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This chapter looks at certain points and characters in Aristophanes's Knights. It mentions Demosthenes, son of Alcisthenes, who was known as one of the most enterprising Athenian generals of the Peloponnesian war. It also talks about Hylas, who was a beautiful youth and beloved by Heracles, and Sibylla, who was an ecstatic prophetess cited by Heracleitus in the mythology. The chapter discusses the death of Themistocles, who was the saviour of Athens and of Greece at the time of the great Persian invasion. It assesses the line “babbling fountain spouting buckets of codswallop”, which is a compound that suggests that Nicias spouts nonsense as a fountain spouts water.

This chapter picks up the terms of the polemic with Virgilian pastoral that began with Milanion in the first elegy, as Propertius repeatedly revisits the situation of the tenth Eclogue. Propertius refuses to accept the proposition that pastoral love would be an equally satisfying but less painful alternative to his own suffering. He points out that Gallus’ mistress in the tenth eclogue was probably bluffing; that the rustic environment of pastoral is less appealing than the urban context of elegy; and that the whole amatory experience in pastoral is substandard. The polemic climaxes at the end of the first book, when Propertius constructs the Hylas-elegy as an elaborate allegory for the dangerous allurements of the Eclogues. Virgil’s antithesis of Aristaeus and Orpheus is, in part, a response to that allegory, and an adaptation of Propertius’ own antithesis of Amphion and Orpheus.

This chapter considers developments in estimation of the philosophical value of the Three Dialogues over the last 100 years. It examines the view, presented in the early and mid-twentieth century, that the Three Dialogues is nothing more than a popular recasting of the Principles of Human Knowledge. It is argued that the stylistic and philosophically substantial reasons for holding such a view are highly questionable and that the emerging view, that the Three Dialogues is a more mature work where Berkeley develops his views after three years of additional exposure to criticism and further contemplation on his philosophical position, is a more accurate description of the work. It ends with a summary of the structure of the Three Dialogues and how the papers in this volume address the issues raised in that work.

Berkeley expresses his idealism in a number of different ways, ranging from the more modest claim that sensible things are nothing but ideas, to the more ambitious claim that the only things that exist at all are minds and ideas. This paper traces Berkeley’s attempts to move from the former to the latter claim. The central thesis will be that in the 1734 editions Berkeley shifts his approach to the question of what kinds of things exist, from an intuitive semantic approach towards a method of proof that is in line with the experimental scientific method. Berkeley’s treatment of absolute space will be used as a case study to confirm this development.