A long and important fragment of the Περὶ μοψσικῆς of Theophrastus is preserved in Porphyry's commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics. Both Porphyry and Ptolemy were reedited earlier in this century by Düring, in works which have rightly been taken to supersede the texts of Wallis: and so far as the Theophrastus passage is concerned, we should expect to be able to abandon in Düring's favour the text published by Wimmer, who in effect reprints Wallis, though adopting a few variant readings and emendations from Schneider. But it seems to me that Düring's text is not in all respects an improvement, and that the comments made on it in a subsequent publication by Alexanderson have muddied the waters still further. It is not only a matter of the text: Alexanderson prints also a (partial) translation and an interpretative commentary, and both are open to serious objections. I intend in this paper to deal only with a portion of the fragment, but it is that portion whose argument is the most intricate, and one which ought to shed a good deal of light on central controversies among the musical theoreticians who follow Aristotle. I am not in a position to dispute any of Düring's findings in the manuscripts, but where emendation has in any event proved necessary or where the manuscripts differ among themselves, I hope to show through a study of the content of the argument that the case in favour of Düring is not always closed.

ᾦ Φοῖβε πυργώσας τὸν ὲν Ἰλίωι εὐτειχῆ πάγον
καὶ πόντιε κυανέαις ὶ´πποις δωρρεύ- 1010
ων ἅλιον πέλαγος,
τώος οὕνεκ᾿ ἄτιμον ὀργάν-
αν χέρα τεκτοσύνας Ἐ- 1015
νυαλίωι δοριμήστορι προσϑέν-
τες τάλαωαν τάλαι-
ναν μεϑεῖτε Τροίαν;

In his commentary on the play (Euripides' Andromache, Oxford 1971, 215) P. T. Stevens gives a clear and concise account of the difficulties of the manuscript reading, ὀργάναν χέρα τεκτοσύνας J. Jackson (Marginalia Scaenica, Oxford 1955, 242) suggested ἄτιμον ὁρκανᾶν χέρα τεκτοσύνας (‘the hand that was cheated of its reward for building the towers of Troy’), but as Stevens points out the sentence is then meaningless, for the question τίνος οὕνεκα is answered by ἄτιμον κτλ.

This paper examines a diffusionist view shared by several classical scholars and folklorists. The ‘popular theme’ cast into Latin senarii by the fabulist Phaedrus in the early 1st century A.D. which appears in modern editions as ‘Appendix Perottina’ 16 Perry / 14 Postgage has, it is supposed, been transmitted to modern West Europe, where it is to be identified in a set of subliterary ‘versions’. The counter-suggestion made here is that (1) this supposition is methodologically dubious and (2) that a close understanding of the nature and history of Phaedrus' collection of fabulae makes it unlikely. The study is also intended to notice some of the central problems, procedural and practical, which are to be encountered in such investigations into folkloric subliterature.

Attempts to interpret the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles have been so numerous that anyone who seeks to add to their number is almost compelled to start by apologising for being so presumptuous as to think that he could offer anything new. I would incline to classify these attempts under four ‘main’ and three ‘ancillary’ headings. The ‘main’ interpretations are those which seek to interpret the play as a drama, and vary according to the view they take of the guilt of Oedipus. There are those who assert (with or without qualification) that Oedipus is to be viewed as guilty; those who see him as a victim of a malignant fate (and hence innocent); those who are content to assert his innocence without stressing the element of fatality; and those who leave the question of guilt or innocence aside. The ‘ancillary’ interpretations are those which seek to find in the play a non-dramatic relevance, i.e. a political relevance, a religious relevance, or a psychological relevance.

The classical periodical literature of the last thirty years or so does not contain much about Virgil's fifth Eclogue, and those scholars who have written on it have mostly been concerned with the mysterious figure of Daphnis and the question of his relationship to Julius Caesar. Two exceptions are Adelaide Hahn, who briefly discussed the first 19 lines to show that the characters of Menalcas and Mopsus are sharply differentiated, and Peter Steinmetz, who, in an article about the Eclogues as dramatic poems, devoted three short paragraphs to Eclogue 5 and argued for the existence of a homosexual element in the exchanges between the two shepherds. Like Hahn and Steinmetz, I shall be concerned with characterisation and dramatic progression. It seems to me that the poem is most interesting if regarded primarily as a mime, with a beginning, a middle and an end, a miniature comedy in which we are expected to read between the lines.

