Horace is like the other Augustan writers in contriving to combine extravagant compliment to the emperor with protests of inability to cope with the magnitude of such a theme. But Horace's handling of the rhetorical recusatio is unusual if not unique in extent and complexity. Most writers pay the compliment and make the disclaimer in a single poem, or, if the need arises to repeat the process, it is undertaken afresh in a new idiom and different metaphor. This is usually the end of the matter. The poet has met his obligation and can now proceed with his work in his chosen genre with a clear conscience and unpreoccupied. It is otherwise with Horace. While there are few poems in which he explicitly couples the laudes Augusti with protests of inability to undertake political epic, Horace continually reminds the reader that he is nagged by a feeling of obligation unfulfilled. Very early in the Odes, however, it becomes clear that the poet's dilemma is not merely the conventional literary frustration of the feeble genius confronted by the colossal theme. All three books of the Odes are solidly provided with encomia of Augustus. Side by side with these, however, and nearly engulfing them is the series of poems that directly or indirectly attack the growing depravity of the Roman people. These invectives vary in intensity but are ranged with a crescendo effect.

The first century b.c. had one hundred and thirty comic scripts with the name of Plautus attached. Scholars disputed about which of the scripts really came from the hand of the Umbrian playwright. The authenticity of twenty-one was never challenged and there is no reasonable doubt that these are the twenty-one which survive to the present day in the Ambrosian palimpsest and the so-called “Palatine” codices. The organisation of the lexicon of the third-century grammarian Nonius Marcellus reveals that Nonius used a corporate edition of the same twenty-one. Somewhere in the ancestry of our witnesses lies one or more editions of the individual scripts made according to the method established at Alexandria for the scripts of the classical Athenian tragic and comic poets. The first such scientific edition could hardly have been made before 168 b.c., the year in which the Pergamene philologist Crates visited Rome and gave lectures, that is some sixteen years after Plautus' death. The claim made by Terence in 161, that he did not know Plautus to have adapted the Κόλαξ of Menander, implies that no edition of this play was then available to the public. Even in Plautus' lifetime his scripts were employed by actors without his supervision and doubtlessly suffered alteration at the hands of those who preferred their own to the author's ideas of what was dramatically appropriate.

In Poem 64 Catullus has encapsulated a great deal of the heroic world within the space of four hundred lines: two relatively brief moments of time (the meeting and wedding of Peleus and Thetis and Ariadne's awakening on the shore of Dia) are filled out by flashback and prophecy so that the range of reference extends from the first voyage in history to near the end of the Trojan War. The poem becomes an epitome of the whole age of heroes, and its central meaning is defined by the poet's attitude to that age and by his conception of its relationship to his own period. Set against the heroic period, in a moralizing epilogue, is a highly colored vision of Catullus' own times (397–408). The theme of degeneration through the ages goes back to Hesiod, but Catullus dispenses with the older poet's first three ages in order to make a two-member contrast. Once gods mingled with men. So, in the primary instance in the poem, they came to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. So Jupiter attended sacrifices made to him, Bacchus led his worshippers at Delphi, and Mars, Minerva, and Diana encouraged their favorites in battle. Now, spreta pietate, man's guilt is so great that the gods will no longer join him in bodily form. The epilogue is not an afterthought. The contrast of ages balances the address to the heroes in 22 ff. and asserts the fundamental antithesis of the poem.

Horace's lyric prayers for poetic inspiration from his Muses seem to fall into two categories. First, there are those odes which contain both the prayer and the poem requested, as do Carm. 1.24 and 3.4. Secondly, there are two odes in particular that consist wholly of the prayers themselves, and do not include the poem that is the object of the prayer. In Carm. 1.26 Horace addresses a formal prayer to his Muse (Pipleis) to inspire in him a poem of diversion and solace for Lamia. Similarly, in Carm. 1.32 he appeals to his barbitos to remember the old days, and speak forth at his request with a carmen Latinum. A question that has yet to be answered is this: if Horace did write the poems referred to in 1.26 and 1.32, did he include them in the collection of odes?

