It is a commonly held view that the basic issue in the Ithakan sequences of the Odysseyis the succession to Odysseus’ position as king. Thus J. V. Luce, for example, sees ‘the outline of a power struggle with kingship as the prize for the most powerful noble’. And M. I. Finley declares: ‘“The king is dead! The struggle for the throne is open!” That is how the entire Ithacan theme of the Odyssey can be summed up’. I should like to argue that this highly political perspective is unwarranted, that in fact there is no throne, no office of king, indeed no real Ithakan state, and therefore no succession struggle.

What is truth and what are lies in the Odyssey? Odysseus in his lying story to Eumaios (14.192ff.), just as the sea-nymph Eidothea in her true advice to the weather-bound Menelaos (4.383ff.), claims to be speaking μαλ' ἀτρɛκέως, ‘quite precisely’. As all politicians are aware, if you wish to stand a chance of being believed it helps to emphasize the accuracy of what you are saying; this introductory line was as much a formula for Homer as it is today.

Along with the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia is perhaps the most discussed literary work of classical Greece. In recent years a substantial part of this interpretative effort has been devoted to various ongoing controversies, such as Agamemnon's guilt, or more generally, the interplay of necessity and freedom in the trilogy, but despite these numerous Streitfragen what is particularly striking about the criticism of the Oresteia is its relative unanimity on certain fundamental questions. This will no doubt sound strange to the classical scholar, all too finely attuned to the various important particulars over which he and his colleagues differ in their reading of the plays, but it none the less seems to me to be undeniable that in their assessment of the general movement of the trilogy, most interpretations are, with some variation and shading, cut from the same cloth. By this I mean that in regard to the fundamental questions of the justice of Zeus, and the resolution of the conflicts developed in the first two plays by means of the famous trial which concludes the trilogy, most critics agree as to Aeschylus’ dramatic intention. In what follows, I will argue that this unanimity arises out of certain shared preconceptions concerning Aeschylus which, in my view, are not supported by the text. I will first discuss the main traditional views concerning Aeschylus’ presentation of what is commonly called the Justice of Zeus, and then try to demonstrate that, in reality, Aeschylus portrays a cosmic and political order which is neither moral nor just, but rather tyrannical, in the sense that its ultimate foundations are force and fear.

Priam has arrived at Achilles' hut. He has taken Achilles unawares. He has clasped his knees, he has kissed his hands. He has made his twofold plea: he has appealed for compassion in Peleus' name and, taking his cue from Achilles' sympathetic response, he has requested the ransom of Hector. It is the climax of the Iliad. We await Achilles' words, we await the response which has been the focus of the enormous expansion and elaboration of Book 24: the preparation for the journey, the journey, the meeting with Hermes, Priam's remarkable arrival at Achilles' hut, his painfully slow but deliberate approach to the single reason for his mission, to his request for the return of Hector's corpse. It has been the point to which the course of the Iliad has been implicitly directed since Achilles first learned of the death of Patroclus: his bitterness and his continuing obsession with Patroclus have found expression in the harsh negatives of his response first to Lycaon, then to Hector. That harshness has been translated into action, too: into the cruel rhythm of Achilles' ἀριστεία and his repeated mutilation of Hector's corpse.

This paper began as a lecture to an extramural weekend course on the Greek Dark Age, organized in Oxford by the Department of External Studies in December 1983. It was intended to suggest that the world of the Homeric poems, insofar as it had any relationship with reality, was more likely to reflect the conditions of the Dark Age than those of Mycenaean Greece, and it was born of increasing frustration at the dominance of what I will call the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation of Homer, particularly at the popular level. The recent BBC series In Search of the Trojan War has done nothing to lessen this dominance – indeed, it barely suggested that such an interpretation had been seriously challenged – and the theme of the lecture has therefore lost none of its relevance. In presenting a considerably revised version here, I have not attempted to offer an exhaustively argued and documented discussion, which would require a book, and must refer the reader to more extensive treatments of the topic for fuller details. Rather, I have decided to leave it as a rather provocative exposition of a case which deserves to be made. I have made some attempt to step outside the framework in which the discussion has often been conducted, which to my mind unduly favours the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation, but readily acknowledge that many of my arguments have been presented in similar form by others, and that some have been admitted to have force by those who in general support the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation. Given the quantity of writing on the topic, it is only too likely that I have neglected some discussions, and I have given references mainly to Homeric sources and to recent archaeological finds of relevance. Finally, I should make it clear that it is not my primary purpose to discuss the historicity of the Trojan War or of the Greek heroic legends generally, though this has often been made to depend on the supposedly Mycenaean content of the Homeric poems, at least in part.

