1. 151-7 qualiter expressum ventis per nubila fulmen
aetheris impulsi sonitu mundique fragore
emicuit rupitque diem populosque paventes
terruit obliqua praestringens lumina flamma:
in sua templa furit, nullaque exire vetante
materia magnamque cadens magnamque revertens
dat stragem late sparsosque recolligit ignes.

Of the rival interpretations of templa in 155, ‘temples’ and ‘quarters of the sky’ Housman espoused the latter; but he did not explain sua, which Weise explained as ‘loca aut regna, in quibus oritur et quasi habitat et regnat fulmen’ (‘the quarter of the sky whence it came’ Haskins). Such in fact seems the only possible interpretation, given the chosen sense of templa, despite Duff's ‘it rushes to its appointed quarter of the sky’ or Bourgery's ‘elle fond sur les lieux qu'elle consacre.’ But why should Lucan tell us this (Weise's ‘habitat et regnat’ is only his own embroidery), and so spoil his sequel? How a Roman reader would understand templa should be obvious to anyone who has read Pease's note on Cic. Div. 1.19 ipse suos quondam tumulos aut templa petivit/et Capitolinis iniecit sedibus ignis.

Nine years being nobody's idea of a significant anniversary, it will be understood that there is no celebratory intent in my returning here – with the kind permission of the Editors – to The Ideology of the Athenian Metic. Nor does it represent an author's peevish response to reviewers' nit-pickings, just or unjust. Rather, two purposes are to be served. The first is simply to bring together some of the less inconsequential addenda and corrigenda which any scholarly work (good or bad) generates, on the basis that the result might be a Nachtrag of some service to users of the book, and others; Section I comprises a series of twenty such points, listed in the order in which they arise in IAM and referred to by its pagination. Section II then re-opens a much broader issue – the Athenian metoikia in the third century – on which IAM could, and arguably should, have said more.

‘The shape of the whole of Britain Livy, the best of the older school, and Fabius Rusticus, the best of the moderns, have compared to an elongated scutula or a battle-axe.’

So runs the context in which these words are situated. On the surface all is plain, but when one asks further ‘what shape has Tacitus in mind?’ serious difficulties are met. Editors usually get round these by analysing the words separately and deciding on parallels from Strabo that vagueness was all that was needed, and that though Tacitus links the words with vel they need not be strikingly similar.

But this is impossible: first, Tacitus must have had in mind objects of mutually similar shape; secondly they must have had a clearly recognizable shape, which conveyed a very definite picture to the minds of those for whom Tacitus wrote. Thirdly why did Tacitus prefer oblongae scutulae vel bipenni to the descriptions of ‘the many writers who have spoken of the geography of Britain’? Tacitus does not claim that Livy and Fabius are most correct, only that they are eloquentissimi.

In piscibus (sc. nascuntur) obsonatores et rhetores: thus Trimalchio concludes the sign-by-sign interpretation he gives in Petr. 39 of the astrological repositorium that has been served some chapters before (35.1–5). While the obsonatores – ‘buyers of fish’ (TLL 9.234.49–70), from ὀΨωνέω, ‘buy fish and other dainties’ (LSJ s.v.) – pose no problem, the rhetores have mystified interpreters since Peter Burman, who frankly confessed: ‘Causam non video, cum pisces vulgo muti habeantur, rhetores vero loquaces. Fortasse corrupta vox. An vectores aut veteratores? Haereo.’

In the Theaetetus, after identifying Theaetetus' conjecture that knowledge is perception with Protagoras' theory that man is the measure of all things, Socrates associates this view with what he suggests may have been a ‘secret doctrine’ of Protagoras. What we say ‘is’ really is only in process of becoming: nothing is really of any definite sort. What is called white colour simply arises between the eye and the ‘motion’ which it encounters and is something peculiar to each several percipient. At this point (154b) Socrates goes on to say that ‘the thing which measures itself against the object or touches it’, like ‘the thing that we measure ourselves against’, is constantly undergoing change, for otherwise ‘when a different thing came into contact with it or were somehow modified, it, on its side, if it were not affected in itself, would not become different’. He continues, ‘For as things are we are too easily led into making statements which Protagoras and anyone who maintains the same position would call strange and absurd’, and he instances the case of six dice, which are said to be more when compared with four and fewer when compared with twelve, and himself, who is now taller than Theaetetus, but within a year will be shorter, without having lost in height (because Theaetetus is growing).

One of the most arresting of Herodotus' ethnographic tales is the famous story of Darius' anthropological investigations in which he asked certain Greeks and Indians how they treated the corpses of their parents when they died (3.38). The Greeks burned their dead parents, the Indians ate them. The Persian king asked each group how much money it would take to get them to treat the parental remains as the other group treated theirs. Each group expressed pious horror at the others' customs, each was convinced that their own practice was the proper one, the other outrageous. So, Herodotus concludes, this shows, as Pindar said, that nomos is king of all; if you were to ask any people which customs were the best (τοὺς ϰαλλίστους) of all nomoi, they would certainly choose their own.

