It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Henry James, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.

W.C. Sellar & R.G. Yeatman, 1066 And All That

As history Tacitus' Annals pose problems. On the one hand meticulously researched — on the other obfuscatory; self-avowedly unprejudiced and conspicuously prejudicial; evocative more than discursive; necessarily reliant upon the flawed historical tradition which they set out to correct. As historical epic they evidence rhetorical mastery and greatness of vision; a sense of dramatic moment and vivid rendering of character; a sense of history as dramatic process, seen through the eyes of contemporary and later observers. Moreover they engage the reader narratologically; point the distinction between Tacitus' insights and those of his occasionally self-deceived, subjective persona, ‘the historian’; signal a mechanism for interpreting the seeming distortions and inconsistencies of the text. This essay looks at six interrelated apsects of the Tiberian Annals, which elucidate Tacitus' purpose and vision as historical epicist, and which fix the rules by which the whole of the Annals are to be read and understood.

The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.

In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.

Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)

In the Iphigeneia at Aulis role and role inversion are paramount concerns. Indeed it could be contended that in this play we find Euripides' clearest and best defined account of human (and divine) variability. Agamemnon, Menelaos, Achilleus, Iphigeneia, and even, in the final analysis, Artemis, all take positions and attitudes diametrically opposed to those initially adopted. Moreover, the basic thrust behind these movements in position and attitude is the same for each of these characters. All are concerned, in one way or another, with the saving or destruction of Iphigeneia, a situation which most emphatically includes Iphigeneia herself. For on the one hand she wildly supplicates to be saved, while on the other she gladly offers her body to the blade. In addition, Iphigeneia plays a crucial role in greater destructions. If she is destroyed by Agamemnon's and the army's actions, then Greece is destroyed in turn by her (Agamemnon's and the Greeks' final triumph is a ‘Pyrrhic’ victory at best), a situation made all the more ironic by her affected stance of saviour to the fatherland. In Iphigeneia's case, however, the discrepancy between intention and the consequences of action is innocent enough. The play gives no hint that she is at all aware of the irony implicit in her actions. But such lack of awareness is not postulated with regard to Agamemnon, Menelaos and Achilleus. The duplicities and hypocrisies of these three have been the subject of much analysis, and it is at least a critical commonplace to observe that they are characterised in a way more reminiscent of the sour end of everyday life than of the due proprieties associated with heroic, or Homeric, behaviour.

One of Horace's best-known allegations in Epistles 1 is that where in the world you are is neither here nor there, as long as you have peace of mind (animus aequus):

caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
strenua nos exercet inertia; nauibus atque
quadrigis petimus bene uiuere. quod petis, hie est,
est Vlubris, animus si te non deficit aequus.
(Hor. Ep. 1.11.27-30)

This turns out to be one of the book's hugest lies. It makes all the difference how Horace and his correspondents are placed when he is writing to them: Rome is different from backwater Ulubrae, Baiae from Brundisium. In Morals and Villas in Seneca's Letters, John Henderson has attached similar importance to named locations in calibrating metaphorical distance between Seneca and the correspondent of his Epistles, Lucilius. This paper aims to close a gap of two centuries between two of the most disparate figures in Latin literature: the same Seneca, that knotted-up recluse, and another Lucilius, the laughing cavalier satirist. The link: a journey made from Rome to Sicily, or, more precisely, the uses of the road to Sicily in epistolary-philosophical discourse (by way of Horace's Satires and Epistles). Lucilius' Iter Siculum and Seneca's mental journeys to Sicily in the Epistulae Morales are related stages, I will argue, in the philosophical applications of travel writing.

English shame and German scham derive from the Gothic schama, ‘to hide, cover, conceal’. German Hemd (shirt) and English and French chemise are other derivatives. In some languages the word for ‘shame’ and the word for ‘wound’ are the same. A wound exposes and can thereby advertise vulnerabilty and a cause for shame. Hiding or covering may seek to guard against wounding, humiliating exposure.

