The first point I should make is that ‘Platonist readings’ in the context of this paper means the reading of Aristotle by Neoplatonist interpreters who were armed with powerful Platonic prejudices. If I have avoided starting with the description ‘Neoplatonist’ that is because the philosophers involved would not so have described themselves. Notoriously they thought that they were Platonists, and, moreover, Platonists like Plato himself. This might be thought to be pointless reiteration of what is ‘allgemein bekannt’ – if not well-known – but it does have some bearing on the present subject, for it meant that the commentators were trying to find in Aristotle the thought of Plato as they understood it. Had they thought of themselves as ‘Neoplatonists’, with a full historical consciousness of the implications of that term, and, in particular, an awareness of how some parts of Plato's thought had, in the course of the Platonic tradition, been thoroughly Aristotelianised, they could not have approached Aristotle in the way that they did.

At this stage it might be as well to set out a few facts and also some assumptions which I shall try to prove, or illustrate, by looking at a few samples of the late Greek interpretation of Aristotle.

Homosexuality, it would appear, now claims the space in the public prints that was not long ago lavished on the ‘woman question’. Its prominence in contemporary life is reflected in art. Nearly sixty current journals dealing with the subject in all its multifarious manifestations are listed in the eighteenth edition of Ulrich's International Periodical Directory (1979). The experience of homosexuals in the concentration camps and the role of the homosexual as hero in contemporary fiction have lately provided matter for books. Recent biographies of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and W. H. Auden discuss their subjects' practice of or writings on homosexual behaviour. Masters and Johnson have now applied their quantitative approach to homoerotic physical response. Christian attitudes to homosexuality, notably in mediaeval Europe, have been extensively canvassed. In a less scholarly vein Edmund White has written of his travels in gay America; he, like Jeffrey Weeks and other members of the British Gay Left Collective, is much concerned with the politics and political vocabulary of homosexuality. Many other illustrations could be given. In short, ‘the love that dared not speak its name has become … insistently communicative’.

The Aulularia has always been one of the most popular and most studied of Plautus' plays, both because of its intrinsic interest and quality and also because of its later influence in the European dramatic tradition. In the large amount of scholarly work which has been devoted to this play the identity of the author of Plautus' Greek model and the alterations which Plautus may have made in this model have been much discussed. Research on these questions was, however, placed on a quite new footing in 1958 by the publication of Menander's Dyscolus: the striking similarities between these plays have now produced a loose consensus of scholarly opinion, although the dissenting voice can still be heard. The two conclusions upon which most scholars who have written recently on this subject seem to agree are that the Plautine changes to the Greek model were relatively minor, consisting in the omission of one or two scenes and the expansion of a couple of others, and that Menander was the author of the Greek original. Although it will become clear that I am very sceptical of the former of these propositions and have at least an open mind on the latter, the aim of this present paper is simply to re-open discussion of the relationship between the Aulularia and its Greek original by pointing to some problems which have been neglected and to others which have not yet been satisfactorily answered. In Part I I discuss the division of the Greek original into five acts and the conclusions to be drawn from difficulties in this division and in Part II I examine a further problem in the Aulularia which might have some bearing on the question of the authorship of the Greek original.

Tacitus Annals 3.28.

In 1920 Ernst Langlotz proposed a scheme for dating Greek vases in terms of absolute and not merely relative chronology. His monograph was entitled Zur Zeitbestimmung der strengrotfigurigen Vasenmalerei und der gleichzeitigen Plastik and was dedicated to his teacher Franz Studniczka. Studniczka's own essay, ‘Zur Zeitbestimmung der Vasenmalerei mit roten Figuren’ had itself represented a landmark in the chronological study of Greek vase painting. As Langlotz's title suggests, he thought it possible to derive a dating system for Greek vases based on stylistic comparisons between the medium of Greek vase-painting and that of sculpture. The Siphnian Treasury, the Marathon Tumulus, and the Persian sack of Athens, however, provided the only supposedly fixed points in Langlotz's framework. He therefore sought other evidence which would link vase-painting to the known facts of Greek history and decided to develop Studniczka's investigation of the extent to which the subjects of kalos-inscriptions possessed an independent historical identity.