Modern knowledge of the grammarian Consentius’ De barbarismis et metaplasmis, a work valuable for the study of the Latin language, dates back to a relatively recent past: it was only in 1817 that its editio princeps was published by Ph.C. Buttmann, just a few years after the legal scholar A.W. Cramer came across a mention of the then unknown treatise in a ninth-century MS in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich, numbered Clm 14666. Based on this solitary manuscript, H. Keil published the short treatise in the fifth volume of his Grammatici Latini. With no little enthusiasm did W.M. Lindsay announce his unearthing of what, in his own words, had ‘long been a “desideratum”, a second authority’ for this text, in the MS F 15 III d at the Universitätsbibliothek Basel; this was followed by E.O. Winstedt's complete collation and M. Niedermann's critical edition. After about a century now there comes to light a third authority, surprisingly enough in a codex which has enjoyed such fame in the past decades that one might wonder how Consentius could have gone unnoticed in it for so long: this is the eleventh-century MS of Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Lat. Z. 497 (= 1811), in which the De barbarismis et metaplasmis is contained on fols. 84vb 39 - 90va 39; moreover, a so-far-unnoticed quotation from it (32.9-14), together with one from Consentius’ De nomine et uerbo (Consent. gramm. V 353.6-7), is found on fol. 41vb 16–21 of the same manuscript in a famous grammatical florilegium. The codex, written in Romanesque minuscule and probably originating in Rome, is regarded as a handbook of liberal arts designed by Lawrence Archbishop of Amalfi, formerly a monk at Montecassino, thereafter a teacher in Florence and Rome, where he died in about 1049. Based on palaeographical evidence, F.L. Newton rightfully assumed as an exemplar for this codex a MS in Beneventan script, as some features can be detected that betray the scribal imitation of that typical South Italian script, namely the use of the distinctive abbreviation for eius as ‘ei in ligature with stroke through the descender of the i’, the Beneventan ti ligature for the assibilated sound, and the 2-shaped Beneventan interrogation sign, to which I would add the typical abbreviation for in as a long i cut by a horizontal stroke and the confusion of a and t. Interestingly enough, none of these features is found on fols. 66–95, those containing the new Consentius: from a codicological point of view, this is an autonomous section, written by a different scribe from the rest of the MS and preserving some grammatical texts generally attributed to insular authors, such as Smaragdus’ Liber in partibus Donati (fols. 66–81vb) and part of the compilation entitled Pauca de barbarismo (fols. 81vb - 84vb), which precedes the De barbarismis et metaplasmis; not surprisingly, the new text of Consentius displays numerous features of the Insular script, such as the symbols for enim, autem, eius, est, nihil and et. On this basis it is most likely that this whole section was never included in the Beneventan exemplar, but was added at the time and place of copying of our MS in order to enrich the grammatical content.

Urban landscapes in the Roman world were covered in written text, from monumental building inscriptions to smaller, more personal texts of individual accomplishment and commemoration. In the East, Greek dominated these written landscapes, but Latin also appeared with some frequency, especially in places where a larger Roman audience was expected, such as major cities and Roman colonies. When Latin and Greek appear alongside each other, whether in the same inscription or across a single monumental space, we might ask what benefits the sponsor of the monument hoped to gain from such a bilingual presentation, and whether each language was serving the same function. This paper considers the monumental entrance to the Pamphylian city of Perge as a case study for exploring this relationship between bilingual inscriptions and civic space. By surveying the display of both Greek and Latin on this entrance, examining how the entrance interacted with the broader linguistic landscape of Perge, and considering the effects that each language would have had on the viewer, I show that the use of language, and the variation between the languages, served not only to communicate membership in both Greek and Roman societies but also to delineate civic space from imperial space, both physically and symbolically.

In C.Q. N.S. xv (1965), 293 f., in a discussion of the popularity of theyounger Pliny's Letters in the late fourth century, I adduced three passages of St. Jerome which reveal acquaintance with the Letters. The list may be extended.

