Athens had a founder. His identity lies concealed in the twilight of myth. When the historians first sought him, and that was centuries after the city had been established, they constructed a traditional picture which—with the necessary modifications to fit current needs—persisted into late Antiquity. A historical picture, even one of a past as distant as the founding of Athens, is never created out of thin air, however. Remnants of ancient customs, no longer understood, remained part of social and religious practices. When the Greek—in the time that also saw the first written recording of history, roughly in the fifth century B.c.—posed his questions about the how and why of the relics, he encountered the stories belonging to oral and written tradition that mentioned and honoured a founder. These shreds of ideas about an ancient past he used, together with the products of his tireless imagination, to create a picture with such a general appeal that it has remained alive and has even become a piece of history whose development can be followed, even though the journey is a difficult one and does not always hold to one path or lead to the same conclusion. The legend becomes history in two ways. Firstly, the human spirit, which loves to make fables and cannot accept its own ignorance, fills out shadowy images from an ancient and incomprehensible past until they become distinct figures. These elaborations then give rise to a new development, which might be called the history of the legend. To trace and describe the evolution of the legend is an extraordinarily fascinating occupation.

The trial of Clutorius Priscus, as Walker says, ‘gives the first instance of a condemnation based only on trivial charges’. Even so, it is clear that the charges against Clutorius had been made possible by Augustus' extension of the law to cover famosi libelli, although Tacitus' words on that occasion (‘cognitionem de famosis libellis specie legis eius tractavit’) may indicate that no formal change in the law was made. Similarly, then, at the beginning of his reign, Tiberius was instructing Pompeius Macer to observe the spirit rather than the letter of Augustus' law. Support may be lent to this view by the fact that both Augustus and Tiberius were prompted in their actions by particular incidents which annoyed them. In the case of Clutorius, the delator may well, in view of Tiberius' absence from Rome, have been encouraged to attempt a similar rather loose interpretation of the law. But is there a ‘false emphasis’ in Tacitus' presentation of the case?

InDidaskalos 1968 I have argued that the chief task of the commentator on a short poem (an ode of Horace, an elegy of Propertius, or a poem of Catullus) is to reconstruct the hypothesis upon which the poem rests by piecing together the data actually provided by the text, or deducible from the text as a plausible, necessary deduction; to these data, I argued, one need only add what the poet feels he can rely on any reader to know, though two thousand years later it may of course require some research to recover what was common knowledge at the time. I cited Catullus 17 as a case in point—a poem where reconstruction of the hypothesis depended on things outside the text, things which, though part of the cultural background of the poet's contemporaries, were hardly part of ours, yet within our grasp if we cast around a little.

The casualty lists in the Trojan War, owing to their late publication, are not very accurate, but they have some interesting features. The named casualties of officers total 238, and unnamed 26. Other ranks are not recorded. Of these 24 seem to have been wounded only, though in some cases it is left uncertain whether a man was only wounded, and not killed. To the wounded must be added Ares and Aphrodite, who obviously could not be killed, though they seem to have suffered considerably. Apparently the Gods and Goddesses who engaged in the fighting had a convention that they must not kill anyone themselves: they only interfered by encouraging their respective sides, and protecting certain favourites or balking their would-be killers. Ares, Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus were thus active on the Trojan side, and Athena, Hera, and Poseidon for the Greeks. Unlike us, the early Greeks appear to have been more proud of the killers than sorry for the killed.

One of the major puzzles in the history of the Graeco-Roman world lies in the great discrepancy between its considerable achievements in art, in literature, in philosophy, in mathematics, and in medicine, and its very marked backwardness in most branches of technology. This is less surprising where the Romans are concerned, since, for all their admirable qualities in other directions, they were not a conspicuously original or inventive people. Even in those spheres in which they most excelled, the arts of government and warfare, they made few contributions of their own, and their strength lay rather in their skill at adapting to their own purposes the bright ideas of other men. It is significant that those two simple but important aids to improved horsemanship and cavalry tactics, the saddle and the stirrup, were not invented by the Romans, nor indeed by the Greeks, but by the nomadic tribes that pressed in on the Roman empire from the third century A.d. onwards. But with the Greeks the case is different. They were a highly intelligent people, gifted with a degree of inquisitiveness which made them unwilling to accept without question the outward appearance of the world in which they lived. Consequently in mathematics and certain branches of pure science they were able to make quite astonishing progress. But these intellectual advances were not accompanied by any marked degree of technological improvement. While Eratosthenes in Alexandria was calculating the circumference of the earth, and obtaining a figure that was less than i per cent short of the real one, the world around him was still more or less at the same technical level as it had been since the end of the Bronze Age. This contrast between theoretical brilliance and practical incompetence is great and dramatic, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest some of the reasons why it existed.

