The following modern editions are referred to: Sillig (1851); Jan (1860); Mayhoff (1897); Bailey (K. C), The Elder Pliny's Chapters on Chemical Subjects (1929–32); Loeb editions (Rackham, Books 33–5 [1952]; Eichholz, Books 36–7 [1962]); Budé editions (Zehnacker, Book 33 [1983]; Le Bonniec, Book 34 [1953]; Croisille, Book 35 [1985]). Abbreviations include: Urlichs1 = K. L. Urlichs, Chrestomathia Pliniana (Berlin, 1857); Urlichs2 = K. L. Urlichs, Vindiciae Plinianae ii (Erlangen, 1866).

The reputation Theologoumena Arithmeticae has acquired is largely that of being an odd, and frequently opaque, compilation of arithmological lore. As a sourcebook for this aspect of the Pythagorean tradition it is, of course, invaluable. However, its poor reputation is increased, and its historical value lessened, by the depredations time has wrought on the text. ThA was never great prose: it is a compilation, largely from the lost Theologoumena Arithmeticae of Nicomachus of Gerasa and from Anatolius' Peri Dekados; and the text which cannot be safely or conjecturally assigned to these two sources often reads like little more than the written-up notes of some student. However, the treatise contains passages of considerable lucidity, within the context of its peculiar framework.

In 1984 and 1985 Ralph Hall and I presented statistical methodologies, based on inductive statistics and the comparative method, to determine the rhythmical qualities of Latin prose from the third to early sixth century A.D. We continued our work with the publication of articles on the final clausulae in the legal codes and Augustine's letters and on rhythms in internal positions, while I produced studies of the clausulae in the Pseudo-Sallustiana and Ammianus.

Diggle has followed Stevens in rejecting 1279–82. Stevens' objections to these lines were that they ‘should [sc. directly] follow a striking demonstration that birth is more important than wealth in marrying and giving in marriage', and that the lines do not form an apt comment on the fates of Peleus and Neoptolemos. The cogency of these objections will be examined presently; but first a counter-objection will be presented against the hypothesis of interpolation.

Matt Neuburg, in CQ 37 (1987), 227–30, rightly objects that it does not make sense that Pentheus should be afraid of being laughed at by the Bacchants when he is disguised as a woman,1 and proposes a new emendation. Apart from possible objections to this, I do not believe that any change is necessary if the line is properly interpreted. The main point is that γγɛλν does not refer to laughter at Pentheus' appearance by the Bacchants or by anybody else. There is also something to be said about the implication of ν κρɛῖσσον.

The first of these is not a single disease but a group of three: ‘all the clinical and epidemiological evidence described by Thucydides’ (henceforward T) ‘can be attributed to infection with influenza virus complicated by a toxin-producing strain of noninvasive staphylococcus’ (A. D. Langmuir, T. D. Worthen, J. Solomon, C. G. Ray and E. Petersen, New England Journal of Medicine [henceforward NEJM] 313 [1985], 1027–30). This initial analysis is in fact supplemented (1028) by bullous impetigo in an attempt to explain the marked skin symptoms which are not ascribable to the other two diseases: streptococci produce flushes of the skin that end in desquamation – something which Langmuir et al. admit T would have described if present.

Plato's striking figure of the ‘child in us’ at Phaedo 77e5 takes on an added lustre when viewed in the light of the theory of explanation Socrates develops between lOObl and 105c7.

Socrates' theory aims to explain why certain objects have certain properties: why something is beautiful (στ…κσλν, 100c4) or tall (100e5–6), or when a body will be sick (νοσσɛι, 105c3) or alive (ζῷν ἔσται, 105c9–10). Explanation is called for, Socrates thinks, when an object has a property its title to which is insecure, in the sense (to judge from 102b8–c8) that the object's having the property is not guaranteed by its being what it is. Thus Socrates wants an explanation, for example, of a person's being tall (102cl–9) or – the case of especial interest in the Phaedo – of a body's being alive.

At 10.17.6–16 Polybius relates how Scipio seized the opportunity offered by his capture of New Carthage in 209 B.C. to increase his fleet of quinqueremes by half as much again. There is a briefer passage on the same subject in Livy 26.47.1–3.

