It used to be supposed that the Ode (Horace i. 28) was a dialogue between Archytas and a sailor, the nauta of verse 23, but considerable difficulties arise in assigning the various verses to the two speakers. It is therefore now the generally accepted view that the Ode is a dramatic monologue by the ghost of a drowned man whose corpse lies unburied on the Marine shore near the grave of Archytas.

Sir William Tarn wrote that ‘the primary reason why Alexander invaded Persia was, no doubt, that he never thought of not doing it; it was his inheritance’. The invasion had been planned and begun by Philip. It was, in name, a Panhellenic enterprise, to exact retribution for the devastation wrought by Xerxes in Greece and to liberate the Greeks of Asia Minor. These aims Alexander faithfully fulfilled. From the spoils of the Granicus he dedicated three hundred Persian panoplies to Athens' tutelary goddess; he sent back to Athens the statues of Harmo-dius and Aristogiton which Xerxes had carried off to Susa; and he excused the burning of Persepolis as a reprisal for the sack of Athens. The Panhellenic war was then over, and Alexander sent the Greek contingents home (A. iii. 19. 5). In general he freed the Greek cities of Asia from the control of satraps; they were to pay no taxes, to receive no garrisons and to live under their own laws. By expelling tyrants or oligarchs and setting up democratic governments, he not only removed the partisans of Persia from power but did homage to the growing tendency in Greece to equate freedom with democracy. The gratitude of the liberated cities was long-enduring; it was here that his cult survived into Roman times. In reality of course they were as much subject to his will as less privileged subjects. And to Greek cities that opposed him he was less accommodating. Halicarnassus and Aspendus, which certainly counted as Greek, were subjected to his satraps. They could be treated as disloyal to the Panhellenic cause, like the captive mercenaries who fought against him at the Granicus and who were sent back in chains to forced labour in Macedon. But Alexander was not always so merciless. He spared the mercenaries who were holding out against him on an island in the harbour of Miletus, and enlisted them in his own army; it would not have been easy to take the island by force. Sentiment and principle gave way to his own interests, as they always did.

Whether men make history or history makes men is an old problem, and one of which the ancients were fully conscious. In Book XV, for example, Polybius describes an extraordinary, certainly fictional interview between Hannibal and Scipio. Here were the two ablest commanders of the day, and on the morrow the issue was to be settled between them on the field of Zama. Polybius knew that this was a contest of generals, and that the better would win. But in the discussion, there is reference only to Fortune and the gods. Of the latter, one knew that they gave or withheld success for good and know-able, if not always obvious, reasons. The former, however, was quite unpredictable, the cause of events which could neither be explained nor anticipated. She was the personification of What Happened, τὸ τυχόν; that is to say, in modern terms, of History.

The story of Medea as pieced together from the numerous references in both Greek and Latin literature represents to my mind a most fascinating picture, both because of the enormity of the crimes she commits and the impunity with which she commits them. She is not the only wicked character in Greek mythology: there are others who are distinguished for their atrocious crimes; but while in almost every other instance the guilty character pays the penalty for his or her crimes, ultimately either with his or her life, like Clytemnestra, or wins release from punishment through the ritual of purification or the intervention of some divine personality, like Orestes, Medea seems to be the one possible exception, whose life history presents an unbroken series of murders, including the most heinous of crimes, child murder, coupled with a constant triumph over her enemies, so much so that her Nurse can confidently assert: ‘Not easily will anyone who clashes with her in hatred carry off the palm of victory’ (44–45). In fact so successfully does she get away with her deeds of wickedness that Aristotle might well have chosen her to exemplify the type of successful villain least suitable as the hero of Greek tragedy.

The punctuation of a classical text cannot by the nature of things be sacrosanct. There has been opportunity enough for errors; and it is the purpose of this brief note to suggest with great temerity that one such may have found its way into Catullus' poem of farewell to his dead brother (Catullus ci.).

When we compare Virgil's Georgics with Varro's textbook of farming, we find that what is cast in the form of a book of instruction in the prose work is transformed into a series of pictures in the Georgics. Virgil is not content with teaching his readers how to farm, he also sets before their eyes a panorama of country life. An example of this procedure is provided by the lines on animal husbandry found in Book iii. Following the framework of Varro, by leaving out certain of Varro's categories, Virgil transforms a schematic textbook arrangement into a life story, and tells this life story with the sympathy of a poet.

Diffugere Nives is not a political poem, and the echoes which link it to the mythology of the Augustan Age are to our ears imperceptible. Yet they do not deserve to be ignored, for in the intellectual climate of the time, used to the images of spring and rebirth for the Augustan restoration and the praise of pietas and the old Roman virtues, this poem must have sounded with a peculiar note of disillusion and regret rather different from the mood modern editors attribute to it. For it is Horace's last statement about the ideals of a new order, for which, despite occasional Epicurean fits of indifference, he had devoted most of his literary effort.

‘Moral idealism in pre-Christian Rome’ will strike many as an unpromising topic, and two preliminary doubts may well arise. Was there any moral idealism? And, if so, is it worth talking about? To the first of these questions the answer is an emphatic yes. For in the literature of the first century B.c. the proportion of moralizing is remarkable and perhaps unique. Historians such as Sallust and Livy moralized explicitly in their prefaces and implicitly on every other page. Cicero, whether as philosopher or politician, moralized at every opportunity. And poets for the most part accepted their traditional role as preachers with enthusiasm, Lucretius with his thundered message of hope through despair, Horace with his more sophisticated poetic sermons, and Virgil his monumental moral epic. Every branch of Roman literature had moralizing as an accepted part of its function. Now the ‘message’ differed in detail from author to author, and was in some cases highly individual: Lucretius, for instance, preached an ideal which bore little relation to that of any other writer and aroused as little reaction in the Roman public. But it remains true that numerous common features are discernible in the moral thinking of Rome's writers, and to these we may give the label ‘Roman morality’.