Those of us whose subject is Roman poetry can feel there is life in the old dog yet. We need only point to the books which have appeared since the industry tooled up afresh after the second world war, just over a quarter of a century ago. I don't mean so much the new texts and commentaries, which after all cater for and circulate chiefly among those with a vested interest in the subject: their proliferation often seems to me a symptom of an Alexandrian age in classical studies more than a true renaissance. Or for that matter the host of new translations —a phenomenon more difficult to assess because of the way in which it is bound up with the economics of publishing. I mean the books which have been written to extend and renew our understanding of Roman literature. Their number is impressive, and each year there seem to be more of them. Many are good, and some have in fact renewed and extended our understanding. I make these my starting point since it is a reasonable assumption that the men who wrote these books had in mind an audience that wanted to understand Roman literature, an audience for whom the task of re-interpretation seemed worth while.

For it is generally agreed that interpretations of the classics, like translations, are short-lived. They last in fact about a generation. Then a style of writing dies, a shift in our capacity to respond dims old responses, brings new awarenesses, while the work we translate or interpret—I am speaking how of course only of the acknowledged masterpieces of Roman literature—remains infinitely meaningful. To each generation the major work appears to speak in a new language and to say new things, so that the translator has to say afresh what it said, and the interpreter to explain afresh what it meant. At the same time our understanding of the literary tradition, in which the individual major works form the high points, also changes.

If the critical re-evaluation of classical authors in recent years has brought nothing else, it has given us a humbling awareness of how difficult it is to arrive at a fully satisfactory reading of ancient pastoral poetry. The poet of the Eclogues, seen less and less as merely a painter of dreamy landscapes or a contriver of political allegories, has emerged increasingly as a self-conscious artist whose conventional, but highly symbolic and allusive language embraces questions of man's relation to art and imagination, to passion and work, to the potential for order and violence in his own being. Is it valid to look at Theocritus in similar terms? Is there more in the Idylls than keenly etched portraits of shepherds among verdant hills singing of love in dulcet hexameters and in an atmosphere of easeful sensuousness? Or should we merely enjoy the surface felicities and depart sated and content, like Horace's well-fed guest? The rhythms and resonances of Theocritus will continue to give pleasure as long as Greek is read. Yet recent work in both ancient and later pastoral suggests that the Idylls will sustain and reward a critical reading which looks beneath this charming surface.

In a recent discussion of the Soracte Ode (Horace C. I, 9) Charles W. Lockyer insists on certain characteristics of the poem which he describes as follows: ‘Keeping in mind, then, the importance of the metaphor, I should like to approach the scene with a certain amount of dramatic emphasis. For Horace has really written a miniature scene, even though he casts it in the form of a monologue–a fact which is itself significant, as will be seen. … Rather we must pay close attention to the fact that the poem presents two real persons and not mere abstract sentiments decked out in elaborate imagery. … The dramatic quality of the poem should not be overlooked as it has in the past.’ (305). ‘Nothing better points up the difference between youth and age than the two people in this little play.’ (308).

There is a growing awareness that this poem does not present its true self if seen as a symbolic vehicle of philosophical maxims. In one way or another, we find the insistence that we are confronted by real people. Kenneth Quinn, without further discussion, had suggested in Latin Explorations (1963), 108-09, that vides ut alta is properly seen as a dramatic monologue. Lockyer, 305 n. 11, claims that the chief contribution of J. W. Rettig, ‘Dissolve Frigus: Horace Carm. I, 9’, CB 42 (1965) 19-23, was perceiving that two real persons are presented. David West, Reading Horace, taking up Quinn's suggestion placed an uneven stress on the setting (6, 10). Viktor Pöschl pays constant close attention to the speaker. Lockyer uses the terms dramatic and monologue, but it is the former that he really finds in the poem, leading him to think of the poem as a play.

The Sixth Aeneid is the noetic core of the poem. It is the centre of the Aeneid, and the centre not only of the narrative movement of the poem but also (and more significantly) of the poem's thematic movement, of its exploration, development and analysis of the ideas and issues experientially presented in the narrative. It is what one might call a ‘meta-book’, that is to say, a book which provides a commentary upon other books and which, in so doing, furnishes the reader with a framework of judgment and evaluation with which to interpret and to understand the noetic content of the poem. It is important therefore that the analysis advanced in Part I of this study be conjoined with a relatively detailed consideration of the Sixth Aeneid and an examination of some of its more significant thematic ramifications.

