The aim of this article is to offer what I consider to be necessary substantiati for the view that the description of the walk which acts as a frame for the singing contest in Id. 7 is based on a precise knowledge of the geography of t island of Cos and that the poem thus displays a topographical realism unique Greek pastoral.

In the fourth book of the Aeneid Virgil presents the epic's titular hero as fated to found Rome, initially neglecting and ultimately reassuming his mission, all the while being accorded praise or blame for his progress. In this article I shall re-examine Virgil's use of the specifically Chrysippan Stoic doctrine of Fate and human responsibility in Aeneid 4, with a focus on three key points: the role of assent in creating a compatibility of Fate and human responsibility; the ‘Lazy Argument’, (...) the position that Chrysippus combatted, that if things are fated they will happen without any effort on my part; and the Stoic conception of Fate as a chain of causes that includes human assents. I shall argue that Virgil's impeccable, almost obsessive, scholarship results in a detailed homage to Chrysippan Stoic doctrine that actually alludes to its finer points. I restrict my comments to Book Four on the grounds that the Dido-episode tests to the limit Aeneas’ resolve to ‘follow … Italy’, even if non sponte, and that the juxtaposition with Dido sheds added light on the picture. I hope thereby to contribute to a topic of research that deserves renewed investigation using the discoveries in Hellenistic philosophy over the last two generations. (shrink)

From a careful and persuasive analysis of Sophocles' debt in the Ajax to Homer's picture of Hector and Andromache's farewell in Iliad 6, P. E. Easterling concludes that in the Ajax ‘we have the paradox of an author's distinctive originality finding expression through his reading of another's work’. In what follows I wish to show that the validity of this statement extends to an aspect of the play which is touched upon by Easterling , but which I would like to (...) single out for special attention: the preoccupation with the problem of what constitutes noble action, or, in the play's own terminology, what is the nature of εγένεια. (shrink)

At W.D. 202–12 Hesiod relates his ανος for the edification of the recalcitrant βασιλες, who must themselves admit the truth of the fable's moral . A hawk has seized a nightingale, and crushes her cries of misery by saying that she is in the claws of one who is πολλν ρείων and who is therefore at liberty to dispense with her as he pleases: anyone who tries to resist κρείσσονες is mad, for he has no chance of winning and merely (...) adds physical pain to the shame of defeat. Just what were the βασιλες to have made of this? Hesiod's most recent editor claims that ‘Hesiod does not manage to make it [the ανος] into a lesson for them [the kings]’, and ‘can only proceed by saying “Well, don't you behave like that” ’. (shrink)