Just as there was a canon of three tragic dramatists, so the ancient world recognized a canon of three dramatists of Athenian Old Comedy: Aristophanes, of course, but also Cratinus and Eupolis. This article is chiefly concerned with Cratinus and Eupolis — a frustrating and unsatisfactory subject. Their plays are lost, and we have to rely on meagre fragments, preserved in quotations or on papyrus, and on various kinds of indirect evidence about their work. There is therefore very little that can be said about them, and even less that can be said with confidence. Nevertheless, the attempt to say something is worthwhile, in part because of the light that it may shed on Aristophanes' surviving works if we can discern something of the context in which he was working, but also because these men were evidently masters of their craft. One word of warning is in order: despite their mastery of the comic craft, uproarious entertainment is not to be expected from a paper on Cratinus and Eupolis; if jokes that have to be explained are notoriously unamusing, what can we expect of jokes that have to be reconstructed conjecturally before they are explained?

It is difficult to prove the Unitarian view of a single author of the Iliad. The old-fashioned Unitarian scholars of this country, who paid little attention to analytical scholarship, had no doubts. They would just assume one poet; and all the extraordinary qualities of the Iliad could be discussed as the achievement of Homer. But simultaneously, in Germany, even more intelligent scholars were carving up the Iliad, arguing from inconsistencies in the story, or linguistic oddities, that what we have is the work of two or more poets, separated in time. Against this, the Unitarians suddenly seem rather simple-minded, as if they were arguing subjectively, avoiding the difficult questions, saying in effect, ‘I like it, and I wish it to have been the work of a single poet, and therefore it was’. My title may therefore cause a slight sinking of the heart. Am I going to say how wonderful Homer is, and give a list of the features that I think unbelievably brilliant, arguing from them that here we have the work of a single mind? The answer is no. I hope to present a more reasoned argument, based on certain features of the content and structure of the poem.

How significant are the Attic orators as sources for Athenian history? Their intrinsic importance is certainly very great, greater perhaps than that of any other comparable category of material. On the other hand, they have received surprisingly little direct and systematic attention from ancient historians. This is something of a paradox, and like many paradoxes it is worth examining in some detail: in this case, it has significant implications for the ways in which the orators have been and ought to be studied.

The network of associations of the word Amazon still plays a part in the shorthand of modern discourse. Its connotations may vary from a slightly comic praise of sporting excellence in women to underlying insinuations that Amazons are not quite feminine. When applied by politicians and journalists to the women in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common during the 1980s, for example, the epithet Amazon carried the implication that these women rejected men and had developed a society apart (therefore (sịc) they must be subversives, lesbians, communists, hippies – etc. etc.). Modern usage perhaps emphasizes the unusual or even threatening associations; Amazons are, for whatever reason, outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life-style and achievements. Ancient usage presupposed an additional element, Amazons as a subject for artistic and poetic interest. The reasons why this was so do much to explain how and why the image of the Amazons communicated certain associations and how these in turn relate to underlying assumptions about the framework of Greek society and its values.

Some time early in 50 B.C. the two elder sons of M. Calpurnius Bibulus the Roman governor of Syria were killed in Egypt by milites Gabiniani, Roman soldiers left there by A. Gabinius – an earlier governor of Syria. What Bibulus' sons were doingin Egypt is a mystery, partly because we do not know how old they were; all we know about them is that they were outstandingly gifted or outstandingly beautiful, or both. The soldiers had been left in Egypt (basically as mercenaries) by Gabinius in 54 B.C. when hehad been bribed by Ptolemy XII Auletes to restore him to the throne from which he had been driven by his exasperated subjects. Why these particular troops took it into their heads to murder Bibulus' sons is another mystery, which we will touch upon, but our main concern here is the effect which the death of his sons had on Bibulus. Our contention is simply that the incident is part of a rarely documented example from the classical world of a clear mental breakdown in one prominent individual. In Bibulus' case it took the form of paralysing shock, followed by grief, depression, and a frenzy of sleepless activity in which he eventually wore himself to death. To understand how this operated in the way it did in this particular case, we need to understand Bibulus the man and his personal history.

