The discoveries and work of Parry and Lord have turned the old battleground of the Homeric Question and its many side issues into a scene of fruitful tillage if not of complete harmony. The exploration in Yugoslav epic songs of the nature of oral narrative, with its identification of the moment of reciting and the moment of composing, has met with wide approval in its application to the Homeric poems. Some scholars, however, feel that the difference in literary merit between the Homeric poems and the Yugoslav epic songs, fine as many of these are, is still too great to allow us to apply to Homer without reserve the conclusions which may be valid for the Yugoslav tradition.

The law of Athens prohibited any but full citizens from owning land or houses. Thus the law also impeded the bequeathing of real property to those who were not citizens. This law seemed to preclude those who were the real backbone of the trading and banking businesses from owning land and, therefore, from lending and borrowing by using it as a security.

The treatise De intellectu attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias can be divided into four sections. The first (A, 106.19–110.3) is an interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of intellect, and especially of the active intellect referred to in Aristotle, De anima 3.5, which differs from the interpretation in Alexander's own De anima, and whose relation to Alexander's De anima, attribution to Alexander, and date are all disputed. The second (B, 110.4–112.5) is an account of the intellect which is broadly similar to A though differing on certain points. The third (Cl, 112.5–113.12) is an account of someone's response to the problem of how intellect can enter the human being ‘from outside’ if it is incorporeal and hence cannot move at all; in the fourth (C2, 113.12–24) the writer who reported Cl criticizes that solution and gives his own alternative one.

H. Dohm has amply demonstrated how the cook of Plautus, Pseud. 790ff. exhibits characteristic features of the mageiros of Greek comedy. He has also argued, however, that this scene contains substantial Plautine expansion, comparable with that which has been recognised in the cook scene of the Aulularia. I wish to suggest that Dohm is largely right but that the Plautine expansion is even more extensive than he supposes.

In 790–838 Plautus is probably for the most part following his Greek model fairly closely. One can trace a logical sequence of ideas, as follows. Ballio: ‘I couldn't have found a worse cook’ (792–7). Cook: ‘Why did you hire me then?’ (798–9a). Ballio: ‘You were the only one left. And why was that?’ (799b–801a). Cook: ‘I am expensive, but nowadays people look for cheap cooks, who produce only concoctions of seasoned vegetables. That is why men are so short-lived’ (801b–25). Ballio: ‘You can make men live longer then?’ (826–8a). Cook: ‘Certainly, for 200 years’ (828b–30). The cook then proceeds to give a list of his fantastic sauces for fish and meat (834f. Neptuni/terrestris pecudes), until he is cut short by Ballio's ‘Damn your lies’ (836–8). We have here a typical comic mageiros: he is loquacious and boastful (794 multiloquom, gloriosum), claims magic powers (829f.), denigrates his rivals (810–25), reels off lists of foods, real and fictitious (814–17, 831–6), and uses grandiose language (834f. Neptuni pecudes).

Within this essentially Greek section there are three short passages which look like Plautine additions. First, Dohm is surely right, following E. Fraenkel, to see 790f. as a Plautine addition.

In I 7 Aristotle lays down criteria for what is to count as human happiness. Happiness for man is self-sufficient (autarkes), complete without qualification (teleion haplos), peculiar to humans (idion), excellent (kat' aretēn), and best and most complete (aristēn kai teleiotatēn). Many interpreters agree that in X 6–8 Aristotle uses these along with other criteria to disqualify the life of amusement and rank one happy life above another.

Some of the manuscripts of Aelius Anstides include a short oration in the form of an encomium to an unnamed king. The oration is entitled in three manuscripts and in another. It has been pointed out that in the former group of manuscripts the title is not preceded by the words thus casting doubt on Aristidean authorship.

Although it is now fifteen years since G. Williams' thorough-going criticism of B. Axelson's Unpoetische Wörter, his discussion has failed to elicit the adverse response which might have been expected in view of the widespread influence exerted by the earlier work.

