The Periegesis of Pausanias has finally entered the world of serious literature. Long after the way was first shown, the Magnesian has arrived and duly taken his place in the intellectual world of the second century: a pilgrim to the past. Yet he was no bookish, library-bound bore. Recent studies have transformed our opinion of him as a recorder of the sites and treasures of what was, even to him, antiquity, ‘His faithfulness in reporting what he saw has, time and time again, been proven at a large number of sites and could easily be demonstrated at a good many others.’ ‘The very fact that the second-century A.D. traveller Pausanias wrote at such length about the sites and monuments of Greece is itself indicative of his most important attitude towards antiquities. That is, he thought them of sufficient value to be worth recording and thought it worth travelling extensively in mainland Greece over a period of many years to see them for himself.’ And so inevitably, as respect for the author has grown, the desire to lay bare his soul has followed. Critics are unanimous in their view of a man sensitive to the resonance of the ancient and power of the past. On occasion a Herodotean fascination with the mutability of man's lot bubbles to the surface, indeed we may surmise Herodotus to have been an important influence on the Periegesis in several fundamental respects. Above all he was a man of deep learning and keen interest in the past and a faithful recorder of its remains. Archaeologists and art-historians concur.

A Principle of fundamental importance, if it is valid, for the interpretation of the Pentekontaetia is laid down by the authors of A. T.L. iii in its most rigorous terms: it is that Thucydides has set events ‘in proper order … without any deviation whatever’. The conclusion appears to the present writer to be founded ultimately on a false assumption about Thucydides' purpose in these chapters (89-118. 2), namely that he set out to write an outline history of the period of fifty years to which he refers in 118.2 and, in effect, in 97. An examination of these passages reveals that it is not the outline of a period as a period that is offered, but rather the account of a particular theme or process falling within the period: his purpose in presenting the theme there defined is to be seen from the setting of the excursus as a unit in Bk. I rather than from the statement in 97.2: the due significance of this last, and of the demarcation of a period in 118. 2, is to be seen only in this wider context.

AT Historia Animalium 561b27, during the course of his account of chick embryology, Aristotle notes (Bekker's text):

.

D'Arcy Thompson (Oxford, 1910) translated this passage as follows:

About the twentieth day, if you open the egg and touch the chick, it moves inside and chirps, and it is already coming to be covered in down when, after the twentieth day is past, the chick begins to break the shell.

An ambiguity in this passage apperas to have gone unnoticed. The ambiguity in line 27 ( ═ ‘arms’ or ‘genitals’) is well known; and when Xanthias at once continues ‘But you tell me about yours’, many a listener might well not immediately realize that the noun to be supplied was from 25 rather than from 27, and might therefore momentarily suppose that Xanthias was saying ‘Tell me about your penis’; a supposition that would be temporarily confirmed when Sosias replied ‘It's a big one’. The reaction of such a listener would be the same as that of Kalonike at Lys. 23. She has been told (14) that the women have been summoned to deliberate . Now she asks and on receiving the answer at once jumps to the conclusion that Lysistrata is using in its phallic sense and asks .

That the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' Metamorphoses is a version of a common world-wide folk-tale has long been recognized. Scholarly debate has concentrated on the conclusions to be drawn from this with regard to the significance of the story—mythological, religious, allegorical, and so on. With the additional information provided by Swahn's comprehensive monograph on the subject an attempt can now be made to study some of the aspects of literary technique involved in the adaptation of the folk-tale. In what follows I have tried to avoid making any assumptions about a possible literary source of Apuleius' tale. I am concerned with the ways in which the literary version which we possess modifies the folk material, and not with the author of this modification.

The significance of the dating of Enmann's Kaisergeschichte in the controversy which has long surrounded the Historia Augusta is common knowledge to all scholars who have more than a nodding acquaintance with the period. Enmann himself concluded that the KG ended with or shortly after Diocletian's accession. This was a necessary hypothesis for Enmann in 1884 because the H.A. had clearly used the KG and the self-proclaimed authorship and dating of the former were generally accepted. None the less in Enmann's opinion the resemblances between Victor and Eutropius continued into the sole reign of Constantius II down to the Battle of Strasbourg in 357 and Enmann was compelled to ascribe this to a ‘continuation’ of the KG.

