The past thirty years have brought us much closer to the meaning of many puzzling terms employed by Aristotle in the Poetics. But there are still many whose meaning may never be established with any certainty, partly because of inconsistencies or deficiencies in the argument and partly because of our own ignorance of the dramatic and critical terminology of the fourth century. For example, it is reasonable to assume that the terms used by Aristotle to describe his three μ⋯ρη of tragedy—пεριп⋯τεια, ⋯ναγνώρισις, and п⋯θος—were all part of the technical vocabulary of the contemporary theatre, and that if only we were familiar with that vocabulary, we should not find Aristotle's vagueness and carelessness in explanation such a hindrance to understanding.

In 1925 Miss J. R. Bacon wrote concerning Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica: ‘If the centre of the story is sought, that feature which above all others is indispensable, it must be found in the Argo. It is Argo—sea-adventure—that differentiates the Argonautica on the one hand from pure fairy-tale, the six soldiers of fortune and the like, and on the other from the stories of great human appeal like the Homeric poems. The Odyssey, as its name implies, is the story of a man: the Argonautica too is well named—it is the story of a ship and of a voyage.’ It was no doubt because he shared such feelings that Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Tanglewood Tales (1853) made so much of the ‘personality’ of the ship, or, more exactly, of its figurehead, ‘the daughter of the Speaking Oak of Dodona’, which in his version of the story of the Golden Fleece so often advises Jason in his difficulties.

Various attempts have been made, over the years, to assess the character of Dido, and explain her presence in, and extraordinary influence on, the Aeneid. Some critics have seen her as the heroine of an Aristotelian tragedy; others believe that Virgil emulated Pygmalion, and fell in love with his own creation; the most perverse of all call her a digression, a fatal flaw in the construction of the poem, and one which irretrievably weakens our view of Aeneas himself.

ProfessorParatore, in a book that I suspect is too little known to students of Lucretius, has called the Fifth Book of the De Rerum Natura ‘perhaps the richest in poetic inspiration’ in the poem. No part of his subject, it seems, fired the poet's imagination more; and it is the quality of Lucretius' imagination as it is seen in his account of the early history of mankind that I have chosen to discuss. The role of the imagination in the work of the historian is reviewed by Professor G. R. Elton in his book The Practice of History: ‘The discovery of truth requires not only the equipment already discussed–acquaintance with the available evidence and scholarly assessment of it—but also imaginative reconstruction and interpretation. Evidence is the surviving deposit of an historical event; in order to rediscover the event, the historian must read not only with the analytical eye of the investigator but also with the comprehensive eye of the story-teller. The truth is the product of this double process.’ For a good deal of what he says about the history of early man Lucretius had very little evidence as we account it. He had some previous scholarly literature at his disposal, but most of that was theoretical: neither he nor his sources had access to the archaeological and geological record. Yet in certain parts of his subject, as we shall see, this enforced ignorance did not hamper him as much as might be expected, even in comparison with a modern investigator.

The second act of Plautus' Mostellaria begins (348ff.) with the panicstricken return from Piraeus of the slave Tranio. He has seen at the harbour his master Theoropides, just returned from abroad; now immediate and drastic action will be needed to prevent him from discovering what his son Philolaches (abetted by Tranio) has been up to during his absence. The first essential is to hustle Philolaches and his drinking-companions indoors before the old man has time to get home. Only when that has been done will Tranio have leisure to think out a plan for duping his master. It takes 28 lines (371–98) to clear the stage; then, having at last got the drinking-party safely inside the house, Tranio can tell Philolaches what he wants him to do. His final instruction (404) is:

Clauem mi harunc aedium Laconicam iam iube ecferri intus: hasce ego aedis occludam hinc foris.

Herodotos in Book V tells us how in 499 b.c. came to Athens the smooth-talking political adventurer, Aristagoras, formerly tyrant of Miletus; he was seeking support from that city, under its democratic government now a mere decade old, for the revolt of the Ionian states against the rule of the Persian King. Aristagoras had it seems initiated the revolt (though its basic causes naturally had nothing to do with individuals), and it had in theory, if not in actual fighting, clearly broken out. The Milesian ex-tyrant explained to the Athenian demos, meeting in their sovereign assembly, the great economic advantages that would flow from this participation by subsequent exploitation of the rich domains of the king. He also, as is customary in these matters, belittled the military prowess of the Persians (despite the fact that they had in half a century overthrown all the great empires of the known world); also (what may have been slightly more effective) he appealed to national sentiment, since Miletus, and some of the other coastal settlements of Ionia, claimed to be colonial offshoots of Athens herself. With these and other (unspecified) inducements Aristagoras succeeded in getting a promise of support for the Confederates—which shows, observes Herodotos, how much easier it is to fool thirty thousand people than one man. The one man, of course, was Kleomenes king of Sparta, whom Aristagoras had narrowly failed (the story went) to induce to provide support from Sparta. That the story of Aristagoras at Sparta has many implausible features does not affect the situation. Athens sent help to Ionia, Sparta did not, and whatever the hidden policies concerned, Herodotos chose the occasion to make a criticism of direct democracy.

Aristophanes' Lysistrata opens with Lysistrata herself waiting in front of the entrance to the Acropolis for the women whom she has summoned. Calonice arrives from the city, and later others from Anagyrus (Attica), Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. Lysistrata expounds to them her plan: wives are to refuse intercourse with their husbands until peace is made. She has also, she says, arranged for the Acropolis to be attacked. Later again, after the women have been won over and sworn an oath of loyalty, a noise is heard (240): it is the Acropolis being captured. This forms the climax, so to speak, of the Prologue. Lampito, the Spartan, returns home, and from now on it is the Acropolis that constitutes the place of interest in the play and the women's occupation of it the central theme. But what is the relation of this plan (Plan B) to the other (Plan A)? And what does Plan B really involve? These questions are never satisfactorily resolved.

Juvenal's sixth Satire begins with a prologue describing the Golden Age which, for the light it sheds both on ancient attitudes to the Saturnian myth and on the Juvenalian concept of satire, is sufficiently important to justify extended analysis, an analysis that may begin with a reference to a discussion by Professor W. S. Anderson, who sums up the meaning of the first twenty lines of the satire: ‘Juvenal represents man's degeneracy through a double withdrawal: that of mankind from direct relation with Nature, that of the goddess Pudicitia from the earth.’ The age of Saturn, therefore, represents a moral ideal from which civilized man has degenerated. However, Anderson sees a certain ambiguity in the satirist's attitude to the Golden Age, particularly to the women of the Golden Age: ‘The attitude toward the aboriginal woman was ambivalent. She was morally upright, physically uncouth.’ There is respect for her ‘stern moral attitudes’ but a realization that her ‘stern dishevelled aspect is not at all alluring’

In 1965 the notable paper ‘Santorini Tephra’ by D. Ninkovich and B. C. Heezen provided the first firm evidence that the Late Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano directly affected the eastern part of Crete through ash fall-out. In July 1967 Professor Marinatos's initial exploration of a settlement buried under volcanic ash near the village of Akrotiri on the south coast of Thera received worldwide publicity, partly for its intrinsic interest, but perhaps even more because the discovery was linked with the magic word Atlantis. The whole subject was then extensively aired in newspaper and magazine articles, and three books on the theme of Thera-cum-Atlantis appeared in 1969.

‘If, almost a hundred years ago,’ writes the critic Martin Esslin, Walter Pater could sum up the then prevailing trend in his famous epigram, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, the dominant tendency of our own age might be described as an aspiration of all the arts to attain the condition of images' Certainly it is true that the study of imagery has been a fashionable method of literary criticism for some time and, employed with the proper blend of caution and imagination, has proved itself of service in the interpretation of a number of poets, most notably perhaps Shakespeare. It has long been recognized that Aeschylus is a poet who often works through ‘key’ or ‘dominant’ images; indeed, I suspect that classical scholarship may take some modest pride in having been the first in this field of study, even if it has yet to reach the dizzy heights (and sometimes the excesses) achieved by the Shakespearians.