The reason for this may be that Axelson's theory is so widely accepted that any refutation thereof may be disregarded. Yet surely Williams was right to point to the dangers of total reliance on statistics and to the necessity of considering the contexts in which words occur in Latin poetry. In this respect, he was not so much rejecting Axelson's work as pointing to its inadequacies: whereas Axelson would be content to label a word that occurs only rarely in poetry as ‘unpoetisch’, it is necessary, as Williams demonstrates, to take the further step of determining the effect that such a word has in a given context. This approach will be particularly helpful, for example, in the case of parvulus at Virg. Aen. 4.328, where the heightened pathos achieved by Virgil's use of a diminutive is better appreciated by the reader who is aware of the scarcity of diminutive adjectives in poetry and in epic above all. To recognise parvulus as an ‘unpoetic word’, with Axelson, is the essential first step, but we should proceed a stage further to inquire what effect was intended by the employment of a form not normally found in elevated poetry.

Of greater importance is Williams' rejection of the ‘hierarchy of genres’ theory, taken for granted by Axelson, that is, that Latin poetry may be divided into a number of higher- or lower-ranking genres and that the more elevated a genre the less unpoetic vocabulary it is liable to employ.

Asconius 63 (Clark), commenting on the pro Cornelio: Fuerunt enim plures Quinti Metelli, ex quibus duo consulares, Pius et Creticus, de quibus apparet eum non dicere, duo autem adulescentes, Nepos et Celer, ex quibus nunc Nepotem significat. Eius enim patrem Q.Metellum Nepotem, Baliarici filium, Macedonici nepotem qui consul fuit cum T. Didio, Curio is de quo loquitur accusavit …

Cicero and his scholiast refer to ‘duo Metelli, Celer et Nepos’ but like Asconius do not specify their relationship. Celer himself, followed by Cicero in correspondence with him, calls Nepos his frater, but since both bore the praenomen Q., this cannot be the whole story. Celer's career shows that he was the elder, yet Nepos senior, according to Asconius, entrusted his feud with Curio not to him but to Nepos iunior.

In Latin Hexameter Verse, his 1903 manual for composers of Latin hexameters which is still useful as a guide to Vergil's metrical and prosodic practices, S. E. Winbolt states that a hexameter ‘must not end with an adjective preceded by a noun with a similar short ending, e.g.…flumina nota’ unless the adjective is emphatic, ‘i.e. strongly distinctive, predicative or antithetical’. Whether or not his distinction between emphatic and non-emphatic adjectives in this position is wholly workable (predicative adjectives are clearly distinguishable, but it is not clear that the other types are), Winbolt here rightly detects a strong tendency in Vergil and other Latin poets towards avoiding endings of this general kind, which we can conveniently call the ‘Discordia taetra’ type after one of its earliest and best-known instances in the Annales of Ennius (225–6 Skutsch ‘postquam Discordia taetra/Belli ferratos postes portasque refregit’). The rarity of this type of line-ending is clear in Vergil; there are only 16 examples, regardless of whether the adjective is emphatic or not, in the 9890 lines of the Aeneid. Such a select and easily-defined phenomenon might prove a yardstick of some interest in the history of the Latin hexameter, for it seems to raise a number of questions to which the answers would be significant and useful. Is this type of ending avoided equally by all poets? Is there an increasing tendency to avoid it as time goes on? Is it associated with any particular genres of hexameter poetry? Do poets tend to use in it the same words or phrases as their predecessors? To discover the answers, this article will look at the ‘Discordia taetra’ phenomenon in Latin hexameter poetry, defining it as the instance where a noun ending in a short vowel (in practice, in ‘-a’) is immediately succeeded by an adjective of similar ending and in agreement at the end of the hexameter, and where such a noun is not a substantivised adjective and such an adjective is neither predicative nor a participle.

