It is generally accepted that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was not conceived as a single poem but is a combination of two: a Delian hymn, D, performed at Delos and concerned with the god's birth there, and a Pythian hymn, P, concerned with his arrival and establishment at Delphi. What above all compels us to make a dichotomy is not the change of scene in itself, but the way D ends. The poet returns from the past to the present, and takes leave of his audience; farewell, he says, and remember me ever after. He is quite clearly finishing. Whereupon there is an abrupt and unsatisfactory transition to P.

The question of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s (Edelstein (b) and (c) marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear and comprehensive statement of the sceptical view, according to which Hippocrates is, as Wilamowitz put it long ago, ‘ein beriihmter Name ohne den Hintergrund irgend einer Schrift’.

L has …, P … Paley wanted to delete Subsequent editors did not take up the suggestion. J. Diggle on the other hand has proposed that was originally a gloss on ‘It would be no cause for surprise that a scribe who had never seen the like of Homer's (Il. 4. 189) should fuse the two versions by distributing the two in what he thought a fair and impartial manner.’ Diggle arrives at The metre is tidied up, the corruption explained. But would be unique in Euripides. is the Euripidean Greek for ‘O dear one’. For ‘O dear Hector’ he writes (Tro. 673). If he did want to create here by repetition a sense of there is no reason why he should not have written what is in L; compare Tro. 1081 , Su. 278 and Andr. 530

Since other readers of Mr. Creed's recent interesting article may find themselves in a similar puzzlement to my own over certain statements there made, I offer this reply in the hope of providing elucidation. It is clear that someone named Adkins has perpetrated something heinous; but that ‘someone’ manifestly holds views which differ in a number of important respects from my own. The most convenient method of demonstrating this fact would be to juxtapose passages of Creed with passages of my Merit and Responsibility; but since space does not permit the juxtaposition of whole passages, I confine myself in the first part of this article to juxtaposing the references.

It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama.

I Should have known better than to revive Carcopino's heresy on the Lex Bembina Repetundarum. My attempt to rob C. Gracchus of this important measure and restore it to Glaucia met with universal disbelief. Soon a powerful counter-attack followed in learned publications. There may seem little left to say. Certainly it would be pointless to go over the old arguments yet again. My only excuse for perseverance is that I have new material. For my readers' convenience I group it under five main heads.

Although the view dies hard that the poetry which Ovid wrote during his years in exile at Tomi consists largely of the ‘querulous and sycophantic’ complaints of a weak man unable to come to terms with a personal disaster, it has been recognized for many years that the Tristia and the Epistolae ex Ponto are not mere expressions of emotion but are as well thought out and constructed as any other of the doctus poeta's products. Of these poems, Tristia 2 must be placed in a category by itself-if only because of its length (578 lines—four times the length of the next longest of the poems from exile) and because it purports to be a plea by Ovid to Augustus, the man responsible for his exile, on the very practical matter of mitigating the sentence.

There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald (1933), almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius (1935). These two contributions of the thirties remain standard to the present day.

I Want to comment on five passages where I have provoked disagreement by a previous discussion. In the first three, my discussion was in Philologus cx (1966), 152–4, and my critic is Bruno Gentili in Quaderni Urbinati iv (1967), 177–81. I was not the first to make an emendation in any of the three places, so that in defending the transmitted text Gentili is actually not only criticizing me but others such as Hermann, Naeke, O. Müller, Schoemann, Hunt, Murray, and Page.

That both parts of the sentence refer to the same person is now generally agreed; it is not so much that a change of subject would be, as the commentators are wont to say, ‘un-Sophoclean’, but simply that it would be awkward and clumsy. But to whom do the lines refer?

D. B. Gregor (C.R. lxiv [1950], 87–8) argues for Clytaemnestra, but despite the apparent force of some of his arguments (e.g. that the clause refers to Clytaemnestra because it is she who picks up Electra, in 616, picks up Clytaemnestra's of 615; but could still be Electra's) I cannot agree. He adds too that the reference to echoes the motif of Electra's speech, but it is just as much the motif of Clytaemnestra's speech, in fact more so. Finally, the first part of the sentence, it is true, could be asserted by the chorus on the strength of some such gesture as the heaving of the bosom, but I cannot see how they could then deduce that Clytaemnestra ‘no longer cares whether justice is on her side’

as Denniston pointed out in his note on the passage, ‘is difficult’. Various suggestions have been made to explain it, from Kvicala's emendation on the analogy of Medea 923, to Parmentier's note, ‘la joue blanche ou claire, c'est-à-dire en sa fleur de jeunesse’; but none is altogether convincing or satisfactory. May one, then, advance the idea of retaining as the Oxford recension does, not on the ground of faute de mieux, but for the sake of the very striking image it contains?

This would be admirably clear and would give excellent sense, but it does entail the deletion of as an interpolation before Marshall is aware that is a word that is not likely to be used by an interpolator, but still feels able to propose its deletion and gives a detailed account of the way in which an interpolator might have approached the sentence. When one attempts to read the mind of an ancient scribe, all sorts of possibilities are opened up; in this instance, it seems equally possible that a reader who, as Marshall suggests, was faced with … and was not able to understand the sentence because he failed to separate from and to see that was to be taken in the second clause, would have been inclined first at least to see whether sense could be obtained by separating from rather than to conjure up the word

In their mangled versions of this poem Baehrens and Housman have both anticipated the first of these changes whilst lines 19–20 are placed as I suggest by Housman and Postgate and lines 21–4 are placed before line 39 by Scaliger, Housman, Butler, and others. Nevertheless I recall these transpositions here, primarily because my third change is intelligible only through them, but also because their correctness has been generally neglected amid the confusing assortment of wholly unnecessary transpositions that this poem has suffered. My reasons for recommending the above changes are these.

Robin George Colling Wood (1889–1943) was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1912 to 1935. During this period he published or prepared his most important philosophical and historical works.