If the Phaedra is Seneca's best-known play, it has suffered more than any other from inadequate or misdirected critical attention. Most accounts have been preoccupied with its similarity or dissimilarity to the Hippolytus of Euripides, or else with its rhetorical luxuriance. The first group has spoken of it as a not very meritorious rewrite of Euripides' play (Version I, II, or mixed). Méridier, for example, in his Hippolyte d'Euripide devotes a chapter to the Phaedra, giving a résumé of the plot, listing parallels and discrepancies with the Hippolytus, and providing by way of conclusion an ‘étude littéraire’. In this he treats the play as mere adaptation, remarking ‘on voit ce que l'œuvre de Sénèque a perdu au changement’. Where Seneca has introduced originalities, ‘ces scenes nouvelles ne témoignent pas toujours … d'un art très heureux’.

If you lived in Reading in 1821, you might be tempted by the advertisement in your local newspaper for forthcoming attractions at the neighbourhood's commercial theatre. Should your taste encompass Greco-Roman themes, you might want to see ‘Monsieur DECOUR, the renowned FRENCH HERCULES!! Who will perform… FEATS AND EVOLUTIONS…’. If you preferred oriental stunts, you would choose ‘The Chinese JUGGLERS from the Court of Pekin!!’ Such exhibitions are fairly typical of the popular entertainments enjoyed during the late Georgian era in any fast industrializing provincial town not too far from London. But what is surprising is that the same newspaper offers a review of a production in the town hall of Euripides’ little known tragedy Orestes.

The following text and translation is extracted from Joseph Addison's Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europae Reddita, 1697 (lines 96–132 and 167–end). The poem celebrates the peace of Ryswick in which William III and his continental allies had halted the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and France had recognized William as King of England. The poem describes, in general terms, William's unification of the allied forces against France, the siege warfare which distinguished the campaigns, and the coming again of agricultural prosperity to war-ravaged Europe. The first extract begins with William's return to England. The omitted lines describe the young William, Dukeof Gloucester, the eldest son of the future Queen Anne, and a firework display in London. The Duke of Gloucester shortly died, and the death of the King himself in 1702 coincided with the outbreak of even fiercer war to prevent the potential unification of the thrones of France and Spain (the War of the Spanish Succession) in which Louis XIV returnedto the support of Jacobite claims to the English crown.

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.

In 1545, nearly two years before the death of Henry VIII, there came to England Nicander Nucius of Corfu. He stayed some months, and later wrote an account of his visit in classical Greek.

There must be many like myself who are indebted to Mr. Stanley Casson's last published work, Greece and Britain, for their first acquaintance with Nicander. Unfortunately his chapter on Nicander is all too brief. Moreover, there is only one English edition of the Greek text, and this was published by the Camden Society over a hundred years ago.2 A more accessible edition is called for, as I hope this paper will show.

Nicander came to England with his patron Gerard, whom the Emperor Charles V had dispatched as an emissary to Henry. We know little about Nicander himself, but there are hints that he had recently left his home owing to some personal tragedy. Corfu was then a part of the Venetian Republic and it was to Venice that he made his way, there to meet Gerard, who was travelling to the court of Sultan Suleiman. Nicander accompanied him to Constantinople. His knowledge of local conditions would make him a useful travelling-companion, and it is probable that he also proved helpful as a diplomatic assistant. At any rate, he remained a member of Gerard's suite and followed him faithfully on the long journey through Germany and Belgium which finally brought them both to Calais. Here they received a travel-permit (ἐυλóσιμον), and after a false start crossed to Dover.

In most branches of classical study, in the interpretation of history, in criticism, whether textual or literary, and most noticeably in archaeology, the present generation knows more than its parents did; that a similar advance has not been made in the strictly linguistic studies is perhaps due partly to an unexpressed assumption that we already know all that we are likely to know about the classical languages, but is certainly due even more to a love of tradition for its ownsake; what was good enough for Kennedy is good enough for us.

Most of us tend to encounter Greek myths in childhood as exciting stories brimming with heroes, monsters, and moody divinities. The story of Odysseus’ homecoming and the story about the Little Mermaid feature different characters, but their relationship to reality is understood to be the same: they are fantasy, and not real. If, like me, you were lucky enough to escape the Disneyfication of fairy tales in your childhood, perhaps you will remember the brutality and harshness of folktales, which puts them on a par with many Greek myths. My first encounters with ancient Greek stories about the gods and heroes were very similar to Sarah Iles Johnston's: we were both captivated by Greek myth as children, and the passion, once kindled, only grew stronger when we became mature enough to read the ‘real thing’. In my case, learning about ancient Greek culture and becoming a scholar of Greek religion required a thorough rethink, as I needed to readjust my stance towards Greek myths in order to understand the role that they played in ancient Greek society as formative narratives about the communities’ identities, early history, and human relationships with the gods. My process essentially required an emotional detachment from the beloved heroes of my childhood and a significant amount of distancing.

