Herennius Philo of Byblos is the subject of a notice in the Suda, which states that he was a grammarian born in Nero's time who lived to such an advanced age that he was still composing works in the reign of Hadrian. The titles listed include: On the Acquisition and Choice of Books; On Cities and their Eminent Citizens; and On the Reign of Hadrian (= Fr. 1 Jacoby). His name, like that of Flavius Josephus, could imply the patronage of a Roman family; we may suppose that, like Porphyry and Maximus of Tyre, he was a Phoenicean by origin who had adopted the tongue and culture of the Greeks.

Procopius states that the Colchian Lazi had neither salt nor grain nor any other good thing; for this reason they always engaged in trade with the Romans around the Black Sea:

Thomas Marshall, who became Rector of Lincoln College in 1672 and died in 1685, left to the Bodleian his collection of books and manuscripts. Two lists of the manuscripts appear in Edward Bernard's Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae (Oxford, 1697), i (1). 272–3, 373–4, but both omit what is now called MS. Marshall 140, which F. Madan in the Summary Catalogue describes as follows

Christopher Carey, CQ 39 (1989), 287ff. sets out to explain the transition in Pindar, O. 8.52–5 from the story of the building of the walls of Troy to the praises of the trainer Melesias. ‘The myth of O. 8’, he writes, ‘tells of the role of Aiakos in the building of the walls of Troy. It closes with Apollo going off to his favourite haunts while Poseidon drives off to the Isthmus of Corinth, depositing Aiakos at Aigina on the way. The myth is followed by an opaque gnome.’

A good story bears retelling many times, and an appreciative audience will delight in debating its finer points; each participant is – of course – always convinced that only his memory, his understanding, of what the author said is the correct one.

Eustathios, in his commentary to Homer's Iliad 768.20–2 preserves two elements of Attic speech which could derive originally from comedy. Although neither of them appears as so much as a conjecture in standard collections, a possibility that they are quotations from a lost comedy merits testing. They may, as it turns out, even be fragments of a comedy by Kratinos. The argument for this possibility rests on a manner Eustathios (and other Greek writers) has of presenting evidence to support his general observations. The pattern is as follows: He will say that such-and-such a usage can be observed among the ancients, and then he will cite an ancient author in whose work he has observed such a phenomenon. A good, simple, short example of this presentation can be found at Eustathios' Commentary to Homer's Odyssey 1419.50–4; λλ κα πλλαξ ξ οὗ κα παλλακή κα παλλκια δ κατ Aἴλιν Διονσιον οὑ παλλήκια οἱ παδες, στιν εὑρεν παρ τος παλαιος οἲ δικαστήριον ἱστοροσιν πώνυµον τς Παλλδος. 'Aριστοφνης ἄκων κτεν σε τκνον. δ'ὑπεκρνατο π Παλλαδωι κτλ (Aristophanes, frag. 602 PCG).

The study of Homeric echoes and allusions in the Argonautica has overshadowed the influence of other literature, even when, as with tragedy, such influence is clear. The easiest framework for studying allusions to tragedy in Apollonius is comparison with the different types of allusion to Homer. Situations in the epic may recall situations and relationships in tragedy, and verbal similarities to passages in tragedy are also identifiable, despite differences of dialect and metre. The latter are often enhanced by rare words, as Homeric hapax legomena and other Homeric rarities establish allusions to the Iliad and Odyssey.

At Argonautica 4.12–13, Medea, frightened and on the point of fleeing her home, 2 is compared to a young deer:

In lines 5–8 of his 95th poem Catullus contrasts the everlasting world-wide fame which P. Helvius Cinna's Smyrna will enjoy with the quick death which Volusius' I Annales will suffer before they get beyond the Po:

Catullus' use of nutrices for the Nereids' breasts in line 18 of Poem 64 is not perhaps the most important problem in the poem, but it is not without interest and may have significance beyond its narrow context. This ‘weird preciosity’ (R. Jenkyns) has been integrated into a wider reading by Francis Cairns, who interestingly drew attention to Artemidorus 2.37–8 where to dream of Aphrodite emerging from the sea and naked as far as the ζώνη is a good omen for sea-travellers because her breasts are τροΦιμώτατοι. So too, to dream of Nereids and Amphitrite (cf. Cat. 64.11) is also a good omen. Cairns linked this passage to the persistent connections of Aphrodite and the Nereids with marriage, concluding that the Argonauts are presented with a very good omen as they set out and as the prospective bride and groom, Peleus and Thetis, meet. Cairns naturally finds support here for what we might call the ‘positive’ view of Catullus' heroic age, a view now apparently in the ascendant after the doubts created by John Bramble's well-known paper. Problems remain of course – Catullus 64 is not a dream – and the purpose of the present note is to keep debate alive by calling attention to a rather different set of considerations which complicate, rather than undermine, Cairns' reading.

The curious phrase ‘vis abdita quaedam’ has traditionally divided commentators into two camps. One group cautiously ensures that 5.1233–5 is kept consistent with the poem's overall scientific perspective and pre-empts any reference on the poet's part to a supernatural force. Munro, for instance, glosses the phrase as ‘the secret power and working of nature’. He supports this interpretation by finding in Book 6 a passage that he believes refers to the same disruptive and destructive physical force (6.29–31). Along the same lines Minadeo proposes that we regard ‘vis abdita quaedam’ as ‘the principle of destruction in the universe’. He understands the phrase to refer to a force which balances the creative or generative force in nature, just as Strife counters Love in the Empedoclean cosmology. It can be said in favour of this interpretation that the words ‘vis abdita quaedam’ must refer most immediately to lines 1226–32. Certainly, vis recalls the phrase ‘vis violenti… venti’ (1226), the violent force of the wind which destroys a naval effort, by sweeping a general, his fleet, his legions and his elephants into the sea.

