We know so much more about Cicero than we do about anyone else from antiquity, and because of the nature of our knowledge, especially the ‘personal’ viewpoint which his letters offer, it is easy to think we know more about him than we actually do, or to consider him unique, attributing to him alone as personality characteristics things which may in fact be features common to others of his class and time. So, for instance, he is regularly accused of inconsistency in public life by both ancients and moderns, but I believe here we are led astray by the evidence, and that he was only marginally more changeable than his contemporaries. This is a position impossible to argue, because it would require information that we do not have about the vagaries of political alliances in the 60s, 50s, and 40s bc, and about how many times various people changed their minds about different things. Even the limited material we do have, however, suggests that the successful late Republican politician held very few alliances to be unbreakable. This article explores the possibility that Cicero was particularly susceptible to the charge of inconsistency precisely because he was not one of the nobiles, and so could not lay claim to this aristocratic virtue without being challenged. It also suggests that he may in reality have had to change his mind more regularly than his contemporaries, again owing to the vulnerabilities inherent in his status. Finally, it raises the possibility that inconstantia and levitas in Latin may mean something different from what inconsistency usually means in English, at least to some speakers of the language. After brief discussion of the nuances of constantia and its opposite, I explore the charge of levitas as wielded by Cicero's enemies against him in the trials of 54 bc, his own defences against the charge, and then his use of it against others in the 50s and 40s. I should perhaps make clear that this is not an attempt to rehabilitate Cicero, except insofar as the ancient evidence misleads us into misjudging him; I hope merely to suggest that inconstantia is in the eye of the beholder, and that most of the leading figures of the Senate were more prone to see it in men like Cicero than in men like themselves.

In his 1982 essay on Catullus 64, Richard Jenkyns offered an eloquent and elegant counterblast to the ‘reductivism that has characterized much recent criticism of Latin poetry’ (p. 82). He argued that to impose a unifying interpretation on such a work as Peleus and Thetis impoverishes it. ‘Anyone who has failed to perceive that throughout this poem Catullus is deliberately various, disproportionate and unpredictable has certainly not understood it’ (p. 92). With the advent of the millennium, it seems that Jenkyns, even if he won the battle, did not win the war, though, doubtless because of him, the unities which scholars now advocate have become decidedly more capacious, more able to serve as hold-alls, than those imposed by their predecessors. The instinct to identify unifying principles appears to be a strong one. In any case, Jenkyns’ own view of the poem – that it ‘is made up of pictures in that it is a gallery of tableaux or set pieces’ (p. 150) – can surely be taken as suggesting the kind of e pluribus unum of a work such as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The various tableaux, each of them displayed, as it were, by the poet to elicit a differing response, may add up to a single experience. It is not simply that the total may be greater than the sum of the individual parts; it is rather that the total may attain a unity of its own.

The Hollywood movie Stranger than Fiction (2006) centres on a tax inspector, Harold Crick, who begins to hear a voice inside his head. This voice, he gradually realizes, belongs to the narrator of a book in which he is the central character. As the plot unfurls, the narrator begins to drop hints that Harold will die at the end of the story. Understandably disturbed by these intimations, Harold decides to confront a university professor, and between the two of them they identify the author as one Kay Eiffel. Harold then tracks down the author and begs her not to kill him off.

In his Sather Lectures on Roman Satire, J. Wight Duff writes (pp. 160–1): ‘Indignatio facit versum, says Juvenal: “Wrath is the maker of my verse”. The author ought to know whence his main inspiration comes; and the thunder of explosive anger is abundantly audible in the earlier books. Yet there is a sense in which this familiar quotation tells only part of the truth. People can be immeasurably angry without achieving the satiric; for anger, to rise above mere invective into satire, must be artistically directed; and this is where Juvenal's own talents are necessary for the complete recipe.’

