Odyssey v opens with an assembly of the gods which has been much criticized, because one of the main speeches it contains is composed of whole sentences found elsewhere in the early books of the Odyssey, and because the entire assembly appears to repeat the assembly of the first book in a way that is unnecessary and alien to epic practice. I shall argue that some of the objections raised (including the most important) cannot be sustained, and that there are strong reasons for holding that this second assembly is not detachable from our existing Odyssey. That is, though not perhaps flawless, the opening of the fifth book is an integral part of the whole poem and cannot be a late addition.

Scholars have observed that in Aristophanes’ Clouds entrance to the phrontisterion is likened to initiation into the mysteries; but there seems to have been no discussion of the effect that such a comparison would be likely to produce upon an audience of the period. In the present paper I wish to explore this question; and also to consider the relevance of Aristophanes’ words to anything Socrates may himself have said or done, and Plato’s attitude to the situation.

Aug. Serm. 378 distinguished clearly between arrabo and pignus: quando datur pignus reddit homo quod accepit re completa propter quam pignus accepit, arra autem quando datur non recipitur sed super additur ut impleatur. The same distinction is drawn by Isid. Orig. v 25.20. Especially significant is the assumption by Gellius, that there was a usual distinction known to everybody, and his consequent explanation of why Quadrigarius used arrabo where pignus would be expected (xvii 2.21): Cum tantus, inquit, arrabo penes Samnites populi Romani esset. Arrabonem dixit sescentos obsides et id maluit quam pignus dicere, quoniam vis huius vocabuli in ea sententia grantor acriorque est. Quadrigarius used arrabo, I take this to mean, because it expressed more keenly the bitterness felt by the Romans at being forced to leave their fellow-citizens in pawn. (If this is so arrabo would already be in sordidis verbis, though Gellius ascribes this colour of the word to his own times as against those of Quadrigarius.)

There was a temple or shrine to Hercules at Rome which bore Pompey’s name: aedes Herculis Pompeiani. If we knew when Pompey vowed or dedicated it, we might be able to map more clearly his association with this hero figure and thus one aspect of his public image (and his image of himself).

The Coma Berenices is not taken very seriously as a poem by some critics of Catullus, and there are some obvious reasons for this attitude. The subject itself seems trivial, and the Catullan version of the poem is thought of as a mere translation, with the implication that it is somehow not an authentic poem in its own right. Moreover, there are a number of real problems in it of text and interpretation to which no agreed solution has been found, notably the problem of the ending. All these factors have combined to make lxvi the most avoided of all the longer poems of Catullus. The only aspect of the poem that has received adequate attention is the character of the translation and the detailed comparison of the Latin text with what has survived of the Greek.

In his article ‘Manilius iv 681-95’, Antichthon iii (1969), 52-3, D. R. Shackleton Bailey (hereafter S.B.) defends certain statements made in his ‘Maniliana’, CQ vi (1956), 81-6, which I impugned in ‘Notes and Conjectures on the Astronomica of Manilius’, Antichthon ii (1968), 63-7. They concern the following passage:

687 artibus Housman, urbibus Ω 689 Pella Schrader, ilia Ω

690 utrisque conieci, ripis Ω

The parallels to doctis artibus which I overlooked in Housman’s note substantiate my view that doctis means σoφαῖς and not, as Mr Gain renders, ‘acquired skills’: especially Ov. Met. ix 743 num me puerum de virgine doctis/artibus efficiet?, of Daedalus. The following list of European towns and regions, characterized by their several specialities, contains nothing directly relevant to doctis artibus except Athenian eloquence.

Francis Bacon, in his unfinished dialogue entitled ‘An Advertisement touching an Holy War’, ends a fierce attack on unnatural social orders with these words: ‘For these cases, of women to govern men, (and) slaves (to govern) free men, are total . . . perversions of the laws of nature and nations.’ In Bacon’s dialogue, Zebedaeus was in fact referring these two cases of perversion to the mythical Amazons and to the slaves of the Sultanry of the Mamaluches. However, his words could equally well apply to the two major themes of Juvenal’s early satires, themes which are skilfully foreshadowed in his programmatic poem, Sat. i. For I suggest that ‘perversion’ is the key theme in this satire, its two main examples being, first, the unnatural roles of the two sexes and, secondly, the servitude of free-born Roman clients to ex-slave patrons and their lackeys; the sexual perversion being emphasized throughout the second section of Sat. i (vv. 22-86), and the clientela anomaly being the dominant theme in the balancing section, vv. 87-146. And I suggest that these two forms of perversion are then fully worked out in the first three books of Juvenal’s Satires, the former, sexual perversion, in Sat. ii and vi, the latter, the clientela paradox, in Sat. iii and v, and both of them in the ironical self-exposure of the client-cumprostitute, Naevolus, in Sat. ix.

The literary evidence for the Trajanic period presents a remarkably difficult problem; for though a fair number of writers whose work is extant today lived and sometimes wrote during the period, they provide information which is disproportionately and disappointingly little in quantity, and in the main highly tendentious. We also lack a biography of Trajan, since Suetonius ended his series not so much at a round dozen as at the end of a dynasty, while the egregious compiler of the Augustan History elected to begin with Hadrian. The reason in the former case is clear and compelling; whatever the motive in the latter, the value of what we have missed as a result is to say the least dubious. Frontinus has no observations on matters outside the scope of his technical discourses; Pliny’s letters, the most extensive of the Latin prose sources, throw valuable light on certain aspects of imperial administration, and offer a rather gingerbread portrait of his own circle of career civil servants and literary dilettanti. In Greek literature, Plutarch is almost devoid of contemporary references, while the orations of Dio Chrysostom have been milked dry, without providing us with any real factual material.

Gibbon describes the years that correspond with the lifetime of Cyprian of Carthage thus: ‘the whole period was one uninterrupted series of confusion and calamity’. On the whole the impression to be gained from the extant correspondence of Cyprian of Carthage (the eighty-two letters are to be dated between the years c.249 and 258) is not of this kind and this evidence ought to act in some degree as a brake on exaggerated descriptions of the chaos of the period. Cyprian can assume, without the slightest hint of doubt, uninterrupted ease of communications all around the Mediterranean, freely cross-referring to other public letters of his on the assumption that they must have come the way of his correspondents. Similarly he is prepared to claim of an open letter written by the Roman clergy that it ‘has been circulated throughout the entire world and has reached the knowledge of every Church and of all the brethren’. The official correspondence which Cyprian conducted is indeed of notable breadth and frequency—among the letters which we chance to have figure communications with Christian communities in Spain, in Gaul, in Cappadocia (all suggesting previous correspondence with these areas), and of course in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. As Metropolitan of the African Church he sends to Rome on one occasion a list of all the orthodox African bishops and their sees, no doubt in order to keep the Roman records up-to-date—and also their address-list for their communications. Furthermore, after the abortively threatening persecution of Gallus the regular meetings in Carthage of the African synod appear to have been resumed. At Carthage, at any rate, life appears to have been little affected by the military and administrative débâcle that was becoming evident in imperial circles and from Cyprian’s point of view the Mediterranean world still appeared to be very much a unity.