As a drama and a poem theEumenidesis often regarded with unease. It brings theOresteiato a conclusion; but its account of Athens and the Areopagus seems to many readers inspired more by patriotism than a sense of dramatic unity. Hence much attention has been devoted to Aeschylus' supposed political message in the play; as a result, the question of its fitness to crown the trilogy recedes into the background or even vanishes. On the other hand, those whose concern is with Aeschylus' (...) poetry tend to ignore his ‘politics’. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to vindicate Aeschylus the artist: to show, that is, how the founding of the homicide court and the cult of the Semnai on the Areopagus in Athens properly marks the end of the troubles of the Argive Atridae, and how the sufferings and guilt of individual men and women are resolved in a city's institutions. In pursuing this aim, it also has to consider, and try to define, the relation of the tragedian to his audience and to contemporary society. My concern, then, is with the individual and the community, both within the play and behind it. (shrink)

I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the (...) Latin fidicen’ . And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles : ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’. (shrink)

It seems clear that Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus knew, if not the third Sibylline Oracle itself, prophecies like it. An unnoticed parallel between that work and Horace may confirm this conclusion and afford a small insight into the Latin poet's art.

It is perhaps unnecessary to defend the principle that mythical exempla in ancient poetry are not merely decorative, but serve in the expression of ‘significant emotion’ it would still be welcome to see it more frequently and more coherently applied. This paper tries to isolate one characteristic use of myth in four poems from Hellenistic and Roman authors; the last section summarizes its conclusions and briefly sets them in a context of literary history.