Mommsen invented the notion that the ancient sources provide clear evidence for placing the pre-Sullan laws affecting the iudicia publica in two distinct categories, i.e. laws affecting courts in general (leges iudiciariae) and laws affecting one court (leges repetundarum, maiestatis, etc.). Fraccaro demolished it, arguing that the term lex iudiciaria had no such precise meaning in the ancient authors and that all the laws to which it was applied, before the Lex Aurelia of 70, were, in fact, leges repetundarum.

Scholars have known for some time that Plotinus' treatment of memory forms an important part of his philosophy; and while there are various points of view from which his doctrine can be approached, one seems singularly important. His analysis of memory boldly contrasts conscious and unconscious behaviour in human beings and so materially advances our knowledge of his concept of conscious experience.

Ser. Sulpicius Rufus (cos. 51) has seldom gone short of approbation: not only noble and patrician but the first jurist to reach the consulate since Q. Scaevola. When Cicero in 63 spoke in defence of Murena he deprecated and derided the claims of legal erudition. Seventeen years later, composing in dialogue form a history of Roman eloquence, he made handsome amends to Servius, at some length (Brutus 150 ff.).

After matching M. Antonius with L. Crassus, the pair of masters who dominated the epoch preceding his own, the expositor brings Crassus into comparison with the jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola (by happy coincidence they shared the fasces in 95). Each was far from incompetent in the science professed by the other. Whereupon the alert Brutus was moved to intervene with a question: might not a similar parallel for excellence obtain between Cicero and Ser. Sulpicius, likewise coeval?

The artful device insinuates a long excursus, breaking the chronological order of the whole treatise. Together from early youth and together at Rhodes, the two friends practised the same ‘exercitationes’. In oratory Servius might perhaps have become ‘par principibus’. He preferred the law: in fact he excelled Scaevola and all predecessors, so Cicero affirms, to the ingenuous surprise of the interlocutor.

Servius had made a sagacious choice between the two civilian arts. In oratory (first in rank and estimation at Rome) Servius achieved enough for a lawyer and a consul: ‘quantum esset et ad tuendum ius civile et ad obtinendam consularem dignitatem satis’ (Brutus 155).

The Brutus furnishes ready and vivid verdicts on speakers of the time. Five consular Lentuli are put on show for style and manner, from Clodianus and Sura to the savage and minatory Crus. All dead, it is true, and they benefit from much indulgence. For Servius no writing of Cicero acclaims a public occasion when the consul displayed his talent – and no appeal to an oration of any kind. For the eloquence of Servius the friend falls back on what the legal works disclose: ‘et litterarum scientiam et loquendi elegantiam’ (153). Posterity is defrauded, the earnest student at a loss.

Jupiter, in his prophetic speech to Venus (Aen. i. 257 ff.) foretells that Aeneas will rule for three years in Italy, that Ascanius will complete the thirty years of rule at Lavinium, and that he will then found Alba, under whose kings' rule 300 years will elapse until the birth of Romulus. The sequence 3–30–300 is unmistakeable: tertia (265) and temaque (266) … triginta (269) … ter centum (272); no effort is required to see that the total of these numbers is 333 and the total is clearly more significant than the antiquarian associations of the individual numbers

In 88 B.C. the dying embers of the Social War kindled an even more dangerous civil war. Violence with gangs was no longer the final solution in Roman political struggles, but war with a regular army took its place. The link between the two wars and the critical escalation of political conflict was created by the tribunate of P. Sulpicius Rufus. Most modern accounts differ little in describing the sequence of events in his tribunate, though they vary in the interpretation of his motives and policy. They agree because they accept the common basis to the narratives of Appian, Plutarch, and Velleius as true, even though they usually discard the Tendenz in these authors, through which Sulpicius is portrayed as an unscrupulous man who put his services at Marius’ disposal. It is the aim of this paper to propose that the wheat in these authors cannot be so easily separated from the chaff: that in fact the bias, which is most obvious in Plutarch’s Lives, and there can be largely ascribed to the influence of Sulla’s fjown memoirs, has not only distorted motives but misplaced and misrepresented facts. Important inconsistencies in Appian, when taken in conjunction with the little information we have outside these sources, suggest a different outline for Sulpicius’ tribunate—one which involves more uncertainties than the commonly accepted view, because it is obtained by rejecting the validity of more of our scanty source material, but which may enable us to judge more fairly not only Sulpicius and Marius but also Sulla himself.

No project lay nearer to the heart of Eduard Fraenkel during his last years than that of promoting a reprint of the famous book Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles, by Tycho von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, which was first published as volume xxii of Philologische Untersuchungen in 1917. Tycho Wilamowitz, the son of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and the grandson of Theodor Mommsen, was killed fighting against the Russians near Ivangorod on the night of 14/15 October 1914. After his death the manuscript was prepared for publication by his friend Ernst Kapp, who has explained in the foreword of the book the nature of his services.

