Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis is the tendency of the characters to alter their attitudes towards the human sacrifice. Menelaus and Iphigenia (and even Achilles, it would appear) each undergo a single but remarkable change of mind, while Agamemnon displays so much confusion and uncertainty in adjusting his attitudes that it is not perfectly clear just how many times he actually changes his mind. These about-faces are not merely responses to changing circumstances or fresh information; rather they dramatize in an unusually arresting fashion a characteristically Euripidean psychology that emphasizes those forces or tendencies, both inside and outside the mind, that work to disrupt or even preclude the moral, intellectual or psychological integration of the character.

Now although this psychology typifies Euripidean drama in general in varying degrees, it would appear to take a more extreme form in the I.A. than in much earlier plays such as Medea or Hippolytus. We shall find it of some interest then, after examining closely the characterization and psychology of this late play, to hazard a number of necessarily brief comparisons with some earlier plays and also with Sophoclean drama.

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of individual narrators within the Metamorphoses. Whereas it was once considered adequate to attribute the characteristics of the poem solely to Ovid as narrator, a number of critics have now drawn correlations between the development of certain tales and the character of the narrators to whom they are attributed within the poem.

Book 10 calls particular attention to itself in this regard. Orpheus is its primary narrator: after losing Eurydice to death for the second and final time, he composes a song that recalls ‘boys beloved by the gods and young girls struck by unsanctioned passion’ (10.152-54) which occupies the major portion of the book. However, the marked dissonance between Orpheus' announced program and what actually unfolds pricks the reader's curiosity. The bard's initial criteria for choosing material implicitly condemn female passion and celebrate pederasty — an understandable, if extreme, reaction on the part of a man who has just been badly hurt by his passion for a woman. But of the seven stories that follow, only two concern divine pederasty; one of these ends unhappily. The subject of a third tale (Venus' love for Adonis) radically stretches the sense of ‘boy-love’. A fourth tale — of Pygmalion and his statue — does not fit either category of love.

The apparent geographical inaccuracies in Sallust's account of the war with Jugurtha have attracted the attention of many scholars. Several years ago Etienne Tiffou devoted a study to the fact that Sallust's three historical works show a progressively greater interest in geography, but many topographical difficulties in The War with Jugurtha remain unexplained. Others see the geographical excursuses in The War with Jugurtha as simply traditional devices or perhaps structural fillers whose content is purely derivative and whose contribution to the themes of the work is minimal or nil: Sallust does not contribute much more than ‘Greek erudition and fancies’. Yet many of the supposed inaccuracies and thematically empty excursuses can be better understood and appreciated as part of a consistent Sallustian technique of internal allusion. A careful reading of Sallust's references to places in The War with Jugurtha reveals the author's sophisticated use of a ‘textual geography’, i.e. the deliberate selection and arrangement of places in the text to allude to and support his central ideas. Most significantly he compares Rome to Carthage in their origins, growth and decline, he describes the reactions of the Roman people to the course of the war, and he characterizes Roman leaders in their conduct of the war against Jugurtha by using this device.

Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable diversity of themes, genres and what, for lack of a better expression, one must call levels of reality. The Archilochean persona maintained in several of the poems is a unifying factor, of course, but it has not seemed pervasive enough to have allowed a systematic interpretation of the whole collection, and even within the Archilochean group scholars have tended to separate the political poems from the invective poems.3 Attempts to find some principle of arrangement for the collection have not been very enlightening, since they have rarely amounted to more than classifying each of the poems by type or theme (usually a completely unsystematic mixture of both), and then putting them into groups, which reveals structural patterns that have a no more than decorative function, or else simply displays Horace's penchant for variatio.