In contrast to philosophy the study of language and literature always enjoyed in Rome an unqualified esteem. For experiments such as Plato undertook with Dion in Sicily a Roman would scarcely have had much sympathy. We recall too how disappointed and irritatedthe rhetorician Fronto was when his illustrious pupil Marcus Aurelius was converted to philosophy: ‘May the immortal gods forbid,’ he wrote years later to the emperor, ‘that the Comitium, the Rostra, and the tribunals, which resounded to the speeches of Cato, Gracchus, and Cicero, should fall silent in this very age of ours, that the whole world, which was eloquent when you received it, should through you lose its powers of speech!… [For if] someone should write using the language of the dialecticians, he would describe a Jupiter who sighs, or rather coughs, not one who thunders.’

In his book, The Roman Empire (Fontana History of the Ancient World Series), Colin Wells mentions incomes and the cost of living in first-century Italy. He concludes that a wage of 4 sesterces a day was an ‘absolute maximum’ and goes on to comment that ‘it is hard to tell whether the discrepancy between the really rich and the labouring poor was greater in some third-world countries today, or in Victorian England… To prove his point Wells gives £300,000 per annum for the Marquess of Bute as an example of an enormous income in the nineteenth century, though he does not tell us what the poor would have earned then.

My subject concerns the practicalities of finding one's way round an ancient city. What aids were there to guide a stranger in town? How did he trace a particular house or other destination? I propose to examine the problem with reference to one of the best known of all ancient cities, Pompeii.

The demands on a modern Latin course are formidable indeed: it must present all the requisite grammatical and syntactical material intelligibly and palatably to learners unfamiliar with the structure of even their native language, whet their appetite for the riches of Latin literature in the original, and allow them to graduate to it as quickly and painlessly as possible. University students, reared on nonlinguistic courses in ‘Classical Civilization’ (uel sim.), bulk large among today's consumers, and as one who has often in recent years had to teach them the Latin language, I wholeheartedly welcomed the appearance in 1986 of Reading Latin (hereafter RL), which expressly sets out to meet the aforementioned needs. Some brief reviews appeared shortly after its publication, but as the authors envisage the course ideally being spread over two academic years (Text p. v), now is perhaps the time for one who has so used it in a university department to appraise it again in the light of experience. Does it work? For some or for all? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How'could it be improved? In offering the following observations and suggestions, I am only too well aware of how easy it is to criticize such a project, and how hard to do better.

In the brief introduction to this speech in his recent commentary, S. Usher observes: ‘Little logical order can be discerned, though the speech has a clearly-defined prooemium in which the main ingredients of the speech are already present.’ There is an element of overstatement in this assessment. The organization of the speech as a whole follows the habitual practice of Lysias, who favours a neat division between sections. Thus we have prooemium (§§1–3), prothesis (§§4–5), proofs (§§5–20; τὴν μὲν οὖν in §5 should begin a new paragraph, since there is a clear break as the speaker moves from a summary of the factual case against him to the first point in his refutation), epilogos (§§21–27). There is naturally no narrative section, since the hearing is concerned with status, not events. Within the proof section the speaker tackles each of the allegations against him separately, wealth (§§5ff.), health (§§10ff.), and bad character (§§15ff.).2 Nonetheless, Usher's description of the speech is true to the extent that the progress of thought in the proof section is. often rambling and disjointed. However, a closer examination of the speech shows that this seemingly undisciplined and unstructured movement is the product of a logical ordering principle, which has its origin in the nature of the speaker's case. To appreciate the rationale behind this structure it will be necessary to preface our discussion with an assessment of the strength of the case.

To every man his own Aeneid. Having spent the last six summers translating it as a Penguin Classic, I was delighted when the editors of Greece & Rome and Vergilius asked me to write a piece for them about this experience. The translator takes millions of decisions on points of detail. It must be useful, for him at least, to look back and ask what he has learned about the poem during this special relationship. I think of four points, the first of which I shall not discuss in this article:

(i) the political purpose of the Aeneid;

(ii) Virgil's gift for characterization, particularly of minor characters and particularly by means of their utterances;

(iii) the intensely rhetorical tone of the poem;

(iv) its passion.

Helen Waddell, in her charming Medieval Latin Lyrics, surely a book which inspired many a young person, trained in the classics, to become a ‘convert’ to the middle ages, described the collection of poems known as the Appendix Virgiliana, as coming ‘down through the Middle Ages bobbing at a painter's end in the mighty wash of the Aeneid’. This same description can, I think, be prettily applied to the Virgil scholia, the humble and often nameless attempts of innumerable scholars to elucidate the master's poems; notes and glosses sometimes wise and often banal, which exist, not like other literature as an end in themselves, but solely as a means towards a better understanding of Virgil.