In the extensive cast of characters named in Isaeus' On the Estate of Hagnias are two brothers, Chaereleos and Macartatus. The speaker, their brother-in-law, is anxious to impress upon the members of the court that neither was a rich man. ‘You are all my witnesses,’ he asserts, ‘that…they were not in the class of those who perform liturgies but rather of those who possess a modest estate.’ Chaereleos on his death left land worth no more than 3000 drachmas. Macartatus left nothing at all. ‘For you know,’ the speaker reminds his audience, ‘that he sold his land, bought a trireme, manned it, and sailed off to Crete, (you know it) because it was by no means a covert act—indeed, it furnished a topic for discussion in the Assembly, namely that he might cause a state of war instead of peace between us and the Spartans.…It turned out…that he died along with this property of his that he sailed off with. For he lost everything, both the trireme and his life, in the war’.(Is. 11.48–9)

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 difficulty of τєἠν at 8 is notorious, and it has never been answered. The word refers back to Apollo, who has been invoked in the first line, but ‘it is not in accord with epic convention that, after the invocation, reference should be made to it’ (Seaton, CR xxviii [1914], 17). I suggest that we simply should not expect Apollonius to conform to the conventions of older epic: he does not do so in a number of other important respects. One is reminded here of the nervous restlessness of Callimachean poetry, particularly Cer. 25. There the goddess is addressed out of the blue with τìν δ’ αύτᾳ, and emendation is unconvincing. Perhaps τєἠν in Apollonius is even more abrupt than the example in Callimachus. Yet Apollonius seems on many occasions to carry further the devices of his master. The astonishing parenthesis at 1. 623 f. is a good example (for Callimachus see Lapp, De Call. Cyr. Tropis et Figuris (1965), 52 f, F. Bornmann, Call. Hymnus in Dianam, 1–li).

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem (Strasbourg, 1776) and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition (Leipzig, 1813), but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969.

One of the most baffling inscriptions has come down to us from the so-called ‘Passage of the Theôroi’ at Thasos. Situated at the north-eastern entrance of the ancient agora, and consisting originally of two walls on either side of a path paved by marble, the monumental passage way had a long list of names inscribed on the inside of its western wall; this is the so-called ‘great list of Thasian theôroi’. Two of its constituent lists bear the headings ἐπὶ τῆς πρώτης ἀπαρχῆς and ἐπὶ τῆς δευ[τέρη]ς ἀπαρχῆς| οἵδε ἐθεόρεον. The meaning of the word aparchê and the nature of the theôroi in question have been the subject of disagreement among historians. The aim of this article is to contribute further suggestions to existing discussions.

This is Snell's text:

In Metaphysics Z 13 Aristotle argues that no universal can be substance. Prima facie, this appears to rule out the possibility that any universal can be substance, species as well as genera. Nevertheless, many commentators have denied that this chapter intends to rule out the possibility that any universal can be substantial. Aristotle, it is thought, cannot wish to deny that any universal can be substance because he believes that some universals are substances, viz. species.

Aristophanes' description of the stages of promotion in the Athenian navy recently received renewed attention, when Mastromarco and Halliwell enlisted it in their battle against the traditional opinion that Aristophanes' early career fell into two stages, a secret one of writing plays but not producing them, and a public one in which he undertook both activities. Mastromarco argues for a tripartite career, and Halliwell, who is against a too strict correlation, for a gradual development, a sort of a complex apprenticeship, which eventually he divides also into three stages similar to those discerned by Mastromarco. In summing up their position, MacDowell paraphrases the above passage according to its prevalent interpretation: ‘The nautical metaphor (541–4), with its progression from oarsman to prow-officer to helmsman, indicates that Aristophanes did not take over his task all at once, but by stages. But what were the stages?’

At the end of the twenty-eighth chapter of the eighth book of the Natural History Aristotle says: , and goes on to narrate a strange story of the method employed to procure the hybrid. Though the details are entirely fabulous, it has not been doubted that the Indian dog was a real animal. In de Generatione Animalium 746a34 he says more cautiously What then was this creature ? Sundevall declines to commit himself. Aubert and Wimmer think perhaps a jackal, for they hold that the θώς of Aristotle was no jackal. But apart from other considerations there is not the slightest reason for saying that θώς does not mean a jackal in Aristotle as much as in other authors; if some of his statements about it are not true, no more are most of his statements about the lion. Yet this absurd notion that the ‘Indian dog’ was perhaps a jackal is adopted in the Berlin Index 419a15. If we look to India for a dog really foreign to the Greeks we are of course at once confronted with the genus Cyon, familiar to all readers of the Jungle Books as the Red Dog; accordingly our problematical Indian has been identified also with this. One would not think that anybody who had ever seen a specimen of Cyon would dream of calling it a cross between a dog and a tiger. It is true, however, that Aristotle believed that the Laconian hound was descended from a cross between dog and fox (the ⋯λωπεκ⋯δεδ of Xen. Cyn. iii. 1 are also said to be so), and that the ancients were very reckless in making guesses of this kind; so the Arabs say that the cheetah is a ‘breed between the lion and the pard’! (Jerdon's Mammals of India, 1874, p. 114).

