There are two women called Salpe who are said to have written books in antiquity: one is described by Athenaeus (7.322a) as the name or pseudonym of a writer of ‘Paignia’ the other is cited by Pliny the Elder who calls her at one point Salpe obstetrix. Salpe is a rare name in antiquity—I know of no other examples—and few ancient books were ascribed to women. That two of these rare female writers should be called by the same name is something of a coincidence. That the name they shared was the very rare Salpe is a priori distinctly unlikely. It is much more plausible that they were one and the same.

In this paper I shall offer an hypothesis to explain the process by which the inventories of the contents of the three chambers of the Parthenon were inscribed in the fifth century and to account for all the surviving fragments of those inscriptions. At the end of their annual term the treasurers of Athena prepared separate inventories of the Pronaos, the Hekatompedon, and the cella which they called the Parthenon. But the four boards of treasurers whose terms filled a Panathenaic penteteris co-operated with each other in stewarding the sacred possessions and began in 434/3 to have their inventories inscribed on the same stelai. The four inventories of the Pronaos filled one face of one stele, the four of the Hekatompedon one face of a second stele, and the four of the Parthenon one face of a third stele. In the course of time the treasurers began to post their records on the backs of stelai erected by their predecessors. This process was apparently changed in 410/09 to allow the four inventories to fill both the obverse and reverse faces of a smaller stele. In 406/5, with the creation of the unified board of the treasurers of Athena and the Other Gods, the inventories began to be inscribed year by year on individual stelai, and the Four Archai disappear.

In classical antiquity Propertius' eloquence was renowned. His successor Ovid referred to the blandi praecepta Properti (Trist. 2.465) and to blandi…Propertius oris (ibid. 5.1.15). Quintilian (10.1.93) stated that to his taste the most tersus and elegans Latin elegist was Tibullus, but sunt qui Propertium malint. Martial (14.189) mentioned the facundi carmen iuuenale Properti.

Turn now from the opinions of ancient authors to those of some modern commentators as they try to elucidate various passages as presented in the extant manuscripts, and you encounter not the adjectives blandus, tersus, elegans, and facundus, but ‘strange’, ‘obscure’, ‘odd’, ‘slovenly’, and the like.

A major reason for such striking differences of opinion should be evident. Ovid, to whom Propertius was blandi oris, read a text separated from Propertius' autograph by at most a few decades. Modern scholars, however, must form their text from a few relatively late manuscripts, none earlier than c. 1200, in which Propertius' eloquence has been obscured by over twelve centuries of careless blundering and deliberate interpolation by a succession of scribes.

A generally accepted example of deliberate interpolation in the Propertian archetype is found at 2.32.3-6:

nam quid Praenesti dubias, o Cynthia, sortes,

quid petis Aeaei moenia Telegoni?

cur tua te Herculeum deportant esseda Tibur?

Appia cur totiens te uia †ducit anum†?

(ducit FLP, dicit N), where the name of some neighbouring town is required in the fourth verse to balance Praeneste, Tusculum, and Herculeum in the preceding three.

In attempting to determine the text of Sophocles in the places presently to be discussed, it is notmy purpose to put forward a series of novelties which, though more or less plausible, are essentially incapableof proof. I seek rather to plead for the reception of certain ascertained but neglected variants, and to establish their claims by a survey of the relevant evidence. After a somewhat prolonged study of the data, I am convinced that the chief hope of progress— apart from the discovery of fresh material—lies in a more methodical use of the ancient scholia and lexicographers. Although their value has long been acknowledged, they have been employed unintelligently or at haphazard, largely because the character of their information and its sources have been imperfectly understood. One of the chief aids which they afford is in passages where the genuine reading has been displaced by an explanatory gloss. This is a possibility which critics have always recognized, but, while ready enough to suggest that the word selected for expulsion is a gloss on some other, they frequently fail to demonstrate that it is used as a gloss at all. Leaving such guess–work aside, we shall still find various grades of probability. It should be a minimum requirement that the word removed from the text is, either itself or as one of a class, a well-attested gloss of the proposed substitute. Thus in El. 800, where LA with most other MSS. have καταξίως but four of the recentiores κατ' άξιαν, I think that Bothe and Monk were right in preferring κατάξι' ἂν.

Who was the author of the Fourth Edict in the great persecution of Diocletian's reign we do not know. Its precise terms are not recorded; of the date of its issue we are not informed. It is true that Mr. Kidd has recently written: ‘On April 30, 304, Maximian put out the Fourth Edict in the name of himself and bis co-Augustus,’ but he discreetly forbears to give the reader any hint of the source on which he bases that statement. It may be doubted whether he has any better authority in mind than the ambiguous Passio S. Sabini, which, as even Mr. Mason admitted many years ago, ‘is not in the highest class of the historical relics of its age.’ If, indeed, this supposition does not do Mr. Kidd an injustice, it would have been well to have given some reasoned defence of the document. Dufourcq regards the Passio S. Sabini as a product of the Ostrogothic period, and contends that its picturesque exordium does not depend upon any earlier source. Until his detailed criticism of the Passion is answered, we can hardly use it for the reconstruction of the history of the fourth century.

Greek New Comedy, as we know it from references and fragmentary MSS., is the meeting-place of three confluent streams—comedy of manners, Aristophanic comedy, and tragedy. From Sicilian comedy, through Epicharmus at Syracuse and Crates and Pherecrates at Athens, it inherited certain stock stage figures, and a tradition of ‘invented’ plots and sententious speech. Old Comedy it resembled in its fun and informality and many stage conventions; and, indeed, the resemblance was so marked, in at least one of the later plays of Aristophanes, that the writer of his life, mistaking effect for cause, claimed the lost Cocalus as the original model of New Comedy. Perhaps most important of all was the influence of tragedy; and this influence may be estimated by a direct comparison between Euripides and Menander, both in the spirit and form of their plays and in the social and philosophic theories underlying them.

‘Tu tuo praecipitante iam et debilitato tribunatu auspiciorum patronus subito exstitisti …; tibi M. Bibulus quaerenti se de caelo seruasse respondit idemque in contione dixit, ab Appio tuo fratre productus, te omnino, quod contra auspicia adoptatus esses, tribunum non fuisse. tua denique omnis actio posterioribus mensibus fuit, omnia quae C. Caesar egisset, quod contra auspicia essent acta, per senatum rescindi oportere; quod si fieret, dicebas te tuis umeris me custodem urbis in urbem relaturum.’

The centrepiece of Cicero's De re publica is a discussion of justice (Book 3). This discussion, which evokes the theme of the Platonic dialogue after which it was named, consists of a set of three speeches. It begins with a speech opposing justice, placed in the mouth of L. Furius Philus and alleged by him to be modelled on the second of a pair of speeches for and against justice delivered in Rome in 155 B.C. by the Greek Academic philosopher Carneades (Rep. 3.8–31 [8–29 B]). Philus' speech lays the dialectical foundation for the two subsequent speeches, a defence of justice as the prerequisite for government by C. Laelius (Rep. 3.32–41 [30–41 B]), and an explanation of its role in various forms of government by Scipio Aemilianus (Rep. 3.42–8).

It will be seen that has twofold prosodic value: in passage (I) it equals but in the others

It is usual to connect the word with Alc, Pind. i.e. Lejeune, Traité de phon. grecque, p. 155note), thus following a lead given by Hesychius This is indeed the only suggestion advanced in the respective etymological dictionaries of Boisacq, Hofmann, and Frisk, and by Seiler (Lex.frühgriech. Epos); though all but Seiler express more or less of doubt, particularly on the ground of meaning.

Who is the author of this poem and what is its historical context?

Gow and Page are convinced that the author is Crinagoras. Manuscript authority, in the person of the so-called ‘corrector’, supports the attribution. Yet, at first sight at least, the attribution of this poem to Crinagoras raises something of a problem. It does so because the poem evidently relates to what seems to be a contemporary marriage linking the royal families of Egypt and Libya respectively: if the author is indeed Crinagoras, what marriage can this be? Only one such marriage is available: as Gow and Page accurately observe, ‘It is generally agreed that this epigram refers to the marriage of Cleopatra Selene and Juba II’.

So far as I am aware, the commentators on the above passage(Horace, Epp. I. 16, 73 sqq.)all say that it is imitated from Euripides, Bacchae 492 sqq., and the commentators on Euripides, loc. cit., agree. It seems to me, however, that there is reason to suppose them all wrong; not of course that there is no connexion between the two passages, for there most obviously is, but that Horace is not imitating the Greek directly, but an imitation or adaptation of it by Pacuvius.

‘ If Rome, addlepate that she is, misprises a thing, let that be no concern of yours. For at Rome every living soul—ah, would that I might utter it! But utter it I surely may, when I consider what dismal old squaretoes we are from the day when we are boys no more. Then, then—forgive me (I don't wish it, I can't help it)—but (this spleen of mine is to blame) I do burst out laughing.’ Down to the middle of u. n my text and punctuation are those of most editors, and I shall uphold them against the MS readings retained by Casaubon and recalled by Buecheler. From that point onward the punctuation is my own, except that it partly agrees with K. F. Hermann's, adopted in 1910 by Mr Leo.

