Since no one doubts the pre-eminence of Socrates as a teacher, there is much, presumably, to be said in favour of his method of instruction. The picture of Socrates to be gained from the earlier dialogues of Plato is one of a man who consistently challenged orthodox opinions. In the same way, but, of course, with nothing like the Athenian's skill, I propose in what follows to react against a commonly accepted view; to be precise, I wish to scrutinize the opinion that the Funeral Speech, delivered by Pericles at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War and known to us from Thucydides, presents the reader with a splendid portrait of fifth-century Athens, and that, in stressing the spirit rather than the forms of Athenian democracy, it qualifies as the ancient equivalent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We all idealize the ancient Greeks; we ignore the harsh realities and prefer to concentrate our attention on what we see as the grandeur of Aeschylus, the splendour of the Parthenon, and the vision of Pericles; and it is the Funeral Speech, beyond everything else in Greek literature, which allows us to indulge in this type of escapism. That the Funeral Speech does have a ‘glorious’ reputation is a fact. Does it deserve so uncritical a fame ? If this question is posed, I ask it not from any perverted desire to debunk its reputation, but simply in order to gain a deeper understanding not only of the speech but also of the Greeks to whom it was addressed and of the particular statesman who delivered it.

Everyone who reads Aeschylus sympathetically does so, I should guess, with at least an implicit understanding of the point I shall be attempting to make in this paper; my reason for elaborating it at such length is that it is barely acknowledged in some of the recent scholarly literature, and the new orthodoxy on characterization is in danger of becoming no more helpful than the old.

Professor Huxley's article on ‘Bos, Bentley, and Byron’ was delightful to read; it provokes these thoughts of mine.

Majority opinion proves nothing, but it is solidly on the side of bos piger. Kiessling, for instance, and F. Villeneuve (in his 1967 Budé text) place the comma after piger. So do Lewis and Short, the TLL, the compilers of the new Oxford Latin Dictionary, and Dominicus Bo in his Lexicon Horatianum. Acron, Pseudo-Acron, and Porphyrion offer no comment. Piger is attached to caballus by Lane Cooper, and rather hesitantly by A. S. Wilkins. The latter felt that this better fitted the general sense of Horace's argument, a point to which I recur later. Wilkins was less confident of the rhythm of the line as a pointer to the ascription, and mentioned that many (unspecified) editors took piger as going with both nouns; this, indeed, might be an attractive compromise.

I am not of course going to talk about a very concrete person, a little bearded man who lived in Chios or Smyrna. Yet that there was someone called Homer, who was primarily responsible for the creation of the Iliad at least, I take for granted, and accordingly spare you the old jokes. They applied to an entirely different situation in scholarship from the one we have today, and the cause of the difference is the realization that the Homeric poems are in essence oral rather than written poetry.

Since so many Roman cognomina are derived from physical peculiarities and personal idiosyncrasies, it is not surprising that the unfortunate bearers were often the butt of laughter. As Cicero says (de Or. ii. 236), ‘Locus autem, et regio quasi ridiculi (nam id proxime quaeritur) turpitudine et deformitate quadam continetur: haec enim ridentur vel sola, vel maxime, quae notant et designant turpitudinem aliquam non turpiter.’ Cicero remarks that there is need for restraint and good taste in such jokes, and he adds (247) that it is not enough just to get a laugh, a man must also derive some benefit from the remark. Cicero's qualifying comments are in reference to an occasion when a man called Vargula was embraced by A. Sempronius, a candidate for office, and the latter's brother Marcus, whereupon he shouted to his slave ‘Puer, abige muscas’ (‘Boy, chase away the flies’), Musca being a cognomen of the Sempronii.

There will never be a perfect translation of Aristophanes. There have been many translations, with many and diverse merits: one thinks of the poetical grace of F. L. Lucas, the deftness of Godley and Bailey, the easy naturalness of John and Patricia Easterling, the zest of B. B. Rogers, the modernity of Douglass Parker and his associates; but combine all these and you are still left a long way from a perfect translation—for there is much truth in the paradox that the only really perfect translation is the original. The Greek and Latin scholar is more aware of this than most people, and the lover of Aristophanes more still. Yet translations there must be—not only for the ‘general reader’, but increasingly nowadays for the student who wants to know more about ancient literature but is not yet (and in too many cases may never be) competent to study it in the language in which it was written; nor should we forget those who produce plays, and those who go to see them. And it matters a great deal whether the people who meet Aristophanes in these ways are brought to appreciate his qualities as comedian and dramatist. For Aristophanes' own contemporaries did, Plato among them; and if he was really boring or obscure or both (so the reader may argue), his contemporaries must have been so too.