As is well known, Epicurus and his followers held that the universe was infinite and f that its two primary components, void and atoms, were each infinite. The void was infinite in extension, the atoms were infinite in number and their total was infinite also in extension. The chief Epicurean proofs of these infinities are found in Epicurus, Ad Herod. 41–2, and in Lucretius 1.951–1020. As far as I can see, both the commentators to these works and writers on Epicurean physics in general have neglected to take into account some material pertinent to these proofs, material found in Aristotle and especially in his commentators Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Simplicius, and Philoponus. In this article I wish to compare this neglected information with the proofs of infinity found in Epicurus and Lucretius and to discuss their authorship.

The New Comedy as an art form is descended both from the Old Comedy and from fifth-century Tragedy. It is a middle style of the sort that Diderot called le genre sérieux. On the one side it made an expurgation of the Old Comedy by dropping the gross elements of the primitive ritual ⋯ϕέσεωςκ⋯μος which still survived in Aristophanes, the phallic dress, the ϒεϕυρɩομός in language, and the reckless personal satire, while it kept and emphasized the final Gamos, or union of lovers, and developed a more elaborate plot. On the other side it reformed Tragedy by getting rid of the supernatural stories and the stiff conventions. To quote some words of my own written in 1912, it ‘introduced all the simplifications and improvements which seem to a modern’—I meant a modern philistine—‘so obviously desirable. It developed an easy colloquial language, a flexible and unexacting metre. It left the Chorus quite outside the play, a kind of entr'acte, not worth writing down. It frankly abandoned religious ritual’—please observe that statement, which I now wish to correct—‘and heroic saga. It drew its material from the adventures and emotions of contemporary middle class life, and boldly invented its own plots.’ Menander in particular was considered in antiquity to have held a mirror up to life; a verse by Aristophanes of Byzantium asks.

According to the traditional interpretation of these celebrated lines, Pindar is saying here that while the wise can understand his poetry by themselves, the mass of his listeners need interpreters if they are to do so; he then goes on to contrast inferior poets, who can sing only ineffectually and only what they have learned, with the poet of natural genius, who surpasses them as the eagle surpasses the crows; and finally he returns to the subject at hand, the praise of the victorious Theron of Acragas. Sandys' Loeb translation may be taken as a representative example:

Full many a swift arrow have I beneath mine arm, within my quiver, many an arrow that is vocal to the wise; but for the crowd they need interpreters. The true poet is he who knoweth much by gift of nature, but they that have only learnt the lore of song, and are turbulent and intemperate of tongue, like a pair of crows, chatter in vain against the god—like bird of Zeus.

Now, bend thy bow toward the mark! tell me, my soul, whom are we essaying to hit, while we now shoot forth our shafts of fame from the quiver of a friendly heart?

Construed in this way, this passage has always been especially popular with scholars and with other readers — not surprisingly, for the former could find in it a justification for their activity as ⋯ρμηνεῖς, while the latter could pride themselves on belonging to the συνετοί.

The dossier of decrees concerning the Deceleans and the Demotionidae of Athens (IG ii 1237) presents fascinating problems and has attracted plentiful discussion. For a long time there has been a division between the view of Wilamowitz and his followers, that the Demotionidae were a phratry and the Deceleans a privileged genos within it, and that of Wade–Gery refined by Andrewes, that the Deceleans were a phratry and the Demotionidae a privileged genos within it.3 Each of these interpretations gave rise to problems; and since the work of Bourriot and Roussel on the gene there has been a reluctance to believe in gene as aristocratic clans able to control their phratries. Recently Hedrick has argued that the Demotionidae were the phratry and the Deceleans the members of the deme of Decelea; and Lambert has argued that the Demotionidae were the phratry and the Deceleans a genos–like body (but not a genos, and not controlling the phratry) which formed a semi–independent group within the phratry and which in these decrees was extending its independence further. These interpretations also give rise to problems: in this paper I attempt to continue the debate and to show that an interpretation on Wade–Gery′s lines is after all the most likely to be right.