We are told by an ancient life of Virgil that the poet had a ready reply for those who chided his extensive borrowing from Homer: ‘Cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent? verum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere’ (Vita Donati, 46). To recapture a Homeric figure, however briefly, was indeed a demanding challenge, but Virgil's task was unusually difficult in the case of Polyphemus. If he followed his model too slavishly the outcome would undoubtedly be disappointing. In going beyond Homer, however, he would immediately find himself on treacherous ground. The danger here was that the intervening centuries between the Odyssey and the Aeneid had overlaid the Cyclops completely with comic and pastoral associations. Most scholars have thought of Virgil as going back directly to Homer for his portrait of Polyphemus at Aen. iii. 588 ff., and I have no doubt that they are correct. In 1959, however, C. S. Floratos attempted at some length to establish that the Polyphemus of the Aeneid has been greatly influenced by the Hellenistic treatments of this figure. No one has replied to his arguments, and, in fact, K. Quinn recently has inclined toward a similar position. It seems, then, that this question deserves closer attention.

The existence of the great ‘palace’ which the Emperor Diocletian built for his retirement on the Dalmatian coast near his birthplace of Salona and which forms the nucleus of the present city of Split has been well known for over two hundred years. It was in 1757 that the celebrated Scottish architect Robert Adam visited Spalato, as it was then known; several years later he published his famous book of beautifully executed engravings of the ruins which, quite apart from its importance for the development of European neo-classical architecture in general and of the so-called Adam style in particular, first widely publicized the details of the palace in Europe. Since then the remains have deservedly been the subject of several complete studies and have featured prominently in many books on Roman architecture and on Dalmatia. With such a large amount of literature available in a comparatively accessible form, it is not my intention in this short article to provide either a complete historical account or a complete description of the place; it is rather to look briefly at its history from the time of Diocletian up to the point at which it stopped being a palace and started being a town, and to consider certain aspects of its architecture.

If punctuation there must be, should I place the comma before or after piger? Our Wickham–Garrod Oxford Text has no hesitation in assigning the epithet piger to caballus. Let us turn therefore to E. C. Wickham's note on the passage: ‘piger is best taken (as Bentley) with caballus. There is no point in making the motive the same in both cases.’ ‘Criticism’, wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance, who will meet the slow, and encourage the timorous; the want of meaning she supplies with words, and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.’ I am not setting myself up as a criticus criticorum, for The Preacher's warning ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it’ is hard to forget. This little note hopes it will underline the lesson that a poet is often the best judge of poetry. My poet is, as the title implies, Lord Byron, my critic Richard Bentley, whose suggested improvements of Paradise Lost are not apt to be regarded as his monumentum aere perennius.

At the beginning of the renewed German excavations at Olympia in 1936, a jumping-weight was found with an inscription cut round the edge; epigraphists assign it to the end of the sixth century b.c.: Ακματίδας Λακεδαιμόνιος νικ⋯ν ⋯νέθηκε τ⋯ Πέντε ⋯σσκονικτεί. ‘Akmatidas of Sparta dedicated me after winning the pentathlon “without dust”.’ The last word of the inscription is obviously a variant of the later ⋯κονιτί. Philologically it is interesting because it is the only evidence in antiquity so far found of a form σκόνις for κόνις, which accounts for the Modern Greek σκονή, ‘dust’. The second K may be no more than a slip by the stone-cutter, wrongly connecting the unfamiliar adverb with νίκη), ‘victory’. There is some justification for this belief. The inscription starts with a hexameter. If we possessed the other weight of the pair, we should expect the inscription to be completed on it metrically. As it stands, this is impossible. But if we omit the second K, then τ⋯ Πέντε ⋯σσκονιτεί (with lengthening of τά in arsi) can begin a pentameter or another hexameter.

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.