It is surprising how many first impressions of the sight of Rome have been put on record. Some of these first impressions are unashamedly imaginary and come to us mediated by or through a persona. This is a common ploy in Augustan poetry, and it is worth remembering that none of the great Augustan poets was a Roman of Rome, so the impressions attributed to the persona may well reflect those of the writer on his first coming to the metropolis as a young man or boy. First impressions can be conveniently divided into two groups. Some are just that, first impressions, with no hint that the visitor might have had some expectations of what would be seen and experienced. A second group, perhaps the more interesting one, distinguishes itself by a shared anticipation: their actual impressions on visiting the city are not really ‘first’ impressions at all. Few have ever brought to Rome an innocent eye: even in antiquity many visitors always already seemed to know what they were going to see there. Considered chronologically, the very first impressions of Rome of this second group were formed in the imagination, by hearsay, by reading, or in modern times by seeing images of the city: theirs is a virtual Rome. When they finally visit the ‘real’ Rome there often occurs a disjunction or contrast; it might be of enhancement.

In 1936, T. B. L. Webster argued that Sophocles' Trachiniae has strong allusions to Aeschylus' Agamemnon, particularly in the characters of Deianeira and Clytemnestra. Once identified, it is easy see: each kills her husband as he returns from battle, and in each case the death contains an element of entrapment. Heracles' poisoned robe indeed seems deliberately to reflect the famous net used to entrap Agamemnon: Heracles' description of it (οἷον τόδ᾽ ἡ δολῶπις Οἰνέως κόρη / καθῆψεν ὤμοις τοῖς ἐμοῖς Ἐρινύων / ὑϕαντὸν ἀμϕίβληστρον, ‘…this woven garment of the Erinyes which the treacherous daughter of Oineus fastened on my shoulders’; Trachiniae 1050–2) is similar to Aegisthus' words near the end of Agamemnon (ἰδὼν ὑϕαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων / τὸν ἄνδρα τόνδε κείμενον ϕίλως ἐμοί, ‘…seeing this man lying in robes of the Erinyes, to my joy’; 1580–1). Even if the direct verbal allusion fails to resonate with an audience, it seems unlikely, given the high level of audience competence, that audience members would not make the thematic connection. It is almost impossible to deny, therefore, that in Deianeira Sophocles was writing a deliberate response to Clytemnestra and contrasting the accidental murder caused by a loving wife with the carefully planned murder by a bitter wife.

Street fights seem to have been as common in classical Athens as they are in modern cities. One incident, which probably took place a few years after 394 bc, involved two rivals for the attentions of a young Plataian, Theodotos, apparently a slave and a rent boy. There was a history of violent disagreement between the opponents, one of whom was a wealthy, middle-aged Athenian citizen whose name we do not know. The other, a (probably) younger man named Simon, claimed to have had a contract with Theodotos for sexual services, which was breached when the older man enticed him away. For the sake of a quiet life, the older man left Athens for a time, taking Theodotos with him, and did not come back until he thought Simon would have forgotten about the boy. But not long after their return there was another fight, accounts of which conflicted sharply. According to Simon, the older man went to his house threatening to kill him, and attacked him with some broken pottery, causing a serious head wound. The older man's story was that Simon and his friends got drunk over lunch, then lay in wait near the house where he and Theodotos were inside, and jumped on them as they came out. After a chase through the streets, the incident developed into a general mêlée in which everyone ended up with a broken head. The older man claimed that he had considered prosecuting Simon for assault, but had been too embarrassed and fearful of damaging his reputation. Four years later, though, Simon prosecuted him for trauma ek pronoias, which we may tentatively translate as ‘intentional wounding’.

Aristotle'sPoetics has centuries of tradition behind it as a substitute for first-hand appreciation in dramatic criticism, and this work has lent colour to the old view that the characters of Greek tragedy were all ‘idealized types’ in a performance in which the plot was the thing. This is because Aristotle explicitly puts plot above character in his list of the essentials of a tragedy, and when he comes to treat of character has little to say which appeals to us. But the pure tragic drama of human feeling depends entirely on its success in eliciting sympathy with its characters. Of this art Sophocles, like Shakespeare, is the acknowledged champion. Aeschylus is inspired to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, Euripides is concerned to question the ways of man to his neighbour. When Aeschylus added characterization to his loftier qualities, he produced in the Agamemnon the greatest play ever written, but we do not suspect his ‘Prometheus’ of character drawing any more than Shelley's. And in Euripides, as sometimes in Shaw, the characters are so under the thumb of the theories that we forget to take much personal interest in them. But in Sophocles we are not distracted by the prophet or the propagandist, and we can let his pathetic, human people stir in us their own hopes and sorrows.

