In this passage the Sausage-Seller is commenting disparagingly on the boast of Paphlagon/Cleon that he has done far more good for Athens (‘the city’) than Themistocles ever did. In lines 814–16 the Sausage-Seller seems to allude to certain laudable actions on the part of Themistocles, which greatly benefitted the city, and in 817–18, by contrast, he sets against these an allegedly deleterious recent proposal/ activity of Paphlagon/Cleon.

Amongst the numerous difficult passages of the anonymous Constitution of the Athenians the present one, as a whole, has particularly tenaciously resisted attempts at interpretation or elucidation in spite of progress made as to a number of details. One major obstacle to a real understanding of this sentence (but by no means the only one) is the corrupt phrase in the final clause.

Andocides is generally not considered one of the best orators. To point up his flawed style, scholars have discussed a notoriously vindictive and humorous section in Andocides 1: in 124ff. Andocides describes the profligate lifestyle of his prosecutor, Callias III the Ceryx, the son of Hipponicus II and dadouchos of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

It is perhaps significant that one of the more informative texts on ancient shipbuilding predates the period in which Greco-Roman shipping flourished. It is Homer's description of how Odysseus built a ship () on the island of the nymph Calypso, with which he intended to return to his native island of Ithaca (Od. 5.244–57). The text is of exceptional interest because it gives as early as the eighth century B.C. a stepby- step description of the tenon-and-dowel ‘shell-first’ method typical of Greco- Roman ship-building, which has been so amply confirmed in the last few decades by underwater archaeology in the Mediterranean.

At Catullus 63.5, OGR read:

deuoluit iletas acuto sibi pondere silices. The gist of this (‘he rolled down from (?) himself flints with sharp mass’) is improbable, and in particular the form iletas is a non-existent word and two syllables too long for the metre.

Here Gellius, also the target of poems 74, 80, 89, 90, 91 and 116, is accused of incest with his mother, sister, and aunt. This accusation is coupled with the only extended mythological reference to be found in the group of short Catullan epigrams 69–116:2 not even Tethys or Oceanus can wash out Gellius' crimes. This notion that large bodies of water are unable to wash away the stain of crime is of course a topos going back to Greek tragedy, but the individual naming of the two sea-deities seems to make a point—a literary point which is relevant to the invective of the poem.

I offer here two emendations of the text of the Odes, in two passages that make perfectly good sense, offer Latin that is unexceptionable, and have apparently never been questioned.

The purpose of this note is to revive Servius Auctus' interpretation of Aeneid 8.363, which has been overlooked or dismissed without argument by recent scholars. It concerns the identification and location of Evander's regia. The relevant lines are worth quoting in full (359–67):

There has been general agreement amongst scholars this century that the building is to be understood to be occupying the same place—or thereabouts—as that later to be taken by Augustus' house. It is now established that this was on the South-West of the Palatine.

‘Some of Martial's shortest epigrams are also the obscurest’, observes P. T. Eden, apropos of 1.102. This two-line poem has certainly generated a remarkable diversity of interpretations. All the critics are agreed that the portrait of Venus owned by the courtesan Lycoris (‘Venerem tuam, Lycori’) is in some way botched or unattractive, but, beyond this, their explanations differ widely.

In chapters 30–1 of the de Stoicorum repugnantiis, Plutarch sets out to show that the Stoics involve themselves in self-contradiction if they claim that their philosophy allows them an intelligible notion of providence. In the first place, he says, this is so because the traditional boons which men expect to receive from the gods (health, wealth etc.) do not benefit them at all if they do not have wisdom. Indeed, the fool uses all things badly, so that to give him anything at all without giving him virtue should be positively harmful to him. Yet the gods never give virtue to anyone so, on this score, they benefit no one either.

So far am I from rejecting the use of what has been well stated by others, that I would wish that everyone said the same things about the same things and, as Socrates puts it, in the same words, and then there would be no undisputed quarrelling among men about the matters at hand.