In the Iphigeneia at Aulis role and role inversion are paramount concerns. Indeed it could be contended that in this play we find Euripides' clearest and best defined account of human (and divine) variability. Agamemnon, Menelaos, Achilleus, Iphigeneia, and even, in the final analysis, Artemis, all take positions and attitudes diametrically opposed to those initially adopted. Moreover, the basic thrust behind these movements in position and attitude is the same for each of these characters. All are concerned, in one way or another, with the saving or destruction of Iphigeneia, a situation which most emphatically includes Iphigeneia herself. For on the one hand she wildly supplicates to be saved, while on the other she gladly offers her body to the blade. In addition, Iphigeneia plays a crucial role in greater destructions. If she is destroyed by Agamemnon's and the army's actions, then Greece is destroyed in turn by her (Agamemnon's and the Greeks' final triumph is a ‘Pyrrhic’ victory at best), a situation made all the more ironic by her affected stance of saviour to the fatherland. In Iphigeneia's case, however, the discrepancy between intention and the consequences of action is innocent enough. The play gives no hint that she is at all aware of the irony implicit in her actions. But such lack of awareness is not postulated with regard to Agamemnon, Menelaos and Achilleus. The duplicities and hypocrisies of these three have been the subject of much analysis, and it is at least a critical commonplace to observe that they are characterised in a way more reminiscent of the sour end of everyday life than of the due proprieties associated with heroic, or Homeric, behaviour.

The first sentence of the Histories, which identifies and justifies the work as a whole, reveals the author's double aim of celebration and explanation:

Both explanation and celebration account for Herodotus' inclusiveness. On one hand, anything great and wonderful should be saved from oblivion, and is therefore appropriate subject for the exposition. On the other hand, the research of the causes of an event leads the historian beyond the simple narrative of the event itself into its remote antecedents and any circumstance which may have possibly affected it. Thus the specific focus of the inquiry — the war between Greeks and Barbarians — is doubly broadened even before it is announced.

Sallust's style is provocative and tendentious, but does his admitted moral tendentiousness carry over into a political or partisan tendentiousness? For centuries we have heard of Sallust the partisan, Sallust the propagandist, Sallustian bias. The history of this perceived bias began at least in the age of Augustus when the anonymous writer of the Invectio in Ciceronem set stylus to wax and began his fraud. Less than a century later (before 96 A.D.) Quintilian regarded the work as genuine Sallust (I.O. 4.1.68; 9.3.89). The deception had worked; and both the fraud itself and Quintilian's acquiescence indicate a perceived anti-Gceronian bias to Sallust's writing.

In the modern period, the history of perceived bias, already resisted by Voss, came to its climax in 1897 with an article by E. Schwartz which argued for a systematic and extreme anti-Ciceronian and pro-Caesarian bias and purpose to the Bellum Catilinae. The charges seemed to Schwartz necessary to explain (1) Sallust's chronology, (2) the significantly small role played by Cicero in Sallust's monograph, and (3) the report of certain rumours which implicated Cicero and Crassus and the denial of rumours which implicated Caesar. A systematic review of the arguments, however, gradually undermined or called into question the validity of most of Schwartz's points. By 1964 Syme could say that the main charges against Sallust had collapsed upon inspection. And they had; all but one.

(Plato, Republic 342c.1-6)

Few things emerge more clearly from Pindar, despite the praise of successful human action to which the odes are devoted and from which their occasion is drawn, than the utter contingency of that success. Ultimately this results from a flaw that is inscribed aboriginally in the nature of human being. However common in source the race of gods and that of men may be, they are split along a primordial rift in dunamis (‘power’, ‘capacity’) that grounds all other inequalities between them (Nem. 6.1-4). It is in the practical realm of desire, aim, will and action that the consequences of this rift become especially evident. On one side, divine action or praxis encompasses the fulfilment of every aim — ‘the goal of every act is in your power’ (Nem. 10.29f.; cf. Ol. 13.104f.) — since the god's powers are sufficient to achieve whatever his elpis (‘hope’) aspires to (Pyth. 2.49). This is because for the god there is a virtual equivalence of dunamis to desire: no distance intervenes between the inner movements that are his desire and will and their perfect accomplishment in and as reality. Divine causality is such that through its workings desire enjoys swift translation into act — ‘swift is the praxis of gods once moved to act, short the pathways’ (Pyth. 9.67f.) — and act into desire's flawless actualization. The full range of the god's dunamis in fact surpasses even credibility (cf. Pyth. 10.48-50), imagination and hope, making fulfilment of desire a ‘light achievement’ (Ol. 13.83).

When Pyramus, the romantic hero of Ovid's tale of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (Met. 4.55-166), mistakenly assumes his beloved Thisbe is dead and thus kills himself beneath a mulberry tree with a sword, Ovid punctures this moment of tragic pathos by a simile comparing the blood spurting from Pyramus' wound to water gushing from a broken pipe (4.119-24):