It was Minoan writing that led Arthur Evans to Crete. In Greek antique shops and elsewhere he had seen certain stone signets, each with three or four facets inscribed with what he felt sure were characters of some prehistoric system of writing (cf. Suppl. PL CLXXVII (a)); they were alleged to come from Crete. After a visit to that island in 1894 to collect further evidence he was able to recognize, besides these ‘hieroglyphs’, a later and more linear type of writing occasionally scratched on vessels of pottery or stone from prehistoric sites in Greece and Crete. In a long article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1894 he hazarded some remarkable conclusions from this scanty evidence: that although the ‘hieroglyphs’ probably concealed a pre-Greek language, the later, linear script might have been used for writing Greek; and that this linear script was a syllabary somehow related to the syllabary used in Cyprus in historical times as an alternative to the Greek alphabet. He was right on both points; but paradoxically his excavations at Knossos, begun in 1900 in pursuit of the origins and history of these scripts, led him gradually farther from the truth. Within the first week of digging he had begun to unearth clay tablets written in what he later dubbed ‘Linear B’ script (cf. Suppl. Pis. CLXXVIII (a), (b), CLXXIX and CLXXX (a)); and they were associated with objects at once identified as belonging to the Mycenaean civilization known from mainland Greece since Schliemann's excavations in the 1870'8. Further exploration, however, revealing the earlier stages of the civilization of Knossos, made it necessary to distinguish a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilization, in many ways a parent of the Mycenaean. Evans saw this civilization more and more as continuous, and as non-Greek. The corollary of this would be that the hieroglyphic script and the two linear scripts that succeeded it (for he now recognized an intermediate stage—‘Linear A’ (cf. Suppl. PI. CLXXVII (cj)—as well as the Linear B of his Knossos tablets)—all represented one non-Greek ‘Minoan’ language.

I

We are often told nowadays that the whole business of war, especially command and administration, is becoming increasingly difficult and complicated as more and more different weapons, each more highly specialized than the last, are brought into service. But the undoubted truth of this contention must not lead us into the error of supposing that ancient warfare was a simple matter between forces composed of nothing but infantry and cavalry. Many of the battles of antiquity, indeed, are made more interesting by the presence of unusual and intriguing armaments; and though some of these may now seem largely obsolete, it does not do to be too sure—was not the Home Guard armed with pikes in its early infancy?

Let us consider, then, the parade state of Antiochus’ army at the battle of Magnesia. After his defeat at Thermopylae in April 191, it will be remembered, he had fled to Ephesus, and by the end of the following year he was ready for the Scipios with an army of 70,000 men. ‘Most of the peoples of the Empire were represented, from Dahae horse-archers of the Caspian to Arabs mounted on dromedaries. It was strong in cavalry—at least 12,000 horse, light or “cataphract”—in light-armed infantry … archers, slingers and javelin men; it included, besides 54 elephants, that engine of war dear to the Ancient East, the dreaded scythed-chariots.’

Here, surely, is a sufficiently varied assortment of nationalities and armaments to show that manifold alliances and specialized equipments are not peculiar to the twentieth century.

Aman's character is judged not merely by his public services and his political views but also by his private life and individual interests. Similarly the history of a nation is to be read not only in its military exploits, its constitutional experiments, its art and literature, but also in the social habits and predominant interests of its citizens. Just as a garden mirrors the character of its owner, so the gardens of a nation reflect the character and the degree of advancement of the State. It is no coincidence that the popular garden of the Roman Republic was the simple kitchen garden, while under the Empire pretentious landscape gardens were the vogue. The vitalizing energy of the Republic found an outlet in the productive vegetable plot: the elaborate but sterile gardens of the Empire were symbolic of incipient decay.

Until the first century b.c. almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine-chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the Elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of a later date that in the past at Rome a garden was the poor man's estate: it was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in more northerly countries, for the diet of the Romans consisted, for the most part, of salads.