In the two speeches with which the play opens the paedagogus has asked Orestes and Pylades to determine the course of action (15-16, 20-21), while Orestes has informed him of the oracle of Apollo and given him instructions about what is required of him (39ff.). In the lines reproduced above the roles are reversed: the paedagogus is asked whether it is his wish that they should stay, a question which goes back upon the words with which Orestes had just concluded his speech at 73-5: σοὶ δ᾿ἤδη, γερον, | τὸ σὸν μελέσθω βαντί φρουρῆσαι χρέος, | νὼ δ᾿ ἔξιμεν· καιρὸς γάρ. He replies decisively that Apollo's orders must come first.

During the last four decades historians of ancient logic have become increasingly aware of the importance of Diodorus Cronus and his pupil Philo as pioneers of the propositional logic which came to flourish in the Stoa. Their direct influence has so far been recognised in two main areas of Hellenistic controversy – the validity-criteria for conditional propositions, and the definition of the modal terms ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’. But some broader questions have not been satisfactorily answered. What were Diodorus' own philosophical allegiances and antecedents? What is his place in the history of Greek philosophy? How far-reaching was his influence on the post-Aristotelian philosophers?

There was little chance of tackling these questions confidently until 1972, when Klaus Döring published for the first time the collected fragments of Diodorus, in his important volume Die Megariker. Meagre though they are, these fragments confirm my suspicion that Diodorus' philosophical background has not been fully explored, and also that his influence on the three emerging Hellenistic schools – the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics – was far wider than has hitherto been recognised. There has been much discussion as to which earlier philosophers played the most decisive part in shaping Hellenistic philosophy, and the respective claims of the Platonists and of Aristotle have never lacked expert advocacy. In all this, the claims of so obscure a figure as Diodorus have been underrated.

There is no agreement on the answer to this straight and modest question of textual history. As representative of one extreme I may cite Page's excursus in Actors' Interpolations: note ‘the prompt-copy must certainly have contained (among other notes) stage-directions’. He and his allies clearly imply that the original text, whether the dramatist's autograph or some contemporary fair copy, was covered with dozens – indeed hundreds – of stage directions, and that for some reason they were all but eliminated in the course of transmission. For the opposite view I quote David Bain's new book: ‘Such marginalia as we have are for the most part reader's additions and do not constitute part of the paradosis’. In favour of this side is the absence from our texts of all but a handful of the thousands of possible stage directions: on the other hand there is just that smattering in both tragedy and comedy, and they have to be explained.

…. siue trans altas gradietur Alpes
Caesaris uisens monimenta magni
Gallicum Rhenum horribilesque ultimosque Britannos.

So the MSS (except that for ultimosque O has the uox nihili ‘uitimosque’ and that a corrector of R and some inferior MSS omit the first -que); but in modern times only the Budé text of G.Lafaye has printed horribilesque unemended and unathetised, and that without a note despite Bentley's observation (on Hor. C. 3.14.11) that there is no instance of a short final vowel in hiatus where there is no break in the sense. The MSS reading does not scan.

Statius in his editio prior of 1566 saved the metre by introducing a postponed et – horribilesque et ultimosque, taking the first -que to mean ‘both’. Scaliger preferred to substitute the postponed et for the first -que, and was followed by Voss and Bentley (on Hor. C. 1.35.29). There is no need to detail here the numerous other suggestions that have been made: I agree with Fordyce that none of them is entirely satisfactory. Some of them substitute a noun for the first -que, and one of these, Haupt's horribile aequor (Opuscula I. 98-105), has now won general favour, having been adopted by Postgate, Merrill, Kroll and Mynors. Kroll admits that horribiles would be a suitable enough epithet for the Britons cf. Caes. B.G. 5.14.2; and for the epithet standing alone, Hor. C. 1.29.4); but the reason given by Haupt for introducing an alien noun is that horribiles detracts from the force of ultimos (Fordyce speaks vaguely of ‘the awkwardly paired epithets’).