The story of the Greek settlements in Sicily and southern Italy is not commonly regarded as one of the 'central themes' of Greek history. For long periods, the paucity of documentary evidence means that there is little story to tell anyway, and when a history of events is possible, it is often because those events are closely linked with the more fully documented history of Greece itself. Such an occasion occurred in 415, when the Athenians decided to send a fleet to western waters, and subsequently to undertake the siege of Syracuse. These events, so vividly narrated by Thucydides in the polished narrative of Books 6 and 7, are often studied today, but many modern readers start with a disadvantage shared, as Thucydides would have us believe, with the majority of Athenians of his own day - ignorance of Sicily and its inhabitants. Thucydides responded by giving his readers an account of the various peoples who inhabited Sicily, to impress upon them the number and power of the cities and settlements on the island (6.2-6). This article offers a short introduction to the political situation the Athenians encountered in South Italy and Sicily. It is written with a minimum of documentation, apart from references to the text of Thucydides. (The spelling of proper names follows that used in the Penguin translation, from which quotations are also taken; some suggestions for further reading are given at the end.)

It is a well-known and often lamented fact that we know very little about the actual staging of plays in the theatre of Dionysus in the Fifth Century b.c. What snippets of information we do have date from later centuries and may reflect contemporary conditions of performance, or may be mere inference based on fifth-century texts. Even though we can derive considerable comfort from Oliver Taplin's dictum that ‘the Greek tragedians signalled all their significant stage directions in the words’, 2 much that would enhance our knowledge of a fifth-century production remains a mystery.

Pirates were frequently employed by the Diadochoi and the Epigonoi of Alexander as an auxiliary military or naval force, and some examples are given below. Unfortunately, the surviving evidence does not allow us to do more than make the general statement. The evidence for piratical activity is largely in the form of personal anecdotes, and the evidence for the nature of Hellenistic military and naval establishments is nothing more than a record of a few persons and/or positions. The authors of our scant literary sources, especially those who wrote many generations after the events which they describe, were not attempting to analyse the role of pirates for posterity, thus they often use the word ‘pirate’ with a notable lack of precision, if they use it at all. Nevertheless, a review of the existing evidence suggests a rather remarkable degree of social and occupational mobility in the third century B.C.

The varied erudition of Catullus and of later Roman poets is wellknown. Among themselves doctus became a term of praise. So the modern reader has to spend some time acquiring the knack of appreciating this showy learning, and a student consults commentaries for instruction in myth and metre, star-lore, and place-names. My concern is with place-names, because they are not, speaking generally, given adequate treatment in the commentaries on Catullus, the Eclogues, or the Odes, which are designed for sixth-form and undergraduate use. An aspect of the learning of the poets goes largely unremarked, or if noticed, too often receives inadequate comment. The main purpose of this article is to restore to proper prominence the innovations made in the use of local names and adjectives by the Latin poets. Complete originality is not claimed; much of this knowledge, it will become clear, is to be found in the professional commentaries, for example, Pfeiffer on Callimachus, Nisbet-Hubbard on Horace, Gow-Page on the epigrammatists, Kroll on Catullus. But the information is scattered or patchy and needs to be brought together and fleshed out so that it impresses by its concentration. Only then will serious attention be paid to the poets' practice.

