What is truth and what are lies in the Odyssey? Odysseus in his lying story to Eumaios (14.192ff.), just as the sea-nymph Eidothea in her true advice to the weather-bound Menelaos (4.383ff.), claims to be speaking μαλ' ἀτρɛκέως, ‘quite precisely’. As all politicians are aware, if you wish to stand a chance of being believed it helps to emphasize the accuracy of what you are saying; this introductory line was as much a formula for Homer as it is today.

Priam has arrived at Achilles' hut. He has taken Achilles unawares. He has clasped his knees, he has kissed his hands. He has made his twofold plea: he has appealed for compassion in Peleus' name and, taking his cue from Achilles' sympathetic response, he has requested the ransom of Hector. It is the climax of the Iliad. We await Achilles' words, we await the response which has been the focus of the enormous expansion and elaboration of Book 24: the preparation for the journey, the journey, the meeting with Hermes, Priam's remarkable arrival at Achilles' hut, his painfully slow but deliberate approach to the single reason for his mission, to his request for the return of Hector's corpse. It has been the point to which the course of the Iliad has been implicitly directed since Achilles first learned of the death of Patroclus: his bitterness and his continuing obsession with Patroclus have found expression in the harsh negatives of his response first to Lycaon, then to Hector. That harshness has been translated into action, too: into the cruel rhythm of Achilles' ἀριστεία and his repeated mutilation of Hector's corpse.

This paper began as a lecture to an extramural weekend course on the Greek Dark Age, organized in Oxford by the Department of External Studies in December 1983. It was intended to suggest that the world of the Homeric poems, insofar as it had any relationship with reality, was more likely to reflect the conditions of the Dark Age than those of Mycenaean Greece, and it was born of increasing frustration at the dominance of what I will call the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation of Homer, particularly at the popular level. The recent BBC series In Search of the Trojan War has done nothing to lessen this dominance – indeed, it barely suggested that such an interpretation had been seriously challenged – and the theme of the lecture has therefore lost none of its relevance. In presenting a considerably revised version here, I have not attempted to offer an exhaustively argued and documented discussion, which would require a book, and must refer the reader to more extensive treatments of the topic for fuller details. Rather, I have decided to leave it as a rather provocative exposition of a case which deserves to be made. I have made some attempt to step outside the framework in which the discussion has often been conducted, which to my mind unduly favours the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation, but readily acknowledge that many of my arguments have been presented in similar form by others, and that some have been admitted to have force by those who in general support the ‘Mycenaean’ interpretation. Given the quantity of writing on the topic, it is only too likely that I have neglected some discussions, and I have given references mainly to Homeric sources and to recent archaeological finds of relevance. Finally, I should make it clear that it is not my primary purpose to discuss the historicity of the Trojan War or of the Greek heroic legends generally, though this has often been made to depend on the supposedly Mycenaean content of the Homeric poems, at least in part.

It is a well-known and often lamented fact that we know very little about the actual staging of plays in the theatre of Dionysus in the Fifth Century b.c. What snippets of information we do have date from later centuries and may reflect contemporary conditions of performance, or may be mere inference based on fifth-century texts. Even though we can derive considerable comfort from Oliver Taplin's dictum that ‘the Greek tragedians signalled all their significant stage directions in the words’, 2 much that would enhance our knowledge of a fifth-century production remains a mystery.

The varied erudition of Catullus and of later Roman poets is wellknown. Among themselves doctus became a term of praise. So the modern reader has to spend some time acquiring the knack of appreciating this showy learning, and a student consults commentaries for instruction in myth and metre, star-lore, and place-names. My concern is with place-names, because they are not, speaking generally, given adequate treatment in the commentaries on Catullus, the Eclogues, or the Odes, which are designed for sixth-form and undergraduate use. An aspect of the learning of the poets goes largely unremarked, or if noticed, too often receives inadequate comment. The main purpose of this article is to restore to proper prominence the innovations made in the use of local names and adjectives by the Latin poets. Complete originality is not claimed; much of this knowledge, it will become clear, is to be found in the professional commentaries, for example, Pfeiffer on Callimachus, Nisbet-Hubbard on Horace, Gow-Page on the epigrammatists, Kroll on Catullus. But the information is scattered or patchy and needs to be brought together and fleshed out so that it impresses by its concentration. Only then will serious attention be paid to the poets' practice.

Callimachus' sixth hymn to Demeter is of considerable importance to the student of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The reason is that it provides us with one of the very few opportunities to put an episode in the Metamorphoses alongside what was apparently its chief source. I say its chief source because Ovid's description of how Demeter punishes Erysichthon for violating her sacred grove by inflicting on him an insatiable hunger is very close to Callimachus' outline of the same story and includes a number of undoubted verbal echoes of the Greek poet. Ovid certainly knew Callimachus sixth hymn well. But, of course, there may have been other treatments of the Erysichthon legend, now lost, which Ovid also drew on to a greater or lesser extent. There is a further point to bear in mind. We seem to be dealing in Ovid with two stories, not with a single legend. The first is the story of Erysichthon's sacrilege and punishment, the second is the story of a girl with powers of selftransformation. These two stories may originally have been quite independent of each other, but we find them linked as early as the pseudo-Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Callimachus does not use the second story about the transformations of Erysichthon's daughter.

When we imagine the world of the Julio-Claudian Emperors and their Flavian and Antonine successors, it is difficult to avoid thinking of suicide as the characteristic Roman way of death. That is because of the numerous acts of suicide which are celebrated by the greatest writers of the period, Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, and Pliny, and which even invade the pages of a minor author such as Martial. There is no reason to think in terms of an epidemic, as Y. Grisé justly remarks in her recent book on Roman suicide. But we do seem to be dealing with a fashion, one curious enough to merit investigation.

Oliver Goldsmith once wrote that the cultural history of a civilization can be divided into three periods: ‘its commencement, or the age of poets; its maturity, or the age of philosophers; and its decline, or the age of critics.’ Goldsmith went on to argue that the increase of critics is a natural result of the spread of learning, but, at the same time, invariably contributes to its decline. This is because critics represent a lower common denominator in literary taste than the poet or the philosopher, and because they approach culture in a more mechanical or hidebound manner. Goldsmith defines critics as ‘all such as judge by rule, and not by feelings’. He looks back to the days of King William and Queen Anne, and suggests that the decline in letters evident in his own day is partly attributable to the prevalence of criticism: