This essay depends upon certain assumptions, which had better be made explicit at the outset.

The first is that in Attic tragedy the choral odes were always intended to have an organic relation to the drama as a whole. They are not mere intermezzi inserted to relieve tension and allow the audience to relax between successive steps in the real business of the drama, but serve rather as lyrical commentaries on what is happening on the stage, inviting us to the emotional response appropriate at that point in the action, and to reflect upon certain ideas and concepts implicit in the events themselves. They form a bridge between successive acts, and their contextual relevance looks back to what has immediately preceded and forward to what is about to come. At this level we need not expect complete consistency between different odes. The Chorus's interpretation of the situation and the emotional reaction it expresses may change quite drastically in the light of a change in situation or the revelation of hitherto unknown facts.

Schol. Pind. Ol. x 19, i 315 Dr.

κυκνέα μάχη · ὃτι τὸν ἊρɛΞς κύκνΞν Ἡρακλῆς φυγών αὖτις ἀνɛἱλɛ, ΣτησίχΞρΞς ἐν τῶι ɛπιγραφΞμένωι κύκνωι φησίν. 21, p. 316 ɛτράπη μἐν ἐν τῆι μάχηι τΞῦ κύκνΞυ ὁ Ἠρακλῆς. ὁ κύκνΞς υἱὸς ὤν τΞῦ ἌρɛΞς ἐν τῆι παρόδωι τῆς Θɛσσαλίας Ξἰκῶν τΞὺς παριόντας ξένΞυς ἐκαρατόμɛι, έκ τῦν κɛφαλῶν ναὸν τῶι Ἀπόλλωνι (Ἄρɛι coni. Heyne, Boeckh) πΞιῆσαι βΞυλόμɛνΞς. παριόντι τΞίνυν τῶι Ἠρακλɛῖ ἐπɛβΞύλɛυσɛ καὶ σύστάσης μάχης ἐτράπη ɛἰς φυγὴν ὁ Ἡρακλῆς συλλαβΞμένΞυ τΞῦ ἌρɛΞς ὡς παίδι τῶι κύκνωι. ἀλλὰ ὔστɛρΞν αὔτόν μόνΞν γɛνόμɛνΞν ἐνίκησɛν ó ρακλῆς, ita cod. A: fere eadem codd. BCDEQ (ad 19), add. ΣτησίχΞρΞς ɛν τῶι> ἐπιγραφΞμένωι κύκνωι ἱστΞρɛῖ.

Ars Am. 3. 627-30

‘Also safe and invisible is a letter written with fresh milk (sprinkle charcoal dust over it and it will become legible), and invisible, too, will be the letter which will be made with the point of moist flax, and an unmarked tablet will bear the hidden message.’

No one has ever explained how or why a letter should be written ‘with the point of moist flax’. Mr Kenney records sympathetically in his critical note Burman's declaration ‘locus sine dubio corruptas’, though he does not apply the obelus. Burman himself diffidently conjectured alumine limini in emulation of Heinsius' equally unhappy alumine nitri. Burman's note is not very illuminating, but it offers the only serious attempt I have seen to confront the problems of the passage. He assumes – and no one has questioned the assumption, which I shall later suggest may be false – that the first couplet alludes to the use of milk on paper; and he assumes, rightly, that the second couplet alludes to the use of a wax tablet. But when he suggests that the occultae notae may have been written on wood and then concealed beneath an overlay of wax, he forfeits conviction. Crispinus, the Delphin editor, expressed the opinion, which prevails in modern translations,3 that the words acumine lini allude to the use of the stalk of the flax plant in the manner of a pen; it is small wonder that he added ‘sed potiora habemus nos, quibus chartas nostras inficimus, succum puta ceparum, citreo-rum, immo lotium’. P. Brandt in his edition of 1902 contributes a mixture of irrelevance and evasion.