IN C.Q. N.S. xiii (1963), 1578ff., M. L. West discusses various non-Greek traditions which throw light on the interpretation of Pherecydes. Of course problems remain, but one of these the comparative material may yet solve. Is West correct in suggesting (p. 157) that we emend the Suda entry on Pherecydesand so reduce the seven recesses to five ? A convincing analogy can help us here. G. S. Kirk has already compared the seven gates which Ishtar has to penetrate when she descends into the underworld. Despite all his reluctance to admit oriental influence on Pherecydes, he sees this as a possible source.

The interpretation of in this context raises some nice problems. (i) It is a term, a very flattering one, which had been appropriated to themselves by a certain class, in many cities at least (cf. 8. 48. 6 ), and by Dorians in relation to ‘Ionians and islanders’; it had thus become a cant phrase in current usage, the kind of phrase which when used tauntingly, as here, or ironically should be given inverted commas.

Mundus istum M. En(n)ius in the manuscripts of Att. 15.26.5 is surely corrupt, as has been unanimously acknowledged (above all Cicero would avoid giving the three parts of a name in the order cognomen + praenomen + nomen, not to speak of the inexplicable istum). Also the modern Vulgate Mundus iste cum M. Ennio, introduced by Wesenberg in his Teubner text, is an improbable guess. Shackleton Bailey has recently proposed Maenius or Men(n)ius as the gentile name of Mundus. Mennius, however, is a very rare name and does not occur in Republican documents, while Maenius, although attested in Republican inscriptions, diverges unnecessarily from the manuscript tradition. Moreover, Shackleton Bailey must forcibly change istum to iste (even if he does not say so expressly). But it is possible to avoid practically any infringement of the transmitted text if we simply read Mundus Istummenius. The name (H) istumen(n)ius, (H)istimen(n)ius (also Inst-), written in a wide variety of ways, does occur some 20 times in urban inscriptions, mostly of the early Imperial period. It is attested also outside Rome: at Velitrae (CIL X 6556, of the early Imperial period), and even as far away as Gallia (CIL XIII 739, Bordeaux, early Empire). This gens must therefore have been somehow present among the Roman population of the Julio-Claudian age. In particular, attention should be paid to an Instumennius on a tessera nummularia of 60 B.C. (CIL I 915). No major figures occur in this gens, the name remaining restricted to the lower strata of the Roman population. That suits Mundus down to the ground. He clearly belongs to the grey mob of Rome. If he is, as it seems, identical with that Mundus mentioned in 15.29.1, then Cicero gives his family name in the first instance. The transmitted form with -mm- could represent a transposition of the double consonant of the common form Istumennius.

The initial paradox is simple: The ideal state, as Plato describes it, is composed of un-ideal individuals. Both the warrior class and the masses are deprived of reason and must be governed by the philosopher-king. How can one legitimately call a community perfect when so many of its members are imperfect ? My point here is logical; the word ‘ideal’ is used in a self-inconsistent manner.

A. H. Sommerstein has recently directed our attention away from the belaboured topic of the essential and original structure of Old Comedy to the more productive question of how the extant plays of Aristophanes are shaped. He begins with the question of the source of ‘the five-act principle, standard in Menandrian comedy’ (140). Correctly looking to the chorus as the key element in articulating a play's form, Sommerstein finds that the five-act format already dominates the shape of Old Comedy, although he argues that the number of acts ranges from four to seven and that only in the fourth century do the acts become about the same length. His analysis is largely correct, I think, but it is in danger of being ignored because his criteria are not objective and have not been applied systematically. Thus, B. Zimmermann has more recently described the structure of Aristophanic comedy as free

Editors are divided on the interpretation of nuda. According to Butler and Barber ad loc. it denotes the absence of defensive armour. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Propertiana, 217 understands it primarily with reference to offensive weapons. ‘Battles fought with sharpened sticks were nuda by comparison with swords and pila.’ Camps compromises: ‘nuda presumably = inermia, which may be used to indicate absence either of offensive or of defensive arms, so that probably both ideas are present here.’

In the foregoing parts of this paper I have sought, first (in A. Plutarch's Text) to recover Plutarch's text of the Rhetra, which I believe to be also Aristotle's text. It is evident that Aristotle knew and commented on this Rhetra: I take it as my hypothesis that his account of it in his Spartan Constitution was substantially the same as what Plutarch gives us.