Until recently this was a question that was not asked. It was not asked because there was a prior question that was asked, and that received a negative answer: Did peasant proprietors survive in significant numbers in the late Republic or early Empire?

The consensus of opinion has been that they were always to be found, but that they were relatively few. As the traditional rural economy of which they had been the characteristic feature gave way under the impact of new economic forces, they became a residual phenomenon. Moreover, this development had already occurred by the late second century B.C.

It is to be noted that peasant proprietors, small farmers working the land they owned, rather than free cultivators as a whole, have usually been the object of inquiry. The roles of tenancy in the late Republic and of wage labour in all periods have rarely been positively evaluated. Again, the idea that small ownercultivators, tenant-farmers and day-labourers were overlapping categories in ancient Italy has been little developed in the scholarly literature.

As is well known, the first edition of Lucan's De bello civili that offered a critical apparatus in the modern sense of the word was Carl Hosius' edition, first published in 1892, then revised and reprinted twice, the last time in 1913. It is the editions of Hosius and Bourgery-Ponchont that give us the fullest information about MSS readings. The most important edition of Lucan in this century, that published by Housman in 1926, contains, on the other hand, only a selection of readings taken over from Hosius. In his preface as well as in his apparatus Housman is eager on any occasion to demonstrate the unreliability of the codex Montepessulanus, M, the favourite of his predecessor Hosius, and a scholar who has recently re-examined an essential part of the tradition of Lucan says about him: ‘The slighting of M and the MSS in general was Housman's peculiar contribution to the study of the transmission of Lucan's text. Rather than attempt to understand the nature of the evidence, he preferred to ignore it. It would be relevant to ask an editor with such an attitude why he bothers to provide an apparatus criticus.’ These hard words come from Harold C. Gotoff, who in 1971 published the monograph The transmission of the text of Lucan in the ninth century. Gotoff's book will certainly give valuable help to a future editor of Lucan as far as the composition of the critical apparatus is concerned, but not at all, I think, to the same degree when it comes to the constitution of the text. This may perhaps sound somewhat peculiar, but I will try to make clear what I mean.

Thucydides' account of faction in the Peloponnesian War (3.82–83) is perhaps more often admired than appreciated; and indeed its structure and wording have not always satisfied commentators. Two kinds of question raised by the passage may be identified:

(1) What does it say and what is it about? We need to examine it as a coherent train of thought, and at the same time – for it is plainly not a mere digression or show-piece – as an essential part of Thucydides' whole work. Both the historian's practice and his programme suggest that the reader should do this. For in putting his thoughts in so highly generalized a form, he invites us to apply them widely. Even when they occur in speeches, where a fallible or even dishonest orator is trying to persuade an audience, general statements may be thus widely applicable; how much more when they come directly from the historian. We should also be ready to consider whether what are presented as remarks on stasis may not apply beyond situations of stasis. For war and faction as twin causes of violent death are closely connected in the proem to Thucydides' whole work (1.23.2); and 3.82.1–2, which echo the proem (1.22.4), bring out that the growth of stasis was a natural consequence of war and that in stasis, as in war, human nature is revealed.

quae tuo ueniunt ero,
quanta gaudia, quae uaga
nocte, quae medio die
gaudeat! sed abit dies.

In PCPS n.s.24 (1978), 99 Professor Nisbet emended medio to emerito, and offered a new interpretation of the lines in which the time of day specified will now be, as he admits, roughly the same in each quae clause. Two points may be worth making about this proposal.

First, the fundamental necessity for change has not been demonstrated. As to the sense of the lines as they appear in the MS. tradition, Professor Nisbet says that mention of love-making between husband and wife in the afternoon ‘has no place in an epithalamium, a serious celebration of married love’. How do we know this? We have only one complete epithalamium in republican Latin poetry, and this is it. It is not therefore possible to say with any confidence what the genre does or does not allow at this stage of its development, except in so far as this poem casts light on the matter. And in this poem we read, not many lines after these, of Torquatus's concubinus. We are told that the concubinus attends Torquatus on his visits to his country estates (136f. ‘sordent tibi uilicae’), and furthermore that Torquatus had quite a developed taste in pueri delicati (141–3 ‘diceris male te’).

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the influence of contemporary Roman mime on Augustan elegy. I shall present evidence and arguments for believing that the elegists exploited that genre directly and deliberately, to provide themes and situations in their poetry. Before, however, considering the influence of specific mime-subjects on specific elegies, I shall show that contemporary mime is precisely the sort of literary production which we should expect to find exploited in elegy. This apologia for mime is a necessary preliminary, because of the entrenched prejudice against the genre as a trivial sub-literary form of entertainment, far beneath the notice of such highly sophisticated poets as the elegists. This prejudice arises from a simple semantic flaw: the term mimus, μĩμος, has always been used to cover a multitude of different types of production. Under this general title, works of a high literary quality have been categorised without discrimination alongside strip-tease and even less intellectual displays. In consequence of this, the higher forms of mime have suffered unfairly from the attacks directed by moralists against the corrupting effects of the lower forms.

It is a familiar fact that the religious tradition of Republican Rome did not depend on overt coercion of the citizen to maintain itself and its rituals. The censor did have powers to discipline those he found wanting in dutifulness towards the sacra; Cato once removed the public horse from one Veturius partly on religious grounds, though partly because he was too fat to ride it. In the courts, irreligion on the defendant's part was one of the most familiar themes of abuse; Cicero never underestimated the emotional impact of religious prejudice in his day. But the only formal charge of irreligion we hear of is that of incestum with a Vestal Virgin and, with that uncommon exception, there is nothing at Rome which corresponds even to the Greek asebeia proceedings, let alone to the persecutions or inquisitions of later Christian Europe. This does not prove that religious obligations were not felt or imposed through other forms of social pressure, but the apparatus of the State and the State's religious authorities seem not to have been directly concerned.

In Lucian's Symposium, one of the wedding guests is a philosopher and another is a grammatikos. The grammatikos provides a bad elegiac epithalamium; the philosopher, who is called Ion, improves the occasion with a speech in which he declares that pederasty offers the best way of life, and the system of communal wives, as recommended in Plato's Republic, is the next best thing.

This fantasy, of course, tells us nothing about what went on at weddings. Lucian's main motive is literary parody, of Plutarch's Erotikos or something of the kind. But it may serve to recall something of which we have evidence enough in Greek rhetoric, namely the practice of delivering speeches of some literary pretention at high-class weddings. The educated classes of the cities of the eastern provinces evidently cherished this habit: a display of culture, as well as of wealth, was admired, and elaborate orations took their place, alongside abundance of food and wine, music and song, elaborately decorated bridal chambers and beds, as concomitants of a wedding that was to do both families credit. This is true of the period of the ‘Second Sophistic’, and of its fourth-century and early Byzantine continuations. How far the practice was common before, say, the Antonine age is much less clear.

The relationship between poetry and the visual arts is seldom close and never simple. But special difficulties attend the study of it in the eighth century before Christ in Greece, when evidence is not only in excessively short supply but, when it does come, is almost by definition ambiguous. On the whole question of the interpretation of Late Geometric vase-painting and other eighth-century art, there are well-established opposing positions: each new discovery finds a different interpretation on the part of what may be called the optimists – those who seek for correspondences between the Homeric epics and the visual arts – and of the sceptics, who habitually argue that there is no evidence for anything of the kind. Each party appears to have found an outlet for the promulgation of its view, inasmuch as many general or semi-popular accounts of Geometric and other early Greek art present it as having a major mythological content derived from epic poetry; while many closer scholarly studies, deploying an array of iconographical learning and strict logic, nowadays reach the opposite conclusion, that there is little or no narrative content of any kind, mythological or otherwise, and no significant contact with epic, until the end of the Geometric period.