Mr Vice-Chancellor,

May I thank you for coming to preside at this occasion, and thank everyone else for coming to be presided over – most especially my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics. You were not all here when I joined the Faculty eighteen years ago, but you have all helped to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation, good will, and intellectual adventure, which has made this Faculty such a wonderful place to work and teach in. There is much that I shall miss when I go. But that is not what I want to talk about now. To borrow the words of our Chairman, Ian DuQuesnay, I should like this occasion to be a party rather than a wake.

What I want to say is this. It is too late now – twelve years too late – to apologize for not having given an Inaugural Lecture. There was no particular moment when I decided not to, just many many moments when other work seemed both more urgent and, to be honest, more interesting. The trouble with Inaugural Lectures is that you are expected to define your subject and say how it ought to be done. You begin by paying respectful tribute to your predecessor – in my case G. E. L. Owen, so the tribute would have been sincere and a pleasure to compose. But then comes the hard part, in which you set out ‘the aims and objectives’ (as the managerial language of our present rulers would have us call them) of your discipline. In other words, I would have had to tell myself and my colleagues where ancient philosophy in Cambridge ought to go and how it ought to get there.

arte Syracosia suspensus in aere clauso
stat globus, immensi parua figura poli (Ovid, Fasti 6.277–8)

‘The astronomy in the Fasti is indebted to Aratus, as was presumably Ovid's own Phaenomena’. The relationship between the astronomical material in Ovid's Fasti and the astronomical poem by Aratus of Soli, composed under the auspices of Antigonus Gonatas in about 278 B.C., is indisputable; but the nature of this relationship has not been explored. Such an exploration may add a new layer of meaning to Ovid's poem, as an entity which responds not only to aetiological models but also to ‘scientific’ didactic models.

A concern with the methods and style of praise and blame recurs, unsurprisingly, throughout Callimachus' Iambi. The iambos is the aggressive mode par excellence, and Callimachus is the most generically-conscious of poets; whether he is writing hymns, aetiological elegy or funerary epigram he is always overtly engaged with the history and development of the literary form in which he operates. The nature of iambic poetry is, however, the explicit subject of two poems in particular, Iambus 1 and Iambus 13, which thus have a special claim to be considered ‘programmatic’. The thirteenth Iambus returns to the choliambic metre of the first four poems, the metre most associated with Hipponax, who appears himself in the first Iambus as the authorising ‘voice’ for these poems, and is apparently spoken in the voice of the poet who to some extent takes up again the themes of Iambus 1 (and indeed of Aitia fr.1); thus the temptation to see a ‘closed’ poetry book, framed by these two poems, is very strong.

Nearly thirty years ago, John Crook's well-known book Law and life of Rome provided what remains the most sustained and wide-ranging survey of the place of Roman law in Roman society. Chapter 7, ‘Commerce’, begins with the observation that in Roman times trade and business were relatively insignificant compared with land. No doubt few would disagree. But in recent years historians have done much to illuminate such questions of economic history as patterns of trade and consumption. Certain other matters, however, remain comparatively obscure. The non-legal sources are sufficiently unhelpful that it becomes important to have regard to the messages contained in the legal sources; and in them there is sufficient material to allow us to consider how the law shaped or was shaped by commercial life. The particular questions on which this paper touches are the type of labour – free or slave, dependent or independent – which was employed in commerce; and the manner in which commercial businesses were organized during the principate.

This paper is specifically concerned with the classical Latin panegyric, thus excluding both panegyrics from late antiquity, where the religious context is substantially different, and (at least in the first instance) panegyrical literature in Greek, with its distinctive linguistic and hence ideological background. I am, moreover, defining ‘panegyric’ to comprise only speeches in praise of a living person or persons: the religious status of living people, and the language applied to them, manifestly raise particular problems not present with other objects of praise.

But there are on the face of things difficulties with this definition. There is an obvious overlap between panegyrical speeches and other forms of oratory: themes of praise can clearly play a role, for example, in forensic speeches. Conversely, according to both ancient theorists and modern commentators, panegyrics can be used to give advice, either openly or covertly – the latter when, for example, one recommends future clemency to a tyrant under the guise of praising examples of clemency in the past. I shall be dealing only with speeches that are overtly panegyrical in form, those whose ostensible object is not persuasion, but simple praise; but the limitation seems rather artificial.

Few passages in Greek literature are as familiar, and as perplexing, as the story of the various races of men in Hesiod's Works and Days. On the one hand, this myth seems perfectly to fulfill Italo Calvino's definition of a classic: somehow we seem always already to know it even when we come upon it for the very first time. For the conception of a golden age, when life was easier and men were better than now, has become so basic a motif of western culture that it is familiar even to the many who have never read or even heard of the Works and Days; moreover, Hesiod seems at first glance to deploy such widespread notions as those of a succession of ages of world history and of a steady moral and physical deterioration from the beginning of human history to the present. But on the other hand, the specific literary form which this myth assumes in the text in which it is embodied here seems strangely at odds with these familiar ideas. For Hesiod's text has a richness and complexity far in excess of what would be needed to communicate them, and in certain crucial respects seems to be at variance or even in contradiction with them. Instead of simply distinguishing between past and present, Hesiod apparently constructs a complicated scheme juxtaposing four metals in descending order of value, from gold through silver and bronze to iron; but he then goes on to confuse this pattern by inserting between the bronze and iron races a race of heroes who not only are not associated with any metal but also interrupt the steady decline by being better than their immediate predecessors. Without Hesiod, we probably would not even have this myth; yet his own version of it seems oddly defective.

One of the most arresting of Herodotus' ethnographic tales is the famous story of Darius' anthropological investigations in which he asked certain Greeks and Indians how they treated the corpses of their parents when they died (3.38). The Greeks burned their dead parents, the Indians ate them. The Persian king asked each group how much money it would take to get them to treat the parental remains as the other group treated theirs. Each group expressed pious horror at the others' customs, each was convinced that their own practice was the proper one, the other outrageous. So, Herodotus concludes, this shows, as Pindar said, that nomos is king of all; if you were to ask any people which customs were the best (τοὺς ϰαλλίστους) of all nomoi, they would certainly choose their own.