The more I study Aeschylus the more clearly I perceive how much he tells us of his characters. The exhibition of character is not his main purpose, and he spends less space upon it than Sophocles or Euripides, not to mention more modern dramatists, but his touches are so sure that the final picture is surprisingly complete. In one case this is generally admitted. Few will dispute that Clytaemnestra is one of the most vivid and striking figures in all tragic drama. But she is an exception, and Aeschylus shows her to us more fully than any of his figures except the still enigmatic Prometheus. (Eteocles in the Septem makes as many speeches as Clytaemnestra, but they are less revealing.) In most of his plays the speeches allotted to the characters are so scanty, and so much dictated by the requirements of the action, that one has to know the play very well before one perceives how much the spare touches of character reveal. That point was only impressed on me when I started to learn the Agamemnon by heart. Then I really grasped it and will try to illustrate it.

Agamemnon himself is the best illustration to begin with, for he is less complex than his wife. He conforms to a well-known type, which most of us have met. He combines an imposing façade with inner weakness. Aeschylus, it is true, does not directly mention his appearance. That we learn from Homer (Iliad iii. 166 f.); and it is noteworthy how close Aeschylus keeps to Homer in depicting Agamemnon.

One of the more interesting features of Terence's dramatic work is the evidence in it of frequent conflict between the dramatist and the dramatic conventions of his day. To some instances of this conflict, represented by criticisms, explicit or implicit, of convention, attention has been drawn by Sir Gilbert Norwood in his book on The Art of Terence. But even he has perhaps not followed up the fuller implications of Terence's critical attitude in determining the nature of his drama. My purpose in this article is to show that there was one convention against which, above all others, Terence consistently rebelled, namely, the convention of the slave who manages the action; and I would even go so far as to suggest that his success as a dramatic artist is, to a large extent, dependent upon the way in which he solved the problem of the slave.

The heroic age of Greece, like the heroic age of western Europe, practised trial by combat. For a combat to be judicial (a) it must be single combat, (b) it must be of numinous import, as evidenced among the Greeks by a connexion with divination in the form of oracle or prophecy, and (c) there must be a dispute the issue of which is to depend on the result of the combat. Not all single combat is judicial, for such a combat may be fought simply for honour and not to decide a dispute, as when Hector and Ajax fight on a challenge of Hector's to the best of the Achaeans to decide which shall have the honour of killing the other and bearing his arms away in triumph (Iliad H 77–83).

The institution of judicial combat is illustrated by a golden passage in the Iliad in Book Γ describing the duel between Menelaus and Paris. The Achaeans and the Trojans agree, after a challenge by Paris, that Menelaus and Paris shall fight in single combat, the terms being that if Paris kills Menelaus he is to retain Helen and her possessions, while if Menelaus kills Paris, then the Trojans are to return Helen and her possessions and pay the Achaeans a proper recompense. After performing the due rites Agamemnon formally recites these terms and threatens to fight to the end if the Trojans should break their word. Hector and Odysseus mark out a space and settle by lot which of the two combatants is to throw his spear first, while the Trojan and Achaean spectators pray to Zeus for death to the man who is responsible for bringing all the trouble on them.

‘In the study of history’, says Livy in the preface to his work, ‘the most salutary and profitable advantage to the reader is that he sees before him examples of every kind set out in their true light. From them he may choose for his own benefit and that of his country what to imitate and what to avoid.’ Whether Livy's moralistic attitude to history is legitimate or not, the fact that he always has a moral purpose clearly in mind lends a unity to his work which bears a compelling appearance of truth. All events, all actions are recounted, interpreted, and judged according to a single norm: how far they reflect and illustrate the glory of ancient Rome or the decline of his countrymen from the Golden Age of times past. It is the purpose of this article to examine the part accorded to women in this scheme, and the history will be judged not as a factual record but, as Livy would have expected, as a work of art and moral instruction.

InGreece and Rome, vol. xvii, No. 51, pp. 128–9, Mr. E. Laughton, referring to pp. 140 ff. of Mr. S. A. Handford's The Latin Subjunctive, put forward Cicero, Att. 3. 20. 1 (‘tibi venire in mentem certo scio quae vita esset nostra, quae suavitas, quae dignitas’) as an example of the imperfect subjunctive in an indirect question in primary sequence, where a preceding imperfect or pluperfect tense has not been employed in mitigation of the violation of sequence. In vol. xviii, No. 54, p. 138, Mr. Handford replies that esset probably means ‘would be’, as Tyrrell took it in Cicero in his Letters, and adds ‘so we are still without a clear example of imperfect subjunctive used in a primary sequence indirect question to express durative (or iterative) action’. In vol. xviii, No. 55, p. 18, Mr. Laughton ‘retreats fighting’, but hopes that ‘some day Mr. Handford's challenge may meet with an unequivocal response’.

In paragraph 3 of the Praefatio to book x of Seneca's Controversiae we read, of the brilliant, but casual declaimer, Scaurus, ‘ex his omnibus sciri potest, non quantum oratorem praestaret ignavus Scaurus, sed quantum desereret’ (‘all this goes to show, not how great an orator the lazy Scaurus was, but how great he missed being’). The variant scire posset in excerpt. Montepessulana can safely be ignored. Though I am sure we should all wish to see an example quoted from a more reputable author than the Elder Seneca, this sentence, occurring as it does in a carefully written preface, confirms Mr. Laughton's intuition that this ‘rational mode of expression’ is not impossible in Latin when the sense of the dependent verb is ‘obviously durative’.