Interpreting the Aeneid in terms of symbols is nowadays a fashionable and respectable procedure. It can also be highly dangerous, as some of its practitioners frankly admit. For example, Michael C. J. Putnam writes: ‘Any attempt, however sympathetic and careful, to delineate or clarify a poet's special, often private, symbolism, is subject to many hazards. I am not unaware of the difficulties of moving over a terrain wherein the already subtle boundary-line which separates critic from creator grows dimmer still.’ A sterner warning comes from Robert A. Brooks at the beginning of his article on the Golden Bough: ‘The oak-spirit and the King of the Wood, the mistletoe and the Queen of the Dead are all impressive concepts. But if the “real meaning” of the golden bough lies in these or near them, then Vergil must be considered an artist after the fashion of the late David Belasco, who painted the back of his stage sets as well as the front. What is happening on the stage or in the poem we may suspect to be illusory or subsidiary; the real action may be taking place in the carefully prepared but invisible recesses of the scene, approachable only by those who have a pass backstage. This is not Vergil's method …’ The warning should be heeded, even though the writer is citing an extreme case.

The ghost of Aristophanes still breathes over the shoulder of any body who wants to discuss, praise, or debunk Menander. Aristophanes' spiritual presence is both inevitable and irrelevant. Inevitable, because to our western world Aristophanes is the Athenian comic poet par excellence, who achieved that miraculous synthesis of imaginative fantasy, vicious satire, elegant parody, comic invention, civic shrewdness, witty obscenity, and the evocative poetry of precise observation. But the ghost of Aristophanes is also an irritating irrelevance when one is considering Menander. An irrelevance, because Aristophanes and the genre that he and other contemporary practitioners had perfected in the last quarter of the fifth century B.c. were as extinct as the great auk a century later, when Menander and a new type of comedy reigned supreme if not unchallenged.

Towards the end of his Brutus Cicero gives a memorable account of his education. He begins at the year 90, when he was sixteen, had assumed the toga uirilis, and so was no longer a boy. He was now apprenticed to public life, and while continuing his academic education, in rhetoric and philosophy, was learning the ways of the forum. Of the first sixteen years of his life the Brutus tells us nothing. We have to look elsewhere for evidence about his earlier education, his schooldays as we may call them, and there is such evidence, though his biographers have not made full use of it.

In 1797 Ennius Quirinus Visconti declared that the starting-gate (aphesis) at Olympia, described by Pausanias, had caused more crashes among modern antiquaries than ever the turning-posts did among the charioteers whom in its heyday it launched on their course; the intervening 170 years have lengthened the tale of academic disasters. But even at the risk of adding to the pile-up of reputations it seems legitimate to attempt another investigation of the subject. The moment is opportune, now that experiments are being made in the use of starting-stalls for horses on British race-courses.

The dictionary compiled by Ælfric, who became Abbot of Eynsham, was perhaps the first work to which the title Latin—English Dictionary can be given. Before A.d. 1000 there had been many glossaries explaining difficult Latin words in simpler or contemporary Latin words; the arrangement had regard to subjects. There had also been lists rendering selected words into a language other than Latin, e.g. the St. Gall manuscript which rendered Latin words into Old High German; the arrangement is in groups, though an alphabetical index is provided in an appendix. But Ælfric's dictionary was probably the first to offer the framework of what we should require in a Latin—English dictionary.

My feelings for Bentley's Horace are best shown by an account of the steps by which I came to study the book. As a schoolboy one knew the name of Bentley; he was mentioned in the notes almost always with disagreement, especially by Page. When one passed on to the Satires and Epistles, he was mentioned with more frequency and on the whole more sympathy by Palmer and Wilkins; his name, or his symbol B, occurred continually in the apparatus criticus, though even so his suggestions very rarely appeared in the Text. As an undergraduate, one came to regard him as something more than a name: in scholarship apparently he was regarded as a ‘giant’ by Wickham and Munro and Jebb; as a man he was seemingly a high-handed and tyrannical Master of Trinity, for years battling single-handed against lawful authority. And then one began, as a Sixth Form Master, to con the Text of Horace more closely; but the result was not to increase one's admiration of Bentley. In youth one looked for dazzling and palmary emendations, but most of his suggestions one saw to be supported by some manuscript or other. In the Oxford Text of the Odes his name appears fairly often in the critical notes, but in only nine places is there mention of his own conjectures and not one is admitted to the Text. Further research showed that these were only a small selection from a host of emendations, some eight hundred in the whole Horatian Corpus—many of which struck one as arbitrary and improbable. Why then, one asked, all this fuss about Bentley, or at least about Bentley's Horace? In his Terence many of his changes are generally accepted and he laid the foundations for a knowledge of Terentian metre. His Manilius shows a number of emendations which have appeared in every edition since his; and one read of his brilliant reconstructions of Greek Comic Fragments. But why should Wickham speak of him as vir omnium maximus qui Horatium attigerunt ‘who collected all that editors had achieved before him and laid the foundations for all who came after’? And one remembered Housman's chastening dictum: ‘Bentley admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars’.

In view of the prominence given to different versions of the Helen legend in Greek literature, it is not out of place to look once more at Homer's presentation of Helen. For a fresh analysis may serve to explain more fully the way in which the tradition developed out of the subtle characterization that Homer had created in the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer describes Helen partly by introducing her directly into the action and letting her speak on the scene, partly by recording remarks and opinions about her, and partly by drawing contrasts with other characters.