What sort of person was Penelope? If Homer were consulted about the casting for a dramatization of the story, what type would he choose to play her part? What sort of person was this Penelope, for whom her husband abandoned a goddess—more than one goddess, indeed—but in whom he yet felt so little confidence on his return that she was almost the last person in the household to learn his identity? One hundred and eight suitors, according to Telemachos' careful count, buzzed about her; either she could not or she would not dismiss them entirely, but she put them off year after year, while she wept for her absent husband, and looked after the housekeeping, and managed the estate, with no help at all from her father-in-law—managed it pretty successfully too, one would think, for all Telemachos' dissatisfaction, or the house could hardly have stood the drain of such continuous entertainment. In all her appearances in the story she seems irreproachably circumspect; yet her own son, a rather staid and solemn fellow, said to a complete stranger, ‘My mother says I am Odysseus' son, but how should I know?’ Even allowing for a conventional reference to a proverbial saying, it is a strange remark from a modest, unsophisticated young man who did not set himself up for a wit, and who, as he justly remarked to his father, was ‘not in the habit of behaving like a light-headed fool’. It is certainly not the sort of answer that Homeric heroes customarily give about their lineage.

‘Wir wollen ja mehr oder anderes als die Thatsachen classificieren; wir wollen sie erklären’ is the cry of a neglected linguist of the last century which it would not be idle to echo today, especially in the matter of syntactical oddities in the Greek and Latin authors. The immensely valuable work of those who have collected and classified instances of ‘aberrant’ syntax in the classical languages has the inherent disadvantage that lists and categories are made up according to the resultant form of the aberration rather than the underlying mental process which can itself often be analysed with profit. The result is a division of the phenomena into anacoluthon, contamination, pleonasm, ellipse, constructio ad sensum, and so on, a convenient but somewhat barren method, lessening the possibility of explaining and illuminating one example from another. Indeed to do thus cuts across the scientific method, putting together forms or uses which result from different thought- or speech-habits and separating many which owe their origin to identical or similar tendencies but have moved on somewhat divergent paths. Löfstedt, though he deals with the oddities of usage under conventional headings, pays no little regard to the psychological aspect and admits that a clear-cut division into conventional classes is not always free from considerable difficulty and is not particularly important for the scholar who would explain these things on a psychological basis.* Contamination in particular has been used rather to excess. The much quoted English oddity ‘I am friends with him’ is consistently stated to be a contamination of ‘I am friendly with him’ and ‘we are friendsür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1860, 1.97.

Chapters 50–2 of Herodotus' first book have been relatively neglected by scholars, presumably because they appear at first glance simply to list Croesus' sacrificial offerings at Delphi, rather than operating as a narrative imbued with the tragic motifs that scholars have long admired and explored in the Lydian logos as a whole. Only H. W. Parke has paid attention to these chapters, and even he considers them only from the perspective of Herodotus' historical veracity. Caroline Dewald, in an article on the misleading power of objects in Herodotus, does not include 1.50–2 in her discussion, while Gregory Crane notes that Herodotus' list is ‘surprisingly detailed’, but can only explain its specificity in terms of the presumed general appeal of such a list to his contemporaries. This note will suggest, however, that, as well as simply documenting Croesus' spectacular offerings, the narrative of these chapters is also shaped by some fundamental themes that run through the whole Croesus story.

One of the aspects of Lessing's misinterpretation of Aristotle1 which deserves a comment is the question of the Greek text used by the author of the Hamburg Dramaturgy for his translation and discussion of Aristotle's sentence describing the nature and function of tragedy (Poetics vi. 2; 1449b). Mr. K. A. Dickson (p. 54) quotes the text of the modern editions:

(1) ἔστιν ον τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶς ἑκάστῳ τῶν εἰδῶν τοῑς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι' ἀπαγγελίας, δι' ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.

Book nine of Ovid's Metamorphoses begins with Achelous telling Theseus and his companions the reason behind the lack of one of his horns. It turns out that the river god has lost it during a fight against Hercules, while they were both wooing Oeneus' daughter, Deianira. The other suitors, realizing that they would not stand a chance against such rivals as Hercules and Achelous, left the contest. While the whole competition seems initially to have depended on the ability to convince Oeneus through self-praise, Hercules' intolerance of the river god's sophisms causes the verbal duel to become a hand-to-hand fight. This fight results in Achelous' defeat and loss of both Deianira and his horn.