The early handbooks of rhetoric compiled by Tisias and Corax and their successors seem to have been directed entirely at successful speaking in courts of law. This was the art that Strepsiades set out to learn in the Philosopher's Thinking-shop; this, Isocrates complains, was the only object of technical writers on rhetoric before his time; and Aristotle, when he wrote the chapter that stands first in hisRhetoric, made just the same complaint: τ⋯ς αὐτ⋯ς oὔσμς μεθ⋯δoυ περι τ⋯ δημηγoρικτ⋯ και δικανικ⋯ και καλλιoνoς και πoλιτικωτ⋯ραςτ⋯ς δημηγoρικ⋯ς πραγματειας oὔςηρ ἤ oὔσης ἤ τ⋯ς περι τ⋯ ςυναλλ⋯γματα, πει μ⋯ν ⋯κεινης oὐδ⋯ν λ⋯γoυγι, περι δ⋯ικ⋯ξεσθαι π⋯ντες πειρ⋯νται τεχνoλoγειν. The art as the Sophists practised it was by no means so limited in its application: many of them were accustomed to playing the parts of statesmen and diplomats as well as of educators; and the most notorious field for their powers of oratory was of course the lecture or ⋯πιδειξις. But the systems of rhetoric that they devised and taught did not cover their own practice; and forensic oratory, as well as seeming the most commonly necessary kind at that time, was also, it must be said, the easiest to reduce to rule. Gorgias, it is true, professed to teach a rhetoric of more extended application, by means of which his pupils would be able to produce conviction in any public assembly;* but we must conclude that this wider field was at least very imperfectly treated in all the technical systems of the time. Plato shortly describes the position thus:μ⋯λιστα μ⋯ν πως περι τ⋯ς δικας λ⋯γεται τε και γρ⋯φεται τ⋯χνῇ, λ⋯γεται δ⋯ και περι δημηγoριας ‧ ⋯π ι πλ⋯o≠ δ⋯ oκ⋯κoα.

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play.

Around 87 b.c. during the turmoil of the first Mithridatic war, Philo of Larissa, head of the so-called Fourth Academy, fled from Athens to Rome. There he gave lectures on philosophical topics and taught rhetoric. His classes were attended by a young man called Cicero, who was inspired by him to include in a work on rhetorical theory, somewhat inappropriately, a fervent confession of scepticism to which he stuck for the rest of his life. Later Cicero claimed to be—as an orator—not a product of the workshops of the teachers of rhetoric, but of the spacious walks of the Academy. And he developed the ideal of the philosopher-orator. Scholars disagree whether the idea to bring philosophy and rhetoric together is Cicero's own invention or an adaptation from someone else, for instance Philo.

The Lex Plotia Agraria is known to us only by name through a single reference in one of Cicero's letters, from which we can extract nothing more than a terminus ante quern and a very general notion of its probable scope. Gabba in a short article, after reviewing the different hypotheses about this law, decided in favour of a suggestion put forward originally by Zumpt, that it belongs probably to the year 70/69 B.C.; and identifying it with a law referred to in a passage of Dio, he argued that the law was passed on behalf of Pompey's and Metellus Pius' veterans of the Spanish war. Following a suggestion of Niccolini he identified Plotius with the Plotius, tribune 70/69 B.C., who was responsible for the Lex Plotia de reditu Lepidanorum, and the date of his tribunate he put in 70 B.C. With Gabba's reasoning and general conclusions the present writer is in agreement, namely, that the law belongs to 70/69 B.C., and aimed at providing land for the veterans of Pompey and Metellus; the object of this note is to draw attention to a piece of evidence which has hitherto been strangely neglected, and to draw some possible inferences about the scope and fate of the law.

Epistles 1.20, the last poem of its book, begins with an elaborate joke on the entry of Horace's book of epistles into the world and ends with a well-known σϕραγίς describing the poet himself. It will be argued here that this final poem recalls and subverts the pretensions of two earlier final poems in Horace's own Odes, and that its good-humoured depreciation of Horace himself is matched by a similar attitude towards his previous grand poetic claims as a lyric vates.