It is now nearly two and a half years since Mr Lobel published the fragment which he has called ‘as surprising as any recovered from the soil of Egypt’. Since then a considerable literature has grown up around the fragment. Mr Lobel with caution and Professor Page with more conviction have attributed the fragment to early Attic tragedy. But the other scholars who have written on the subject have with striking unanimity assigned it to the tragedy of the Hellenistic age, some of them with what seems to me a surprising self-assurance.

Arguments from the nature of the subject-matter seem to give little help in reaching a decision. If one party can adduce the Persae of Aeschylus and the Phoenissae and the Capture of Miletus of Phrynichus, the other can retort with the Themistocles of Mausolus and the Cassandreis of Lycophron. Leaving subject-matter aside, three main types of evidence have been brought forward, that of the style, that of the language and that of the metre. Any inference about the date based solely on the style must rest on foundations that are at least partially subjective.

The Eighth Nemean has never been reckoned among Pindar's more difficult odes. It has its own problems, as does every other ode, yet beside the Seventh Nemean, for instance, or the Second Pythian, these problems pale into insignificance. But although the significance of the central myth has generally been recognized, scholars have failed, I believe, to appreciate the overall cohesion of the ode and the single-mindedness with which Pindar pursues his argument. I should like to offer a personal appreciation of this poem, to demonstrate its striking unity of design and its impressive economy. The text is based on that of A.Turyn.

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

In ‘the only coherent piece of autobiography which we possess from Horace's pen’, as Fraenkel has called it, the poet wrote these famous lines (Epist. 2.2.49–52):

unde simul primum me dimisere Philippi,
decisis humilem pinnis inopemque paterni 50
et laris et fundi paupertas impulit audax
ut uersus facerem.

As soon as Philippi discharged me thence, poverty drove me—grounded as I was, with my wings clipped, and deprived of my ancestral home and farm—boldly to produce verses.

As is remarked by Lyne, however, ‘Horace here omits an intervening and prosaic stage’. The evidence for this omission comes from Suetonius' biography of the poet, in which the same period of Horace's life is described slightly differently: ‘uictisque partibus uenia impetrata scriptum quaestorium comparauit. ac primo Maecenati … insinuatus…’ (‘after the defeat of his party and a successful request for pardon he procured the position of scriba quaestorius. And having first become involved with Maecenas…’). What was the exact sequence of events? Lyne, like Brink, proposes that Horace after Philippi derived income from his position as scriba quaestorius and that this in turn enabled him to write the poetry which eventually brought him to Maecenas' attention. Nisbet, on the other hand, thinks that Horace's early poetry elicited subsidies from ‘grandees like Pollio and Messalla’ and that these provided him with the wherewithal to buy his position as scriba, from which he was effectively relieved by his later association with Maecenas.

This paper focuses on the pair of philosophical puzzles, in the first section of Plato's Theaetetus, concerning the comparison between cardinalities and sizes. My initial task is to analyse some difficulties and distractions which affect our understanding of the argumentation that Socrates puts forward on Protagoras' behalf. I then offer a revised interpretation that integrates the puzzles with the rest of the Protagorean/Heraclitean theory. The emerging discussion, far from being a bridging passage or detour, is a unit with its own specific identity. Its goal is to stretch the Protagorean/Heraclitean metaphysics of events to a new limit: the dematerialisation of change. Change may also be the simple effect of quantitative comparisons as such. At the same time, important traces of Plato's indirect move against Protagoras are detected: the conceivability itself of this Protagorean view descends from a common application of mathematics.

This article considers acrotelestich wordplay in the major poets of the Augustan period, with particular reference to Ovid, and analyses its main types and characteristics. The article's final section seeks to demonstrate that Ovid invented a new category, that of political acrostics and telestichs, unique to him and uniquely suited to his own experience of Augustan terror and of the need for literary subterfuge and plausible deniability.

On the hideous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humourist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

This inscription was published with commentary by Dr H. W. Pleket in The Greek Inscriptions in the ‘Rijksmuseum van Oudheden’ at Leyden (Leiden, 1958), as no. 57. The principal discussions of it since that of Pleket have been by Mrs K. M. T. Atkinson in Revue Internationale des droits de l'antiquité, 3e sér. VII (1960), at pp. 227–72, and by Prof. W. Kunkel in Studi Betti, at pp. 593–620.

Heroides 15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer, the Greek love poet par excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks very written, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of the Heroides' illusion of female authorship.

In doing so, Sappho functions as the crucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?