Medea has dwarfed her ‘human fly’ of a husband. She plans poisoned gifts of Colchian gold for Jason's bride, inaugurates murderous rites (568-78). Despair and alarm for Jason's safety stir in the men of Corinth at the spectre: ‘Ode 3 is at the bridge between Medea the wife of Jason, Medea the human being, and Medea the manifestation of Hecate’, Bishop observes. The moment at the close of Medea's exchange with Jason is clearly critical, as she sees in a flash of certainty her route to revenge: sic natos amat? / bene est, tenetur, uulneri patuit locus (‘Does he love his sons so? / Splendid, he's mine, his weak spot exposed for my strike!’, 549f.). And we are caught still in the dramatic suspense demonstrated by Pratt which keeps spoken certainty of revenge specifically through infanticide back within the text until 924f., liberi quondam mei, / uos pro paternis sceleribus poenas date (“Children, once my children, / you pay the price of your father's wickednesses!). But already we must hesitate: did Seneca's Medea really start out in the play as a ‘human being’? Herington's phrase ‘Cloud of Evil’ is surely nearer the mark: ‘the raging sorceress Medea will shake the light from heaven as easily as she will shake the marriage torches from the hands of her enemies’ — and this is to translate lines 27f. from the play's prologue, manibus excutiam faces / caeloque lucem …

‘sophos’ uniuersi clamamus et sublatis manibus ad cameram iuramus Hipparchum Aratumque comparandos illi homines non fuisse…
(‘Fantastic!’ we all cry, and raising our hands to the ceiling we swear that not even Hipparchus and Aratus could have been put on a par with him.)
Petronius Satyricon
This then is the visible work of Menard, in chronological order….I turn now to his other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’

The Flavians needed a poet. When Octavian established the Julio-Claudian dynasty he had in his hands a usefully exploitable victory over the forces of chaos and oriental despotism, a spin on Actium and its aftermath that was given full epic representation in the Aeneid's description of Aeneas' shield (Aen. 8.671-713); Antony was compromised by Cleopatra and years of propaganda, and it all took place far enough away for the final act in what everyone knew was a civil war to be portrayed as defeat of a foreign power and celebrated as such in the traditional manner (Caesar triplici inuectus Rotnana triumpholmoenia…, ‘Caesar, borne within the walls of Rome in triple triumph’, Aen. 8.714f.). By contrast the Flavian ascendancy was achieved through assault on these selfsame walls, and involved the desecration and burning of the Capitol (Tac. Hist. 3.69-74, who remarks id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, ‘this was the most deplorable and outrageous crime to befall the republic of the Roman people since the foundation of the city’).

Simonides once called painting silent poetry and poetry articulate painting. Comparing the two ‘sister arts’ in the sixth or fifth century BCE, he wrote the first chapter of a story which, even if one thinks only of antiquity, is a rather long one, and in which many of the issues raised seem tremendously complex. In addition, many ancient authors wanted to add their own passages to this story, and quite naturally different writers arrived at very different conclusions about the two arts' respective relationships. Yet however different these conclusions were, no writer, as a writer, could avoid agreeing with Simonides on a basic thing: any statement about the visual arts is inevitably a hermeneutical effort to make the visual speak, and in doing so it equally inevitably implies a deficit of the visual arts: namely, that art cannot speak and needs some form of ‘translation’ to be communicated. Discussing art in written texts, then, cannot but entail implicitly a statement about writing's hermeneutical superiority; this is the case even if the statement may explicitly deny any such superiority. It has been argued that this deficit in art is real and that there does exist a ‘Hermeneutic Gap’ in painting; whereas verbal discourse, so the argument goes, operates with a ‘hermeneutic of understanding’, painting, by contrast, is bound to a ‘hermeneutic of calculated misunderstanding’. Certainly there are paintings for which such a statement is correct—but there may be as many cases in which a text only construes such a gap and uses it as a good opportunity to establish its own hermeneutic superiority by contrasting itself with an image which is supposedly less precise in communicating meaning.