One of the more intriguing figures of the first period of the Successors is Nicanor, the lieutenant and admiral of Cassander. He came into prominence when he assumed command of the Macedonian garrison at Athens, late in 319 B.c. After distinguishing himself there he took a fleet to the Bosporus, where with Antigonus' collaboration he won a decisive victory over Polyperchon's royal navy. Subsequently his aspirations became sufficiently lofty to threaten his patron's security, and Cassander took elaborate precautions to ensure his arrest and condemnation. Nicanor was clearly a figure of considerable importance; yet no source even hints at his origins and family background. Can conjecture go any way to filling the gaps?

Among other recent attempts to correct what he takes to be Cameronian misconceptions, Barry Baldwin has reopened the question of a difficult passage in the panegyric to Anastasius the quaestor prefaced to Corippus' In laudem Iustini. His discussion perfectly correctly emphasizes the fragility of our knowledge of Corippus' life and background, but unfortunately it introduces certain misconceptions itself which make a rejoinder inescapable, especially since new arguments may be adduced.

The earlier part of this paper yielded the result that the assertion ‘A portion of everything in everything’ has no place or function in the explanation of any sort of apparent ‘becoming’ or change. This conclusion is important because, ever since Aristotle, it has been assumed that the assertion was made in order to explain away becoming and change. But if (as I have shown), according to the best evidence, becoming and such sorts of change as Anaxagoras considered can be explained away without using the assertion at all, it follows that the motive for it must be sought, not in the processes of apparent becoming and change, but in the permanent constitution of the ungenerated and unchanging things which figure as elements in the system. A visible mass of gold or of flesh is formed by the aggregation of smaller particles of gold or of flesh, and it is infinitely divisible into parts, every one of which is gold or flesh. But what is the constitution of a piece of gold of whatever size, and how does it differ from the constitution of a piece of flesh? The proposition we have so far successfully excluded comes in here as part of the answer to this question.

It is generally agreed that the Topics is one of Aristotle's earliest works. But after saying this most writers are unwilling to commit themselves any further and discuss the work, if they discuss it at all, with a vagueness about dating that leads them to do it less than justice. Part of the difficulty, no doubt, lies in the fact that the Topics consists of a central, early, core, surrounded by later additions, and cannot therefore be dealt with as a whole. The suggestions about its date that I wish to make now are concerned solely with what I take to be the original Topics—or such part of it as remains—which I believe can be delimited almost exactly.

Commentators on the Trachiniae, when dealing with Heracles' second request of Hyllus, normally take it that the dying hero asks his son to marry Iole, Heracles' concubine.

Such a request on the part of any Greek in Heracles' situation would be puzzling. It is specially so on the part of Heracles, who has not been notable in the drama up to this point for tenderness to his womenfolk, having given no consideration to Deianeira's sentiments in the matter of his liaison with Iole, and less to Iole's, in that he has sacked her city, slain her kinfolk, and enslaved herself. Albrecht von Blumenthal expresses the bewilderment which all who have read the passage in this light must initially have felt: ‘Warum Herakles den widerstrebenden Sohn zur Erfüllung dieses mit hellenischer Sitte unvereinbaren Vermächtnisses durch die schrecklichsten Drohungen zwingt, ist ein noch nicht enträtseltes Geheimnis des Sophokles.’ Explanations must be sought.

In his Life of Plotinus (16), Porphyry makes reference to certain gnostic ‘revelations’ under the names of ‘Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos and many others of this kind’ which were circulated in Plotinus' school and refuted by Plotinus and his students, including Porphyry himself. Porphyry claims to have made ‘several refutations against the book of Zoroaster’ while Amelius apparently wrote some ‘forty volumes against the book of Zostrianos’. The surprising discovery of Coptic gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi Library under the specific names of Allogenes (Nag Hammadi Codex XI.3) and Zostrianos (VIII.1) and the close relation of these texts to The Three Steles of Seth (VII.5) and Marsanes (x) has led to the general consensus that we now possess some of the actual texts mentioned by Porphyry.