This comes near to satisfying; but even with ipsa the change of subject from tecta to plaustra is awkward, and exsultant is inappropriate to a lumbering plaustrum (cf. Virgil, G. 1.163 tardaque Eleusinae matris uoluentia plaustra). I suggest reading cisia instead of ipsa. The cisium was a fast light two-wheeled vehicle which might well jump up on a rough road; and the first three letters cis could have become the -es of the MS exsultantes. Two further points: lapis uiai is not ‘a stone on the road’ (Bailey and Rouse/Smith [Loeb, 1982]), but rather the stone of the road, i.e. the paving; and utrimque is not ‘on one side or the other’ (Bailey in notes) but ‘on both sides’. There remains Ernout's objection that the suppression of the final s of lapis (which stands for lapids*) is unlikely. One can only say that no one would have ventured to introduce by conjecture pendentibu' structas or manantibu' stillent, but both are found in Lucretius' text (6.195, 943).

To the host of suggestions I would add the sense of the passage is, ‘I have never annoyed you with petulant language, with the things the mob in the heated forum is accustomed to say, that you suffer me to… But I have often…’ His was, as line 41 explains, the language of poetry. The contrast between the language of the forum and poetry is an obvious one, and is made elsewhere by Propertius ‘turn tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo et vetat insano verba tonare foro. at tu finge elegos’ (4.1.133f.). In the present passage the contrast is between the common language typical of the angry mob and the original (‘novo’, line 41) verses of the exclusus amator. It is particularly bitter that he should be condemned to the ‘trivio’ (line 40) which, like the forum, is the very milieu of the type of language he has eschewed.

All editors and translators of Propertius seem convinced that the Roman poet has endowed the horse Arion with the power of speech. I present a few sample translations of the two lines:

In Book 6.88–94 of the Aeneid reference is made by the Cumaean Sibyl to the fact that there will be terrible wars on the Trojans' arrival at Lavinium. The details given by the Sibyl evoke the war at Troy; there will be a Simois, a Xanthus, and a Greek camp. Moreover, there will be another Achilles in Latium and the war will again be fought over a woman. Aeneas, when he hears this, has just arrived in Italy after the war at Troy and a gruelling seven-year journey. The prophecy is therefore the last thing that he wants to hear, but he responds very stoically and then proceeds to ask the Sibyl's permission to enter the Underworld (6.103ff.). Aeneas' filial pietas is therefore stressed by his determination to meet with his father's shade in the face of forthcoming adversity.

The aim of these lines seems to be to demonstrate that everyone has his price. Even Jupiter can be bribed. According to the text as printed above (= O.C.T.), the sequence would then continue: ‘What can a wise man do (sc. but submit to bribery) when even foolish ones willingly contract to keep quiet?’

Ajax is the subject of intonat, but little else is certain. Various punctuations are on offer, and even the authenticity of lines 545 and 546 is questioned; the difficulties are set out in Professor Tarrant's commentary (Cambridge, 1976). My concern is focused solely on 545 and the word nunc, printed in the text of the recent Oxford Classical Text and obelized by Professor Zwierlein. I suggest that the original word in this part of the line was saeuum, a standing epithet of the sea. Written seuum, its initial syllable might have disappeared through haplography; that would have left uum to be transformed into something else. E came up with a word close to the ductus, nunc; the A-tradition added se either to mend the metre or perhaps to indicate (by superscription?) the omitted syllable. If saeuum is a plausible emendation, we might at least keep 545 as a piece of direct speech introduced by intonat, exactly as at Phaed. 1065 magnum intonat.

This is the only undisputed fragment of Nero's poetry which is longer than a single line. It is preserved for us by the scholiast on Lucan 3.261, who gives us the additional piece of information that it belongs to Nero's ‘first book’. It is overwhelmingly likely that this refers to the first book of Nero‘s epic Troica, his most famous work and the only one, as far as we know, to have been comprised of several books.1 Since the fragment is the most significant surviving, but this attribution to the Troica cannot be quite certain, Morel and Büchner list it as fragment 1 with the simple heading ‘E libro primo’ and scrupulously keep it entirely separate from Servius’ two testimonia (frr. 9 and 10) on the content of the poem. This entirely sensible procedure, however, may trap the unwary reader into assuming that not a word of Nero's epic actually survives.

‘Phoceus’is ambiguous. It could mean ‘Phocian, of Phocis’, and thus ‘Massilian’. Massilia was founded by refugees from Phocaea; but Latin writers sometimes put instead Phocis, a name which Lucan also used for Massilia. Alternatively it could be a proper name appropriate to a Massilian. It is difficult to decide between the two readings: while no other participant is mentioned simply as a Roman or a Greek, some do appear unnamed. I prefer to see ‘Phoceus’as the swimmer's name. It seems attractive to divide off the four lines describing his life in peacetime (697–700) from ‘pugna fuit unus in ilia’ in 696; and this cannot be done if we must take ‘unus’ with ‘Phoceus’. Secondly, it seems strange of Lucan to give the swimmer four lines of description and Homeric pathos, and then not give him a name.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the time appointed for the arrival of Lucian's leviathan was intended to bring to the reader's mind Nearchus' account of an alarming encounter with a school of whales in the course of his famous voyage from the Indus to the Persian Gulf (Arrian, Ind. 30.1−3 = FGrHist 133 F 1 (c. 30)):