The elder Carcinus and his sons are mentioned, or appear on stage, as tragic performers in three plays by Aristophanes (Wasps, Clouds and Peace). They provide a unique insight into how the performance of tragedy could be (and frequently was) a family business. This study attempts to establish what can be known about this theatrical family from the evidence of comedy and how it functioned as an acting troupe. Moreover, in examining how the family troupe changed over time, we begin to learn more about the process by which one of Carcinus’ sons, Xenocles, was trained as a tragic poet. Though little is known about Carcinus, Xenocles was a relatively successful tragedian, who was active in the final two decades of the fifth century B.C. Both ancient and modern scholars have assumed that Xenocles was a poet by 422, when he is thought to have appeared as a character in the Wasps. I argue that Xenocles did not in fact make his debut as an independent poet until after 420. Before this date Aristophanes recognises Carcinus as the poet of the family company, which suggests that the young Xenocles was still serving his apprenticeship with his father at this time.

Aristotle’s treatment of the qualitative parts of tragedy in chapter 6 of the Poetics contains in 1450a12–14 a passage that is hard to understand and generally condemned as corrupt. This passage is given a better understanding in this paper: In a first step the discussion of the relevant research literature shows that the text has hitherto been neither adequately explained in its transmitted form, nor satisfactorily healed by critical interventions. In a second step it is shown that, contrary to the communis opinio, the transmitted text is in fact coherent and its presence in this context pointedly raises the quality of the argument. The solution thus found also contributes to improving our understanding of, on the one hand, the structure of the argument in the whole second half of the sixth chapter of the Poetics and, on the other hand, Aristotle’s essential position on staging (ὄψις) and on fourth-century tragedy.

According to the scholia, Apollodoros of Cyrene considered Eur. Or. 1384 to be a stage instruction interpolated into the text, and many modern editors follow him. A survey of the previous studies of the passage shows that acceptance of Apollodoros' version requires a series of improbable assumptions, whereas acknowledgement of the verse's authenticity does not involve serious difficulties. A new argument against Apollodoros' hypothesis is proposed in this paper: namely, the exact meaning of such a stage instruction cannot be explained adequately. A direction to sing the text to a melody by Olympos is impossible: if the music of Euripides still existed, it would not be substituted and, even if the original music did not survive, such a complex lyrical part could not be sung to a melody not specially composed for it. As an indication of the mood of performance, the line would prove to be too obscure. It is improbable that Euripides himself composed the verses to a famous melody, because the music of Olympos was distinguished by its old-fashioned simplicity, which was impossible to imitate, whereas Euripides belonged to the musical 'avant-garde'. If someone observed in the margin that Euripides' music to the passage was stylistically close to the chariot nome, it would be a gloss and not a stage instruction; it seems more reasonable that the poet himself underlined the resemblance in his text. Finally, instrumental insertions were not characteristic of a classical tragedy.

The communication processes between princeps and the Roman upper class, which Tacitus presents in his Annales, run strikingly counter to any model of communication based on understanding and to Grice’s conversational maxims. They can be described, instead, through two levels of communication in which certain contents are intended to be concealed and not understood. On one level, visible from the outside, the communicators allow signs to appear that are intentionally misleading and manipulated and which are intended to prevent recognition of what they really think or feel. The recipients of these messages nonetheless attempt, on the basis of these signs, to decipher what is hidden at a second level. These rhetorical-hermeneutic processes of coding and decoding are, in both cases, supposed to remain unnoticed by the other party. Tacitus thus stages breakdowns in communication that depend not on the system of signs being used, nor on the ability of the communicators, but on the power relations in force. Tacitus uses the depiction of this communication interrupted by power structures in order to construct a communicative discourse which, during the lifetimes of the emperors, remained hidden and unofficial.

Abstract A close reading of a chapter of Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (IV 7) on the quantity of prefixes reveals that the two prose quotations from the elder Cato, which seem to be inappropriate in a discussion that otherwise consists of nothing but poetic examples, are in fact not at all out of place, since Cato himself offered poetic material in these quotations. Through this, two fragments of Old Latin poetry can be recovered. The first (faenoribus copertus or faenoribus copertust), the ending of a hexameter, is probably taken from a satiric context. The content of the second fragment (ita nos fert ventus ad primorem Pyrenaeum quo proicit / in altum), an iambic octonarius, may indicate occasional poetry.

Abstract A comparison between ecl. 1 and ecl. 10 shows not only the deep differences of the new Virgilian pastoral poetry from Theocritus’ bucolic, but confirms that even Virgil lacked confidence in the power of poetry to solace real sorrow, an idea maintained throughout the whole Bucolicon liber. Interesting analogies between the first and the last eclogue help furthermore to explain Virgil’s farewell to his bucolic production.

Abstract The Law of Hermann and Lachmann stipulates that in the iambo-trochaic verses of Roman drama the two shorts of a resolved element must not be the final syllables of a trisyllabic or longer word. The exceptions are covered by the ‘rule for places with licence’ (‘norma delle sedi con licenza’), for which a redefined and extended version is given in this paper. Its purpose is to show that a dactylic word can be placed behind the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius. The paper discusses the transmitted evidence for this licence and argues that the place after the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius corresponds to the place after the median diaeresis in the trochaic septenarius, a well established licence-place which permits dactylic words.