Polybius says that the total number of prisoners taken was nearly ten thousand, from whom Scipio separated two groups: first citizens, men and women with their young children, and secondly craftsmen. He freed the former, and made the latter, numbering about 2000, public slaves of Rome. In Livy's account women and children are not mentioned; the prisoners are said to be ten thousand free men. As in Polybius, the citizens are said to have been set at liberty and the two thousand craftsmen made public slaves. In Polybius Scipio is said to have selected from all those not in the first two groups ‘the strongest, the fittest looking and the youngest and mixed them up with his own crews. And making the whole body of oarsmen (ναται) half as many again as before he succeeded in manning the captured ships as well as his own στε τοὺς ἄνδρας κστῳ σκϕει βραχ τι λεπειν το διπλασους εἶναι τοὺς ὑπρχοντας τν προγενομνων, for the captured ships were eighteen in number and the original ships thirty-five’. The corresponding passage in Livy is as follows: ‘the remaining multitude [multitudinem, a word suggesting a larger number than the two former groups together] of young inhabitants and of strong slaves he handed over to the fleet to increase the number of oarsmen (remigum). And [an increase was needed because] he had added eight captured ships to the fleet’.

In her recent discussion of ILLRP 311 Kirsteen Moir draws attention to the discrepancy between the epitaph's apparent claim that young Publius had before him a brilliant career, had he but survived, and the description which Cicero provides of Africanus' son, Publius, who is usually identified, with varying degrees of conviction, as the subject of this inscription. As Moir points out, the son of Africanus, though remarkably erudite, was incapacitated by poor health from achieving the military and political distinction predicted by the necrology. Within the actual text of this inscription, one might add, there is another discrepancy: the Publius here commemorated was flamen Dialis, and the taboos which restricted the daily life of the priest of Jupiter effectively barred him, regardless of his powers or inclination, from fulfilling the promise voiced by his memorial. Moir proposes a solution which will solve both problems. She suggests that the gloria to which Publius could look forward was literary celebrity. The son of Africanus, after all, composed works known and read by Cicero a century later, works which documented his literary capabilities. Such attainment was well within the grasp of the flamen Dialis. And this interpretation of the inscription, if correct, would solve both discrepancies.

In his reply to my previous article Professor Tatum has added some interesting material to the discussion and has made some points which invite further examination.

He rightly stresses that the statement in the added first line, that the dead man had been flamen Dialis, would have conflicted with the hopes expressed in the original epitaph if we think these hopes referred to success in war and politics. This objection would be equally relevant if the Publius of the epitaph were the grandson proposed by Sumner or any other young Scipio who, though robust enough for a public career, died prematurely.

Aeneas ends his first speech to Dido as follows:

quae te tam laeta tulerunt

saecula? qui tanti talem genuere parentes?

in freta dum fluuii current, dum montibus umbrae

lustrabunt conuexa, polus dum sidera pascet,

semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt,

quae me cumque uocant terrae.

A number of parallels have been cited for 607–9, notably Eel. 1.59f. (an adynaton) and the positive statement (about Daphnis) at Eel. 5.76ff., which even ends with the same line:

In his final words to his son, Pallas, Evander interposes a prayer:

‘At uos, o superi, et diuum tu maxime rector

Iuppiter, Arcadii, quaeso, miserescite regis…’

Of recent commentators, C. J. Fordyce alone is bothered by the reference to Evander's Arcadian origin; he reckons that it alludes to his exiled condition and so establishes a claim on Jupiter's mercy. That may be so, but it is worth suggesting that this is rather a piece of Virgil's Callimachean learning. For at the opening of his first Hymn Callimachus had rejected the story that Zeus was born on Crete in favour of Arcadia (6–7, 10). The Arcadian birth-place was known to Cicero (De natura deorum 3.21,53: principio Ioues tres numerant…ex quibus primum et secundum natos in Arcadia). Yet Cicero is less likely to be in Virgil's mind than Callimachus, from whom he derived so much learned detail. Evander then is appealing to Jupiter as a fellow Arcadian, docte.

tantane me tenuit vivendi, nate, voluptas,

ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae,

quern genui? tuane haec genitor per vulnera servor

morte tua vivens? heu, nunc misero mihi demum

exitium infelix, nunc alte vulnus adactum!