It has been easy to take the apparently detached viewpoint of the two early Greek epics as actually objective, a window on a ‘Heroic Age’, on a ‘Homeric society’ and its values. We used to ask whether ‘Homeric society’ belongs to the poets' own time or to some earlier one. We still ask how to characterize and explain the ways in which the ‘Homeric world’ differs from any world that we can accept as having existed: we answer with phrases such as ‘poetic exaggeration’ and ‘epic distance’. We have constructed ‘Homeric society’, but it remains an isolate. It can tell us nothing in return of the poets' intentions, or of the society of their time, unless we have a working hypothesis as to the place in that society that was held by the poets and their audiences.

Following the idea first expressed by Heinrich Swoboda, there is a general perception that the meaning of ἀτιμία in Athens eventually evolved from the original ‘outlawry’, when an ἄτιμος was liable to being deprived of his property and slayed with impunity if he returned to the land from which he had been banished, into a certain limitation on civic status, which has often been rendered as a ‘disfranchisement’. Specific outcomes of this later form of ἀτιμία varied depending on the dating and circumstances of individual cases, thereby giving rise to theories of a so-called full – or ‘total’ – and partial ἀτιμία. Still, whether it was viewed as ‘full’ or ‘partial’, this ἀτιμία did not inflict the death penalty. The precise dating of the transformation of ἀτιμία has also been debated, with opinions ranging from pre-Solonian times (L'Homme-Wéry) to the late sixth (Swoboda, Hansen, Manville) or the late fifth century (Scafuro). While the exact dating is unknown, this transformation was definitely over in the fifth century, when inscriptions and literary texts mentioned punishment by ἀτιμία alongside the death penalty and the confiscation of property. Thus, according to Raphael Sealey, ἀτιμία evolved ‘from a more severe to a milder sense’, and Alick R.W. Harrison pointed to the evidence that, by the fourth century, any willing Athenian could seize an ἄτιμος who happened to be in Athenian territory and surrender him to the θεσμοθέται, instead of killing him.

Late in the campaigning season of 198 B.C., the Achaean League abandoned its traditional place within Macedon's Hellenic Symmachy and entered into war on the side of Rome against the Macedonian king, Philip V. The Achaean politician Aristaenus, strategos of the League in 199/198, played a crucial role in bringing about this reversal of policy. The strategic impact of the Achaean decision is not in doubt: the Macedonian political-military system in Greece was weakened, while the Romans and their allies gained a firm base in southern Greece from which to threaten the Macedonian homeland next summer. What has been in some question among scholars, however, is the extent to which the Achaean decision was controversial among Greeks in the second century, both in the 190s and later. It is the purpose of the present paper to re-examine this question, with particular attention being paid to Pol. 18.13–15: the famous discussion ‘On Traitors’ by the historian Polybius, himself an Achaean statesman of a later period. I will suggest that – contrary to current scholarly opinion – the discussion ‘On Traitors’ was evoked, precisely, by Polybius' reflections (and unease) about the behaviour of Aristaenus and the Achaean League in 198, behaviour which was, in fact, highly controversial.

Lucretius' primary didactic aim in De Rerum Natura (DRN) is to teach his readers to interpret the world around them in such a way as to avoid the formation of false beliefs. The price of failure is extremely high. Someone who possesses false beliefs is liable to experience fear (of the gods, or of death, or both), and so will not be able to attain the state of tranquillity that, for Epicureans, constitutes the moral end. Equipping readers with sufficient knowledge always to form true beliefs about the phenomena they encounter thus serves no less a purpose than the enabling of their future happiness. This paper is concerned with how Lucretian intertextuality contributes to this primary didactic aim. For reasons to be explained below, I will focus on Lucretian engagement with the texts of Greek and Roman drama. I will show that allusions to drama in DRN, rather than functioning simply as ‘honey on the rim of the cup’, make a direct contribution to Lucretius' ethical project, teaching readers how to respond rationally to the full variety of their cultural experience.