Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

Where ought we to begin the story of the Trojan War? If we follow Homer, we shall begin with Paris and his mad folly or ate in abducting Helen (Iliad 24.28; cf. 3.100 and 6.356, and contrast 5.62–64 and 22.115–16). But the rape of Helen was a direct consequence of Paris awarding the prize for outstanding beauty to Aphrodite, when, while tending animals on Mount Ida, the prince was approached by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite and required to adjudicate between their conflicting claims to be thought the fairest.

En comparant la « Théogonie » et les « Travaux et les Jours », ou bien Hésiode et Homère, nous pouvons voir comment l'adoption de l'écriture entraîna certaines modifications dans la tradition orale des aèdes. Elle permit à Hésiode de faire l'essai de nouvelles formes, à partir surtout de la technique de la composition « annulaire ». Grâce à celle-ci, il réussit à introduire un élément de continuité dans les « Travaux et les Jours ». Elle est, pour ainsi dire, le ciment du poème et lui confère cette essentielle unité de structure qui se révèle à l'analyse. Au reste, Hésiode ne se limite pas à la répétition des mêmes mots et des mêmes formules, il fait également usage de sentiments et d'idées analogues.

No abstract

One of the less expected treatises included in Plutarch's Moralia consists of the nine books of ‘Table-talk’ or topics suitable for discussion by the participants at the strictly male and private drinking party or symposium (612Cff.) But even when the association of symposium and the erotic is acknowledged or we note the interest of ancient philosophers in the general area of eugenics (e.g., Arist. Pol. 1334b29 ff. and Plutarch on the Spartan marriage, Lye. 15.3–9) or we identify the type of prejudice which later led Christians to believe that a child conceived on a Sunday will be a leper or epileptic, the sixth question analysed in Book 3, ‘the right time to make love’ (653Bff), is perhaps considerably more surprising. The conclusion eventually reached, however, will occasion no alarm: the right time for men and women to sleep together would appear to be at night when it is dark (cf. 654D–E) – after all, we are busy and preoccupied throughout the day and are not animals like the cock eager for sex first thing in the morning. But in the evening we are relaxed and at our ease, and so the time is right provided, of course, we have neither eaten nor drunk to excess. This is hardly a conclusion, however, to be warmly welcomed by the sexually liberated for whom intercourse is there to be enjoyed wherever, and at whatever time of night or day, excitement mounts. But when it comes to sex, Plutarch is no revolutionary keen to experiment.