The Μελιταῖον κυνίδιον, as the very word κυνίδιον or its Latin equivalent, catulus, suggests, was a little lap-dog. It was so small that Aristotle compares it with an ἴκτις or marten and Aelian with the Indian Phattage. People commonly called it νανούδιον—a little dwarf. It was a well-proportioned, flat, long-haired dog with a bushy tail and a sharp nose of the type of the Spitz or Pomerian. We are also informed that it barked in a squeaky voice.

In the Aeneid there is a tendency to dissociate action from emotion. Action is often dictated by a strong sense of duty, while emotion, instead of being a motivating power, becomes an idle accompaniment that contradicts the meaning of the act. This is most clearly observed in the person of Aeneas, particularly in those Odyssean books when he schools himself in a ‘new heroism’ whose very basis seems to depend on such a dissociation. Thus, in the midst of Troy's destruction, his natural desire is to die fighting for his city. If he had acted out this desire (as he begins to do) he would have been conforming to the standards of the old, Homeric, heroism. But he is caught in the complicated fabric of Rome's future, and the old, simple heroism, founded on a natural and impulsive nobility, is not for him. He must go against his natural desire and, as a runaway, escape the doomed city to refound it elsewhere. And yet his heart is set on the city he has lost, not on the city he must build, as becomes clear in the succeeding books. In Book iii he envies the miniature Troy which Helenus and Andromache have built in Epirus, while in Book iv he longs to stay with Dido and share in her city. The division he so frequently evinces in these early books between what he has to do and what he wants to do can be considered as part of a training in pietas, in devotion to his highest duty, which is consummated in the underworld encounter with his father Anchises in Book vi.

Pliny lived in the heyday of the Roman empire, being born in A.d. 62 in the middle of the reign of Nero, at Comum by Lake Como in north Italy, and he lived until about A.d. 112. His family were not of the old Roman nobility but belonged to the second grade of the Roman upper classes, the so-called Knights or equites Ramani. Pliny trained to become an advocate in the courts of civil law, and partly by his talents and partly through the influence of family friends in the senatorial class he gained promotion to the senior grade of the Roman administration. He became a Roman senator when he was about twenty-eight years old, and eventually climbed to the top rung of the Roman public service. So he was in Roman terms a self-made man, the first senator of his family. But he was also a highly educated man; as a young man he attended the schools of the most famous professors of literature at Rome, and especially that of the great Quintilian, whose book on the art of rhetoric survives to show the sort of education that Pliny received.

During the period of the Roman Republic incense from Arabia, ivory from East Africa, pepper from India, and perhaps an occasional consignment of silk from China had reached Roman markets, having passed through the hands of many eastern merchants. The trade had remained small, for such wealth as Rome possessed was in the hands of a small number of landowners or financiers, and the unsettled conditions in the eastern Mediterranean were not conducive to a free flow of trade.

In terms of telling us what the poem is about, the first stanza of Odes i. 37 is rather nebulous. Nunc est bibendum, as a translation of νῦν Χρὴ μεθύσθην, could have been pregnant with meaning for an educated Roman but it could also have been a straightforward way of saying ‘it's time for a drink’, and the full significance comes out only in retrospect. The substance of the whole stanza can be briefly summarized: now, at last, has come the time for celebrations which will include drinking, dancing, and feasting, and the occasion is not without its religious significance. The transitions are carefully contrived: libero, besides suggesting the vigour of the dancing, has associations with Liber, the old Italian equivalent of Bacchus, while the Priests of Mars were notable as much for the excellence of their College Feasts as for their choreographic dexterity; nor is it surprising that a banquet fit for priests should be laid at the table of the gods.

In the 1957 volume of Greece & Rome the Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford gave readers a preview of certain opinions subsequently developed in the two volumes of his study of Tacitus.

His rebus gestis, ex litteris Caesaris dierum viginti supplicatio a senatu decreta est. With these words Caesar ends the account of his campaign in Gaul in 55 B.c.