It will be best to explain here, at the start, that I do not propose new etymologies for the words εὒξεινος (or ἂξενος) and πόντος. I regard, then, εὒξεινος πόντος as meaning ‘the hospitable way’. My purpose is to show how such a name came to be given to the Black Sea by the Greeks.

First, the word πόντος. The familiar explanation (so Boisacq) connects it with a series of words, of which I give the most important: Gk. πάτος (*pnto-) ‘trodden path’; Skt. pάnthāḥ ‘way’, fem. pathyā ‘id.’; Zend paθ ‘id.’; Arm. hun ‘ford, road’; Lat. pons ‘bridge’. Further, as a verb the root appears in Gk. πατεν ‘tread down’ and is given in Walde-Pokorny as *pent- (Ar. -th-) ‘tread, go’: W.-P. points out that the derived nouns (given above) mean ‘way’, and particularly a way that goes over or through water, as can be seen from the Armenian and Latin.

Ephoros is known to have conceived each of his books as a unit with a specific theme, so that where we have any quantity of material it is worth while asking what the theme of a book was supposed to be. Clearly Ephoros i was about the return of the Herakleidai and the early history of the Peloponnese, but that defines the starting-point, not the scope of the book: I propose to argue that he presented here the contrast of the three Heraklid kingdoms, the degeneration and downfall of the Argive and Messenian Heraklids as opposed to the salvation of the Spartan state by Lykourgos.

In Virgil, as in modern narrative, the act of saying is barely mentioned or left out altogether. At times the transition from indirect to direct speech comes abruptly, without warning (Aen. 2. 657 ff., 675 ff., 10. 825 ff.). On the other hand, the stress falls on the speaker's position within the general narrative. We are thus drawn away from the actuality of speech to a broader frame of reference. The characters seem to be more concerned with the distant implications of the action than with the present moment. Their motivations and fortunes cover the years. They merge, therefore, into legend, history, romance; and the words they speak illustrate their extending roles.

Bowra (Pindar, p. 270), referring to the image of the , and to the striking impression , states ‘Pindar seems to fuse two unusually disparate images into a single result… While the sheddingof leaves implies that he would have grown old without winning any wide renown, the cock means that such renown as he would have got would have beenof little account in the Greek world at large.’ Gildersleeve's comment ad loc, ‘The thus becomes a flower’, implies a similar assumption, that the secondimage is entirely unconnected with the first.

The long-awaited publication of Otto Zwierlein's edition of Seneca's Tragedies provides a welcome opportunity to present a few observations on the penultimate scene of pseudo-Seneca's Octavia (846–76).

The scene in question features Nero quarrelling with his Guard Prefect over the fate of the Empress Octavia. In this altercation there are three textual points which have for long been in dispute. The first section of the article is concerned with these, favouring an emendation (858) discarded in the new Oxford edition, but questioning two of the verse divisions suggested (867b–868a) or adopted (870a) by Zwierlein.

There can, I think, be little dispute that the most exciting plays about Philoctetes are those which have been described by Bowra, Kitto, and now B. M. W. Knox. It is a matter for regret that we must choose between them, or even reject all of them, since only one play is in question, the Philoctetes of Sophocles. My purpose, however, is not to compare the merits of these rivals, but something more restricted and rather duller. I shall make use of them in reexamining the difficulties raised by Sophocles' handling of the prophecy of Helenus, for it is to these that they largely owe their origin.

TheProblems, which occupy pp. 859-967 of the Berlin Aristotle, have probably been less read and studied than any other treatise in the Aristotelian Corpus; they contain, however, a vast quantity of interesting information on a great variety of subjects, and an enquiry into their composition may be not without interest.

Despite Lachmann's attempt to place them in the second century, it is now generally agreed that the Fables of Avianus cannot have been written before the late fourth or early fifth century. The linguistic and metrical evidence is decisive. For these matters I merely refer to the material collected in the prefaces to the editions of Ellis and Hervieux. Though these works appeared in 1887 and 1894 respectively, when the study of Late Latin was in its infancy, I suspect that a fresh study with the aid of modern tools would serve only to confirm their conclusions.

This short political pamphlet has survived to our day through the lucky chance of being included in the minor works of Xenophon, and for over 150 years it has been the subject of lively scholarly debate. The unknown author was a confirmed oligarch, but with an insider's insight into Athenian democracy. Though he cannot approve of this form of government, he is astute enough to see that the system works well on its own terms and that it is therefore popular; it will prove very hard to overthrow. The work has proved difficult to tie down to an historical context.

In a recent note, I collected instances of ‘stichometric allusion’, the technique in which poets allude, in one or more of their own verses, to source verses with corresponding line numbers. The technique existed in Hellenistic Greek poetry, but seems more prevalent (or at least, detectable) among the Latin poets of the Augustan era, who applied it to Greek and Latin predecessors alike, as well as internally to their own work. New illustrations of each type may be added here to those previously brought to light. Further examples, detected in an unsystematic fashion, no doubt lie dormant in published discussions and commentaries. Callimachus is still the only known Greek practitioner; perhaps his Roman successors considered the technique not merely Hellenistic but Callimachean. Authors of later ages employ the same techniques in equally haphazard fashion, although this does not mean that they had necessarily noticed examples from antiquity.

The cento of Proba has recently enjoyed a remarkable upsurge of scholarly interest. A welcome translation was provided in 1981, and an article of five years later, scrutinizing the evidence for its date and authorship, has aroused much controversy. In two recent contributions vindicating the traditional date new or more precise suggestions have been made about the poem's historical context. In between these, yet another article has argued, without confirming or refuting the revised dating and attribution, that in various ways the work reflects the interest of the aristocratic ladies of the Anician family. And now there is a second article by Danuta Shanzer, repeating many of her early points (not always with greater clarity) and adding some interesting new ones. All this sudden attention is not unmerited, for as Herzog observed long ago the work is not of the comic or trivializing kind that Ausonius envisaged in his comments on the genre and does not degrade Vergil but rather, at least in the often quoted words of its prefatory poem, ‘improves’ him.

The demonstration by E. Wölfflin that between the Histories and Annals Tacitus progressed towards a more archaic and artificial style is well known. From the outset Tacitus adhered to the traditional Roman view that history should be composed in an archaic language remote from everyday usage ; but he was apparently at first not fully aware of the possibilities of the archaizing style. New archaisms and artificial usages suggested themselves as he advanced ; and others, which he had used sporadically even early in the Histories, were allowed to oust ordinary alternatives completely.

The dating of Manilius' Astronomica and of the Aratea attributed to Germanicus are both long-standing problems of Latin scholarship. The large number of significant correspondences between the two poems suggests a considerable degree of imitation and allusion one way or the other, but it is widely agreed that the internal evidence of the poems can shed no light on the direction of the influence. I would like to present a new observation, however, suggesting that the Aratea was already available to Manilius in some form by the time he came to compose his first book.

In the second century of our era the Athenian Platonist, Atticus, claimed that it was clear not only to philosophers but perhaps even to ordinary people that the heritage left by Plato was the immortality of the soul. Plato had expounded the doctrine in various and manifold ways (ποικίλως καì παντοίως) and this was about (σχεδόν) the only thing holding together the Platonic school. Atticus is but one witness to the prominence accorded the soul in discussions and debates among later Platonists. But while questions concerning the origin, constitution, and destiny of the human soul are relatively well attested for Middle Platonism, not to mention Neoplatonism, we know much less about these topics among Plato's immediate successors in the Academy, Speusippus of Athens (c. 408–339) and Xenocrates of Chalcedon (396–314). Both wrote treatises on the soul (περì ψυχ⋯ς), but these have been lost along with their other, numerous writings. Because the least that can be said is that Speusippus and Xenocrates upheld the immortality of the soul (as would be expected), any snippet of information that might tell us more deserves close consideration.

It is obvious that A.P. attached importance to chronology and considered it his business to supply his sketch of Athienian constitutional development, at every stage, with such chronological indications as were available. Thus his account of Peisistratos (14 ff.) largely follows Herodotus (1. 59 ff.), but with the addition of a more detailed chronology of the tyrant's comings and goings (and some other matter derived from the Atthidographers). From the archonship of Solon to that of Xenainetos he has constructed what is evidently intended to be a continuous chronological chain, by marking the intervals between events.

Philostratos records that the ephebes of Athens wore a black χλαμ⋯ς to commemorate their murder of Kopreus in defence of the Herakleidai. Both the Herakleidai and a herald of Eurystheus appear in Herakleidai of Euripides, but the murder of the herald is not at issue, nor indeed is there any reference to ephebes or ephebic practice. This state of affairs will cause no surprise, for tragedy regularly selects its story-line from the wider range of the myth, and later uses to which that myth may be put have no necessary bearing on the play. It is however the contention of this article that the religious and social context of Herakleidai has been neglected, and that careful reconstruction of that context from later sources, restoring to us the associations that Euripides could assume in his own day, is an essential prerequisite to any aesthetic or dramatic interpretation of the play.