Callimachus' sixth hymn to Demeter is of considerable importance to the student of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The reason is that it provides us with one of the very few opportunities to put an episode in the Metamorphoses alongside what was apparently its chief source. I say its chief source because Ovid's description of how Demeter punishes Erysichthon for violating her sacred grove by inflicting on him an insatiable hunger is very close to Callimachus' outline of the same story and includes a number of undoubted verbal echoes of the Greek poet. Ovid certainly knew Callimachus sixth hymn well. But, of course, there may have been other treatments of the Erysichthon legend, now lost, which Ovid also drew on to a greater or lesser extent. There is a further point to bear in mind. We seem to be dealing in Ovid with two stories, not with a single legend. The first is the story of Erysichthon's sacrilege and punishment, the second is the story of a girl with powers of selftransformation. These two stories may originally have been quite independent of each other, but we find them linked as early as the pseudo-Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Callimachus does not use the second story about the transformations of Erysichthon's daughter.

‘As writes our Virgil, concerned more with what made the best poetry than with complete accuracy, since his object was to delight his readers rather than to instruct farmers.’

Seneca passed this judgement on the Georgics after witnessing certain agricultural practices where he was staying (at Liternum on the north-west coast of Campania), which appeared to disagree with a statement of Virgil's (G. 2.58). He then proceeded to mention another Virgilian agricultural error (G. 1.215–16), selected from ‘all the others’ (alia omnia) that he says he could have discussed, in order to drive his point home.

When we imagine the world of the Julio-Claudian Emperors and their Flavian and Antonine successors, it is difficult to avoid thinking of suicide as the characteristic Roman way of death. That is because of the numerous acts of suicide which are celebrated by the greatest writers of the period, Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, and Pliny, and which even invade the pages of a minor author such as Martial. There is no reason to think in terms of an epidemic, as Y. Grisé justly remarks in her recent book on Roman suicide. But we do seem to be dealing with a fashion, one curious enough to merit investigation.

The Aeneid, like the Iliad, opens with a seven-line paragraph. The question arises: is this paragraph also a single sentence, consisting of the first three words arma uirumlque cano as main sentence, with all the rest forming one long relative clause of six and a half lines, introduced by qui in line 1, and organized round the one indicative verb apart from cano, namely, uenit in line 2? A glance at the editions confirms that we have a problem here. Everyone agrees on commas after cano, superum, iram, passus and of course on a full stop after Romae. The uncertainties arise after litora and after Latio. Whereas Sidgwick (1890) and Page (1894) put commas at both these points, Mynors (1969), followed both by Austin (1971) and R. D. Williams (1972) puts a comma after litora, but a semicolon after Latio, while Hirtzel (1900) puts a dash at both points. What difference does it make?

Oliver Goldsmith once wrote that the cultural history of a civilization can be divided into three periods: ‘its commencement, or the age of poets; its maturity, or the age of philosophers; and its decline, or the age of critics.’ Goldsmith went on to argue that the increase of critics is a natural result of the spread of learning, but, at the same time, invariably contributes to its decline. This is because critics represent a lower common denominator in literary taste than the poet or the philosopher, and because they approach culture in a more mechanical or hidebound manner. Goldsmith defines critics as ‘all such as judge by rule, and not by feelings’. He looks back to the days of King William and Queen Anne, and suggests that the decline in letters evident in his own day is partly attributable to the prevalence of criticism:

II. Just as suicide has been, and is, practised in all sorts of societies, from the most primitive to the most civilized, so there has probably never been a social code that sanctioned it absolutely without conditions. In primitive societies there are often deep-seated superstitions about βιαοɡάνατοι, victims of violent or untimely death. It is a fear of the ghost, which it is thought will be vengeful or troubled and not rest in peace. Special modes of burial with denial of ordinary burial rites, originally an expression of this fear, are attested for Greece and possibly for early Rome. But whatever regulations of a religious kind once obtained in Rome, they seem to have lapsed by the historical period. It has, however, been suggested that the persistence of such feelings may partly explain the fairly frequent cases of mutual killing recorded right into the Empire. The Emperor Claudius, celebrated as an antiquarian, proposed to remove from the senate rolls a man who was said to have stabbed himself (Suet. Cl.16).