The hypothesis offered here is an obvious one, but one not (to my knowledge) explored before: namely that the poems asked for in Carm. 1.26 and Carm. 1.32 are the odes which immediately follow them. In other words, Carm. 1.26 is the proem to 1.27; and Carm. 1.32, to 1.33. What I hope to prove, then, is that in each of these two pairs of odes Horace has skillfully contrived to integrate with the dedicated poem an introductory ode that shares with it important features of theme, allusion, and meter, and to fashion of each pair an organic whole.

In 1883 our knowledge of one genre of Latin poetry was roughly doubled: fragments of nine epigrams, three of which were substantially complete, were found scratched on the outside wall at the west entrance gate of the Small Theatre in Pompeii and were recognized almost immediately as examples of pre-neoteric, amateur verse inspired by Hellenistic epigram, a genre represented until then only by the five epigrams of Aedituus, Licinus, and Catulus (Morel, FPL, pp. 42–3, 46). A faint note of enthusiasm can be detected in the words of those who read and studied the graffiti at the time, but since then the epigrams have again been almost universally forgotten, not only by Lovers of Poetry (whose lack of enthusiasm may be freely pardoned), but even by historians of Latin literature seeking to reconstruct this important, though dark, area of poetic development. It would seem worthwhile, then, to sketch a history of the epigrams since their discovery, to present the text in a purer form than that which can easily be had today, and to discuss briefly the importance of these fragments and their place in the development of Latin poetry.

The scientific portions of Lucretius' poem, that is, those passages which deal most explicitly and argumentatively with technical matters, are often disparaged, or at least tacitly ignored. At best they are tolerated for the sake of the proems and the “digressions.” As Bailey puts it in the introduction to his edition:

Bailey himself argues that “there are not in fact two styles; the one is only the heightening or intensification of the other,” but his argument is perfunctory and has certainly not prevailed against the general feeling among commentators and common readers alike that the technical parts of the De Rerum Natura are less interesting than the “poetic” passages.

The consensus that Epicurean philosophy constitutes an intrinsically unpoetic subject is perhaps derived from a famous passage in which Lucretius himself seems to say that his poetry is, in the modern cliché, merely the sugar coating on the bitter pill of his science. In his own image, he touches everything with the charm of the Muses just as doctors, when they try to give nasty wormwood to children, first smear the rims of the cup with honey.

Plautus wrote only one Comedy of Errors. His Greek predecessors wrote so many that ῞Αγνοια (“Errora,” or more literarily, “Ignorance”), who speaks the prologue to Menander's Perikeiromene, has often been called the patron goddess of New Comedy. The Menaechmi is generally considered to be early Plautus, and may well have been an experiment with a theme which proved uncongenial to the Latin comic poet. For Plautus usually prefers wit to ignorance, shrewd deception to naive misunderstanding. Chance, τὸ αὐτόματον, rules the world of Menander, and things haphazardly “happen to happen,” ἀπὸ ταὐτομάτον, a condition which Plautus usually mocks.

In a Comedy of Errors we “automatically” laugh at the bumbling ignorance of characters who are nothing but puppets. But Plautus' real affection is for puppeteers, manipulators like Tranio, Palaestrio, Epidicus and Pseudolus, men whose cleverness leaves nothing to chance, and who flourish in a world where the source of laughter is not automation, but machination.

The first man to translate it into English saw that the Menaechmi was different. Writing his preface in 1595, William Warner called the play:

It is not “harmfull” because it lacks the very feature that was Roman comedy's prime legacy to the Renaissance: intrigue.

The present essay does not seek to advance any new set of theories with regard to the Saturnian. Its purpose is rather to criticize some of those already current and to restate others in such a way as to make them more convincing to the skeptics. There is no dearth of correct observations in the scholarly literature devoted to the Saturnian, and there is even one general discussion, that of Leo, which seems to me to be right in many of its essential conclusions. What is most needed at present is some attempt to disengage valid observations from the fanciful contexts in which they are often embedded and, more important, some attempt to point the way, by example if possible, out of a methodological difficulty that has never been handled in a completely satisfactory fashion and is too often ignored altogether. The character of the difficulty is best stated in the words of A. W. De Groot, the scholar who has faced it most openly and coped with it most successfully: