The influence of Seneca's tragedies is now a commonplace: it was Seneca, not Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Euripides, who provided the classical models for Renaissance and Elizabethan Tragedy. To quote the considered judgement of a distinguished English scholar, the late H. B. Charlton: ‘Seneca's influence on the serious drama of most of Western Europe is almost immeasurable.… In effect, the Latin dramatist founded a tradition which at least until the 19th century passed through Europe in secure and often undisputed triumph.’ The precise extent of his influence and the ways in which it was exercised are matters which are still in dispute, and I cannot hope to say anything new about them in the space at my disposal. What I hope to do, however imperfectly, is to try to look at Seneca through the eyes of those on whom he made his first impact in England and to examine in retrospect the sources of his appeal to dramatists in the second half of the sixteenth century: why was it that he came to be described as ‘our Seneca’ even by one who was able to recognize the superiority of the Greeks, as those who were most influenced by the Roman were not?

Athens had a founder. His identity lies concealed in the twilight of myth. When the historians first sought him, and that was centuries after the city had been established, they constructed a traditional picture which—with the necessary modifications to fit current needs—persisted into late Antiquity. A historical picture, even one of a past as distant as the founding of Athens, is never created out of thin air, however. Remnants of ancient customs, no longer understood, remained part of social and religious practices. When the Greek—in the time that also saw the first written recording of history, roughly in the fifth century B.c.—posed his questions about the how and why of the relics, he encountered the stories belonging to oral and written tradition that mentioned and honoured a founder. These shreds of ideas about an ancient past he used, together with the products of his tireless imagination, to create a picture with such a general appeal that it has remained alive and has even become a piece of history whose development can be followed, even though the journey is a difficult one and does not always hold to one path or lead to the same conclusion. The legend becomes history in two ways. Firstly, the human spirit, which loves to make fables and cannot accept its own ignorance, fills out shadowy images from an ancient and incomprehensible past until they become distinct figures. These elaborations then give rise to a new development, which might be called the history of the legend. To trace and describe the evolution of the legend is an extraordinarily fascinating occupation.

The trial of Clutorius Priscus, as Walker says, ‘gives the first instance of a condemnation based only on trivial charges’. Even so, it is clear that the charges against Clutorius had been made possible by Augustus' extension of the law to cover famosi libelli, although Tacitus' words on that occasion (‘cognitionem de famosis libellis specie legis eius tractavit’) may indicate that no formal change in the law was made. Similarly, then, at the beginning of his reign, Tiberius was instructing Pompeius Macer to observe the spirit rather than the letter of Augustus' law. Support may be lent to this view by the fact that both Augustus and Tiberius were prompted in their actions by particular incidents which annoyed them. In the case of Clutorius, the delator may well, in view of Tiberius' absence from Rome, have been encouraged to attempt a similar rather loose interpretation of the law. But is there a ‘false emphasis’ in Tacitus' presentation of the case?

Juvenal's Fourth Satire has not attracted the critical attention to which its interest and literary merits entitle it. It has a further claim to extended discussion inasmuch as it is precisely those features that make it an untypical specimen of Juvenal's work as a whole which throw light on his technical resources and, paradoxically perhaps, on some of the distinctive qualities of his own particular brand of satire.

InDidaskalos 1968 I have argued that the chief task of the commentator on a short poem (an ode of Horace, an elegy of Propertius, or a poem of Catullus) is to reconstruct the hypothesis upon which the poem rests by piecing together the data actually provided by the text, or deducible from the text as a plausible, necessary deduction; to these data, I argued, one need only add what the poet feels he can rely on any reader to know, though two thousand years later it may of course require some research to recover what was common knowledge at the time. I cited Catullus 17 as a case in point—a poem where reconstruction of the hypothesis depended on things outside the text, things which, though part of the cultural background of the poet's contemporaries, were hardly part of ours, yet within our grasp if we cast around a little.

In the ten years between 1929 and 1939 three remarkable books were produced in a tiny Irish-speaking community of less than one hundred and fifty people living on the Great Blasket, an island off the south-west coast of Kerry. The authors, two men and a woman, were peasants, eking out a scanty living by farming and fishing. They were technically literate in that they had acquired the rudiments of reading and writing at the island school, but for all practical purposes their culture was oral. They certainly had neither opportunity nor inclination for book-reading. Yet out of the resources of their oral culture they produced works of a high literary standard, one of which has (in translation) achieved the status of a ‘World's Classic’.

This article, which makes no claim to scholastic profundity, arose from a discussion as to whether the use of a supine to translate a purpose clause after misit was admissible in G.C.E. ‘A’ level Latin Prose.

This construction, which describes action as a goal of motion, is explained in probably all syntax books used in schools: e.g. North and Hillard, Latin Prose Composition, has a note (p. 110) in which the following examples are given of ways to express purpose:

Legates misit ut pacem peterent

qui pacem peterent

ad pacem petendam

pacis petendae causā

pacem petitum

It is also noted that the future participle (pacem petituros) occasionally occurs in this sense. This use is so rare that I do not propose to consider it.

The casualty lists in the Trojan War, owing to their late publication, are not very accurate, but they have some interesting features. The named casualties of officers total 238, and unnamed 26. Other ranks are not recorded. Of these 24 seem to have been wounded only, though in some cases it is left uncertain whether a man was only wounded, and not killed. To the wounded must be added Ares and Aphrodite, who obviously could not be killed, though they seem to have suffered considerably. Apparently the Gods and Goddesses who engaged in the fighting had a convention that they must not kill anyone themselves: they only interfered by encouraging their respective sides, and protecting certain favourites or balking their would-be killers. Ares, Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus were thus active on the Trojan side, and Athena, Hera, and Poseidon for the Greeks. Unlike us, the early Greeks appear to have been more proud of the killers than sorry for the killed.

