Alcestis not only contains an unusual mixture of serious and comic elements, but the plot itself seems to be pulling in two quite different directions. There is a happy ending in that Alcestis is restored to Admetus, and Admetus contributes to this by his hospitality to Heracles. But much of the play seems to deal with failure: Alcestis is shown to have more to lose by her death than other characters in Euripides who sacrifice themselves, and her sacrifice does not even seem to succeed, in that the life which it gains for Admetus comes to seem worse than death to him. Admetus himself has been criticized for having accepted the sacrifice in the first place, for being concerned with his own suffering rather than feeling genuine grief for Alcestis, and for offering inappropriate hospitality to Heracles.

I take the question in my title from a memorably worded passage in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes 26, where Plutarch is describing Demosthenes' exile in 323 B.C. Demosthenes was now 60 and after more than 30 years of active participation in Athenian political life, he had been condemned by an Athenian court for taking bribes from Harpalus, the late treasurer of Alexander the Great, who had fled to Athens with 700 talents. Demosthenes had been fined 50 talents by the court, and had been put in prison when unable to pay. But he had escaped from prison and now went into voluntary exile. North' Plutarch goes on:

Poliziano's theory that the sparrow of Lesbia in Catullus 2 and 3 is none other than the phallus of the poet has not fared well in recent years. H. D. Jocelyn has mounted a spirited attack against it, taking most effective aim against the arguments of E. N. Genovese and G. Giangrande, whose articles, as he points out, ‘seem to have no nineteenth or twentieth-century predecessors’. This attack has been facilitated by the tendency of both Genovese and Giangrande to dilute their arguments with extravagant claims. Thus Genovese would have the passer stand not only for the poet's phallus, but for an actual pet of Lesbia, a fascinum charm around her neck (with bells on it!), and a human rival, possibly named Passer, as well. Similarly, Giangrande spends too much of his time attempting to attach poem 2b to 2 by means of a tortuous interpretation of the Atalanta myth, just as he develops a convoluted argument about the tension between topoi of Totenklage um Tiere and impotence at the end of 3. Even Jocelyn gets too far away from the poems themselves with detailed examinations of masturbation and fellatio among the ancients (pp. 429–33) and a careful footnote on the missionary position (pp. 433 n. 65). There are only two ways to establish the probability of an obscene allegorical interpretation of Catullus 2 and 3: to examine the usage of passer in the poems themselves, and to see whether Catullus' imitators in antiquity – especially Martial – were aware of and exploited Catullus' double entendre. In defending Poliziano's theory, this paper will argue these two points in more detail than they have been treated in the past.

The imposing and romantic remains of the Tiberian palace on the eastern heights of Capri are now visited by relatively few people, and it is often possible to wander among the ruins for an hour or more without meeting another soul. Yet for about a decade, from A.D. 27 to 37, this villa seems to have been the principal residence of the emperor of the Roman world, and Capri, together with Rome, the administrative centre of that world. As imperial residence, as administrative centre, and as a typical Campanian villa, this and the other imperial buildings on Capri must have been thronged with people, from the emperor's family and friends to the palace staff to administrative personnel. It is the purpose of this paper to consider Tiberius' stay on Capri in various contexts, especially that of the people who were on the island with him, in order to understand more clearly what his life there was like.

From Cluverius and Holstenius, through Nissen and Hülsen to the distinguished contributors to the Quaderni dell' Istituto di Topografia antica, the study of Italian topography has achieved solid progress, sometimes with important consequences for military and economic history. New concords between battles and battlefields, between nameless sites and siteless names, continue to be proposed and the steady popularity of a subject involving archaeology, epigraphy, literary texts, and country walks is readily understandable: we must all be grateful for the very real improvements which continue to be made to our map of central Italy.