For some years past there has been a welcome change of emphasis towards the consideration of staging in books published on Greek tragedy; and yet with that change also a curious failure to be explicit about the central problem connected with all stagecraft, namely that of the acting-area. In this study two scholars with considerable experience of teaching classical drama in performance consider this problem of the acting-area in close relation to major scenes from two Greek tragedies, and suggest some general conclusions. The article must stand to some extent as a critique of the succession of books that has followed the apparently pioneering study of Oliver Taplin, none of which has made any substantial or sustained attempt to indicate where actors might have acted in the performance of Greek tragedy, though most, if not all, have been prepared to discard the concept of a raised ‘stage’ behind the orchestra.

Hippolytus (428 BC) is the earliest of the surviving plays of Euripides to involve three speaking actors in one scene. Both Alcestis (438 BC and Medea (431 BC almost certainly require three actors to be performed with any fluency, but surprisingly present their action largely through dialogue and confrontation — surprisingly, perhaps, because at least since 458 BC and the performance of the Oresteia it is clear that three actors were available to any playwright.

As examples of the Roman poetry book composed of ten poems, Vergil's Eclogues, Horace's Sermones 1 and Tibullus' first book of Elegies are conspicuous for their similarity of form, all three containing poems of uniform metre and comparable length. Although we cannot be certain that these were the first or only ten poem books in the history of Latin poetry, we cannot help but notice the circumstances that draw them together: their close succession within the space of a decade, their identical positions as the first major publication of each author's career and the well-documented personal association between Horace as central figure of the succession and his two fellow poets, especially his close friendship with Vergil at the time he was composing the Satire Book. While inconclusive in themselves, these circumstances are an inducement to look closely at such similarities of compositional design as the books themselves may show.

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.

Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text is cui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is?

It is a well known fact and problem for students of Plautus and Terence that the lack of corresponding Menandrian originals for the comedies known to have been adapted into Latin has forced us to operate with various conjectural theories about the amount and method of change introduced in their adapted plots by the Roman playwrights. We might have expected Donatus to have provided some help here, since he frequently cites the Greek lines that Terence altered in his own way, but Donatus proves remarkably disappointing when it comes to details of plot. There is, however, one passage in Menander's great admirer, Plutarch, which I suggest might be pressed somewhat into service, though cautiously, and it is my purpose here to discuss this passage and its potential utility.

Among the questions debated at banquets, Plutarch introduces one which, reviewing what drama and poetry best suit a dinner party, singles out Menander for special praise. His speaker, Diogenianus by name, expresses total admiration for Menander's style, for his excellent mixture of playful and serious, and his appropriate handling of the erotic material of his comedies. I am interested in the last point and the way Diogenianus elaborates upon it. For him, the important point is that, after a reading of Menander at a symposium, male banqueters are put in the right mood to go home to their own wives. I do not wish to pursue that chauvinistic topic, but rather to examine the scheme of Menandrian love plots which Diogenianus develops by way of explaining his thesis that Greek New Comedy possesses a special propriety for the average male banqueter.

A recent English-language textbook on Greek and Roman historical epic begins its account of Silius Italicus by describing the author of the Punica as ‘not a literary person. Most of his long life was spent in the Roman civil service’. Then, after suggesting that the poet was seeking to make up for earlier missed opportunities by writing what is the longest surviving Latin epic, the potted biography concludes by declaring that his actual demise was in line with Stoic theory: ‘Silius met a bookish end…he starved himself to death.’

While these remarks will not be left unchallenged, the very venom of the reaction to them is instructive. Scandalised, a reader of an earlier version of this paper thought that they should never be mentioned or at best buried in a footnote. After all, Wallace Stevens worked for a living too. No, show us that Silius is a good poet.