How to begin is not the least of the dramatist's problems. It is essential, in the construction of any play, not only to establish at the start a suitable mood, but to make clear, without undue delay, the place, personalities, and general antecedents of the plot. Of the two methods of doing the latter that offer themselves—that by which such information is contained in a ‘prologue’ or set speech, and that by which it is introduced in the course of the action—the former is simpler for the author, and, for the spectator too, it may be more convenient to have these details given once and for all. But it tends to artificiality, and the impression is often created that here is something outside the plot, a mere introduction to the play rather than a part of the play itself. In Greek tragedy the method was of course much used by Euripides, and he has perhaps been over-criticized for it, both in his own time and since. But later writers have not shunned it, and its final development is found in the splitting-off of the initial ‘address’ and its assignment to an extraneous speaker dubbed ‘Prologue’ or ‘Narrator’. This has at least the merit of logical clarity. But, while a definite line cannot be drawn between them, the more informal method must be accounted artistically superior. This was especially that of Sophocles, and his opening scenes (or ‘prologues’ in the technical sense), in both their informational and other aspects, are worth attention in themselves, as well as being indicative of his general approach to his art.

Europa was the daughter of Phoinix or Agenor, king of Phoenice, and Telephassa; her brother was Cadmos. Zeus came in the form of a bull and carried her away to Crete, where she gave birth to Minos, also Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon the elder. Afterwards she married Asterios (or Asterion), who reared her children.

In the Aeneid there is a tendency to dissociate action from emotion. Action is often dictated by a strong sense of duty, while emotion, instead of being a motivating power, becomes an idle accompaniment that contradicts the meaning of the act. This is most clearly observed in the person of Aeneas, particularly in those Odyssean books when he schools himself in a ‘new heroism’ whose very basis seems to depend on such a dissociation. Thus, in the midst of Troy's destruction, his natural desire is to die fighting for his city. If he had acted out this desire (as he begins to do) he would have been conforming to the standards of the old, Homeric, heroism. But he is caught in the complicated fabric of Rome's future, and the old, simple heroism, founded on a natural and impulsive nobility, is not for him. He must go against his natural desire and, as a runaway, escape the doomed city to refound it elsewhere. And yet his heart is set on the city he has lost, not on the city he must build, as becomes clear in the succeeding books. In Book iii he envies the miniature Troy which Helenus and Andromache have built in Epirus, while in Book iv he longs to stay with Dido and share in her city. The division he so frequently evinces in these early books between what he has to do and what he wants to do can be considered as part of a training in pietas, in devotion to his highest duty, which is consummated in the underworld encounter with his father Anchises in Book vi.

Pliny lived in the heyday of the Roman empire, being born in A.d. 62 in the middle of the reign of Nero, at Comum by Lake Como in north Italy, and he lived until about A.d. 112. His family were not of the old Roman nobility but belonged to the second grade of the Roman upper classes, the so-called Knights or equites Ramani. Pliny trained to become an advocate in the courts of civil law, and partly by his talents and partly through the influence of family friends in the senatorial class he gained promotion to the senior grade of the Roman administration. He became a Roman senator when he was about twenty-eight years old, and eventually climbed to the top rung of the Roman public service. So he was in Roman terms a self-made man, the first senator of his family. But he was also a highly educated man; as a young man he attended the schools of the most famous professors of literature at Rome, and especially that of the great Quintilian, whose book on the art of rhetoric survives to show the sort of education that Pliny received.

In terms of telling us what the poem is about, the first stanza of Odes i. 37 is rather nebulous. Nunc est bibendum, as a translation of νῦν Χρὴ μεθύσθην, could have been pregnant with meaning for an educated Roman but it could also have been a straightforward way of saying ‘it's time for a drink’, and the full significance comes out only in retrospect. The substance of the whole stanza can be briefly summarized: now, at last, has come the time for celebrations which will include drinking, dancing, and feasting, and the occasion is not without its religious significance. The transitions are carefully contrived: libero, besides suggesting the vigour of the dancing, has associations with Liber, the old Italian equivalent of Bacchus, while the Priests of Mars were notable as much for the excellence of their College Feasts as for their choreographic dexterity; nor is it surprising that a banquet fit for priests should be laid at the table of the gods.

In the 1957 volume of Greece & Rome the Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford gave readers a preview of certain opinions subsequently developed in the two volumes of his study of Tacitus.

His rebus gestis, ex litteris Caesaris dierum viginti supplicatio a senatu decreta est. With these words Caesar ends the account of his campaign in Gaul in 55 B.c.