tone and pace to hold the audience's interest and to emphasize the point; and a proper appreciation of the context in which the point has to be made: these requirements seem to be valid, whether the narrative being presented is a literary history, an imaginative novel, or an archetypal story which starts with ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman …’ For each of these narrative forms implies intellectual judgement by the narrator on his material, artistic judgement about its presentation, and assumptions about the audience for whom it is intended. I should like to consider some aspects of Tacitus' art of narrative presentation, and the connection of that art with his historical judgement.

The legend of the dying swan's melancholy song is given its first expression in extant Greek literature by Aeschylus in 458 B.c., and it has obsessed poets, commentators, and natural historians ever since. Poets like Tennyson may sing of the dying swan's ‘music strange and manifold’, unaffected by the scoffing doubts expressed by ancient scientists and modern editors of classical texts. But do dying swans really ‘sing’? The answer has been known now for over a century and a half, and is mentioned briefly in one or two works on ancient zoology such as C. J. Sundevall's Die Thierarten des Aristoteles (Stockholm, 1863), p. 152, and O. Keller's Die antike Tierwelt (Leipzig, 1913; reprinted 1963), ii.215. English commentators on ancient texts and D'Arcy Thompson's standard Glossary of Greek Birds (second edition, London and Oxford, 1936; reprinted 1966), however, tend either to neglect or unscientifically to dismiss the correct explanation. For this reason a restatement of the facts both ancient and modern seems advisable.

In the Republic (519 E ff.), having finished his account of the education of the philosopher king, and having described the ideal life of pure contemplation in the Simile of the Cave, Plato makes Socrates say:

Then it will be our function as founders, I said, to compel the best natures to undertake the study which we previously declared to be the highest, to observe the good, and to make that ascent we mentioned, and when they have done so and looked their fill, then we must not allow them that freedom which they now possess.

The ‘poetry’ of my title has at least the virtue of brevity as a description of the sort of literature Plato discusses in Books 2, 3, and 10 of the Republic. But in its Platonic sense ‘poetry’ is too narrow a description. Two characteristics recognized by Plato as invariably belonging to poetry (poiēsis) are (i) that what it composes are fictional stories (muthoi) (Phd. 61 b), and (ii) that it composes them in verse (Grg. 502 c; Smp. 205 c; R. 393 d, 601 d, 607 d; Phdr. 258 d). And the sort of literature discussed in the Republic, while it invariably has characteristic (i), does not invariably have (ii).

Variety is a keynote of Ovid's Metamorphoses: variety of myth is complemented by variety of structure and style to create a symphony of sophisticated versatility. From this arise complex techniques of wit and it is the purpose of this paper to investigate these within myths which are basically similar. It is our purpose to examine comparatively three myths in order to elucidate the particular form of wit which predominates in each.

The height of the building in which the fire has broken out, the location of the poor man's dwelling in it, and the relevance of both to Juvenal's sketch, have often been misunderstood. This misunderstanding, handed down from the early commentators, still lingers in such commonly consulted works as those of Mayor, Duff, Ramsay (Loeb), and, more recently, Peter Green (Penguin). These assume that verse 199 indicates a house that has three storeys and that the poor man lives in the third: e.g. ‘smoke is pouring out of your third-floor attic’ (Ramsay). The poor man's inexplicable ignorance (tu nescis) of the alarming events about him, of the inevitable din and commotion, even of the very smoke in his own home, has been astonishingly ascribed by some (so Mayor and Green) to his being asleep. Of this the poet gives no hint; that the fire may be nocturnal has scant relevance.

Where ought we to begin the story of the Trojan War? If we follow Homer, we shall begin with Paris and his mad folly or ate in abducting Helen (Iliad 24.28; cf. 3.100 and 6.356, and contrast 5.62–64 and 22.115–16). But the rape of Helen was a direct consequence of Paris awarding the prize for outstanding beauty to Aphrodite, when, while tending animals on Mount Ida, the prince was approached by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite and required to adjudicate between their conflicting claims to be thought the fairest.

There is general agreement that from Homer onwards references in Classical writers to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians are almost never to modern Ethiopia or to the highland peoples who were the ancestors or predecessors of present-day inhabitants of the Ethiopian plateau. Homer's Ethiopians are indeed almost in the realm of Märchen; gods visit them, or are reported among them when they absent themselves from Olympus; they are ἔσχατοι ἀνδρν, and without fault or blame; and their only human visitor is Mene-laus. But they are not perhaps wholly fairy-tale. Some Ethiopians fought on the Trojan side in die war (under their king Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos), and the lost Aethiopis, from the Epic Cycle, will have dealt with this. The notorious disjunction of Eastern and Western Ethiopians has a factual ring about it; and Ethiopians might be found in West Africa as well as in East, as Hanno discovered in his voyage in the early fifth century B.c., and in India as well as Africa; for the name, it seems, may be applied to dark-skinned people generally.

The names and natures of the three parties which struggled for power in early-sixth-century Athens have puzzled scholars both ancient and modern. The paucity and murkiness of the evidence have made progress difficult and the decisive contribution to the solution of the problem most probably lies in the hands of the archaeologists and the epigraphists. In the meantime some scholars have retreated into agnosticism. ‘The reasons for Athens' rejection of the Solonian solution are, except in broadest outline, lost.’ Scepticism is clearly an important tool in the handling of inadequate evidence, but the present article is written in the belief that some clarification of the problem is still possible with the existing evidence.

The amount of Ovid's surviving poetry is almost exactly equal to the sum total of poetry which has come down to us from Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius. Ovid wrote because he was a compulsive writer, ‘a poet utterly in love with poetry’ as Gilbert Murray aptly put it. He was the only classical poet to leave an autobiography, and in it he records that as a boy ‘I tried to write words freed from rhythm, yet all unbidden song would come upon befitting numbers and whatever I tried to write was verse.’ The quantity of Ovid's poetry, of course, cannot be made an excuse for lack of quality, but no indulgence need be begged and no allowances made for his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses. When the blow of exile fell on Ovid in a.d. 8 the Metamorphoses was substantially complete, much more so than the Aeneid had been when Virgil died in 19 b.c.