The first lines of Vergil's Georgics make clear the literary debt:

Vos, o clarissima mundi
lumina, labentem caelo quae ducitis annum;
Liber et alma Ceres … (G.1.5-7)

The reader recalls immediately Lucretius' invocation to Venus:

Parallels of subject are obvious. Lucretius' famous pessimism about the earth's ability to renew herself, at the conclusion of his second book, is behind Vergil's insistence, in Georgics I, that the farmer prepare all his resources to bolster a faltering soil; the famous picture of rustic celebration and the pleasures of soft grass and jovial interchange with which Georgics II ends is an elaboration of Lucretius' spring-time, when men stretch at leisure on greening grass inter se prostrati (‘relaxing with each other’); the hideous account of Athens' plague in Lucretius, Book VI, is matched by Vergil's description of Noricum at the end of his third book.

Aischylos wrote Agamemnon for exhibition in a theatre. A theatre whose conditions of production almost defy our imagining — how, in particular, were the chorus able to convey the verbal richness and complexity of their lyrics, while at the same time singing and dancing? To a music and choreography of which we know little and nothing respectively, but which yet, however stylized, however unobtrusive, added something to the complexity of the drama. We are left with a mere script. But a stage script, designed to be heard, performed with the phrases emerging in a prescribed order. The audience cannot refer back or leaf forward as in a book. They are — as the parodos is performed — witnesses of a lyric narrative. At any one point, they can only know what they remember of what has been heard already. About what is going to happen, immediately or later, they have only conjecture. We presume the majority to have been acquainted with some or many versions of the history of the house of Atreus; they are, then, aware of a range of possibilities. Aischylos can use any or none of the traditional versions, move from one aspect of the story as he imagines it to another as his purpose demands. And so, as the drama unfolds, the audience's range of expectations can be narrowed, or widened, at will by the emphases given to what they are hearing, the ways in which it adds to what they have heard already.

Enkarterēsō bioton (‘I shall endure life’). So speaks Euripides' Heracles in a moment of crucial decision when he rejects the idea of suicide in spite of the horror he has been through and the subsequent shame he must live with. This moment expresses more than patient resignation; it is a calculated and positive decision to live on, a hard-made decision and perhaps a surprising one. Was Euripides here thinking of that other great hero depicted by Sophocles, Ajax, who had been through a similar experience of madness and had chosen the opposite course in consequence of it, namely to take his own life? Sophocles' Ajax was probably produced in the 440's, Euripides' Heracles about 418. It is scarcely credible that Euripides was not familiar with this great work of Sophocles. There were doubtless other plays on the theme of madness in between but Ajax would surely be particularly memorable as a well-known cult figure in Athens and elsewhere.

The similarities between the two tragedies are considerable. I want first to explore them, then show how the difference in treatment of similar themes, particularly those of aretē, madness and tukhē, make up the unique character of each play. Such a comparison starting from common focal points should serve to set in relief the distinguishing characteristics of each author's treatment.

The apparent geographical inaccuracies in Sallust's account of the war with Jugurtha have attracted the attention of many scholars. Several years ago Etienne Tiffou devoted a study to the fact that Sallust's three historical works show a progressively greater interest in geography, but many topographical difficulties in The War with Jugurtha remain unexplained. Others see the geographical excursuses in The War with Jugurtha as simply traditional devices or perhaps structural fillers whose content is purely derivative and whose contribution to the themes of the work is minimal or nil: Sallust does not contribute much more than ‘Greek erudition and fancies’. Yet many of the supposed inaccuracies and thematically empty excursuses can be better understood and appreciated as part of a consistent Sallustian technique of internal allusion. A careful reading of Sallust's references to places in The War with Jugurtha reveals the author's sophisticated use of a ‘textual geography’, i.e. the deliberate selection and arrangement of places in the text to allude to and support his central ideas. Most significantly he compares Rome to Carthage in their origins, growth and decline, he describes the reactions of the Roman people to the course of the war, and he characterizes Roman leaders in their conduct of the war against Jugurtha by using this device.

