Thucydides does not have very many fundamentalist zealots left. Nevertheless many scholars still feel the urge to do away with contradictions and tensions within the text. The urge to resolve them is stronger if inconsistent statements occur in prominent passages which are close to each other, and where the reader is unwilling to posit that the author simply changed his mind between writing them. This paper starts by dealing with a much discussed inconsistency which belongs in this group. I will offer two solutions, a longer one and a shorter one. These solutions will demonstrate that Thucydides uses consistent and recoverable principles. The main aim of the paper however is to show that we should not stop at solutions: interpretive problems can lead to a deeper understanding of Thucydides. The arguments below employ two methodological approaches, one fairly well established and one more novel. By comparing passages exemplifying Thucydides' analysis, and by explaining specific differences between them, we can arrive at some important premises in his ideas on causation and responsibility.

Pliny's encyclopaedia demands a very particular approach from its readers. The key paradox of the genre is that, having gone to the immense effort of gathering together information covering all the branches of human knowledge, it expects its readers not to read it all. The tension between the unifying discourse of complete knowledge and its practical segmentation into digestible chunks requires a certain amount of conceptual shimmying on the part of the reader. How relevant is the surrounding information to the single fact retrieved? In the case of Pliny, the possibility of understanding disembodied sections and facts in isolation is a promise held out to the reader by the book itself: Pliny explicitly gives his blessing in the preface and provides a summarium to aid in the process. This summarium takes up all of Book One of the Natural History, listing the contents of other 36 books, together with the sources Pliny consulted. But although the paratext promotes one model of how to read the Natural History, the text itself is ambivalent; the insistency of linear narrative never quite surrenders to the allure of complete segmentation. There is a logic to the Natural History that only reveals itself to the reader who follows the stream of information from fact to fact, section to section, book to book, subject to subject.

Dining with Domitian could be a trying experience. Dio describes one memorable meal with the emperor:

(Dio 67.9)

Now, at this season when selected girls
And the boys who are about to venture upon them,
Though still in bud, sing what will please London…

(C.H. Sisson, 1974)

Rome's first emperor proved remarkably successful in shaping a positive image for himself in his own and subsequent eras. Here was a man who came to power through that most criminal of means, through victory in civil war, and yet managed to persuade his own and succeeding generations of his right to rule. How did the enthusiastic proscriber of the innocent and the brutal destroyer of Perusia transform himself into the sublime Augustus? Here was one of Rome's great militarists, a man who, by one reckoning, doubled the size of the Roman empire. How could this warlord be perceived as a ‘prince of peace’? One answer to these questions is that this transformation of perception, both ancient and modern, was achieved through die emperor's promotion of a complex of ideas designed to accomplish precisely this perceptual shift, a complex of ideas which we variously call ‘Augustan ideology’, ‘Augustan discourse’ or even ‘Augustan cultural thematics’.

Ovidians today agree that humour is central to understanding the Metamorphoses; but much disagreement exists about what passages are funny; what type of humour is used; and what response it is intended to elicit. Since his own time Ovid's humour has provoked criticism: Quintilian and the two Senecas criticise him for introducing to the Metamorphoses an inappropriate tone. The Romantics found Ovid's humour in bad taste. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries it was taken to be light and on the surface. More recently scholars identify his humour as either deep and humane or hateful and misogynistic. This division is caused, in my opinion, by Ovid's black humour, which by its very nature is easily misunderstood or missed, especially by those inclined to see the tragic in things, disinclined to see comedy mixed into a scene of death or rape, inclined to think the tragic, serious and universal more worthy, profound and significant than the comic, base and particular.

The structural formation of Martial's books of epigrams, especially what has been termed the intratextuality of the poems in each volume, has received considerable attention in recent studies of the author. Both Scherf and Merli, for example, in the latest collection of essays on Martial, not only provide useful critical surveys of past scholarship on the issue but propose their own, occasionally more detailed, schemes. The result is a growing recognition of the intricate designs Martial created out of his varied themes and of their importance in helping us to understand the literary purpose of the books.

For the most part, editors and teachers have conspired to ignore the book gatherings in administering their dosage of Pliny (as of Cicero's, or of Seneca's Letters). But Epistles 3.21 is a striking tailpiece which pricks the reader to reflect back over all the book they have been reading. A resounding sequence of letters through the book has been writing up writers when we reach the finale's valediction to Martial. Each time writer and subject of writing share the trait of being writers, this entices readers to play at joining them, and so entertain the experience of reading through their minds' eyes. Attuned empathy is the challenge, though not necessarily in a spirit of congeniality or collegiality; and the cumulative project is to lever us into sharing and appreciating Pliny's ability to represent the fraternity to others, and thereby to communicate his own self, as writer and subject of writing. No half measures: letters mediate, immediate.

The lively debate about the function of the fable of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius is continually expanding. On the narrative level, they act like pairs of star-crossed lovers in the Greek Romance tradition, but by designating them ‘Love’ and ‘Soul’ Apuleius has invited philosophical, religious and loosely symbolic interpretations of this inset story. The ambiguity surrounding Cupid and Psyche (characters or concepts) is complicated and enriched by the storyline which concerns the falling in love of Love and the falling in love with Love by Soul (the respective states.of the hero and heroine). By making the Love God suffer the passion he inflicts upon other gods and upon mortals, Apuleius fulfils the sometimes heartfelt but more usually tongue-in-cheek desire of the elegiac poets to punish their tormentor. At the same time, Psyche (Soul) becoming besotted with Love has more serious implications in Platonist doctrine and her actions throughout the story and her ultimate fate have been read both positively and negatively by Apuleian scholars.

While it is the common nature of water to mirror the exact image of the body, it alone boasts the strange power that it mimics not human forms but human character (mores).

Claudian

As Claudian observes, water can display some very human moods and emotions, such as anger or calm. It can be quite anthropomorphic. Rivers, springs, the sea are readily personified. But, further than that, when water is imagined, it can also reveal many of the fantasies, wishes, fears and preoccupations of the person who does the imagining. The rich symbolism of water comes about, at least in part, because of the readiness of people to project on to it, as if on to a screen, the contents of their psyche, the character of their inner lives. Sadistic or lustful drives, nostalgic longings and much more may emerge in dreams, fantasies and images associated with water. Even when an author's work teems with traditional aquatic imagery, such images have to be selected from the larger cultural storehouse and the consequent array and treatment of these has a particular cumulative effect. Certain attitudes may reveal themselves. Imagined water that is particularly turbulent, for example, may reflect the turbulence of an author's psyche. Through an author's treatment of water one can often gain some idea of how changeable, comforting and threatening the world appears to him or her.