Of the ten ships of the barbarians three the reef that is between Sciathus and Magnesia and is called the Ant. When the barbarians had brought to the reef and set up there a pillar of stone, they themselves set out from Therma, as the way ahead had now been made clear for them, and sailed on with all their ships, having let eleven days pass since the king's departure from Therma. The reef, which was right in their course, had been pointed out to them by Pammon, a Scyrian.

In his discussion of the ethics of suicide (Phaedo 61 c ff.) Plato alludes to more than one traditional injunction against it:indicates a fairly general acceptance of its wickedness. Cebes has heard the Pythagorean Philolaus, among others, saying that suicide was immoral, but has gathered no satisfactory explanation as to why this should be so. One reason, impressive, but, Socrates admits, difficult is to be found

Aetiological poetry tends to be mature poetry in both a literary and a political sense. Interest in antiquarian lore belongs in general to a poet's middle and later years when youthful and audacious quests for what is avant-garde and anti-establishment have yielded to conservatism and a desire to preserve the past. Propertius and Ovid both turned to aetiological poetry after a long apprenticeship in amatory ‘nugae’ which enabled them, like their predecessor, Callimachus, to embellish their work with a diversity of artistic devices founded on considerable poetic skill and literary experience. With this, a vital ploy to engage the sympathy of a sophisticated audience, went the poise and urbanity with which the aetiological poet found humour in the pose of earnest researcher, in the naivety of primitive cult and in clever literary adaptations. Moreover, dedication to a form of writing essentially nationalist and conservative encouraged a tone of patriotic pride and allusions, even compliments, to the ruling powers. In the light of such considerations we may examine Ovid's account of the ‘Ludi Megalenses’.

The ‘Megalensia’ furnished Ovid with a goddess who had enjoyed fame and even notoriety in the pages of Roman literature. In addition to showing a poetic and neoteric interest in the orgiastic elements of her cult and the alien music of her retinue Roman poetry could reflect too the awe and reverence inspired of old by the Great Mother and expressed in the Greek poets, whom Lucretius claimed as his sources in his powerfully beautiful excursus on Cybele worship. Again, Cybele's importance in Rome had been augmented by her Trojan origins, concerning which a canonical Augustan theology had been established by Vergil in the Aeneid.

1. The Commentariolum Petitionis is not in the Codex Mediceus of Cicero's correspondence with his brother Quintus, but it appears at the end of the letters to Quintus in the other manuscripts. It starts in the normal manner of a letter (QVINTVS MARCO FRATRIS. D.) and is, or purports to be, a collection of tips on canvassing set in the particular context of M. Cicero's consular candidature in 64: a composition of his brother Quintus. It is printed as no. 12 in Tyrrell and Purser's collection of Cicero's Letters.

Fabvla misere mutila: this notice in the Oxford edition, reinforced in the critical apparatus, warns the reader against the transmitted text of the Heradidae. It tends to perpetuate the view which Wilamowitz, following up the hints of G. Hermann and A. Kirchhoff, propounded in 1882. The sweeping assurance of his famous article gave it a publicity which makes a detailed rehearsal superfluous. Wilamowitz throughout his life stuck to the opinion that ‘wir lesen die Herakliden in der Bearbeitung eines Regisseurs’. Dissentient voices have been raised from time to time. M. Pohlenz in 1930 even proposed an interpretation of the Heradidae which quietly discarded the thesis of Wilamowitz. Nevertheless the latter appears still to hold the field at least in the English-speaking countries. If it is correct, the Heradidae of Euripides is beyond our reach. This conclusion has indeed, quite recently, been drawn by H. D. F. Kitto.

The scene in Aristophanes' Frogs where Dionysus rows Charon's boat across the Styx to the accompaniment of the chorus of frogs is, of course, one of the most famous passages of Greek Comedy, and an essential element of the humour of the passage is the ineptitude of Dionysus as a rower. As a large part of the Athenian audience would have served in triremes as rowers, Dionysus' inability to perform this familiar task adequately will have been immediately ridiculous. Aristophanes was thus exploiting an easy source of humour in depicting Dionysus as an unaccomplished rower battling against the difficulties and discomforts of the task. Had so obvious a source of humour been neglected by the playwrights of Athenian Old Comedy till the time of Frogs? We should have been obliged to answer that we had no positive indications to the contrary till the publication in 1968 of Pap. Ox. 2740, but this now furnishes us with grounds to infer that some other Old Comedy, very probably the Taxiarchs of Eupolis, contained a scene where some person was represented as rowing ineptly.

