Ever since the decipherment of Linear B, a large amount has been written on Mycenaean spelling. The basic rules were established very quickly, although the debate is still continuing as to the theoretical basis of Mycenaean spelling; various models have been proposed here. One of the most serious problems for all existing models is that at the edges, there is spelling variation that simply cannot be captured by one and the same algorithm. Here, we shall look at two such cases:

• the graphic rendering of the subphonemic glides j and w as in e.g. i-je-re-u, a-re-ku-tu-ru-wo which can be contrasted with later Greek ἱερεύς and ἀλεκτρυών where the glides are not or not routinely indicated;

• and so-called plene writing; this term is used in a variety of meanings. Here, we shall deal with the graphic rendering of consonants in the coda of final syllables where the standard spelling rules would predict their omission, e.g. wa-na-ka rendering /wanaks/ where the spelling rules would predict a rendering wa-na.

In 1903, in the preface to the first volume of his edition of Manilius, Housman wrote:

… we now witness in Germany pretty much what happened in England after 1825, when our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley's Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester. England disappeared from the fellowship of nations for the next forty years.

(Housman (1903) xlii)

The name which lurks unspoken behind this paragraph is that of Richard Porson, and Dobree, Elmsley and Blomfield, whose names are spoken, were all in different ways his disciples. Although Porson had no pupils and gave no lectures, in the generation just after his death he had a number of followers who cultivated his memory and emulated his style, at least before they were removed to higher spheres by death or preferment to bishoprics. If the cultivation of his scholarly style can be called Porsonianism, it was the cult of Porson himself after his death in 1808, centred on Trinity College, Cambridge, for which three years later the Oxford scholar Peter Elmsley coined the name ‘Porsoniasm’. As one might expect, the name-giver was an outsider. Yet as his inclusion in Housman's sketch indicates, Elmsley could be called a Porsonian, and indeed in 1911, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin at Cambridge, Housman remarked that ‘scholarship meant to Elmsley what it meant to Dobree’ (Housman (1969) 25). But though Elmsley was a Porsonian, he was not (if I may venture a hapax of my own) a Porsoniast.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara's famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus' description of the sea-monster Scylla's lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa. The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode's elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses' poetics.

This article subjects the final part of the treatise Expositio et ratio omnium formarum (Systematic presentation of all figures), included in the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum and commonly ascribed to Balbus, to fresh philological scrutiny (Balbus gromaticus pp. 107.10–108.8 ed. Lachmann). The passage deals with methods of constructing right angles for the purpose of drawing rectangular and rectilinear figures. On the basis of a reconsideration of the preserved textual witnesses and previous scholarship, the passage is critically and interpretatively studied in the form of a running commentary.