Vergil's parade of heroes, a panegyric that becomes a threnody, is an odd blend. It is framed by an elaborate quasi-philosophical eschatology, whose relation to the parade is problematical. Much of the passage puts itself forward as high panegyric, yet certain sections are at variance with that tendency. The lament for Marcellus (868-86) is most commonly remarked upon; other passages are equally, or more, anomalous. Still, the massive self-assurance of the picture of the underworld has its own imposing conviction, so that although the disparateness of the contributing elements has been documented often enough, few have felt the need to dispute the question of whether the blend coheres as a single statement. One noteworthy reader of Vergil was, however, compelled to give minute attention to the implications of the historical vision in Book 6. Incidentally throughout the Bellum Ciuile, but especially in his own sixth book, with the vision of hell called forth by the agency of the witch Erictho, Lucan provides a provocative reading of Aeneid 6. His insights will be exploited in the discussion as a valuable stimulus to reflection and re-assessment; an appendix will give a more systematic account of his re-interpretation of Vergil.

‘Then babble, babble words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three…” Beckett.

In this paper, I intend to discuss three central Hellenistic poems: Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus, Theocritus' Idyll 11 and Idyll 7. Each of these poems holds a privileged position in the discussion of the Hellenistic era as well as in each poet's corpus. I am certainly not offering here what could be called complete or exhaustive readings of these works – that would be far beyond the scope of a paper of this length; rather, I want to focus on a key point of interpretation in each poem. In the Hymn to Zeus, I am going to investigate the language of truth; in Idyll 11, the poem's structure of frame and song; and in Idyll 7, the poem's programmatic force. There are two aims in this strategy: the first is to investigate the topic of the ‘poet's voice’ in Hellenistic poetry. The three poems and the three topics of my discussion are linked in the concern for how a poet places himself within his poetry – ‘Who speaks?’, as Roland Barthes put it. The interest in poetry and how a poet relates to his poetry is a constant and fascinating theme through these works, and each of the topics I have chosen to discuss will illuminate this interest from a different aspect. Secondly, through a consideration of these three key moments of interpretation, I shall be arguing for an increased awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hellenistic poetry. I intend to show how critics' approaches and decisions with regard to these nodes of interpretation, which may be regarded as paradigmatic, have led to a worrying oversimplification of Hellenistic poetry. I hope to show in some measure how the intellectual complexity which makes these poems so hard to read and to criticize, can also be a source of their continuing interest and delight for us.

Hyginus, Fabula 274.10-13:

antiqui obstetrices non habuerunt, unde mulieres uerecundia ductae interierant. nam Athenienses cauerunt ne quis seruus aut femina artem medicinam disceret. Agnodice quaedam puella uirgo concupiuit medicinam discere, quae cum concupisset, demptis capillis habitu uirili se Herophilo cuidam tradidit in disciplinam. quae cum artem didicisset, et feminam laborantem audisset ab inferiore parte, ueniebat ad eam, quae cum credere se noluisset, aestimans uirum esse, illa tunica sublata ostendit se feminam esse, et ita eas curabat. quod cum uidissent medici se ad feminas non admitti, Agnodicen accusare coeperunt, quod dicerent eum glabrum esse et corruptorem earum, et illas simulare imbecillitatem. quod cum Areopagitae consedissent, Agnodicen damnare coeperunt; quibus Agnodice tunicam alleuauit et se ostendit feminam esse. et ualidius medici accusare coeperunt, quare tum feminae principes ad iudicium uenerunt et dixerunt, Vos coniuges non estis sed hostes, quia quae salutem nobis inuenit eam damnatis. tunc Athenienses legem emendarunt, ut ingenuae artem medicinam discerent. (ed. Rose)

These words were written by a Roman eques just after he had taken part in the funeral of Livia's son Drusus in 9 B.C.; they derive from a poem known conventionally as the Epicedion Drusi or Consolatio ad Liviam. Drusus, consul in that year, had died of an illness on campaign east of the Rhine; for his successes against the Germans he had been about to receive various honours at Rome, including a triumph. Among these one of the more outstanding was the banquet for the principal women of the city which his mother and step-sister (Julia, Augustus' daughter by Livia) were to give in his honour; a celebration which they had previously organized for Drusus' brother Tiberius, to commemorate the pacification of Pannonia.

The Phaedrus falls by design into two distinct movements. The first movement includes three set speeches, one a written speech which claims to be by Lysias, the other two given impromptu by Socrates; the second then uses these speeches as the basis for a general discussion of rhetoric and of the value of writing as a medium of communication and teaching. Whatever else we may want to say about the structure of the dialogue, this much is clear enough. But there is a problem. So powerful is the impact of Socrates' second speech, with its eloquent account of divine love and the peregrinations of the immortal soul, that everything which follows it is likely to appear to any ordinary reader as mostly dull and insignificant by comparison. If Socrates suggests, as he does at 265c-d, that the only fully serious aspect of the speech was as a demonstration of the method of collection and division, the rest being ‘really playfully done, by way of amusement’, that looks merely disingenuous; for it is hard not to feel, with Ficino, that it is in this main speech of Socrates the ‘principal mysteries’ of the Phaedrus are contained. Yet if this is so, the dialogue is intolerably misshapen.

In Memory of Moses and Mary Finley

Like many of its brothers in ambiguity, ‘the Black Hunter’ has a double birthday. Like the First international, it is a French child educated in England. As ‘Le Chasseur Noir’, this paper was first given in Paris, on 6 February 1967, at the Association pour l'Encouragement des Etudes Grecques, and, a year later (15 February 1968), in Cambridge at the Philological Society. I owe it to the truth to say that in Paris the audience remained mute. In Cambridge, on the contrary, there was a lively discussion, not only among the classicists but also with no less an anthropologist than Edmund Leach, now Sir Edumnd. A few months later the paper was first published in Cambridge, on the initiative of the late Denys Page, in a translation by Janet Lloyd and with a dedication to the late Moses Finley, and a little later in Paris. One may easily note here a structural opposition in the form of a chiasmus: in Cambridge, in the University where eminent classicists – Jane Harrison, Francis MacDonald Cornford – were also anthropologists, it was in a purely philological publication, the Proceedings, that the paper was published. In Paris, where the anthropological tradition of classical studies remained, with Louis Gernet and Henri Jeanmaire, and, more recently, with Jean-Pierre Vernant, outside the University proper, it was in the Annales that the paper was published.

Nine years being nobody's idea of a significant anniversary, it will be understood that there is no celebratory intent in my returning here – with the kind permission of the Editors – to The Ideology of the Athenian Metic. Nor does it represent an author's peevish response to reviewers' nit-pickings, just or unjust. Rather, two purposes are to be served. The first is simply to bring together some of the less inconsequential addenda and corrigenda which any scholarly work (good or bad) generates, on the basis that the result might be a Nachtrag of some service to users of the book, and others; Section I comprises a series of twenty such points, listed in the order in which they arise in IAM and referred to by its pagination. Section II then re-opens a much broader issue – the Athenian metoikia in the third century – on which IAM could, and arguably should, have said more.