The opening lines of the Eclogues are justly famous:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena.
(E. 1.1-2)

Tityrus, you lie beneath spread of sheltering beech
Studying the woodland Muse on a thin oat-straw.

Their rich, inviting allusiveness is well known. The sonal echo of Theocritus Idylls 1.1, the Callimachean canon (tenui, ‘thin’; cf. tēn Mousan leptaleēn, ‘the thin Muse’, Aetia fr.1.24 Pf.), the Lucretian siluestrem Musam (‘woodland Muse’) provoke the imagination, goad the intellect. Virgil's reference to his Roman predecessor especially intrigues. The context alluded to — Lucretius' ascription (DRN 4.577-89) of the fiction of satyrs, nymphs and the siluestris Musa of Pan to the echo-producing properties of rocky, solitary places — contains embryonically a theory of poetics, an evaluation of pastoral song, which, quickened into life in the Eclogues' initial statement, appears to be of programmatic significance. The theory — the viewing of pastoral poetry as essentially (to use Marie Desport's compelling phrase) ‘une poésie à écho’ — may be termed the echoic theory of pastoral song. Its main import is — as I take it — reductive: pastoral song is to be construed as the internal resonance of the singer's fictive world, condemned to triviality by its inability to reach beyond the boundaries of private experience or private vision so as to affect the world of action, events, history.

Nowadays, scholars usually speak of a ‘renaissance’ of poetry in the Greek literature of late antiquity, underlining at the same time the new relevance of poetic communication in late antique society and the renewal of our interest in this not so well-known production of late Greek literature. Renaissance and related terms are, of course, effective ways to describe the flowering of Greek poetry from the fourth to sixth centuries CE, so long as this does not undervalue the importance of continuity (which is not the same as tradition). Even the most significant innovation in late antique Greek poetry, namely the so-called ‘Nonnian manner’ or ‘modern style’, stems from a longtime sedimentation and perfectioning of linguistic and stylistic features which can be traced back to the Hellenistic age. Albert Wifstrand, in his seminal book of 1933, already pointed to this major fact, which Mary Whitby has systematically dealt with in an important article of 1994. Moreover, recent studies demonstrate that for a proper understanding of late antique poetry one must take into account Christian poetic production as well, which stands four-square within the traditions of Greek literature (in spite of the fact that classical = pagan is an equation which dies hard for some classicists). In the present paper both pagan and Christian epigrams will be considered to equally represent the aesthetics of late antiquity (or estetica antico-bizantina, to use Averincev's terminology).

‘Noble’: the invariable response of readers and critics of the Captiui. Read almost any modern work on this play and you will not have to wait long for that word. Up it pops, reflexively. The slave Tyndarus' readiness to stay in captivity, risking and in the event undergoing a gruesome punishment to free his master Philocrates, the master keeping his side of the bargain and returning to Aetolia to redeem Tyndarus in exchange for Hegio's son Philopolemus when he could as easily have stayed home (why should he care about a slave?)—surely actions that reflect refinements of character and feeling so unlike the routine skulduggery of New Comedy. We all know Lessing's famous eulogy on this play. That was determined by his own personal and cultural situation. But most critics in this century, to judge from the regularity with which they cite the Epilogue, agree with Lessing that this is a play in which ‘the good become better’ (ubi boni meliores fiant, 1034).

The Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478-608) can easily be qualified as ‘the mother’ of all ekphraseis, and scholarly interest in this passage has been massive. Scholars have mainly discussed three issues: the relation between the Shield and real shields; the relation between the scenes on the Shield and the Iliad; and the method of description.

In this article I will focus on the third point. As noted famously by Lessing, the description of the Shield is dynamic, both in the sense that we see Hephaestus making the shield and that the scenes depicted become stories, with characters speaking and thinking and events following one after the other. My central question is: who is responsible for these narrativised scenes, Hephaestus or the Homeric narrator? Or to put it more poignantly: who creates the scenes on the Shield? I note the following positions. It is the divine artist Hephaestus who either creates figures which (1a) can really move, like his tripods and handmaids: 18.376f., 418-20 (‘the figures are not merely lifelike, they really live!’), or (1b) at least suggest movement, a suggestion to be decoded by the narrator (‘the consistent transformations of gold into natural image, of image into action, give us to understand that the qualities of sound and movement and emotion come into being through the responsive participation of the spectator in the work’). Or, it is the Homeric narrator who either (2a) cannot suppress a ‘youthful pleasure in animated narration’ and himself narrates stories instead of describing the figures which Hephaestus makes, or (2b) subtly blends description and narration (‘a cycle of scenes wrought in metal—or in words? This description of the shield actually is a poem’).

The first thing that the student of Vergilian pastoral may notice in turning to the pastoral Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus is the obvious symmetrical arrangement of the poems in the later book. While the multitudinous inter-lacings of theme and subject in Vergil's ten poems continue to tease and baffle investigations of the larger organizational pattern, the principles of Calpurnius' design are simple and clear. Instead of ten poems, an even number that causes Vergil's centrally oriented balancing of similar pieces to remain ambiguously off-centre, Calpurnius has seven, clearly divided by subject into two kinds: four rustic poems and three that critics have called court poems, allegorical poems, or, more rightly, political poems whose chief topic is the benefits of the Neronian golden age. The uneven number allows for a precise balancing of similar poems in the two halves of the book. A political poem, a contest poem and a rustic dialogue in the first half have their counterparts in a rustic monologue, a contest poem and a political poem in the latter half. The central poem is political. In devising this order, Calpurnius may well have aimed to remedy what to him seemed defective in Vergil's uncertain symmetry, but the pattern is also well adapted to his own themes.

The Vita Terenti, Suetonius' biography, presents Terence as the classic Republican self-made man. Born in Carthage on the margins of the empire, he is said to have been brought to Italy as part of the spoils of conquest (the very word for ‘spoils’, praeda, is used to describe him in the epigram or epitaph devoted to his memory in the Latin Anthology). Here is a rags to riches to rags again story: the Cinderella figure reading out his first play on a humble bench, then invited to join Caecilius, the comic toast of the town, at his high table; the pretty boy-slave who mingled suspiciously closely with Scipio and Laelius. Six perfect plays later, and varying degrees of success, at the age of twenty-five Terence was pitched into decline: he withdrew, he retired, he went into voluntary exile to Asia or to darkest Greece, he drowned at sea, in the middle of a valiant last attempt to bring a suitcase of Menander's plays to Italy, or else he died of grief at the loss of his baggage. The details vary, but the stories always return him to the margins he emerged from, leaving behind his exemplary dramatic products and his solid influence on the school curriculum for centuries to come. Of course this narrative has its improbable side (Suetonius himself is sceptical about the various reports): the name Afer does not necessarily mean that Terence was African; Caecilius had died two years before Terence's first play was performed; the rumours about men in high places ghost-writing for him have been lifted straight from one of the prologues. But take it on its own terms and it is a tale based on the fluid opportunities of the expanding Roman world, a tale of suspicion, integration and then rejection. Terence begins and ends as part of the flotsam of empire.

It has become a commonplace of Statian criticism that, if Thebaid invokes Virgil as model, then Achilleid sees Statius using Ovid. Important work has been done in this field, most notably by Rosati and Hinds: Rosati has explored the relationships between Achilleid and several Ovidian texts, while Hinds has insisted on the centrality of Metamorphoses to understanding Achilleid: ‘it is an epic: a markedly Ovidian, markedly metamorphic epic’. This essay aims to extend that discussion through consideration of the differences between Statius and his Ovidian models in his handling of a number of key episodes.

The most obvious connection between Ovid's works and Statius' Achilleid is the story of Achilles' rape of Deidamia, for these are the only extant classical poets to narrate the story at any length. That Statius' account actually alludes to Ovid's account in Art of Love is clear. For example, both poets use marked alliteration when describing Achilles' violence:

(Ars 1.699f.)