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.

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.

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.

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.

Before drama ever appeared in Rome, comedy in Greece had passed to its final stage of evolution; and it was this form of comedy—New Comedy—which was to provide the stimulus for Roman Comedy. It is necessary, therefore, very briefly to describe the various stages of Greek Comedy, especially New Comedy, before passing on to Plautus. This will raise at least two important issues: (i) the reason for Plautus' choice of New Comedy for his models, and (ii) his treatment of the originals.

During the Corinthian War Agesilaos, after capturing the port of Lechaion in 391 B.c., returned to Corinth the following spring. He found the Corinthians and Argives, who had formed a defensive union, on the point of celebrating the Isthmian Games. When the Spartans approached, the celebrants decamped, whereupon Agesilaos bivouacked in the sacred enclosure, sacrificed to Poseidon on his own account, and waited until the pro-Spartan Corinthian exiles had done the same. On the king's departure the Corinthians and Argives returned and celebrated the games all over again.

Through the ages it has been the tendency of critics to dwell upon Virgil's praise of Augustus and to emphasize the poet's role as a propagandist for the new regime. In his first encounter with the Aeneid, the student learns to consider this work, as well as the author's treatment of its central figure, a ‘glorification’ of the Princeps.