So Clerimont in Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman; and it is to be feared he speaks for many. Plutarch's miscellaneous works, commonly and perhaps unfortunately called Moralia, have never enjoyed the popularity of the Lives. Yet they have enormous interest. They are a collection of short works on all kinds of subjects, the record of a life devoted to learning and a heart both generous and devout. Without them we should not only have lost a mass of knowledge, we should also have a different impression of many of the moral, social, and religious attitudes of the ancient world. Besides, as Bernays told Wilamowitz and Wilamowitz told the world, you can't say ‘I know Greek’ until you have read them.

To assess the influence of one author on another and the extent of one's use of another is always difficult. When the authors assessed are poets who each give a highly individual stamp to material, it is doubly difficult. When they are separated by one and a half millennia and by a language difference, the assessment is open to pitfalls almost too enormous to bear contemplation. What follows, therefore, does not attempt to be a categorical statement that Shakespeare used Virgil solely or in part in any one particular instance or in any one particular way; it rather offers a juxtaposition of lines, images, or ideas which appear to be similar in both authors, in the hope that the comparisons may prove interesting in themselves and that the sum total of them may lead at least to some guarded and cautious conclusions about the use of classical authors and in particular of Virgil's poetry and thought by Shakespeare in Henry V.

Magna est his temporibus exorta inter doctos controversia num debeat is qui linguae Latinae discendae studet ex Anglica in Latinam posse vertere. Alteri contendunt in versione positam esse vim totam huius disciplinae: vertendo enim et intellegentiae vires augeri et accuratam Latinitatis notitiam comparari; excellere autem eum demum qui Ciceronem quam maxime referat. Alteri contra sic esse rem gerendam negant: per istius modi versiones minimum provenire utilitatis, plurimum autem temporis sine fructu perire; praestare antiques legere deque lectis disputare, quod sit nostris temporibus accommodatius et ad iuventutem erudiendam magis idoneum.

The Romans have always been regarded as a rugged and energetic people. Originally farmers and fighters, they established a world-empire. It must therefore strike many people as curious that the Latin word indicating business, negotium, is primarily of negative connotation; it indicates the lack of leisure, leisure being semantically prior. The word otium itself, like many Latin abstract terms, bears many meanings, some relevant to the conditions of the time.

The younger Pliny was consul suffectus from September to October, A.d. 100, and delivered in the Senate his official gratiarum actio to the Emperor Trajan for his appointment. This practice went back to the days of Augustus, according to Ovid (Ep. ex Ponto iv. 4. 35), though nothing is known of the senatorial decree which made it obligatory. Nor do we know if both consuls made speeches, or whether Pliny was following normal practice when he spoke on behalf of his colleague, Cornutus Tertullus. In Ep. ii. 1. 5 he tells us that Verginius Rufus was rehearsing a similar speech (to be addressed to Nerva) at the time of his fatal accident, and elsewhere (iii. 13) he writes of the boredom of having to listen to speeches of this kind, brief though they could be, and the distasteful duty of addressing words of insincere flattery to an emperor (Domitian) under whom freedom of speech was impossible. The custom of the official vote of thanks continued; M. Cornelius Pronto was suffect consul in July-August 143, and delivered his speech to Antoninus Pius on 13 August (Pronto, Ep. ii. 1).

Two articles on Catullus' eighth poem in recent issues of this journal (Greece & Rome, xiii [1966], 15–21, 155–7) appeared under the title Miser Catulle; and indeed the poem itself might aptly have its first line—Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire—as its heading. But this apparently is not how the Romans themselves would have headed it. If Ovid three times uses the phrase perfer et obdura (Am. iii. 11. 7; A.A. ii. 178; Tr. v. 11. 7; cf. Fordyce, ad Cat. 8. 11) he is clearly recalling what to him seemed to be the ‘message’ of Catullus' poem, conveniently transferring it from scazon to hexameter (or pentameter) by the simple addition of et. The word obdura, first introduced (with perfer) at the end of the central ‘stanza’ and repeated at the end of the following line and again at the very end of the second ‘half’, is surely the theme word of the whole poem. It is the positive self-admonition, after all the negative self-advice of the first part, beginning with desinas ineptire and culminating in nec miser uiue (10): it is the only thing that is left to the lover when all is over between him and his love.

One of the aspects of Lessing's misinterpretation of Aristotle1 which deserves a comment is the question of the Greek text used by the author of the Hamburg Dramaturgy for his translation and discussion of Aristotle's sentence describing the nature and function of tragedy (Poetics vi. 2; 1449b). Mr. K. A. Dickson (p. 54) quotes the text of the modern editions:

(1) ἔστιν ον τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν τοῑς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι' ἀπαγγελίας, δι' ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.

The ostensible subject of this Satire is an invitation to dinner extended by Juvenal to his friend Persicus, with a description of the proposed menu, which gives rise to comments drawing an unfavourable comparison between Juvenal's meal and the prevalent dining habits of his day. In his justly famous study Professor Highet accepts this ostensible subject at its face value as the real subject of the Satire—his chapter on it is entitled ‘Dinner at Home’ (ch. 20)—and on p. 279, note 3, he tabulates the structure of the Satire as follows:

(a) lines 1–55: introductory chat.

(b) lines 56–63: the invitation.

(c) lines 64–89: the food (with reflections on old Roman manners).

(d) lines 90–135: the furniture and dishes (with reflections on manners old and new).

(e) lines 136–61: the servants and the wine.

(f) lines 162–82: the entertainment.

(g) lines 183–208: conclusion, the preliminary relaxation and comfortable bath.