It is difficult to prove the Unitarian view of a single author of the Iliad. The old-fashioned Unitarian scholars of this country, who paid little attention to analytical scholarship, had no doubts. They would just assume one poet; and all the extraordinary qualities of the Iliad could be discussed as the achievement of Homer. But simultaneously, in Germany, even more intelligent scholars were carving up the Iliad, arguing from inconsistencies in the story, or linguistic oddities, that what we have is the work of two or more poets, separated in time. Against this, the Unitarians suddenly seem rather simple-minded, as if they were arguing subjectively, avoiding the difficult questions, saying in effect, ‘I like it, and I wish it to have been the work of a single poet, and therefore it was’. My title may therefore cause a slight sinking of the heart. Am I going to say how wonderful Homer is, and give a list of the features that I think unbelievably brilliant, arguing from them that here we have the work of a single mind? The answer is no. I hope to present a more reasoned argument, based on certain features of the content and structure of the poem.

The network of associations of the word Amazon still plays a part in the shorthand of modern discourse. Its connotations may vary from a slightly comic praise of sporting excellence in women to underlying insinuations that Amazons are not quite feminine. When applied by politicians and journalists to the women in the Peace Camp at Greenham Common during the 1980s, for example, the epithet Amazon carried the implication that these women rejected men and had developed a society apart (therefore (sịc) they must be subversives, lesbians, communists, hippies – etc. etc.). Modern usage perhaps emphasizes the unusual or even threatening associations; Amazons are, for whatever reason, outside the ‘normal’ parameters of life-style and achievements. Ancient usage presupposed an additional element, Amazons as a subject for artistic and poetic interest. The reasons why this was so do much to explain how and why the image of the Amazons communicated certain associations and how these in turn relate to underlying assumptions about the framework of Greek society and its values.

In his book, The Roman Empire (Fontana History of the Ancient World Series), Colin Wells mentions incomes and the cost of living in first-century Italy. He concludes that a wage of 4 sesterces a day was an ‘absolute maximum’ and goes on to comment that ‘it is hard to tell whether the discrepancy between the really rich and the labouring poor was greater in some third-world countries today, or in Victorian England… To prove his point Wells gives £300,000 per annum for the Marquess of Bute as an example of an enormous income in the nineteenth century, though he does not tell us what the poor would have earned then.

In the brief introduction to this speech in his recent commentary, S. Usher observes: ‘Little logical order can be discerned, though the speech has a clearly-defined prooemium in which the main ingredients of the speech are already present.’ There is an element of overstatement in this assessment. The organization of the speech as a whole follows the habitual practice of Lysias, who favours a neat division between sections. Thus we have prooemium (§§1–3), prothesis (§§4–5), proofs (§§5–20; τὴν μὲν οὖν in §5 should begin a new paragraph, since there is a clear break as the speaker moves from a summary of the factual case against him to the first point in his refutation), epilogos (§§21–27). There is naturally no narrative section, since the hearing is concerned with status, not events. Within the proof section the speaker tackles each of the allegations against him separately, wealth (§§5ff.), health (§§10ff.), and bad character (§§15ff.).2 Nonetheless, Usher's description of the speech is true to the extent that the progress of thought in the proof section is. often rambling and disjointed. However, a closer examination of the speech shows that this seemingly undisciplined and unstructured movement is the product of a logical ordering principle, which has its origin in the nature of the speaker's case. To appreciate the rationale behind this structure it will be necessary to preface our discussion with an assessment of the strength of the case.

To every man his own Aeneid. Having spent the last six summers translating it as a Penguin Classic, I was delighted when the editors of Greece & Rome and Vergilius asked me to write a piece for them about this experience. The translator takes millions of decisions on points of detail. It must be useful, for him at least, to look back and ask what he has learned about the poem during this special relationship. I think of four points, the first of which I shall not discuss in this article:

(i) the political purpose of the Aeneid;

(ii) Virgil's gift for characterization, particularly of minor characters and particularly by means of their utterances;

(iii) the intensely rhetorical tone of the poem;

(iv) its passion.

Helen Waddell, in her charming Medieval Latin Lyrics, surely a book which inspired many a young person, trained in the classics, to become a ‘convert’ to the middle ages, described the collection of poems known as the Appendix Virgiliana, as coming ‘down through the Middle Ages bobbing at a painter's end in the mighty wash of the Aeneid’. This same description can, I think, be prettily applied to the Virgil scholia, the humble and often nameless attempts of innumerable scholars to elucidate the master's poems; notes and glosses sometimes wise and often banal, which exist, not like other literature as an end in themselves, but solely as a means towards a better understanding of Virgil.

Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the elder Pliny. We all have a nodding acquaintance with the Natural History, but few wish to pursue the relationship to the level of intimacy. Critics who care for the purity of Latin prose take a particularly dim view of him. Eduard Norden's verdict in Die antike Kunstprosa (i.314) is much cited: ‘His work belongs, from the stylistic point of view, to the very worst which we have’. This negative judgement was firmly endorsed by Frank Goodyear in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature: