The friendship between Horace and Maecenas quickly attained an almost mythical status as the ideal relationship of poet and patron. In addition to such material generosity as his gift of the Sabine farm, Maecenas seems to have given the poet a ‘spiritual’ patronage which was equally important. As a gesture of gratitude, the mature Horace dedicated to his patron the first three books of odes and addresses to him seven poems within that collection. Several of these take the form of invitations to symposia at the poet's Sabine retreat. Their primary interest for critics has been ethical: the poet suggests the value of his humble farm as a recreative, peaceful environment for the sophisticated urban dweller who is caught up in the busy world of Rome. Critics have shown how the invitations to this simple, private world involve the attainment of a proper attitude towards life, an awareness of human limitations. Recent studies have tended to explore more fully the poetic implications of Horace's invitations, by which the poet points beyond the ethical to the artistic principles associated with his Sabine farm. They have, for example, analyzed metaphors which link wine with poetry and Greek things with Italian as Horace's self-conscious expressions of his special contribution to the lyric genre.

Three extended dialogue or monologue passages, along with numerous brief references and two choral odes in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis talk about the past. As in many tragedies, the past is not altogether past because it is forced upon characters and audience alike by the pressure of tradition and by its likeness to the present situation.

Agamemnon begins the play by harking back to a previous time. Nor is his monologue a simple, ingenuous statement of historical facts. It is full of subtleties which clarify much of what subsequently occurs in the drama. Timing is important from his first utterance:

The Aristaeus Epyllion is the finale and the climax of the Georgics. Although a radical departure from the poem's didactic formula, the distinction of a lengthy narrative affords emphasis as well as a certain fitness to the conclusion of a long and complex poem. The task, however, of relating the myth to an interpretation of the poem has taxed the imagination and ingenuity of scholars, undermining the confidence of not a few in the poem's integrity. The object of this paper is to examine Aristaeus' role in the epyllion and to show to what extent it suggests initiation into a mystery religion.

The epyllion is motivated by the beekeeper's loss of his hive; Vergil advises restoration through the bougonia. The epyllion, however, exceeds the needs of an explanation and acquires a meaning and function all its own, displacing the bees at center stage. The ostensible object of the epyllion is to recount the discovery of the bougonia: Arcadii memoranda inventa magistri (G.4.283), But in fact the bougonia plays only a small part in the epyllion, providing at the end, as the means of restoration of Aristaeus' bees, a sacrifice, which indeed proves anticlimactic after the drama of Aristaeus' quest and Orpheus' loss. Moreover, the early revelation of its formula removes any suspense about its details. The bougonia is in fact a structural device that introduces and concludes the myth; it is part of a complex of previously unrelated myths, cleverly manipulated by Vergil to formulate the epyllion.

Language is central to homo sapiens and in literature is used in a special way to investigate the human condition. In poetry language is even more special and particular poets employ it in a highly individual fashion. ‘Style’ is the term that describes this individual use of language by a writer and style by definition implies choice: from a wide, indeed infinite number of sentences available in the language he uses, the writer selects particular sentences which best express what he wants to say. And in poetry he must also choose a particular metrical pattern into which he fits his sentences or else decide to write vers libre.

The writer's choice extends over numerous aspects of the finished work such as syntax, sound, vocabulary, metre and rhetorical figures like metaphor, metonymy and anaphora. In syntax the writer can use hypotactic or paratactic, long or short sentences and can alternate between the indicative and the subjunctive or optative moods; as regards sound he can make the words echo the sense; through his choice of vocabulary he can emphasize vital matters and adumbrate motifs central to his work; in his handling of metre the poet can use enjambment or end-stopped lines, vary the caesura and substitute long for short or vice versa; finally, the writer can employ the innumerable devices available to a self-conscious literary artist to add distinction and power to his work. A word of warning, however, Dylan Thomas rightly tells us that when all the technical aspects of a poem have been minutely analysed there is still something left that defies the scholar's annotating: the intangible, but ineluctable, impact of great poetry.

One of the most valuable keys to an interpretation of the Antigone lies in a proper understanding of the role of the Chorus, and this in turn depends on a close attention to its characterization, its personality, attitudes and feelings, its relationship to the principal characters, the way in which it is involved in and affected by the actions of those characters, and how it responds to their actions. Any overall view of the play must take account of these matters, not only in order to appreciate the many dramatic effects which are created by, for example, the ironic tension between what the Chorus believes and the words in which it expresses that belief, but also hecause the handling of the Chorus and its responses to the action may direct our attention to a more adequate and satisfactory interpretation of the play.

For several years Horace had lived a regulated and retiring life dedicated to philosophy, and had written poems of an avowedly ethical nature embodying the fruits of his contemplation. These poems are letters addressed to his several friends, and of course to his patron, and are as MacLeod defined them: ‘ethical poems in which the epistolary form led to the presentation of moral matters.’ These poems were in the fulness of time collected and, after well-documented literary custom, were arranged in a significant order. A final poem was written (as was usual) in which unequivocally Horace set his seal (his sphragis) on his latest collection, identifying himself as the writer. He indicated his parentage, his achievement (which belied his humble origins) and, finally, stated his age.

In the opening lines of his signature poem, Horace suggested that his book wanted only to go whoring in Rome. He does this by writing of his book in words which apply equally to a young slave who yearns for the bright lights of a free life in the world at large. The book/slave imagery is sustained throughout and seems to organise the poem along an orderly (and limited) progress from beginning to end. But the poet's attitudes are so complex, his stance about poetry is so provocative (in the poem he seems to create a conflict of interest between the poet and his poems) and, for all the tour de force of his imagery, so single-mindedly fierce and uncompromising that, though we particularly relish the fine verbal control, the poem opens up new horizons of perception.