Critical comment on the end of the Odyssey has centred on a two-fold question: first, is Book 24, together with the last 76 lines of Book 23, an interpolation? And secondly, does this final section of the poem add significantly to the content or meaning of the poem as a whole, whether or not its originality can be established? Two of Homer's early critics, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, are reported by the scholiasts to have placed the ending of the poem at Book 23, line 296. However, the terms used for ‘ending’ (πέρας, τέλος) are subject to varying interpretations. It is uncertain whether these expressions indicate that the text in its entirety ends at this point, or simply that the substance of the narrative ends here, in which case what follows is inessential. Recent commentators have carried on the controversy; however, despite some forceful arguments to the contrary, the dominant consensus now favours the Unitarian position. The present discussion will attempt to reinforce this position and specifically to explore some ramifications of the second Nekyia which have not yet been fully dealt with.

One of the most striking dramatic features of the climax of Homer's Odyssey is the lengthy postponement of the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. The sequence of scenes which lead finally to recognition begins at 17.508, when Penelope asks the swineherd Eumaios to summon the disguised Odysseus so that she may question him about her husband. But it is only at 23.205, after many diversions, that she breaks down in tears at the final realization that Odysseus is really home.

In a well-known article appearing in 1967, E. L. Harrison examines Plato's manipulation of Thrasymachos in the first book of the Republic. Harrison looks into certain peculiarities in the argument between Thrasymachos and Socrates and explores motives that may have led Plato to have Thrasymachos develop his doctrine in this particular fashion. Though Harrison's conclusions are widely discussed and frequently accepted, it strikes me as interesting that little scholarly attention has been focussed on equally striking features of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias. For I believe it can be shown that Plato's presentation of Callicles contains numerous peculiarities of its own, that the powerful, vigorously argued doctrine of immoralism enunciated by Callicles in a celebrated portion of the dialogue is actually infected with glaring weaknesses. I do not believe that these weaknesses have been satisfactorily accounted for, nor has the possibility been explored that Plato could have put them there intentionally. The purpose of this paper, then, is threefold: (a) to examine the nature of these flaws in Callicles' position; (b) to demonstrate their apparently odd and gratuitous character; and (c) to explore possible reasons Plato may have had for incorporating them into his presentation of Callicles in the Gorgias.

It may be argued that some inconsistencies in Thucydides are due to impartiality, to the prevalence of straight reportage based on available evidence, whereas narrative guided and coloured by opinions and judgements would more probably be consistent. The present writer, however, is more impressed by the view that many inconsistencies are due to imperfect integration into continuous narrative of different or even opposing attitudes.

The Puritan ethic insists that work is both necessary and virtuous. But if automation makes work unnecessary, is it still virtuous? Indeed, if work is in short supply, may not industry actually be vicious, since it would mean taking more than one's fair share of the work available to the community as a whole, a new sort of πλεονεξία? A letter appeared in the national press recently which said: ‘Work is virtuous only when it is necessary, and much of what was done in the past and for which people were trained, no longer needs to be done. We already have butter mountains, beef mountains, barley mountains, lakes of milk, surfeits of electricity generating capacity, of shipping, of coal and so on.… Twenty thousand miners could be retired tomorrow on £10,000 a year and there would still be a surplus of £50,000,000 from the quarter of a billion pounds we spend on keeping open uneconomic pits. Rather than see these pits close, Mr Scargill wants to condemn his members in perpetuity to that unpleasant job, when they could have the money without doing the work. I see nothing virtuous in a miner doing that sort of work for its own sake.’

For all its swashbuckling image, classical mercenary soldiering was, on the whole, as subject to the discipline of practical economics as less glamorous-sounding pursuits. Current economic and political considerations dictated whether and why a citizen would become a mercenary; what and how he would be paid; what negotiating power he possessed; whether a ruler would use mercenaries or his own citizenry to fight his wars, and the necessity for a recruiting centre or ‘mercenary market’ where prospective employers and employees could meet and strike a bargain.

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

Scholars have long recognized that the story of Dido in the Aeneidis structured like a Greek tragedy and that several of Aristotle's concepts in the Poetics can profitably be applied to it. Here I return to an old question, to which no answer yet given has commanded general assent: if Dido is a tragic heroine, what, in Aristotelian terms, is her hamartia? I shall argue that Aristotle's model of tragedy provides a useful blueprint for gauging both Dido's moral responsibility for her downfall and the moral and emotional response to it which Virgil expects from his readers. These matters have indeed been very extensively discussed by very distinguished scholars, but in many areas of classical literature – and nowhere more than in the Aeneid – modern criticism has become so sophisticated and so attuned to the detection of subtleties such as irony, ambiguity, and ambivalence that it sometimes misses the significance of what is simple and obvious. Aristotle's model of tragedy, while not a refined critical tool, helps us to isolate some basic truths about the tragedy of Dido.

The first flight of Harpalus is an enigma, more so than his second flight taking place some ten years later in 324, the motives for which are more apparent.

The relationship between Tiberius and the senate as a corporate body has attracted frequent attention. That between Augustus and the senate, on the other hand, has suffered comparative neglect. Explanations of the contrast quickly suggest themselves. Not only did Tiberius prove the more willing of the two emperors to participate at sessions; his relationship with the senate is also much better documented, since it forms one of the principal themes of Tacitus' account of the reign in his Annals. But although the relationship which Tiberius determined to establish did have its own distinctive character from the outset, it is important to recognize that it was developed from a foundation painstakingly laid by Augustus. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to trace the nature and growth of Augustus' relationship with the senate, and to assess briefly the significance for the corporate body of Tiberius' different attitude.

Critics have been fairly unanimous in their assessment of Menander's concerns. F. H. Sandbach asserts that ‘the authors of New Comedy shut their eyes, generally speaking, to politics as a whole’. He writes of Menander that ‘the politics of his time were far too grim and frustrated to make a suitable subject for an audience that wished to be entertained on a public holiday.… It is within domestic and private life that he found the subjects for his comedy’. T. B. L. Webster agrees that recent political events were ‘too painful to be remembered in comedy’. E. W. Handley believes that in Dyskolos Menander's ‘basic point is an ethical and not a political one’; considering the possibility that ‘the thought and moral tone are politically inspired’, he dismisses the idea that Menander was a propagandist. Michael Anderson recognizes that Dyskolos, as an ‘ethical’ comedy in Aristotelian terms, must relate the behaviour of individuals to society, but he does not go on to relate the play to the particular society for which Menander wrote.

The Bellum Civile is a poem great enough to appeal to readers in different periods for different reasons. Thus Dante hugely admired Lucan (quello grande poeta) while not sharing his political views, since he himself favoured a universal monarchy in which the Emperor in possessing all would be free from all appetite, and, therefore, just. Lucan's portrait of Cato so impressed him that in the Convivio, in an allegorical exposition of B.C. 2.326ff., Cato is taken as a figure for God, and in the Divine Comedy he is the guardian at the foot of Purgatory, although he had been a pagan, a suicide, and an opponent of Julius Caesar whom Dante favoured (Brutus and Cassius are with Judas in the mouths of Satan). Nevertheless it is likely that many of Lucan's admirers have been attracted above all by the poet's espousal of libertas and hatred for autocracy. This must account for Shelley describing the Bellum Civile as ‘a poem as it appears to me of wonderful genius, and transcending Virgil’, a judgement that he conceded would be ‘no less unpopular than some of the others I entertain’, and may also help to explain Milton's interest in Lucan. However, in this century the idea has been widespread that the Bellum Civile is not in any real sense a ‘Republican’ poem. There are signs that this view may be hardening into something like an orthodoxy, according to which the poem, if properly understood, and at least as originally conceived, is in no sense a poem of political protest or opposition, and contains no serious criticism of the Principate as such, even if parts of the later books are coloured by Lucan's personal resentment of Nero (it is sometimes even argued that Lucan intended to finish his epic with praise of the imperial peace and of the Principate as a restored Republic). Lucan's political views are thus taken to be (behind the rhetorical fireworks) approximately the same as those of his uncle Seneca. I shall here consider the principal arguments adduced in the debate, and shall indicate briefly why the question is an important one, even for readers primarily interested in the Bellum Civile as poetry.

Of the twenty-nine series in the Plautine corpus, seven may legitimately be called senex amator – that is, an old man who for some reason contracts a passion for a young girl and who, in varying degrees, attempts to satisfy this passion. They are Demaenetus (Asinaria), Philoxenus and Nicobulus (Bacchides), Demipho (Cistellaria), Lysidamus (Casino), Demipho (Mercator), and Antipho (Stichus). Two others – Periplectomenos (Miles) and Daemones (Rudens) – still, perhaps, feel the sap rising, but they keep their instincts within acceptable limits, and both are regarded as senes lepidt, a description which usually denotes approval of a character.

‘A prodigious memory, a facile talent for versification, a cheerful and kindly optimism, and an avoidance of all that was serious or profound or disquieting’ – so Professor Robert Browning not unjustly sums up the poetic character of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. He was a professor of Latin, and it shows in his work. That is not surprising, since it was on his professional and professorial skill as teacher and rhetorician that his whole career was founded. It was by displaying proficiency in Latin Prose and Verse Composition that he rose to provincial governorships and to the consulate, and to the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian. It is to this last circumstance that we owe his best poem, the Mosella, a celebration of the beauties of the river Moselle. In A.d. 367 the Imperial court had been established at Trier in Gaul; and Ausonius was required to accompany the Emperor Valentinian, with his pupil, on his German campaigns. These, continuing a policy inaugurated by Valentinian's predecessors, were directed towards the consolidation of a Roman presence on the German bank of the Rhine, with the ultimate object of incorporating the Germans in the Empire and setting up a bulwark against further barbarian encroachments. It is against this political and military background that the Mosella must be read. It was clearly intended as propaganda. ‘The purpose of the poem was to inspire the Gauls with confidence in the renewed peace and security.’ They stood in need of such reassurance, for the recent past in Gaul had been far from secure.