The difficult and apparently inconsistent regulations by which certain marriages are forbidden in the Republic have not, it would seem, been consistently explained hitherto. It is the purpose of this article to prove that—if we read Plato's text without prejudice—marriages between brothers and sisters are nowhere prohibited, but expressly allowed; and that there are in the ideal city certain family groups, though I do not contend that any very great importance is to be attached to these.

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)

Plutarch concludes his chapter on the Rhetra (Lye. 6) with six lines of Tyrtaios:

φο⋯βου ⋯κο⋯ςσαντες Πυθων⋯θεν οἴκαδ' ἔνεικαν1

μαντε⋯ας τε θεο⋯ κα⋯ τελ⋯εντ' ἔπεα

ἄρχειν μ⋯ν βουλῦς θεοτιμ⋯τους βασιλ⋯ας

οἷσι μ⋯λει Σπ⋯ρτας ἱμερ⋯εσσα π⋯λις

πρεσβ⋯τας τε γ⋯ροντας, ἔπειτα δ⋯ δημ⋯τας ἄνδρας

πὐθε⋯αις ῥ⋯τραις ⋯ντααπαμειβομ⋯νους.

These lines are quoted to confirm Plutarch's statement, that the Kings who added the last clause to the Rhetra (what I have called Clause III, α⋯ δ⋯ οκολι⋯ν, etc.) ‘persuaded the city [to accept this addition] on the grounds that it was part of the God's command'. On Plutarch's view, the two Kings added an extra clause to an oracle, and justified their action by alleging that Delphi had authorized the clause. It is not immediately obvious how Tyrtaios’ lines confirm this view. The Delphic utterance whose substance is given in lines 3–6 approximately paraphrases parts of Clauses I and I I (γερωσἰαν σὺρχαγ⋯ταις … τοὺτως εἰσφ⋯ρειν … δ⋯μω δ' ⋯ντααγορ⋯ααν ἦμεν), but where is Clause III ? The burden has to be borne by the one word εὐθε⋯αις: ‘the Kings and gerontes shall initiate business, the demos shall reply with undistorted rhetrai’ or ‘shall respond to the rhetrai without distorting them’ (according as we take the dative ῥ⋯τραις as instrumental or as a true dative). If εὐθε⋯αις is given enough weight, the oracle which Tyrtaios quotes may be held to forbid the ‘excessive amendment’ against which Clause III was (in Plutarch's view) aimed.

At Euripides' Heraclidae 630, an anonymous character arrives onstage to report the arrival of Hyllus' army, and returns at 928 accompanying the defeated Eurystheus. He is generally identified by editors as a therapōn, following the dramatis personae of the hypothesis. Mastronarde briefly challenges this assumption, stating that ‘he is a soldier, not a servant’. There are, however, four reasons to identify the character as neither a soldier nor a therapōn, but as Hyllus' herald. Although none of these reasons is conclusive on its own, the cumulative weight of the evidence is compelling. This identification contributes to the structural coherence and thematic development of the play, and gains special significance from the play's interest in the representation of absent characters.

At 876ff. Octavia's partisans lament the ruinous intervention of the Roman mob in support of the heroine's legitimate claims against Poppaea. A series of paradigmatic figures illustrates the sentence ‘o funestus multis populi dirusque fauor’: the two Gracchi, first, then Livius Drusus, the tribunus plebis of 91 B.C., stabbed to death in his house in the year of his tribunate. The gallery of historical characters suits the Roman atmosphere of the play, the fallen heroes of Republican times are presented as noble and disinterested figures, struck by disaster and evil fortune. This is the description of Livius' fate (887–90; text and colometry given as in Zwierlein's OCT):

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.

Chapter 47 contains a sentence which has been the subject of a good deal of controversy and is manifestly corrupt. In the codex it reads as follows: κα τοᾁτων πνω μαϰιμᾃτατον ἒθνος Bακτριανν ὑπ βασιλα οὖσαν ἴδιον τπον κα 'Aλξανδρος ρμηθες π τν μερν τοᾁτων ἂϰρι τοȗ Γγγον διλθε κτλ.

