Stock-keeping in the Mediterranean has to be adapted to the fundamental characteristics of the Mediterranean climate (mild wet winters and hot dry summers) and to the distinct variations in soil type and plant growth at different altitudes. The natural vegetation of the coastal regions is dominated by plants that can withstand the summer drought (when temperatures average 70–80 degrees F) such as the olive, holm oak, cork oak, and macchia scrub. The lowland pastures are green and succulent from autumn to spring, when temperatures average 45–55 degrees F and rainfall is relatively abundant, but are withered and of little nutritional value in the summer. In the interior mountains of Spain, Italy, and Greece, average January temperatures are below freezing and snow covers the highest regions through the winter months, but there is extensive grazing of excellent quality from the late spring to early autumn.

Our situation with respect to Plato is paradoxical. Here is a philosopher who emphatically insisted on truth and repudiated persuasion. And yet the community of Plato's admirers finds itself in the predicament that persuasion (or plausibility) seems all it can get: there is not nor was there nor will there be one way to read Plato. There are only temporary agreements among a number of scholars who share certain basic assumptions. And it does not look as if there is anything one can really do about this situation, not for any deconstructionist reasons, but because Plato's dialogues themselves seem so elusive that one cannot help thinking that he intentionally left us with puzzles without the necessary clues that would guide us to a decisive final picture. So we always go on puzzling anew ….

Satire is not ‘about’ women (or even ‘Woman’). But it is tied into social discourse on gender. If you ask me, feminism has it knocked into a cocked hat.

1. Roman, Human, Man:

The important thing is to have said I AM I, or even I AM AN I THAT IS IN WITH THE CROWD THAT LIKES TO SAY I AM LIKE THIS

It is not, I suppose, difficult to state the principle that no text can simply report, image, reflect or document the ‘position’ of women in culture. Nor would it be difficult to show that all writings, ancient or modern, are implicated in this truth. I feel it as I write, feel it as you read this.

In the first place, texts always do both more and less than ‘report’ – about anything. There could not be a text recognisable as a text which just offered information indifferently as to its recipients, impersonally so far as its authorship is concerned, neutrally in terms of its role within the social, political, cultural discourses which empower it to speak.

As the sun rises over the heights, a band of pirates cross a ridge near the mouth of the Nile and look out to sea. No prospect of booty meets their gaze, which travels to the shore. A merchantman is moored there, laden but unattended. The shore itself is strewn with bodies, some dead, others still writhing, in the aftermath of a feast that turned into a pitched battle. The pirates approach but are struck by a sight yet stranger. A girl sits on a rock, a girl whose beauty suggests a goddess. On her head is a wreath, over her shoulder a quiver; a bow supports her left arm; her right elbow rests on her thigh, and her chin on her right hand, as she stares at a youth who lies wounded and gasping at her feet. Only because he still draws breath, she tells him, has she not used on herself the sword that lies across her knee. So saying, up she springs, and the pirates take cover from her tall figure, made more awesome by the rattle of her quiver and the sunlight reflected from her golden raiment. Who can she be? Perhaps Artemis, Isis, or a mad priestess on a murderous rampage.

Reunited after nearly twenty years' separation, Odysseus and Penelope retire at last to bed, οἱ μὲν ἔπειτα | ἀσπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο (Od. 23.295–6). This, we are told in the scholia, was for the two greatest Homeric scholars of antiquity the τέλος; of the Odyssey: τοῦτο τέλος τῆς Όδυσσείας φησὶν Άρίσταρχος καὶ Άρισιοφάνης (H, M, Q), Άρισιοφάνης δὲ καὶ Άρίσταρχος πέρας τῆς Όδυσσείας τοῦτο ποιοῦνται (M, V, Vind. 133). The interpretation of this testimony poses one of the most important problems of Homeric scholarship; Bethe did not exaggerate its significance when he wrote ‘Es hängt von der Auffassung dieses Scholions die Beurteilung unserer Homerüberlieferung überhaupt ab und mit ihr die Frage, was der Kritik gegenüber der Ilias und Odyssee erlaubt ist’. (‘The interpretation of this scholium is of vital significance for our view of the transmission of the Homeric text as a whole, and for the question of the proper limits of criticism where the Iliad and Odyssey are concerned’.) Here, as all too often, we are frustrated by the abbreviated condition of the Odyssey-scholia which, as the poem draws to a close, reflect in their increasing concision the diminishing energies of those to whom we owe our knowledge of ancient Homeric scholarship, Prima facie, the note tells us that Aristophanes and Aristarchus took 23.296 as the limit of the Odyssey; this is commonly understood to mean that they judged the Epilogue to be unhomeric, but this interpretation is not free from difficulty, and some have maintained that the note represents aesthetic criticism.

The Ion is one of Euripides' most dazzling and puzzling plays. Poised on the boundary between the sacred and the sceptical, the mysterious and the mundane, the mythic and the realistic, and, as so many have noted, between the tragic and the comic, the drama dips and twists and turns and turns and turns again in a continuing series of theatrical tours de force. The birds who swoop down in the opening scene and intervene again in the most important moment of the plot at Ion's banquet might well exemplify these paradoxes of which I speak.

Defilers of the sacred temple dedications with unwanted offerings of their own (106–7, 176) and nesting in the eaves of the roof, crudely ‘making offspring’, no doubt, as Ion suspects them of doing (172–5), they are at the same time bearers of sacred messages (phēmas) to mortals from the gods (180–1), oracular portents (oiōnoi) both generic and particular (1191, 1333, 377) which will prove their worth when, later at the banquet, one of the birds drinks the poisoned wine meant for Ion and by its own lifeless form reveals the lethal plot to its interpreter (1196–211).