Shame is self-evidently an important human emotion. Insofar as animals are innocent of shame, experience of it is a mark of humanity. Much human behaviour is influenced by fear of shame and embarrassment. Living in the face and eyes, shame is very close to the experienced self. Self-image and self-esteem are heavily determined by one's susceptibility to shame. Experience of shame is impossible without a sense of individuation, without a sense of discreteness from the world and of being an object in the eyes of another. Study of shame sensitivity therefore offers many clues to an individual's or a culture's behaviour, sense of identity and relationship to the environment.

The Romantics usually placed originality at a high premium, downplaying or disguising wherever possible their debts of theme and form to previous literature. But in other periods the ideal of imitation, of re-creating for the new poet's own generation the essence of a great drama from the past, has been more highly regarded; and where the Greek tragedians are the source on which the more modern playwright draws, the results are always of interest, whether they be a deliberate narrowing from the scope of the original to a precise contemporary purpose such as Anouilh's Antigone, or a complex reshaping like Racine's Phèdre, which places the values of Louis XIV's France in a stimulating dialogue with the tragic vision of the Greeks.

In this essay on the relationship between the Elektra of Richard Strauss and that of Sophokles, the idea of dialogue is central. The relationship of Hofmannsthal's Elektra to Sophokles' has been treated by only a handful of writers; only one of these (Hans-Joachim Newiger) exhibits a knowledge of Greek and a familiarity with the range of twentieth century Sophoklean scholarship; and the relationship with Sophokles discussed in these works is always that of Hofmannsthal's play, never that of Strauss's opera.

The first stasimon of the Antigone is widely and justly acknowledged to be one of the finest of Sophocles' extant lyrical compositions. The praises of the achievements of man are set forth in language whose sheer power of diction and imagery imparts to the ode a tone of sincerity and conviction which is perhaps rivalled only by the praise of Athene in the first stasimon of Oedipus Coloneus. Just as that ode shows that Sophocles felt a real and abiding love for his native city, so too from this ode in Antigone we can see that he was deeply and genuinely impressed with the picture of the cultural progress of man as expounded by Protagoras. The power and the achievements of man made a great impact upon him, which is reflected in this ode. But just as the praise of Athens is not to be regarded in this light alone, as an independent song (for it has an intimate connection with the drama arising from its immediate response to the situation and from its wider implications for the action of the play as a whole), so also here, the praise of man in Antigone must not be treated as independent of the action of the play. For the choral ode stands, in the first place at least, as a response to the situation by a character involved in that situation, and as such it has an important contributory part to play in the total effect of the drama.

There have been few works of literature so widely known, so persistently traduced and so little understood as the Odes of Horace. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries his defamation has been little less than wanton outrage. Landor's sweeping criticisms are well known. But consider also Tyrrell (1895) on Horace's style: ‘The runnel is exquisitely smooth, but its shallow waters flow where they will, from their natural channel, and end in a puddle’; or Pound (1930) on the question of emotional strength: ‘Against the granite acridity of Catullus’ passion, against Ovid's magic and Ovid's sense of mystery, Horace has but the clubman's poise and no stronger emotion than might move one toward a particularly luscious oyster’; or Nisbet (1962) on artifice and artificiality: ‘His [Horace's] high standards of technical perfection brought a loss of spontaneity; only those who write fast can express all the shades and subtleties of thought.’

One of the commonest clichés in the study of ancient and modern democracy is the claim that the former is ‘direct’, the latter ‘representative’. A few scholars have recently explored areas in which the Classical Athenian democracy had representative features, particularly the magistracies. These studies continue, however, to understand ‘political representation’ according to the definition proposed by the political scientist Hanna Pitkin, that is, as ‘acting [on the part of the political representative] in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them’. In this paper I introduce the insights of the recent ‘constructivist turn’ in studies of political representation to the analysis of Athenian politics in the hope of suggesting, in what will necessarily be a brief and incomplete exercise, how productive this exciting new paradigm can be for understanding the dynamics of ancient democracy. I first lay out the basic tenets of constructivist representation, particularly the notion of the ‘representative claim’ as developed by the political theorist Michael Saward, and argue for their suitability for studying ancient Greek history and political thought. Next, I adapt the model of the representative claim to two episodes of Athenian democratic deliberation, showing how it illuminates processes of demotic will- and identity-formation. I conclude by briefly underscoring how approaching Athenian politics in terms of constructivist notions of representation restores an aesthetic dimension to ancient democratic debate, one that allows us to compare more productively the ‘demos’ of symbouleutic oratory with its counterparts in poetry, sculpture, and other media, namely as a represented object fashioned for creative and rhetorical purposes.

With these words Circe prepares Odysseus for his voyage to the land of the dead. Following the enchantress' instructions, he soon completes his mission: Teiresias is duly summoned, provides his information, then — at 11.151 — departs forever. But what of the rest of the book? Circe's words at the close of Book 10 have led us to expect none of the encounters which are described in 11.152-635, yet these occupy the greatest part of Odysseus' time among the shades. Particularly problematic has been the catalogue of women which extends from 225 through 332. Denys Page thought this passage an awkward interpolation, since the women who appear in it ‘have nothing whatever to do with Odysseus; he has nothing to say to them, and they have no motive for reciting to him their pedigrees … the episode is wholly irrelevant to Odysseus and his story; it is loosely attached and carelessly adapted to its surroundings …’ Shortly after Page published his views, however, T. B. L. Webster bluntly denied ‘all Page's strictures on [the passage's] quality’, suggesting that the list was genuine because it contained information which would have been ‘of extreme interest to the Ionian descendants of the Mycenaeans’; and W. B. Stanford restated his belief that the episode was authentic, noting again that it seemed an appropriately clever device by which Odysseus could entertain — and by so doing secure the favor of — Arete, the queen of the Phaeacians.

Pastoral is a contemplative form. Created in the midst of social turmoil and political convulsion, the Eclogues constitute a meditation on the emotional, intellectual and moral dislocation of contemporary man. They investigate not only the brute historical fact of the destructive impact of the politico-military world — the world of the city, of Rome — upon the country, but also the psychological chaos and spiritual impoverishment which Virgil sees as the city's legacy and the corollary of technological growth. And within the context of a world dominated by urban values they scrutinise the question of poetry's function and efficacy. They present, in short, a poetic analysis of postlapsarian man measured against the yardstick of his finest ideals and, concomitant with this, a statement of poetry's impotence.

At F. 6.3-8 Ovid lays claim to the kind of vatic authority (cf. fas mihi praecipue…, ‘I have a special right’, 7) which entitles him to a visitation from Juno (13ff.); but this pose soon turns out to be less stable and assured than he would have us believe at the start of the book (cf. facta canam, ‘I shall sing the truth’, 3). Cautioned by Paris' experience and the dangers implicit in favouring one goddess over others in a competitive iudicium (99f), he proves unable to judge between Juno, Juventas and Concordia as the source of the month's name (97f.). Throughout the Fasti, of course, gods and goddesses are invoked to authenticate the causae which Ovid reports for given festivals or rituals, but at the start of Fasti 6 (as at the start of Fasti 5) he is reduced to aporia through the very mechanism—divine invocation—which is normally the bedrock of his vatic authority. This adjustment in his role as vates, from the authoritative mouthpiece of the gods to the uncertain, judicially impotent arbiter, is but one illustration of a broader phenomenon in the Fasti: far from occupying a position of rigidly inflexible authority as he moves through the calendrical cycle, Ovid's vatic persona proves to be a flexible narratological instrument which compromises his vatic authority at different points within the poem.

Josephus, cultural critic and chronicler of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73/4 CE), is one of the most polemical and compelling writers of the Roman Empire. He writes in Greek, as a Jewish leader of a revolt against Rome, who came over to the Romans. His extraordinary prose combines an extended self-justification, an explanation of Jewish culture to the Romans, through the medium of a culturally privileged Greek, and the riveting story of a failed rebellion against the dominant Empire of the Mediterranean, written now as an awkward insider of the corridors of power, recalling his own opposition to that power. Josephus, that is, writes on and through the boundaries of culture; if all history is written by victors, he writes as a defeated leader now with the triumphant new emperor: he crosses the boundary between victor and victim, insider and outsider. For the scholar interested in post-colonial writing, in cultural identity, in the rhetoric of self-fashioning, Josephus is a remarkable gift. What is more, the history he tells has powerful resonances today in the Middle East: it is he who gives us the authoritative account of Masada, the rocky desert fortress destroyed by the Romans and now a central icon of the state of Israel. The destruction of the Temple is a founding moment in the Jewish imagination, still rehearsed in ritual and political rhetoric. What more could one want from an ancient source? In 2003, Mary Beard invited us to imagine the euphoric reception classicists would give his work were it to be newly discovered today:

According to Proclus, the story of the bowman Philoctetes' return to Troy from his solitude on Lemnos appeared in the Little Iliad. In terms of the overall history of the war, the event occurs relatively late—shortly before the destruction of the city; indeed, according to the oracle of Helenus which inspired the recovery expedition to Lemnos, it seems to have been necessary to the success of the Greek war-effort. In terms of the epic tradition, it can be seen as something of a watershed, standing between a glorious, but unsuccessful, past and a successful, but somewhat ambivalent, future, recorded in the Iliou Persis.

Sophocles' play looks both forward to and back at the war in which it is situated. Neoptolemus and Odysseus, the men chosen to retrieve the great bow of Heracles and its current owner, Philoctetes, anticipate the glory that will belong to the destroyers of Troy. They also together concoct a manipulative account of the recent past—a version clearly at odds with familiar epics. The purpose of this account—narrated by Neoptolemus— appears to have been to win Philoctetes' trust and sympathy, and so to induce him to hand over the bow of his own accord. At first this bow seems to be the primary focus of the conspirators' designs, although eventually it becomes clear that Philoctetes himself also will be needed at Troy. Philoctetes hands Neoptolemus the bow when he falls ill, but shortly afterwards Neoptolemus explains the true reason for his arrival on Lemnos, and later returns the bow to Philoctetes. Neoptolemus' gradually emerging scruples are the obvious cause of this breakdown in the plot. He reclaims the heroic tradition of his father, Achilles, and rejects Odysseus' trickery.

In Euripides' Suppliants as one commentator remarks, ‘the play consists of talk’. Much of the talk is about ideas, which weave a tantalizing and complex intellectual dance through the debates of the central figures. The tone is set by the first debate, between the suppliant Adrastus and the young Theseus. The former makes a plea in terms that he himself seems to characterize as inadequate, while the latter rejects the suppliant with a bravura speech that offers no less than a philosophy of religion, morality and politics. Theseus' ideas are marked by severe internal contradictions, and they are subjected to further contradictions by later statements of Theseus and others. Yet this puzzling philosophy is assigned to a character who seems entirely free from the misjudgments typical of other tragic protagonists. The Euripidean tag that ‘the gods ordain things counter to expectation’ appears not to be true in Theseus' case. Here is a tragic hero who, in a just cause, plans a brief war from which he hopes to return home successful, without major harm to his people and without offense to the gods; and—unlike the protagonists of several Aeschylean plays and Adrastus in this play— the Athenian king succeeds in all his aims. Even when Theseus reverses his initial rejection of Adrastus, he is careful to point out that his initial moral assessment was and is correct (334-36). The reversal itself suggests that, if Theseus has a susceptibility to error, the hamartēma may be located in the fit between logos and ergon, thought and reality, a famous dilemma in the intellectual history of the fifth century.

Apuleius’ On the God of Socrates (De Deo Socratis), a lecture on Platonic demonology and Socrates’ daimonion that dates to the second half of the second century CE, is a critical work in the assessment of Apuleius’ Platonism, but it also should play a larger role in our reconstruction of his public image than it has. This popular philosophical lecture focuses on the same theme as two Greek works from roughly the same time period: Plutarch's dialogue On the Daimonion of Socrates (περὶ τοῦ Σωϰράτους δαιμονίου) and Maximus of Tyre's Orations 8-9 (Διαλέξεις). Discussion of On the God of Socrates has centered on its relationship with these other texts, with the aim of comparing Apuleius’ argument about daimones with Plutarch's and Maximus’. The consensus view is that Plutarch's treatment of demonology has little in common with Apuleius’ (I present further evidence supporting the consensus near the end of this essay). On the other hand, many scholars assert Apuleius’ closest Greek model is Maximus of Tyre, a sophist with a Platonic orientation who wrote forty-one brief lectures on ethics and other philosophical subjects in the second century CE.

At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force in the arrangement of his material creates a portrait that is absolutely not neutral. As David Wardle put it in a 2016 review, ‘Anyone who reads Suetonius without regard to the careful structures within which the biographer places his material can produce almost any picture.’ Yet these ‘careful structures’ are a mystery known only to the initiated. This paper lays out the complex and varied ways in which Suetonius uses structure, specifically the ‘rubric system’ of arranging his material under subheadings and those subheadings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer creates.

For the most part, editors and teachers have conspired to ignore the book gatherings in administering their dosage of Pliny (as of Cicero's, or of Seneca's Letters). But Epistles 3.21 is a striking tailpiece which pricks the reader to reflect back over all the book they have been reading. A resounding sequence of letters through the book has been writing up writers when we reach the finale's valediction to Martial. Each time writer and subject of writing share the trait of being writers, this entices readers to play at joining them, and so entertain the experience of reading through their minds' eyes. Attuned empathy is the challenge, though not necessarily in a spirit of congeniality or collegiality; and the cumulative project is to lever us into sharing and appreciating Pliny's ability to represent the fraternity to others, and thereby to communicate his own self, as writer and subject of writing. No half measures: letters mediate, immediate.

For the Bacchae Lévi-Strauss' view of myth as concerned with the mediation of fundamental polarities is both fruitful and fruitfully inadequate. The conflicts between Pentheus and Dionysus clearly involve an opposition of city and wild, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, male and female. Further in the background stands another series of antitheses: mortal and immortal, man and beast, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth, fire and water. Like much of Greek literature, the Bacchae is founded on the proportion, mortal: immortal :: beast : man. That proportion, in turn, is part of an encompassing cosmic order which distinguishes the three basic categories of animate beings: god, man, and beast. What is unique and disturbing about this play is the thoroughness and violence of the reversals which take place in a situation in which god fuses with beast and beast with man.

In just over a decade, interest in Xenophon's Symposium has risen dramatically. No longer the poor relation to its author's more popular Socratic works or to Plato's dialogue of the same name, it now merits scholarly attention on a regular basis. However, despite an increased sensitivity to the author's literary and philosophical strategies, modern readings of the text are informed above all by the presence of Socrates. Because the philosopher is assumed to be Xenophon's primary interest, the Symposium is viewed as an apology for the radical philosopher or a promotion of his ideas and methods. This perception derives in part from an old-fashioned dismissal of Xenophon as a poor man's Plato, intellectually incapable of anything more than biography. But it also relates to the work's longstanding association with Xenophon's other Socratic works, namely the Apology, Memorabilia, and Oeconomicus. Since scholarship on Xenophon began, the four texts have been treated as a unit, bound in purpose by their depiction of Socrates. However, although the philosopher certainly features prominently in these four texts, each work is structurally distinct. In the Apology, the narrator invites Hermogenes to replay his final conversation with Socrates and to describe the philosopher's performance in court, in order to correct inadequate understandings of Socrates' choice of death over life. By contrast, the Memorabilia depicts Socrates in extended disputation with many interlocutors on a wide variety of subjects as he seeks to lead them towards virtue and, in the narrator's opinion, demonstrates himself to be kalos kagathos (literally ‘beautiful and good’). Then again, the Oeconomicus records two exchanges, one between Socrates and Critoboulus and another between Socrates and Ischomachus, and juxtaposes their arguments one against the other. And finally, the Symposium locates Socrates within a lively symposion (drinking party) at the house of Callias, son of Hipponicus, in Athens during 422 BCE. Here, the philosopher often directs the conversation. However, his drinking companions also participate freely in the performances and conversations that take place. In short, Xenophon's four Socratic texts all have their own dramatic contexts and conceits, with different structures and ambitions, and different roles for Socrates. Yet even amongst them, the Symposium's dramatic staging of a vibrant and varied symposion particularly stands out.