It is probably still true to say that the satires of Juvenal's last two books, apart from the tenth, continue to suffer an undeserved popular neglect (using that phrase in a somewhat special sense by virtue of which it may permissible to suggest that, say, the Odes of Horace or the Amoves of Ovid do not suffer ‘popular neglect'). Certainly, one recent critical work on Roman satire contains no analysis of any of the Juvenal satires later than the sixth. Satires 11–15, and obviously not 16, do not generally receive the supreme accolade of being ‘set’ by the examiners for the Advanced level of the G.C.E.; they occasionally do not feature even in university examinations. There has indeed been no lack of recent scholarly interest in the later satires, but it would be optimistic to believe that that interest is good evidence for the poems’ actually being more generally, or more attentively, read.

The patera (‘drinking-bowl’) of King Pterelas that Amphitruo brings back as a trophy of his victory over the Teleboeans plays a central role in Plautus' Amphitruo. Amphitruo and Sosia plan to show it off to Alcumena to impress her and to aggrandize their triumph, and this military bragging characterizes Amphitruo as a modified miles gloriosus (‘braggart soldier’). Jupiter steals it and, in disguise as Amphitruo, gives it to Alcumena, wooing her and further solidifying her belief that she has just spent the night with her husband. After Amphitruo accuses his wife of lying when she states that she has slept only with him and that he gave her the drinking-bowl, he commands Sosia to open their box containing it to prove otherwise; of course, it has vanished, and its disappearance leads to more confusion and accusations. The drinking-bowl thus also serves as a physical token that might establish a character's identity, just like the cistella (‘box’) of Plautus' Cistellaria or Rudens, but with the twist that Jupiter's manipulation of the token intensifies misunderstanding rather than dispels it, per the usual model of comic anagnorisis. In short, this prop contributes greatly to Amphitruo's characterization, narrative development, and metatheatrical play.

TheAb Vrbe Condita of Livy has been on many counts justly criticized as defective. The inaccuracy of his battle accounts, the vagueness of his geography, the occasional confusion caused by his failure to reconcile divergent accounts in his sources, the distortion of history through the excessive partiality shown to one or other of his ‘heroes’, and in general the highly rhetorical nature not only of his speeches but also of his dramatic narrations, which inevitably causes distortion—all these are formidable and justifiable criticisms. Some of these faults are, of course, attributable to the conventions of rhetorical history initiated by Isocrates, which dominated Roman historiography. Others have their cause in the fact that Livy was a book-scholar pure and simple; he seems not to have understood fully the tactics employed on the battlefield or the manifold devices used in sieges, nor to have visited many of the sites he describes. Now it is essential to expose these limitations, but in a sense it is unfair to condemn Livy for them, since they arise from human defects which would have required a heroic determination to repair.