Whilst Theophrastus (Char. 17.8) implies that the logographos had a great deal of control over the oral version of a forensic speech and what went into it,2 the part played by the logographos and the client in the content and circulation of the oration after oral delivery is controversial, and has attracted a fair share of attention.3 Sir Kenneth Dover argued that joint or composite authorship of the speech (i.e. client and logographos together) could take place, and that it was the client who could publish the speech after the trial and was free to include his own remarks.4 Thus, as Dover would have it, in the case of Lysias (and of other orators too if joint composition occurred), no unique style of that orator could be discerned in his speeches as we have them today. This composite authorship was first questioned by T. N. Winter,5 and denied even more vigorously by S. Usher,6 who argued that responsibility for a speech's later circulation lay only with the logographos, who also revised the speech as he saw fit.7 Their arguments, which nicely complement each other, are convincing enough on the evidence we have (although a case will be made below that in certain circumstances some, but probably not many, speeches appear to be the work of joint authorship). However, two other factors may be brought in as further support: the stylistic nature of the revised speech and the extent of literacy. The argument of this paper is that the composition of the final circulated speech was beyond the ability of the ordinary client and could only have been produced by the logographos.

There is preserved in Suidas' Lexicon a story about Polycrates of Samos and the island of Delos. It is offered by the lexicographer as an explanation of the phrase τα⋯τ⋯ σοι κα⋯ πύθια κα⋯ δ⋯λια (s.v. and sub nom. πύθια κα⋯ δ⋯λια), when used in a colloquial sense to mean ‘it's all the same to you’. Polycrates had instituted a festival on Delos and asked the Pythia whether to call it by the one name or the other. The phrase, which was supposed to have been the Pythia's reply, was taken to mean that it was all the same to Polycrates whatever he called it, and the death of Polycrates, coming soon after, was interpreted as the fulfilment of the prophecy. Suidas cites Epicurus and Menander for the phrase itself, which was therefore in familiar use by the end of the fourth century B.C. As for the story about Polycrates, it is quite likely that Suidas' ultimate source was some writer of about that period, such as Demon, περ⋯ παροιμι⋯ν. It is very much in the manner of his fragments.

In Juvenal's third satire the main speaker, Umbricius, delivers a speech of farewell (a syntacticon) as he prepares to leave Rome. In it, he mounts a sustained attack on life in the capital. By contrast, he praises Italian country towns, a combination of laudatio and vituperatio which is foreshadowed in the prefatory praise of provincial Cumae (2–5) and denigration of Rome (5–9).

Achilleus′ speeches and action in Iliad 24 ‘complete a development of character-or better, enlargement of experience and comprehension-which stretches through the whole poem’. I largely agree with this statement, but since I also believe that an ‘enlargement of experience and comprehension’ necessarily entails ‘ a development of character’, I do not hesitate, as its author does, to assert that Achilleus′ character develops, i.e., changes for the better, in the course of the Iliad. It is my purpose here to discuss one of the ways in which his speeches in Book 24 are specifically designed to bring this out. I will also argue that it is precisely because his character changes for the better that the poem fits the Aristotelian concept of epic. Lastly, I will attempt to refute Redfield's arguments in support of his opinion that Achilleus does not change in the course of the story.

The idea that ‘Horace repeatedly puns on his name’ has recently sprung up again. Flaccus we are told means ‘limp’ and Horace uses his name to make various jokes about impotence. This is a load of cobblers.

In their introduction to the recent excellent volume Plato & Hesiod, the editors G.R. Boys-Stones and J.H. Haubold observe that when we think about the problematic relationship between Plato and the poets, we tend to narrow this down to that between Plato and Homer. Hesiod is practically ignored. Unjustly so, the editors argue. Hesiod provides a good opportunity to start thinking more broadly about Plato's interaction with poets and poetry, not in the least because the ‘second poet’ of Greece represents a different type of poetry from Homer's heroic epics, that of didactic poetry. What goes for Plato and Hesiod goes for Proclus and Hesiod. Proclus (a.d. 410/12–85), the productive head of the Neoplatonic school in Athens, took a great interest in poetry to which he was far more positively disposed than Plato had ever been. He wrote, for example, two lengthy treatises in reaction to Socrates' devastating criticism of poetry in the Republic as part of his commentary on that work in which he tries to keep the poets within the Platonic pale. This intriguing aspect of Proclus' thought has, as one might expect, not failed to attract scholarly attention. In Proclus' case too, however, discussions tend to concentrate on his attitude towards Homer (one need only think here of Robert Lamberton's stimulating book Homer the Theologian). To some extent this is only to be expected, since much of the discussion in the Commentary on the Republic centres on passages from Homer. Proclus did not, however, disregard Hesiod: we still possess his scholia on the Works and Days, now available in a recent edition by Patrizia Marzillo.