Caesar left off writing de Bello Gallico at the end of the Alesia campaign in 51 B.C., and his account of the civil war begins in January 49. There was therefore a gap ofa year and more between the narratives in the two collections of Caesar's own Commentaries. Some time soon after Caesar's death, his officer A. Hirtius decided toknit together these unlinked narratives, supplying a preface to account for hisprocedure. It is usually assumed, and it is assumed here, that this Preface, whichappears at the start of B.G. 8 in the MSS, should be taken to mean that its author wasthe author too of the book immediately following, which connects de Bello Gallico with de Bello Civili by narrating, essentially, the transactions of the year 50.

Zosimus is speaking in this passage of the activities of Alaric in Aemilia as he tried to win Italian support for his puppet emperor, Priscus Attalus. ‘The other cities he won over with no trouble; but Bologna he besieged, and when it held out for many days and he was unable to take it, he went to the Ligurians, forcing them, too, to accept Attalus as emperor.

The basis of Plato's style being for the most part informal conversation, certain elements natural and appropriate to this atmosphere may be looked for and found. These include: (1) colloquialisms in the accepted sense—short phrases, or special uses of words, associated with informal or comic style; (2) phrases of poetic type, probably quotations or adaptations, used frequently with burlesque effect; (3) proverbial or semi-proverbial matter; (4) word-play of various types. The above groups overlap at certain points, but the classification may serve fairly well to set forth the material in question.

In a recent article I tried to disperse the fog in which modern editions envelop the transmission of the Livian Periochae and Floras' Epitoma de Tito Liuio. Working from editions and catalogues, and without looking at more than a few readily accessible manuscripts, I argued that the Periochae reached the Middle Ages in the company of Floras and nothing else; that the mainstream of the medieval tradition, which probably issued from the region south-west of Paris, derived first from a manuscript that presented Florus and only 1–7 of the 142 Periochae, Λ, and then from one that presented Florus alone, e; that after appearing for several centuries only in N (s. ix1) and P (s. xii2) the complete text of Florus and the Periochae saw a revival in the Italian Renaissance, probably thanks to Petrarch and Boccaccio; and that most Italian manuscripts contaminate the text of e with the complete text. Pending visits to libraries, I left open several questions: whether Λ derived from the source of NP; whether e derived from Λ; whether the Italian manuscripts of the complete text all derive from one source; whether, if so, it was P; whether any of them have escaped contamination in Florus; and whether contamination had already begun in France.

In English, down to the 19th century, the beast which carried Balaam was generally and almost universally, both in speech and in writing, denominated the ass. It is so no longer: the name ass, except in metaphor as a term of contempt or insult, has disappeared from conversation and from most kinds of print, and survives only in serious poetry and in prose of some solemnity. The name donkey, first printed in 1785 in a dictionary of slang, has usurped its place.

Mr. Powell's ingenious observations on The Simile of the Clepsydra in Empedocles raise afresh the problem of the precise form and construction of the instrument with whose aid Empedokles is said to have reached his memorable conclusion that air is a corporeal substance. That ‘klepsydra’ was the name of the instrument in question is shown by a comparison of Aristotle, Phys. 213a, 22 sqq. with Empedokles, fr. 100; but though so far the fragment is plain, in its detailed interpretation there arises a difficulty which is the subject of the present note. Empedokles is explaining his theory of respiration, and the theory is illustrated by the action of this apparatus. To make clear the general drift of the passage, it may be well to quote again so much of it as is relevant. ‘Thus do all things draw breath in and breathe it out again. All have bloodless tubes of flesh extended over the surface of their bodies; and at the mouths of these the outermost surface of the skin is perforated all over with pores closely packed together, so as to keep in the blood while a free passage is cut for the air to pass through. Then, when the thin blood recedes from these, the bubbling air rushes in with an impetuous surge; and when the blood rushes back it’ (i.e. the air) ‘is breathed out again.