Greek plays were made in the theatre. We must watch our language when we talk about them, for we too are in the theatre. Most of us receive our critical training with works of art that are constructed and exist on the written page. We study word generating word, images interacting. And when we apply these techniques to plays we learn much; the way a playwright uses language, all the hidden things that make a play what it is. And some plays, an Ajax, or a Trojan Women, read so well that we are tempted to forget, or at least disregard that they were not in the first place made for reading. Not that the words are unimportant, but they point beyond themselves to realization in performance. They are as blueprints to a finished building.

This does not mean that the critic must spend his time filling the gap between text and production. He will too soon find himself lost in speculation or tangled in archaeological problems. Rather, whatever we say of the words of a play must be conditioned by the fact that they are words for the theatre. A play cannot be something that it could not be on the stage. A sense of what it was in performance is at the same time the starting point and the final criterion of our criticism.

The first stasimon of the Antigone is widely and justly acknowledged to be one of the finest of Sophocles' extant lyrical compositions. The praises of the achievements of man are set forth in language whose sheer power of diction and imagery imparts to the ode a tone of sincerity and conviction which is perhaps rivalled only by the praise of Athene in the first stasimon of Oedipus Coloneus. Just as that ode shows that Sophocles felt a real and abiding love for his native city, so too from this ode in Antigone we can see that he was deeply and genuinely impressed with the picture of the cultural progress of man as expounded by Protagoras. The power and the achievements of man made a great impact upon him, which is reflected in this ode. But just as the praise of Athens is not to be regarded in this light alone, as an independent song (for it has an intimate connection with the drama arising from its immediate response to the situation and from its wider implications for the action of the play as a whole), so also here, the praise of man in Antigone must not be treated as independent of the action of the play. For the choral ode stands, in the first place at least, as a response to the situation by a character involved in that situation, and as such it has an important contributory part to play in the total effect of the drama.

In the darkness of these times, it may well prove that we are the last generation to pursue the study of classics at all seriously, whether we are hewing squarely to the philological, or more modern, approaches to classical literature. The rights and wrongs of this particular ideological struggle will be settled, I suspect, by time and our students. One may, however, take for granted the perceptible erosion of anything like a real inwardness with Latin as a language among the protevangelists of either school. The gentlemanly dilettante stuck to his familiar authors, such as Virgil and Horace, ignoring their Alexandrian complexities for their human values; the supposedly serious scholar adopted such a scientific attitude to Latin that it would sometimes seem that his main pleasure consisted in correcting Lewis and Short, while putting together prose and verse compositions for his peers or pupils.

Certainly ignorance on the one hand and pedantry on the other are logical culprits, along with time, for this loss of inwardness with Latin as a language. One would like to think that Dr. Johnson (and some of his contemporaries) had something close to the careless familiarity with Latin displayed by Dante or Poggio: unfortunately a glance at the frigid exercises to Ms Thrale or to his Highland hosts, written during his tour of the Hebrides, quickly dispels this illusion.

Curses and oaths play an interesting and important role in the tragic action of the Hippolytus which is generally overlooked. They dominate two of the play's most powerful scenes, Theseus' imprecation of doom upon his son (885-98) and Hippolytus' defense (1025-31).

I shall begin with the latter passage. Here the hero's solemn oath of self-destruction (ἐξώλεια ) forms a dramatic climax to his denial of the charges against him (1025-31):

It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the criteria to be used in the understanding of a poem are internal. What counts as evidential in respect of poetic intent and meaning is what the poet actually says in the poem, and the only methodology worth serious attention is a careful, detailed and critical analysis of the poem itself. Despite this platitude biographical assumptions and postulates have exerted, and are still exerting, a disconcerting influence upon the criticism of ancient literature, most notoriously, perhaps, in the case of Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. All too frequently Virgil's life has been taken as the datum, the fact, to which his epic has had to be accommodated. This is not the occasion to take up arms against the biographical approach to Roman poets; I wish only to assert that, while it is important to place a poem such as the Aeneid in its historical context, it is equally important (indeed, more important) not to allow the historical context to dictate the interpretation of the poem. The poem, after all, is not a postulate; it is a determinate thing, present in a way in which a historical context is not. It must be given primacy, and any attempt to supplant this primacy with biographical hypotheses about the working of a poet's mind during the third decade B.C. based upon ambiguous external criteria would be the antithesis of the procedures of serious (that is to say, intelligent and relevant) criticism.