Since the days of Merula it has been regularly assumed by editors and critics of Ennius that, despite the express statement of Cicero to the contrary, the Annales did contain some narrative of the events of the first Punic War. Familiar as the passage in the Brutus is, it must be quoted once again: “Tamen illius quem uatibus et Faunis annumerat Ennius Bellum Punicum quasi Myronis opus delectat. Sit Ennius sane, ut est certe, perfectior: qui, si ilium, ut simulat, contemneret, non omnia bella persequens, primm illud Punicum, acerrimum bellum, reliquisset”.

The principate of Augustus coincided with a surge of interest in the short Aristotelian treatise which we now entitle Categories, contributing to its later installation at the outset of the philosophical curriculum and its traditional function as an introduction to logic. Thanks in part to remarks made by Plutarch (Sulla 26.1–2) and Porphyry (Vita Plotini 24.7), the origin of this interest has often been traced to Andronicus of Rhodes: his catalogue (πίνακɛς) and publication of the Aristotelian corpus began with the Categories and may have drawn fresh attention to a previously obscure treatise. But the later Neoplatonic sources name several other philosophers who also discussed the Categories and played an important role in crafting its interpretation during the first centuries of our era. For example, the Neoplatonist Simplicius discusses the views of Stoics and Platonists who questioned the Categories' value as a treatment of grammar or ontology, while others defended its usefulness as an introduction to logic. These early debates, as these later sources suggest, exercised a lasting influence on the shape of subsequent philosophy and philosophical education within and beyond the Aristotelian tradition.

In the above paper I suggested that in Anth. Pal. ix. 519 and xi. 12 Philip V of Macedon was himself the Cyclops and the Centaur, and that these two identifications were not only appropriate to Philip's character (as popularly interpreted), but also historically associated with the Argead dynasty. In my case for the ‘Centaur’ identification, however, I overlooked one of the most important pieces of evidence, though it had been available since 1926; and that is the meaning of the word κέντανυος In an article published that year E. H. Sturtevant showed that κέντανυος is a word of Thraco-Macedonian origin with the same meaning as the Greek ϕίλɩππος. The first part κενττ– is the κενττ– οΤ κενθ which is a constituent of several Thracian personal names, e.g. Aulu-centus, Aulu-centius, Ἐπται-κενθος, Zipa-centhus, etc. (almost a score are quoted by Sturtevant). The second half of the word, avro-, occurs in Ἀβρο-ξελμης, Ἀβρου-πολις Ἀβρο-τονον etc. (with such variants as Αὐλου-ξελμις, Ἀλλου-πορις, which led Tomaschek to suggest that ἀβρο(υ)- and αὐλο(υ)- are alternative forms of the same word). Already Tomaschek had identified κεντ- with the Greek ϕιλ-, and had argued that Thracian avro- ‘was borrowed from Iranian neighbours of the Thracians. Avestan aurva-, aurvañt (“runner, swift”) is strikingly similar in form to Thracian avro-, avrū-, and the Avestan word applies so frequently to the horse that it might easily come to mean ”horse”’. From a combination of the two forms Sturtevant gets the convincing κένταυρος (cf. the reverse form Aulu-centus) = ϕίλιππος.

A Previous article in this journal gave some account of Terence quotations in Priscian. A similar account for Servius is necessary. Umpf en bach's summary is far from accurate; and it has the serious defect that no distinction is made between Servius proper and the material peculiar to the enlarged Commentary. With Thilo's warning that the evidence is all against the assumption that the enlarged Commentary is a truer representation of what Servius himself wrote, we should, in any problem relating to Servius, confine ourselves strictly to what we know to be his work.

Caper in his section on the preposition ex cited Ennius, Ann. 309:

nauibus explebant sese terrasque replebant,

and declared that Virgil used the verb with this antique sense in Aen. 6, 545:

discedam; explebo numerum reddarque tenebris,

i.e. ‘minuam vestrum numerum.’

This we are told in Servius' note, which begins: Ut diximus supra, explebo est minuam. Thilo gives no reference to any such previous words of Servius, and I have failed to find them. Can it be that Servius has carelessly transcribed a note of Donatus, and that Donatus had discussed ex minuens at Geo. 2, 65, or 4, 145 ? Donatus' note on Terence, Hec. 755, is Explere exinanire Terentianum est; the passage of Terence is:

eas ad mulieres huc intro atque istuc iusiurandum idem

polliceare illis: exple animum îs teque hoc crimine expedi,

i.e., relieve their mind of suspicion against Pamphilus and free yourself from this charge. The phrase recurs in the next Scene (785; 787):

illis modo explete animum.

i atque exple animum îs, coge ut credant.

The author of the Orphic Argonautica was, except by personal election, no poet. He was, however, a very devout reader of poetry and, had he only been Irradiated by the same Celestial Light, might well have been a Milton, for he went to work in very much the same way. Books, and not personal experience, were his guides. His mind was stored with the lines and phrases of other poets; he read his authors attentively: but he did not always understand them, and he lacked the Miltonic art of giving borrowed gems new value from their setting.