Cicero's grandfather is credited with the observation that the better a Roman knew Greek the bigger a scoundrel he was. Nevertheless one of his sons, Lucius, belonged to a circle that knew quite a lot of Greek and another, Marcus, certainly gave his own children a Greek education. Marcus, the father of the orator, seems to have shared the prevailing view that one had either a Greek education or none at all. Indeed, in 92, when Cicero was fourteen years old, the newly established Roman schools of rhetoric were closed down by the censors Crassus and Domitius, Crassus' reason, according to Cicero, being that the Roman schools were a travesty of their Greek exemplars: ‘nam apud Graecos, cuicui modi essent, uidebam tamen esse praeter hanc exercitationem linguae doctrinam aliquam et humanitate dignam scientiam, hos uero nouos magistros nihil intellegebam posse docere, nisi ut auderent.’ Amongst these schools was that of L. Plotius Gallus, who seems before the closure to have attracted a fair number of pupils.

Many without direct access to detailed information are by now quite firmly convinced that the numbers of students studying Classics at British Universities have been declining and are continuing to decline. To some this is a matter of regret, to others it is a matter of indifference, and to others again it is something positively to be welcomed. From time to time those with a committed belief in the value of classical studies tend to see hopeful signs of a recovery, while the enemies of Classics can hardly wait for the final demise of an outmoded and irrelevant discipline. But whatever the attitude adopted towards the decline, the fact that there is such a decline is normally not regarded as a matter that can be disputed. Indeed anyone who demurs about the facts tends to be ignored or dismissed, as if he were not only an interested party but a dishonest one as well. The present article is an attempt to consider the actual position in greater detail and it is hoped with greater objectivity than is to be found in many of the statements frequently put forward in the course of discussion.

Metapoetics—the name given by Aristotle's editors to his works on Publishing (either because they came after, or because they went beyond, and transcended, his Poetics)—deals with literary activity not qua itself but qua its product (ἔργον), the Book (ὥσπερ γὰρ τῆς οἰκοδομικῆς τέχνης ἐστὶν ἔργον ὁ οἶκος, ὁμοίως τῆς ποιητικῆς τὸ βιβλίον), and considers how this product is brought to the notice of the reader–or, rather, readers (μία γὰρ χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ).

In 1888 Rudyard Kipling published a collection of short-stories entitled The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. Perhaps the most famous of these stories, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, recounted the adventures of two British military veterans, Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot Esq., played by Michael Caine and Sean Connery in John Huston's 1975 film of the same name. Both men have seen India's cities and jungles, jails and palaces, and have decided that she is too small for the likes of they. So, they set out to become kings of Kafiristan, a mountainous, isolated, and unstudied country beyond the Hindu Kush in north-eastern Afghanistan. They confide their plan to their recent acquaintance Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer), then editor of the Northern Star, who calls them mad. No man, he says, has made it to Kafiristan since Alexander the Great, to which Peachy replies ‘If a Greek can do it, we can do it.’ What they find in north-eastern Afghanistan are the last remnants of Alexander the Great's empire, a local culture and religion part-Greek and part-Kafiri. The story is fiction, but aspects of its historical context are true. Alexander spent most of the years 330–325 campaigning in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and he left behind Greek kingdoms and culture that flourished throughout the Hellenistic period and even later. Traces of these Greek kingdoms are continually coming to light and the archaeological, artistic, and epigraphic evidence coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India reveals a prosperous and culturally diverse kingdom.

It has been a commonplace for centuries that there is much more in Martial than scurrility. Yet to those who do not read him his name is probably still synonymous with a certain type of crude and monotonous jesting: to that extent at least he has been unfortunate. The jests, brilliantly phrased and pointed, are plain enough, but (quite apart from the reasonable assumption that he had to make them or starve) it is not mere wishful thinking which compels his admirers to maintain that the true man is not to be found there. For to many he is one of the most human and companionable of Latin authors, and they return with perennial delight to his descriptions of country life, his friends and amusements, his troubles and disappointments, his whole lively picture of the world of his day. Critics have remarked at length on his perpetual brilliance, his complete mastery of language, and it would be pointless to draw attention once again to the superb craftsmanship and exquisite polish which characterize every line of his best work.

‘No other poet in any language has the same never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting ingenuity, an equal facility and finish.’ So Mr. H. W. Garrod in a well-known essay. And it is a verdict from which few will dissent.

For all that, it may be argued that there is still one further aspect of Martial's genius, or character, which has received something less than its rightful share of attention; a quality of mind difficult to define in set terms, but which perhaps may be tentatively described as tenderness; a sensitive and warm sympathy; above all, an almost painful awareness of the swiftly passing beauty of childhood and the bitterness of the death which comes too soon.