Pliny the Elder, enumerating the different varieties of chalk, writes, ‘Vilissima qua circum praeducere ad victoriae notam … instituerunt maiores’ (NH xxxv. 47. 199). The Loeb translator gives: ‘The most inferior kind is the one which our ancestors made it the

practice to use for tracing the line indicating victory in circus-races.’ If Pliny meant no more than ‘to mark out the winning-line in the circus’, he seems to have used a curiously clumsy way of expressing it, ‘to mark out the circus at the winning-line’. Elsewhere he uses praeducere more straightforwardly. When he is describing how channels were constructed in mountainous country to bring water to mines, he says that workmen, hanging in cradles from the top of precipices, ‘lineas itineri praeducunt’, ‘mark lines for the route’. We might then have expected him to write, ‘In circo praeducere victoriae notam’, had that been his meaning. If, however, lanes were marked on the track from the carceres to Cassiodorus' ‘break-line’ (Fig. 1), Pliny's expression is justified, ‘to mark out the circus near the winning-line’. The winning-line may have been the same as the break-line, or it may have been level with the meta (A–B, Fig. 1). Pliny's words are equally suitable in either case, as the lanes were at the same end of the circus as the winning-post and near it.

One of the major puzzles in the history of the Graeco-Roman world lies in the great discrepancy between its considerable achievements in art, in literature, in philosophy, in mathematics, and in medicine, and its very marked backwardness in most branches of technology. This is less surprising where the Romans are concerned, since, for all their admirable qualities in other directions, they were not a conspicuously original or inventive people. Even in those spheres in which they most excelled, the arts of government and warfare, they made few contributions of their own, and their strength lay rather in their skill at adapting to their own purposes the bright ideas of other men. It is significant that those two simple but important aids to improved horsemanship and cavalry tactics, the saddle and the stirrup, were not invented by the Romans, nor indeed by the Greeks, but by the nomadic tribes that pressed in on the Roman empire from the third century A.d. onwards. But with the Greeks the case is different. They were a highly intelligent people, gifted with a degree of inquisitiveness which made them unwilling to accept without question the outward appearance of the world in which they lived. Consequently in mathematics and certain branches of pure science they were able to make quite astonishing progress. But these intellectual advances were not accompanied by any marked degree of technological improvement. While Eratosthenes in Alexandria was calculating the circumference of the earth, and obtaining a figure that was less than i per cent short of the real one, the world around him was still more or less at the same technical level as it had been since the end of the Bronze Age. This contrast between theoretical brilliance and practical incompetence is great and dramatic, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest some of the reasons why it existed.

This is the somewhat surprising moral drawn by Horace, in the twelfth poem of the fourth book of Odes (lam verts comites), from an idyllic description of spring, which includes the nesting of the unhappy bird that weeps for Itys and goes on to an Arcadian scene of shepherds with their pipes. In this ‘thirsty season’ Vergilius, who is addressed as iuvenum nobilium cliens, is invited to join the poet in broaching a jar of wine (but to earn his drink with a gift of perfume) and to forget for a while his usual preoccupations:

verum pone moras et studium lucri,

nigrorumque memor dum licet ignium

misce stultitiam consiliis brevem:

dulce est desipere in loco. (25–8)

How to begin is not the least of the dramatist's problems. It is essential, in the construction of any play, not only to establish at the start a suitable mood, but to make clear, without undue delay, the place, personalities, and general antecedents of the plot. Of the two methods of doing the latter that offer themselves—that by which such information is contained in a ‘prologue’ or set speech, and that by which it is introduced in the course of the action—the former is simpler for the author, and, for the spectator too, it may be more convenient to have these details given once and for all. But it tends to artificiality, and the impression is often created that here is something outside the plot, a mere introduction to the play rather than a part of the play itself. In Greek tragedy the method was of course much used by Euripides, and he has perhaps been over-criticized for it, both in his own time and since. But later writers have not shunned it, and its final development is found in the splitting-off of the initial ‘address’ and its assignment to an extraneous speaker dubbed ‘Prologue’ or ‘Narrator’. This has at least the merit of logical clarity. But, while a definite line cannot be drawn between them, the more informal method must be accounted artistically superior. This was especially that of Sophocles, and his opening scenes (or ‘prologues’ in the technical sense), in both their informational and other aspects, are worth attention in themselves, as well as being indicative of his general approach to his art.

The private life of one of the great figures of history, indeed, as a discerning judge has recently put it, ‘perhaps the most civilized man who ever lived, attracts and deserves attention. A considerable, though subordinate, part in the life of a Roman of the upper classes was played by his servants, who ministered to his comfort, supported his dignitas, and were essential agents in his political work. In the case of Cicero these servants are known to us from his letters, while the staffs of other republican magistrates are much less completely revealed. An investigation of his more trusted and important servants, that is his freedmen, should cast light both on Cicero's private character and on the extent to which he relied, in his political and private life, on his subordinates.

Europa was the daughter of Phoinix or Agenor, king of Phoenice, and Telephassa; her brother was Cadmos. Zeus came in the form of a bull and carried her away to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos, also Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon the elder. Afterwards she married Asterios (or Asterion), who reared her children.