In a notice of Knecht's new edition of the Ciris to appear in due course in the Classical Review, I was able to commend the book only in one respect: that it provided copious information on largely neglected recentiores. For the first time all the manuscripts which have ever been considered possibly significant for the text of the Ciris were assembled and fully reported in one place. However, this mass of information was ill-digested: the conclusions drawn from it were vague, or inadequately argued – or simply wrong; and much was left unsaid. But I thought that the results towards which Knecht's work pointed were interesting and that it would be a pity if they remained obscured. Since to clarify them involved more space than a review allowed, I offer the following short paper. Necessarily it will have some of the appearance of a review article; but I shall try to make it as self-contained as possible. Knecht never once ventures a stemma – in my remarks I shall have in mind Goodyear's stemma on p. 99 of the OCT Appendix.

The twenty-two volumes of the last edition of the collected works of Galen occupy a smaller place in the affections of classical scholars than on the library shelf. The reputation of Galen as a great physician is sufficient to ensure a respectful neglect of his writings that is as undeserved as it is effective and that hampers a reassessment of his aims and abilities. Even though recent scholarship has done much to show him as a recognizable product of and participant in the Second Sophistic movement with strong claims to be regarded as a universal scholar, Wilamowitz's dismissal of him as a ‘Seichbeutel’ still remains a typical verdict. Not that the epithet was entirely unjust, for Galen's prolixity, his frequent polemics, his repetitions and recapitulations, and the inelegance of much of his prose style are all obstacles to his readers, few of whom have had the stamina and enthusiasm, to say nothing of the linguistic competence, to read all of his works preserved in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac. Thus it is not surprising that the finest contemporary account of society in Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, which lies buried deep in the fourteenth volume of Kuhn's edition, has only rarely been utilized in a discussion of that period. Πɛρὶ τΞῦ πρΞγινώσκɛιν, ‘On prognosis’, whose title, given by Galen himself, disguises the variety of its contents, has remained unread and its absence from the three volumes of the Scripta Minora Galeni and, as yet, from the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum has placed it beyond the ken of most historians. It is my intention in this paper to present a description of this treatise and a discussion of its position within literary genres as a contribution to the history of autobiography.

Apart from Callimachus, I know no new piece of Hellenistic elegy more interesting than P. Sorbonn. inv. 2254, first published by M. Papathomopoulos in Recherches de Papyrologie II and most admirably edited by Professor Barns and Professor Lloyd-Jones in SIFC xxxv, 205 ff.

Lloyd-Jones proves, I believe beyond question, two points:

(a) That this elegy belongs to the world as it was before Callimachus; it is only our fourth large specimen of the literary elegy from the early part of the third century, the others being the long extracts from Hermesianax, Phanocles and Alexander Aetolus most conveniently read in Powell's Collectanea Alexandrina.

(b) That the subject-matter is of a very unusual nature; the lines are ‘spoken by an unknown person threatening an enemy with a punishment quite out of the ordinary’ – viz. with tattooing on his skin the images of punishments suffered by notorious legendary sinners. The poet's enemy is to be tattooed with a picture of the stone of Tantalus, with another of the Calydonian boar sent to punish Oeneus, and with at least one other (there is a fragmentary second column, one line beginning στίξ[ω).

The object of this paper is to demonstrate an intimate coherence of thought on the problems of flux and language between the Cratylus, Theaetetus and Timaeus, and as a consequence to salvage the traditional view that the Theaetetus and Timaeus both propound versions of Plato's own theory of perception. This undertaking will involve grappling with views which were given their most forceful expression by Owen, but which have frequently been adopted and marshalled afresh since his classic article. The burden of these views is that the Cratylus and Theaetetus are engaged in analytical work which is more sophisticated than anything in the Timaeus; that this is supported by a number of points on which they are demonstrably correcting the Timaeus (and other earlier works); and that the similarities on the subject of perception, for example, are to be explained on the grounds that Plato in the Theaetetus is concerned to expose the essential incoherence of the basis on which a theory such as that of the Timaeus rests. It will be desirable, therefore, to examine first the passages on which this argument is principally based.