The past thirty years have brought us much closer to the meaning of many puzzling terms employed by Aristotle in the Poetics. But there are still many whose meaning may never be established with any certainty, partly because of inconsistencies or deficiencies in the argument and partly because of our own ignorance of the dramatic and critical terminology of the fourth century. For example, it is reasonable to assume that the terms used by Aristotle to describe his three μ⋯ρη of tragedy—пεριп⋯τεια, ⋯ναγνώρισις, and п⋯θος—were all part of the technical vocabulary of the contemporary theatre, and that if only we were familiar with that vocabulary, we should not find Aristotle's vagueness and carelessness in explanation such a hindrance to understanding.

ProfessorParatore, in a book that I suspect is too little known to students of Lucretius, has called the Fifth Book of the De Rerum Natura ‘perhaps the richest in poetic inspiration’ in the poem. No part of his subject, it seems, fired the poet's imagination more; and it is the quality of Lucretius' imagination as it is seen in his account of the early history of mankind that I have chosen to discuss. The role of the imagination in the work of the historian is reviewed by Professor G. R. Elton in his book The Practice of History: ‘The discovery of truth requires not only the equipment already discussed–acquaintance with the available evidence and scholarly assessment of it—but also imaginative reconstruction and interpretation. Evidence is the surviving deposit of an historical event; in order to rediscover the event, the historian must read not only with the analytical eye of the investigator but also with the comprehensive eye of the story-teller. The truth is the product of this double process.’ For a good deal of what he says about the history of early man Lucretius had very little evidence as we account it. He had some previous scholarly literature at his disposal, but most of that was theoretical: neither he nor his sources had access to the archaeological and geological record. Yet in certain parts of his subject, as we shall see, this enforced ignorance did not hamper him as much as might be expected, even in comparison with a modern investigator.

The second act of Plautus' Mostellaria begins (348ff.) with the panicstricken return from Piraeus of the slave Tranio. He has seen at the harbour his master Theoropides, just returned from abroad; now immediate and drastic action will be needed to prevent him from discovering what his son Philolaches (abetted by Tranio) has been up to during his absence. The first essential is to hustle Philolaches and his drinking-companions indoors before the old man has time to get home. Only when that has been done will Tranio have leisure to think out a plan for duping his master. It takes 28 lines (371–98) to clear the stage; then, having at last got the drinking-party safely inside the house, Tranio can tell Philolaches what he wants him to do. His final instruction (404) is:

Clauem mi harunc aedium Laconicam iam iube ecferri intus: hasce ego aedis occludam hinc foris.

Aristophanes' Lysistrata opens with Lysistrata herself waiting in front of the entrance to the Acropolis for the women whom she has summoned. Calonice arrives from the city, and later others from Anagyrus (Attica), Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. Lysistrata expounds to them her plan: wives are to refuse intercourse with their husbands until peace is made. She has also, she says, arranged for the Acropolis to be attacked. Later again, after the women have been won over and sworn an oath of loyalty, a noise is heard (240): it is the Acropolis being captured. This forms the climax, so to speak, of the Prologue. Lampito, the Spartan, returns home, and from now on it is the Acropolis that constitutes the place of interest in the play and the women's occupation of it the central theme. But what is the relation of this plan (Plan B) to the other (Plan A)? And what does Plan B really involve? These questions are never satisfactorily resolved.

In 1965 the notable paper ‘Santorini Tephra’ by D. Ninkovich and B. C. Heezen provided the first firm evidence that the Late Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano directly affected the eastern part of Crete through ash fall-out. In July 1967 Professor Marinatos's initial exploration of a settlement buried under volcanic ash near the village of Akrotiri on the south coast of Thera received worldwide publicity, partly for its intrinsic interest, but perhaps even more because the discovery was linked with the magic word Atlantis. The whole subject was then extensively aired in newspaper and magazine articles, and three books on the theme of Thera-cum-Atlantis appeared in 1969.

We are told by an ancient life of Virgil that the poet had a ready reply for those who chided his extensive borrowing from Homer: ‘Cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent? verum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere’ (Vita Donati, 46). To recapture a Homeric figure, however briefly, was indeed a demanding challenge, but Virgil's task was unusually difficult in the case of Polyphemus. If he followed his model too slavishly the outcome would undoubtedly be disappointing. In going beyond Homer, however, he would immediately find himself on treacherous ground. The danger here was that the intervening centuries between the Odyssey and the Aeneid had overlaid the Cyclops completely with comic and pastoral associations. Most scholars have thought of Virgil as going back directly to Homer for his portrait of Polyphemus at Aen. iii. 588 ff., and I have no doubt that they are correct. In 1959, however, C. S. Floratos attempted at some length to establish that the Polyphemus of the Aeneid has been greatly influenced by the Hellenistic treatments of this figure. No one has replied to his arguments, and, in fact, K. Quinn recently has inclined toward a similar position. It seems, then, that this question deserves closer attention.

At the beginning of the renewed German excavations at Olympia in 1936, a jumping-weight was found with an inscription cut round the edge; epigraphists assign it to the end of the sixth century b.c.: Ακματίδας Λακεδαιμόνιος νικ⋯ν ⋯νέθηκε τ⋯ Πέντε ⋯σσκονικτεί. ‘Akmatidas of Sparta dedicated me after winning the pentathlon “without dust”.’ The last word of the inscription is obviously a variant of the later ⋯κονιτί. Philologically it is interesting because it is the only evidence in antiquity so far found of a form σκόνις for κόνις, which accounts for the Modern Greek σκονή, ‘dust’. The second K may be no more than a slip by the stone-cutter, wrongly connecting the unfamiliar adverb with νίκη), ‘victory’. There is some justification for this belief. The inscription starts with a hexameter. If we possessed the other weight of the pair, we should expect the inscription to be completed on it metrically. As it stands, this is impossible. But if we omit the second K, then τ⋯ Πέντε ⋯σσκονιτεί (with lengthening of τά in arsi) can begin a pentameter or another hexameter.

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.

The Olympian faith was the religion of the poetry of Hesiod and J. Homer, including the Homeric Hymns, and upon this poetry the thought of all Greeks in the archaic and early classical ages was founded: ‘All men begin their learning with Homer,’ says Xenophanes. Herodotus makes it clear that any Greek of his own day considered Homer and Hesiod canonical:

Whence each of the gods arose, whether all always were, what their individual forms are, the Greeks did not know until the day before yesterday, so to speak. For I think that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years older than me and no more. And they are the ones who constructed divine genealogies for the Greeks, gave the gods their epithets, determined their spheres and functions, and indicated their forms (ii. 53).