No satisfactory treatment of the whole subject of jurisdiction in the Athenian Empire of the fifth century B.C. yet exists, and in this paper I make no attempt to provide a complete account. My purpose is twofold: to deal in some detail with certain specific problems, and to demonstrate that the most fruitful method of approach to the whole subject—perhaps, indeed, the only one which can reduce it to order–is to divide it up under three particular headings and to treat each of these separately. Only Part I will be included in the present issue of this journal; Parts II and III, with a brief Conclusion, will appear in a later issue.

Translation at this stage would be premature, but three variants in line 3 deserve notice, (a) Bury (iii.394) writes (b) Natorp (p. 292), followed by Brochard (p. 62 n. 4), suggested (which would yield a meiouric line), (c) Wachsmuth (p. 22) prints a colon instead of a comma after

It is not surprising that line 3 has attracted emendation. As it stands, it lacks a verb and has to modify an understood existential

In the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth thematic resemblances to the Roman elegists in Paulus Silentiarius (and other late epigrammatists) were explained as the result of the poets' reliance on a common Hellenistic source – usually this was identified as the so-called ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ – and this represented a departure from the views of earlier scholars such as Hertzberg and Postgate, who had maintained that Paulus knew and imitated the elegists. In recent years the pendulum has swung back (partly, perhaps, because the whole notion of a ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ has been abandoned), and the prevailing opinion seems to be that the Roman elegists were known to Paulus. This is the view of, for instance, Giovanni Viansino in his edition of Paulus, of Elmar Schulz-Vanheyden in his important work on Propertius' relationship to Greek epigram, and of Hermann Beckby in his edition of the Greek Anthology. Recently, too, Gordon Williams has put forward a very strong case for earlier epigrammatists like Antipater and Crinagoras imitating the Augustan poets.

The papyrus fragments that belong almost certainly to Sophocles' Inacbos (P.Oxy. 2369 and P. Tebt. 692) have been admirably discussed by Pfeiffer andCarden.1 But one remarkable feature that has never been explained adequatelyis the apparent reference to a black Zeus. P. Oxy. 2369 contains a fragmentarydescription of a stranger turning Io into a cow with a touch of his hand and thenleaving the palace.

Homer's Iliad is an epic poem full of war and battles, but scholars have noted that ‘[t]he Homeric poems are interested in death far more than they are in fighting’. Even though long passages of the poem, particularly the so-called ‘battle books’ (Il. Books 5–8, 11–17, 20–2), consist of little other than fighting, individual battles are often very short with hardly ever a longer exchange of blows. Usually, one strike is all it takes for the superior warrior to dispatch his opponent, and death occurs swiftly. The prominence of death in Homeric battle scenes raises the question of how and in which terms dying in battle is being depicted in the Iliad: for while fighting can be described in a straightforward fashion, death is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to grasp. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have ascertained that, when coping with difficult and abstract concepts, such as emotions, the human mind is likely to resort to figurative language and particularly to metaphors.

Among the scanty remains of poetry attributed to Eumelus of Corinth two lines (fr. 13 Kinkel, fr. 1 Bergk, Diehl, Edmonds, fr. 696/1 Page)2 stand out as different from the rest, first because they are concerned not with the legendary past but with an actual, present occasion, and secondly because they are composed not for Corinthians but for Messenians. Our evidence comes from Pausanias and may be set out at the start:

The 166th codex of the Bibliotheke of Photios comprises a summary of a peculiar work written by one Antonius Diogenes, entitled τ⋯ ὑπ⋯ρ Θούλην ἄπιστα. This told the story of an Arkadian named Deinias, who travelled the world κατ⋯ ζήτησιν ἱστορίας (109a 13–14), coming eventually to Thule, where he met Mantinias and Derkyllis, a brother and sister from Tyre, and struck up an erotic relationship with Derkyllis (109a 26). A narrative of Derkyllis, told to Deinias, seems to be inset at this point (109a 29–110b 15), relating her own travels and including much Pythagorean material associated with her wonder-working companion, Astraios, which was authentic-seeming enough for Porphyrios to make use of it in his biography of Pythagoras. The Apista was a long work, running to 24 books, and it seems likely that a sizeable proportion of its length was devoted to paradoxographical material related to the places and peoples visited by the various narrators, but largely omitted from Photios' summary; the plot itself, though both complex and episodic, does not seem capable of sustaining such length.