Attempts have been made to connect this sentence with the rulers of the Kushan dynasty. It has even been suggested that οὖσαν represents Kονσαν (Kennedy, J.R.A.S. 1913, p. 127): the suggestion naturally won no acceptance, but one may point out that in any case it failed to attack the real difficulty, which lies in the words (or word) ἴδιον τπον On that essential point, the views of recent editors have both varied and combined.

The study of the republican Roman Senate was revolutionized by Professor Broughton's Magistrates, and to a lesser extent more recently by Professor Lily Ross Taylor's Voting Districts of the Roman Republic. Naturally, neither of these two great works rounded up all the available evidence without exception, and a considerable amount of mopping-up has been carried out. More remains to be done, however, and this article aims at providing some further information on republican senators, their tribes, and their origins, as an addendum to (in the first section) M.R.R. and its Supplement, and (in the second) the prosopogra- phical chapter of Professor Taylor's book.

1. IN the C.Q.xxxiv (1940), pp. 118 ff., I wrote on ‘Some Uses of the Imperfect in Greek’ (hereafter quoted as ‘Uses’). It occurred tome to check the suggestions there made by examining all the instances in one author. I had no hesitation in choosing Herodotus, who of all authors, except perhaps Homer, presents the most baffling diversity of types (I quote by chapter and the lines of Stein's annotated edition). For purposes of comparison I also read Thucydides and Xenophon's Anabasis 1–4. It would appear that Thucydides retains something of Herodotus' freedom, Xenophon comparatively little.

‘To attempt to say anything new about Horace may seem absurd.’ To attempt to say anything new about the Roman Odes may seem still more absurd; my purpose, nevertheless, is to reconsider the lines of Carm. 3.3 set out above, and to reinterpret an argument begun by the editor of the Delphin Horace (1691) in which the authority of Bentley is against me. My question is: what does Horace mean the reader to understand by describing Augustus as drinking nectar ‘purpureo ore’?

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.

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.

In this scene Oedipus receives the delegation of suppliants who have come, under the leadership of the priest of Zeus, to entreat Oedipus to deliver them from the blight and the plague. The issue with which I propose to deal concerns the composition of this delegation.

This article offers a new interpretation of Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche. Most scholars have previously offered a second-time reading of this story, according to which the reader reaches Book 11 and then looks back at Psyche's story of fall and redemption as a parallel for Lucius’ life. Following Graverini's and other scholars’ emotional approach to the Metamorphoses, I argue that the ecphrasis of Cupid's palace within the story of Cupid and Psyche includes multiple re-enactments of the novel's prologue. These re-enactments invite the reader to undertake a first-time and immersive reading of this story, which focusses on Psyche's experience of Cupid and her reaction to his epiphany. In its use of immersion, this article draws from recent developments in cognitive narratology and pushes scholars of Apuleius to focus on the reader's immersive and emotional response in order to reassess the value of a second-time reading of the Metamorphoses.

There can be few Greek prose authors who outdo Plutarch in fondness for elaborate similes, and a determination to sustain at length vocabulary appropriate to both objects of comparison within the simile, once it is embarked upon. In the essay Quomodo adulescens (Mor. 32e) he uses a favourite image, in which a young man aspiring to be educated in quality literature is recommended to follow the example of the bee, which extracts material for its honey from the most pungent plants: μν οὖν μλιττα ϕυσικς ν τοῖς δριμνττοις ἄνθεσι κα ταῖς τραχντταις κνθαις ξανενρσκει τ λειτατον μλι κα χρησιμώτατον, οἱ δ παῖδες, ἂν ρθς ντρϕωνται τοῖς ποιμασιν, κα π τν ϕαλονς κα τπους ὑποψας χντων ἕλκειν τι χρσιμον μωσγπως μαθησναι κα ὠϕλιμον. In another such essay (De recta, Mor. 41e–42b) he elaborates this theme at greater length as follows:

Shortly before the death of Augustus, Tiberius dedicated the celebrated ara numinis Augusti, thus formally enshrining the numen of Augustus within the Imperial Cult. The step was a radical one, fundamental to the whole development of the emperor's ‘divinity’. Whereas the official cult of the emperor's genius had continued a traditional Republican practice, if with significant differences, to ascribe numen to the princeps was to establish Augustus as a through whom divinity could function as an intermediary. For to pay cult to the numen Augusti was to ascribe to the human emperor the quintessential property of a god.