In the last issue of Greece & Rome there appeared two critical analyses of Propertius iii. 10, an elegy written in celebration of Cynthia's birthday. Here I propose to enlarge on some of the points made by my predecessors, and publish my own reactions to reading the poem. I agree with Dr. Lyne and Mr. Morwood in detecting an underlying urgency in the piece: they notice marks of anxiety and preoccupation with passing time, along with a conflation of the concepts of sleep and death. But neither writer asks what I believe to be the necessary first question: what kind of poem is Propertius iii. 10? Formal considerations—classification according to literary genus—do in fact warrant some of their contentions, but leave others in need of modification.

Our views on literary patronage in the Augustan Age may be dominated to such an extent by the personality of Maecenas that other, contemporary, patrons are forgotten or, worse still, seen as pale reflections of the ‘ideal’ patron, Maecenas, and so best disregarded. Professor Ronald Syme, for example, in his notable chapter on Augustus' ‘Organization of Opinion’, writes that ‘Augustus’ chief of cabinet, Maecenas, captured the most promising of the poets at an early stage and nursed them into the Principate. Augustus himself listened to recitations with patience and even with benevolence. He insisted, however, that his praises should be sung only in serious efforts and by the best poets. The Princeps succeeded: other patrons of literature were left far behind.’ This article looks briefly at the work of those poets who were closely associated with one of these ‘other patrons’, M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, and attempts to show that his patronage, and the poets' attitudes towards it, were essentially Republican in nature—a factor which should be kept in mind in making any comparison between Messalla's poets and those more directly concerned with the Princeps.

In contrast to earlier works of scholarship directed towards resolving the problems of authenticity and date of composition through considerations of metre, language, and style, there has been a tendency for more recent studies of the Prometheus Bound to concentrate upon those aspects of thematic development which some have seen repeated in the Supplices, now dated to 464–463 B.c., and the Oresteia of 458. So, for instance, C. J. Herington has demonstrated on more than one occasion the apparent divergence that exists between the cosmic system portrayed by Aeschylus in the Persae and Septem and that found in the later plays, including the Prometheus. In the former group he says: ‘the Divine is united against man: let a human being swerve by a hair's-breadth from the rules, and the powers of earth and heaven will join together to castigate him’, while in the later plays ‘the human and divine cosmos is divided into the enemy camps of male and female, and of the opposites that go with them respectively: light/dark, heaven/earth, new/old; the universal fabric is torn in two.’ Certainly the ideas he puts forward here are acceptable in the case of the Oresteia, but for their extension to the Supplices and Prometheus they depend largely upon reconstructions of the lost plays that made up their respective trilogies: a hazardous course, though perhaps not altogether unjustified in the light of the available evidence.

The only reference to the Sauroktonos by Praxiteles occurs in the writings of Pliny. Although much scholarly ink has flowed over virtually every square inch of the figure's languid body, no one (to my knowledge) has yet considered the activity of the left hand which is held directly above the ascending lizard in all three copies and on coins of Nikopolis and Philippopolis.

As the first in what is hoped to be a continuing series, the editors of Greece & Rome have invited two contributors to attempt a critical appreciation of Propertius iii. 10. The contributors were asked to present their opinions independently and no ‘rules’ were laid down by the editors. It is our intention to publish from time to time further exercises of this type.

The major puzzle which confronts readers of Odes iii. 14 is the relationship between the public celebration described in the first half of the poem and the private party proposed in the second. Both are responses to the one event—news that Caesar is not, as feared, dead, but has won a victory and is returning home from Spain—but they do not quite harmonize. It is not just that the one response is public and Roman, while the other is private and somewhat Greek, for there is nothing objectionable in this combination. Rather the disharmony lies in a number of contrasts which, taken singly, are slight, but together create an effect which is hard to define but hard to deny.

I should like to begin like a preacher in his pulpit, by citing two texts. In a lecture given at Harvard University in 1950 on the subject of ‘Poetry and Drama’ T. S. Eliot said: ‘I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something should happen; that the audience should be kept in the constant expectation that something is going to happen; and that when it does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect.’ My second text comes from the paper that has most effectively influenced my own ideas on the subject of Euripides' clever exploitation of the unexpected in his plays: R. P. Winnington-Ingram's ‘Euripides: Poietes Sophos’, published in the second volume of Arethnsa. Winnington-Ingram ends his paper with these words: ‘It makes me wonder whether, in the words of Oscar Wilde, Euripides was not capable of resisting everything except temptation—the temptation to be clever.’