In the opening chapter of his Annals Tacitus gives us a potted history of Rome to the point at which his work begins. First, there were kings; then, with Lucius Junius Brutus, came liberty and the consulship (or, as we would say, the Republic); from time to time there were periods of one-man rule, most of them short-lived; and finally there was Augustus, who found the whole state exhausted by civil strife and therefore took it all into his own control and began what we call the Principate.

Among a number of short Latin poems by Walter Savage Landor, of which an interesting appreciation was published recently by Bruce Mackinnon, of British Columbia, is one particularly attractive pastiche of Catullan hendecasyllables. In many respects this poem could claim to reproduce the manner of Catullus himself. My own uneasiness was aroused by the rhythm of the opening line:

I was aware of no rule for the composition of this type of verse which was infringed here; but the run of the words appeared curiously prosaic. After some consideration, I identified the metrical feature in question as the opening of the verse with two disyllables: the former spondaic (no examples were to turn up, as it happened, with a trochaic or iambic word), the latter of necessity trochaic. It is a rhythm often employed by Landor in the fifty and more pages of hendecasyllables found in the 1847 edition of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (pp. 125–78), occurring for example in poems 3, 5, 9, 10, and three times in 12. A particularly striking example is found in 88.8, quaedam scripsit avunculus… which nobody would mistake for a production of Catullus.

There are certain puzzling features about Sophocles' Philoctetes, notably concerning the oracle of Helenus that is the mainspring of the whole action. What were the exact terms of Helenus' prophecy? Did he state simply that Troy was to fall to Neoptolemus and the bow of Heracles; or did he also stipulate that the bow was to be used by its present owner, Philoctetes, that Philoctetes was to come willingly to-Troy, and that his wound was to be healed there? By the end of the play, we may well think that the prophecy made these further stipulations; but the references to the prophecy earlier in the play (and the actions of Odysseus, who should be familiar with its conditions) do little to make this plain. It is also difficult to determine exactly how much Neoptolemus knows about the prophecy. In the opening dialogue with Odysseus, he seems to know nothing about the oracle, not even the role of the bow in the capture of Troy (112 ff.). But, as the play proceeds, he gives an increasingly precise account of its conditions; although the source of his expanding knowledge is by no means clear. A further problem is posed by the epiphany of Heracles that concludes the play. Why has Sophocles constructed his play in such a way that the natural conclusion of the human characters' interaction is in direct contradiction both to the divine plan and the traditional myth, and needs (as it may seem) to be awkwardly reversed by a deus ex machina??

The purpose of this paper is an examination of the metaphors of life as warfare and life as a journey in the prose writings of the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The discussion will centre on the essays and letters; the tragedies will not be directly considered. The philosopher's use of these metaphors will be related to a review of the teachings of Seneca and of the Stoic school on death and on certain other central Stoic concepts.

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the significance, whether historical or historiographical, of the year 431 BC:historical, in that it saw the outbreak of a war which in its scope and consequences was to be unprecedented in the Greek world of its day; and historiographical, because a serious-minded young man in Athens realized the importance of what was happening and made up his mind to put it on record for posterity.

Street-reciters were a feature of the ancient city (cf. Dio Chrys. Orat. 20.9 f.). Suetonius may include them (or their performances) under ‘triviales ex circo ludios’ (MS ludos), but they were certainly called circulatores (schol. on Pers. 1.134, quoted below; Jerome, Epist. 53.7; Augustine, contra Iul. op. imp. 5.15). This term may describe any huckster who attracts a street-crowd (circulus), and some hawkers of wares may have recited versicles as part of their routines to attract customers (cf. Satyricon 68.6 f.). In any case, as applied to a street-reciter, circulator aptly evokes the lowly circumstances and quality of his performances. And it was understandably galling to associate a poet or his works with such a figure. The slur of Vergil's Menalcas springs readily to mind (Eel. 3.26 f.): ‘non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas/stridenti miserum stipula disperdere carmen?’ Other references to the street-reciter, however, seem less well recognized.

Aeneid 2 is for the most part a book of action, telling the whole story of the rapid series of events that led to Troy's final destruction. Aeneas' narrative of these events is fast-paced, almost breathless; it has the flavour and emotional intensity of an eye-witness account rather than a retelling of a past experience. But it is noteworthy that Aeneas begins the story very slowly, by recounting in detail an exchange of speeches between Laocoon and Sinon (40—198). A quick summary of Trojan reactions to the horse might have sufficed for Aeneas' purposes. Virgil's model, Demodokos' song in Homer's Odyssey, treats the debate over the Trojan horse by simply summarizing the three positions taken (Od. 8. 499—513). When Odysseus asked the bard Demodokos to sing the story of the wooden horse (487 ff.), there is no suggestion, either in the wording of Odysseus' request or in the summary of Demodokos' response, of a pivotal debate between Laocoon and Sinon; in Homer's version of the story the major debate was internal to the Trojans and took place after the wooden horse was brought into the city. Why did Virgil have Aeneas linger over the exact words of Laocoön and Sinon? What, beyond a report of causes and events, is suggested by the speeches of Laocoön and Sinon? It would seem that the personalities and oratorical styles of these two men, not just their viewpoints in debate or their roles in the story, are important for the reader to understand.