(1) Horace, Janus, and Pighius' Acta

In PBSR 54 (1986), 213–28 Andrew Lintott dusts down the fragments of the Acta Urbana published by S. V. Pighius in 1615 and universally supposed today to be a forgery. Lintott himself, after a most learned discussion, concurs, but one senses a wistful longing for the fragments to be genuine. The purpose of this note is to offer another reason why sadly this is unlikely.

For a defence of ‘crudum’ against Courtney's strictures, see the reviews by Goodyear and Reeve. I am presently concerned not with the unresolved crux in verse 144, but with the medical reason for the death of the glutton. Galen (xix. 692–3 K), quoted by Mayor, warned that one should not bathe after eating ἵνα μ μϕραξις κατ νεϕρὺς κα ἦπαρ γνηται. More recently, Courtney ad loc. has quoted Persius 3.98ff. and has attributed the death to ‘apoplexy’, which in more modern parlance is called a ‘stroke’ or a ‘cerebral haemorrhage’. What Persius and Juvenal are actually describing is not a stroke but what was formerly known as ‘acute indigestion’ and is now called a ‘heart attack’, as indeed ought to have been obvious from ‘nescio quid trepidat mihi pectus’ at Persius 3.88, and ‘tange, miser, uenas et pone in pectore dextram’ at 3.107. As Duff says, ‘the natural and ordinary time for bathing was just before the cena, but the gluttons of this time had discovered that digestion was temporarily promoted by the unhealthy practice of bathing in very hot water immediately after the meal’. Modern medical research has shown why this practice was very unhealthy indeed. As a meal is digested, the pulse rate is elevated, and bathing in hot water increases it even further. The consumption of alcohol, such as that described at Persius 3.92–3 and 99–100, would further accelerate the heart beat. The synergistic effect of these three circumstances, digesting a heavy meal, metabolising a large dose of alcohol, and bathing in hot water, was liable to cause a heart attack in an overweight man whose arteries were clogged with cholesterol.

I quote Griffiths' translation: ‘A crown of many designs with all kinds of flowers had girt her lofty head; in its centre a flat disk above the forehead shone with a clear light in the manner of a mirror or indeed the moon, while on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes; from above it was adorned also with outstretched ears of corn’. This is the detailed description of the crown worn by Isis in her epiphany to Lucius at Cenchreae. ‘Sulcis’ is strange; it can only refer to the tracks or furrows left by snakes, a notion wholly irrelevant here – we require a noun referring to actual physical parts of the two snakes (or rather reproductions of snakes) which border Isis' moon-disk on either side, preferably a reference to their hanging coils – so Griffiths' translation runs ‘on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes’, though this does not render his text, which keeps ‘sulcis’. Read ‘spiris’, a word of similar shape to ‘sulcis’; ‘spirae’ is twice used of the coils of snakes by Vergil, at Aen. 2.217 and 12.848; ‘serpentum spiris’ in the latter passage may influence Apuleius’ ‘spiris…viperarum’. The alliteration and assonance of ‘spins’ and ‘spicis’ would be very much in Apuleius' manner as a jingle involving the change of a single consonant between two words – cf. Florida 3 (p. 5.10–11 Helm) ‘ita Marsyas in poenam cecinit et cecidit’, Apologia 85 (p. 94, 12–13 Helm) ‘acerbiores morsus viventi et videnti offeruntur’ and H. Koziol, Der Stil des L. Apuleius (Vienna, 1872), 204–5.

In 1880 Spyridon Lambros discovered in the library of the Dionysiou monastery on Mount Athos a manuscript containing, among other things, the missing second book of a compilation of zoological lore made for the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (912–59), generally referred to as the Sylloge Constantini. The first book, already known from a manuscript in Paris, proclaims in its heading that the compilation was based on the epitome of Aristotle's περ ζῴων by Aristophanes of Byzantium, with supplements from the writings of Aelian, Timotheos and others. These supplements are found exclusively in the second book, which Lambros edited, along with the first, for the Supplementum Aristotelicum. They add greatly to our knowledge of the περ ζῴων by the fifth-century grammarian Timotheos of Gaza, a work hitherto known only from the so-called Epitome Augustana, a selection of 53 unconnected chapters made in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–55).