There is an almost overwhelming mass of material available to the scholar who wishes to investigate the history of the text of Terence's plays. The manuscripts themselves number over 450 and of these over 100 belong to the period 800-c. 1300. No one, however, has undertaken a comprehensive recension of even the older group of medieval manuscripts. One reason for this is that the extent to which contamination has occurred makes classification extremely difficult, another is that it is unlikely that the laborious task of examining and studying so many manuscripts will produce much new evidence for the text itself. Many of the corruptions which survive in the plays probably arose at an early stage in the tradition and prior to the archetype of the manuscripts which have been used by past editors. Any marked advance in the constitution of the text would seem to depend on the discovery of a manuscript which belonged to a different tradition.

The twenty-four lines of this poem have been preserved only by the cod. Sangallensis 878 (variously assigned to saec. IX or IX-XI or XI-XII), whence it was edited in 1863 by K. SchenklSitzungsb. d. phil.-hist. Cl. d. kais. Akad. d. Wissensch. (Vienna) XLIII p. 71. A single line, the last, exists also in the cod. Bernensis 108 saec. IX. Fifteen survive in a MS of the 17th century now divided into two parts, Barberinus (or Barberinianus) XXXI 39 and Vaticanus 9135, the former containing the hexameters 3, 5, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23 and a spurious hexameter in lieu of 1, the latter the pentameters 2, 4,14,16,18, 20, 22, 24. The eight consecutive lines 6-13 are therefore missing from both ; and in this imperfect and interpolated form the poem was edited by Mommsen with Haupt's assistance inC.I.L. I p. 411.

Over twenty years since the influential revisionist studies of Roussel and Bourriot, agreement on a satisfactory theory of the Attic genos seems as elusive as ever. Although they differed on details, these two scholars were agreed in their rejection of the old monolithic account of the genos as aristocratic family whose institutionalized control over state cults and phratry admissions in the historical period was a relic of a wider political dominance. Roussel and Bourriot instead proposed a tripartite model according to which the formal genos-kome—a more or less localized community similar to the later deme, with hereditary but socio-economically diverse membership, and enjoying, as a tighter community well placed to regulate its own admissions, automatic access to the wider phratry—was distinguishable both from aristocratic families, such as the Peisistratidai or Alkmeonidai, and priestly houses, such as the Kerykes and Eumolpidai of Eleusis. Subsequent discussion has moved in several directions. My analysis of the relationship between phratry and genos followed a broadly revisionist line. I found no good evidence for gene controlling the access to phratries of persons who were not genos members and presented a new interpretation of the crucial Demotionidai decrees in which, contrary to prevailing theories, neither of the two groups mentioned in them—the Demotionidai and the House (oikos) of the Dekeleieis—was a privileged subgroup dominating the whole. Rather, I suggested that the Demotionidai were a phratry in process of fission, the Dekelean House a product of this process. Others, however, have taken the debate in the other direction, as it were reprivileging the genos.

Herodotus’ Histories begin in earnest with Lydia and the infamous tale of the fall of Candaules and the rise of the Mermnad dynasty under Gyges. Yet, for all that Gyges was evidently a transformational figure in Lydian history and, through the story of his usurpation of the throne from Candaules, came to occupy a prominent place in the received memory of the Lydian world, Herodotus tells us very little about Gyges himself or his reign. Chapters 1.13–14 tell us about the role of the Delphic oracle in legitimizing the rule of Gyges in Lydia, as well as his lavish dedications at Delphi, in which he set a precedent followed by Alyattes and Croesus, the more notable among his successors. Yet, the remainder of his reign is summarized in less than one sentence: ‘He sent an army to Miletus and Smyrna as soon as he took power, and seized the citadel of Colophon, but no other great deed was done by him during his thirty-eight year reign … ’.

‘Who wrote the scurrilous iambic poems of the first stanza?’, asks David West at the start of his commentary on the ode. ‘The culprit’, he declares, ‘must be Horace.’ This answer accords with that to be found in other commentaries: ‘my scurrilous verses’ (Page), ‘my scandalous lines’ (Gow), ‘my scurrilous iambics’ (Wickham), ‘my abusive iambics’ (Shorey), ‘miei ingiuriosi giambi’ (Colamarino and Bo), ‘my libellous iambics’ (Nisbet and Hubbard), ‘my libellous iambic verses’ (Quinn), ‘miei giambi ingiuriosi’ (Fedeli). What, then, are these iambic verses? Some earlier scholars suggested that Horace is referring to various of his epodes, such as those addressed to Canidia (5, 17); but our knowledge of Canidia (cf. also Serm. 1.8) indicates that she would scarcely make plausible the accent on beauty in the first line of the ode. Most commentators, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, have believed that Horace is referring to some iambics which he had targeted at the ode's addressee but of which we now have no further knowledge: Kiessling and Heinze, for example, refer to ‘the satirical poems which Horace … has levelled at her’, while in the most recent commentary in 2012 Mayer says that Horace ‘assures an unnamed young woman that it rests with her to put an end to his vituperative attacks’.