Gell. NA 3.10.13 citing Varro's Hebdomades uel de imaginibus, reports:

Venas etiam in hominibus, uel potius arterias, medicos musicos dicere ait numero moueri septenario, quod ipsi appellant τν δι τεσσρων συμφωναν, quae fit in collatione quaternarii 〈et ternarii〉 numeri.

He also states that doctors who make use of music theory declare that the veins, or rather arteries, in human beings move in accordance with the number seven; they call this motion ‘the consonance of the fourth’, which is produced by the proportional relation of the numbers four and three.

There are signs that a list of parallelisms containing quite lengthy citations of republican works in prose and all kinds of verse, as well as remarks highly critical of Virgil, provided the material of Saturnalia 6. 2, Saturnalia 6. 3, and Saturnalia 6. 1. 55–65.1

Whereas Macrobius transmits the uersus parallelisms practically without comment, the locus parallelisms have a certain amount of discussion clustered at the beginning and at the end. This is for the most part neutral and matter of fact but in 6. 2. 33 the harsh tone of an obtrectator makes itself heard: nee Tullio conpilando, dummodo undique ornamenta sibi conferret, abstinuit. The original list was excerpted very carelessly: in 6. 2. 29 the Virgil citation ought to continue for two more verses; in 6. 2. 7, 9, and 24 the Lucretius citations are likewise defective.

In 1884 Ivo Bruns began his Lucrez-Studien, on the relationship between Lucretius' treatment of Epicureanism and the exposition by the philosopher himself in the extant Epistles, with the question (p.4) for whom did Lucretius write? His answer was to show (p.l 1) that the general public, who were the poet's real objective, were very different readers from the disciples whom Epicurus addressed in the Letter to Herodotus and similar works. This conclusion, and the subsequent investigation of the ways in which this difference affected the treatment of doctrine in the two works, does not concern me. My interest is rather in the manner in which Bruns tackles the problem of the ostensible addressee, Memmius, and the extent to which this man remains in Lucretius' mind throughout the whole six books.

In an article in an earlier issue of this journal Vivienne Gray sought to challenge my claim that Xenophon's account of Prodicus' narrative concerning the Choice of Heracles (Mem. 2.1.21–34) represents ‘a very close approximation to Prodicus’ actual wording'. Since that time, Gray's article has been cited approvingly by Louis-André Dorion and David Wolfsdorf, both of whom consider that Gray has settled the matter, at least as far as the linguistic aspect of my argument is concerned. In view of this, I feel it necessary to point out that Gray's argument is fundamentally flawed. In addition, I should like to take this opportunity to show that the arguments of Dorion and Wolfsdorf, which are aimed at other aspects of the case that I made for Xenophon's faithfulness to Prodicus' text, are likewise invalid.

Roman magistri and grammatici taught their students a wide range of subjects, primarily through the medium of Latin and Greek literary texts. A well-educated Roman in the Imperial era was expected to have a good knowledge of the literary language of Cicero and Virgil, as well as a competent command of Greek. By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, this knowledge had to be taught actively, as everyday Latin usage had changed during the intervening four centuries. After the reign of Theodosius the division between the Eastern and the Western Empires meant that knowledge of Greek was no longer as common as it had once been in the West. At the same time, by Late Antiquity, migration increased and foreigners as well as provincials moved within the empire, for example, in search of military promotion. There is evidence that recruitment to official or public careers was based less on birth than on education. These ambitious newcomers sent their children to Roman schools, which would facilitate their access to public office. Receipt of this education provided a means by which men from less privileged backgrounds could achieve promotion to such office and become prominent and influential individuals. At the same time a late Roman education also produced a high level of cultural homogeneity among those who had experienced it. So what might we learn about how language was taught—and what kinds of language were valued—in a late-antique Roman school? How might this contribute to our understanding of late-antique Roman elite society?

As we read these lines we are inevitably reminded of the old adage ab love principium, . Horace here conforms to the ancient precept, as many other poets, at least since Pindar, had done before him. But in his works as a whole, and in the first collection of Odes as a whole, he begins not with Jupiter but with his patron Maecenas.3 Perhaps, therefore, Horace's own practice may help to justify the division of this Horatian article into two separate but interdependent parts of which the first takes Maecenas as its starting-point while the second is concerned with Jupiter and with Augustus, his vicegerent on earth.

According to Suetonius, Nero Claudius Drusus, the younger of Augustus' two stepsons, was said to have aspired to win spolia opima, that is, spoils taken from an enemy commander killed in battle. The aim of this paper is to consider what substance there may be in this claim and what light it may throw on Augustus’ relationship with the princes of the imperial family.

All commentators so far as I know have believed that lines 100–1 are simply a vague paraphrase for Jebb's translation may be taken to represent the usual view: ‘… is he threading the straits of the sea, or hath he found an abode on either continent?’ But this sense is not only poetially inept, but linguistically impossible.