Intense scrutiny can raise chimaeras, and Virgil is the most scrutinized of Roman poets, but he may have engineered coincidences in line number (‘stichometric allusions’) between certain of his verses and their Greek models. A handful of potential examples have now accumulated. Scholars have detected Virgilian citations of Homer, Callimachus and Aratus in this manner, as well as intratextual allusions by both Virgil and Ovid, and references to Virgil's works by later Roman poets using the same technique. (For present purposes I disregard the separate, though related, phenomenon of corresponding numbers of lines in parallel passages: G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964) suggests several examples of such correspondences between Homer and Virgil, especially in speeches. Another purely formal mode of allusion faintly present in Roman poetry is homophonic translation (the technique which Louis Zukofsky's 1969 translations of Catullus pursue in extenso); thus Virgil's fagus, beech, corresponds with Theocritus' phagos, oak.) If genuine, the phenomenon lacks any consistent method or regular pattern (and the degree of plausibility varies); if genuine, it is very rare, even if accidents in textual transmission could have obscured some examples; if genuine, it probably originated in the Hellenistic period, although such a case has yet to be made. Virgil presently seems the earliest and most copious practitioner of stichometric allusion. A previously undetected example in the Aeneid is proposed below.

This paper owes its inspiration to a remark made by Professor M. Rostovtzeff; in a note in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire on the widespread social unrest of the first two centuries A.D., having cited other literary authorities such as Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, etc., he writes: ‘The social problem as such, the cleavage between the poor and the rich, occupies a prominent place in the dialogues of Lucian; he was fully aware of the importance of the problem.’ No one, as far as I know, has attempted to collect and discuss the main passages in Lucian on this topic, and the latest writer on this aspect of Lucian reaches a conclusion quite opposed to Rostovtzeff and one which I believe to be wholly misleading. The aim of this paper is to collect and discuss the main references in Lucian to the social problem interpreting them in the light of Lucian's life and background, and the social and economic conditions of his age. In particular I shall stress the importance of the Cynic tradition as it bears on Lucian's attitude, but shall endeavour to show that this tradition is firmly rooted in practical politics and actual participation in social revolutionary movements and goes far beyond the repetition of mere ethical cliches generally ascribed to it.

Despite the importance of the Judgement of Paris in the story of the Trojan War, the Iliad has only one explicit reference to it. This occurs, rather out of the blue, in the final book of the poem in a dispute among the gods about the treatment of Hector's body (24.25–30). Achilles keeps dragging the body around behind his chariot, but Apollo protects it with his golden aegis (24.18–21). Apollo then speaks among the gods and attacks the conduct of Achilles (24.33–54), claiming at the end that he offends the dumb earth (24.54). Other gods too have their concerns about what is going on, and they keep trying to get Hermes to snatch the body away (24.23–4). The three most powerful divine enemies of Troy, however, Hera, Poseidon and Athena, will have none of this. They remain as hostile to Troy and Priam and his people as they ever were, and it is in this context that the Judgement of Paris is mentioned:

Lactantius' treatise the de opificio dei has received little attention from classical scholars in modern times. There are two main reasons for this. First, Lactantius is regarded essentially as a Christian apologist and therefore of interest primarily to theologians and students of Christian history. Second, that work which has been done on the treatise has tended to the view that the opif.'s interest for scholars lies largely in the question of its written sources, its main such source, according to several commentators, being the Hermetic body of writings. Both of these reasons need re-examining. With regard to the first, it is unfortunate that the only surviving works of Lactantius are his specifically Christian treatises, written after the outbreak of persecution in A.D. 303. As such they represent only a portion of his work, being composed in the last two decades of a long life. The basis of his reputation as a rhetorician, a reputation which secured him his appointment as professor of Latin rhetoric at Nicomedia under Diocletian, must have been his earlier works, which pre-date his conversion in c. 300.