My purpose in this paper is to reassert the traditional view that Athenian women of the classical period regularly had an association with phratries (and incidentally to clarify the nature of that association). As part (though not an essential part) of my argument I adduce an overlooked piece of evidence, a much discussed passage from the Donatus commentary on Terence; for this I provide a new interpretation.

There is some evidence that Athenian women were introduced to their fathers phrateres at birth, or to their husbands' phrateres at marriage, or both. The speaker of Isaeus 3 repeatedly asserts (73, 75, 76, 79) that a certain Pyrrhus would have presented his daughter to his phrateres if she had been legitimate (which he denies). A scholium on Aristophanes, Acharnians 146 (= Suda s.v. Apatouria) may refer to such a practice. Euxitheus calls as witnesses of his mother's citizenship phrateres for whom his father celebrated the wedding feast, the gamelia, on her behalf (Dem. 57.43, 69, Isaeus 3.79); celebration of the gamelia is regarded as proof of the legitimacy of the speaker's mother at Isaeus 8.19. Neither Demosthenes nor Isaeus says that women were formally registered among the phrateres or even present at the feast; but notices in the lexicographers do connect the gamelia with registration among or introduction to the phrateres (Harpocration s.v. gamelia, Suda s.v. gamelia, Etym. Magn. 220.50 s.v. gamelia, Pollux 8.107, Anec. Bekk. 228.5, Schol. Dem. 57.43). Many scholars have accepted these passages as evidence for normal practice at Athens in the classical period.

Scholars have long seen that Horace's treatment of Homer in this Epistle demands to be read in the tradition of moral allegory in which Ulysses becomes the type of the ‘man of virtue’ (‘rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit / utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen’, 17–18): on such a reading, Circe becomes an allegory of foolish passion ‘to which Ulysses’ companions give in through their stultitia, and because of which they lose their reason and become no better than animals. Antisthenes, from whose writings such an allegorising approach probably developed, was regarded as an early Cynic, and the idea became the special province of Cynic-Stoic philosophy; scholars have therefore felt justified in seeing this epistle as a criticism of Epicureanism, represented by the sponsi Penelopae, nebulones, Alcinoique … iuventus, from the point of view of a Cynic or a syncretistic Stoic.

In beginning to speak of Euripides in this University of Manchester, one's thoughts naturally turn to the work of Professor Norwood in this direction, and it is with an especially keen sense of pleasure that I find myself not only following in his footsteps—a long way after!—but helping in a small way to contribute some further confirmation to the views on Euripides established by him and Professor Verrall.

Some scholars have seen in ‘fulminat’ an allusion to Callimachus' βροντ⋯ν οὐκ ⋯μ⋯ν, ⋯λλ⋯ Δι⋯c (fr. 1.20 Pfeiffer), and that is reasonable enough, since Virgil contrasts the warlike fulminations of Octavian with mocking disparagement of his own very different lifestyle (563–4 ‘illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti’). But it may have escaped attention that Virgil seems to be imitating some lines by another Hellenistic poet, Rhianus (mid to late third century B.C.); the parallel has thought-provoking implications.

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!

Among the most characteristic motifs in Greek mythology is the sexual union of a god with a mortal woman and the resultant birth of a hero. The existence of hexameter poetry listing the women thus favoured – the famous women in the underworld in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and above all the Eoiai – is evidence of an interest in the women involved, not only in their heroic sons, and suggests that already at an early date the theme was the object not merely of passive reception but of an active consciousness. The Eoiai, indeed, saw such unions as an integral part of an earlier and better age, when mortals and immortals were closer:

ξυναὶ γὰρ τότε δαῖτες ἔσαν, ξυνοὶ δὲ θόωκοι
ἀθανάτων τε θεῶν καταθνητοῖς τ' ἀνθρώπων
(fr. 1 Μ–W)