At the end of his summary Photios has a short discussion of the place of the Apista in literary history (111 b 32ff.). Detailed analysis of this passage will form an important part of this paper, but for the moment it will suffice to say that Photios saw the work as germinal for Greek fiction, and in particular expresses the view that it was the ‘source and root’ (πηγ⋯ κα⋯ ῥίζα, 111 b 36–7) of Lucian's True Histories.

In an important recent article T. C. W. Stinton reaffirmed the case that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13, has a wide range of application. I do not wish to dispute the general conclusion of what seems to me a masterly analysis of the question but simply to discuss two areas where Stinton's argument may be thought defective–the interpretation of the examples given by Aristotle in Poetics 13, 5 3all and 53a2O–1 and the problem of the contradiction between 13, 53a13–15 and 14, 54a4–9.

According to a report in Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 561CD), the qualities of Erosled the Stoic Zeno to make him the tutelary god of his ideal state:

Pontianus said that Zeno of Citium took Eros to be the god of love and freedom, and even the provider of concord, but nothing else. This is why he said in his Republic that Eros was the god who contributed to the safety of the city.

Catullus 68 has for generations been the site of hard-fought and inconclusive philological battles. This, it may be confidently predicted, will continue to be the case. The present contribution, therefore, can pretend to no more elaborate aim than the opening up of certain new fronts. It falls into two parts of unequal length: first (I) some general observations on the contents of the poem — or poems, for the Einheitsfrage cannot be evaded — and the underlying theme(s) thereof; second (II) a detailed examination of the source (A) and significance (B) of perhaps the most remarkable passage in an altogether remarkable piece of work, to wit the barathrum simile (107 ff.). The argument of I has, the reader will observe, a not inconsiderable bearing on that of IIB, though it is in no way dependent on the latter's acceptability. The argument of IIA, to the contrary, has no necessary link with those of I and IIB and may profitably (and justly) be judged by itself.

The reader of Catullus' fiftieth poem can hardly fail to be struck by the poet's use of erotic language to his friend Calvus. Sleeplessness and lack of appetiteare symptoms of love, and the threat of Nemesis is commonly used againsta haughty beloved; miserum (line 9), incensus (line 8), and indomitus furore (line 11) are words to describe a lover, and ocelle (line 19), as Kroll observes, is naturally addressed to a beloved. Even ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem (line 13) suggests a lover's yearning, if we recall how Plato in erotic contexts stresses the desire to have company and conversation with the beloved (Symp. 211 d 6-8; Phdr. 255 b 2). It is strange then that Kroll should comment onpreces in line 18 that their content is not clear.

The first publication of a hitherto lost work on moral philosophy by Galen deserves the attention of scholars interested in the thought of one who was the last great physician of antiquity, who by a peculiar chain of circumstances became the teacher of the Middle Ages in scientific medicine, and who in his own day enjoyed also success as a philosopher. Posterity, it is true, did not regard his philosophical work with the favour it bestowed on his achievements in medicine, and hence a very small number of his philosophical writings has survived to the present day either in the original text or in Arabic translations.

Current scholarly opinion holds that the poet Claudian was a pagan who was able to hide sufficiently his personal views at a largely Christian court. This opinion is not unanimous: Claudian has in the past occasionally been considered a Christian, and recently that view has reappeared in print. That Claudian wrote carm. min. 32, de saluatore, should not be doubted; yet this collection of stock phrases cannot be considered Claudian's credo. As Gnilka has shown, Claudian's treatment of the traditional gods and goddesses displays warmth and fondness beyond the requirements of epic and consequently reveals his true beliefs. The poem is an Easter card for Honorius, displaying not religious convictions, but an instinct for survival at a Christian court. The exegesis of Carmina Minora 50 here proposed suggests that Claudian was familiar enough with Christian ideas to criticise them. Nothing hinders him from repeating them when it proved advantageous.

The interpretation of carm. min. 50 depends in some measure on the literary relationship between Claudian and the Christian poet Prudentius. Specifically, it is important to ascertain whether Claudian was aware of the work of his contemporary. Several studies have argued that Prudentius read and used Claudian, but only recently has Cameron suggested Claudian also read and used Prudentius. His arguments and example are convincing and conclusive, revealing at the same time the nature of Claudian's use of his contemporary's words and ideas. Because similar echoes of Prudentius' poetry will appear in the interpretation of carm. min. 50, it will be useful to cite the example here.