Publishing a collection of fragments from a classical author is a risky business: the moment the book appears in print, it may already be outdated, as new fragments could have come to light. Or, in the words of Ecclesiasticus 18:7: ‘When a man hath done, then he beginneth; and when he leaveth off, then he shall be doubtful’ (Ὅταν συντελέσῃ ἄνθρωπος, τότε ἄρχεται, καὶ ὅταν παύσηται, τότε ἀπορηθήσεται). The same fate befell me shortly after the publication of my collection of fragments from Rufus of Ephesus' On Melancholy. Manfred Ullmann wrote to me that the late Rainer Degen had discovered a new fragment; in the course of my research, I came across some relevant quotations in the Hippocratic Treatments by the tenth-century author aṭ-Ṭabarī; and recently, Klaus-Dietrich Fischer published two related fragments. The following short note contains these new fragments together with an English translation and commentary. At the end, I also offer some addenda and corrigenda, partly in light of the reviews that have since appeared.

My aim in this paper is to examine Aristotle's puzzling and contentious claim in Politics 1.13 that the deliberative faculty in women is ‘without authority’ (ἄκυρον):

Plato Rep. X. 616B. ⋯πειδ⋯ δ⋯ τοῖς ⋯ν τῷ λειμ⋯νι ⋯πτ⋯ ⋯μ⋯ραι γ⋯νοιντο, ⋯ναστ⋯ντασ ⋯ντε⋯θεν δεῖν τῇ ⋯γδΌῃ πορε⋯εσθαι, κα⋯ ⋯φικνεῖσθ;αι τεταρτα⋯ονσ ὅθ;εν καθ;ορ⋯ν ἄνωθεν δι⋯ παντῸς το⋯ ο⋯ρανο⋯ κα⋯ κα⋯ γ⋯ς τεταμ⋯νον φ⋯ς εὐθ;⋯, οἱον κ⋯ονα, μ⋯λιστα τῇ ἴριδι προσφερ⋯, λαμπρ⋯τερον δ⋯ κα⋯ καθαρώτερον εῚς ὃ ⋯φικ⋯σθ;αι προελθ;⋯ντεσ⋯μερησ⋯αν ⋯δ⋯ν, κα⋯ ⋯δεῖν αὐτ⋯θι κατ⋯ μ⋯σον τῸ φ⋯ς ⋯κ το⋯ οὐρανο⋯ τ⋯ ⋯κρα αὐτο⋯ τ⋯ν δεσμ⋯ν τεταμ⋯να—εἶναι γ⋯ρ το⋯το τ⋯ φ⋯σ σ⋯νδεσμον το⋯ οὐρανο⋯, οἶον τ⋯ ὑποζ;ώματα τ⋯ν τρι⋯ρων, οὕτω π⋯σαν συν⋯χον τ⋯ν περιφορ⋯ν—⋯κ δ⋯ τ⋯ν ἄκρων τεταμ⋯νον 'Aν⋯γκησ ἄτρακτον, etc.

At the end of the singing contest of Thyrsis and Corydon in the seventh Eclogue, the narrator Meliboeus summarizes its result in the poem's last lines (69–70):

Probably no philosopher of antiquity has occasioned more daring speculations and the expression of graver doubts than Posidonius. On the one hand it has been argued that he was purely a man of science and hardly a Stoic philosopher at all. On the other hand he has been called the first and greatest Stoic mystic who under Oriental influence spurned the body as vile and earthly. Reinhardt has of late years resolutely maintained that the importance of Posidonius in the history of thought lies in his having originated a completely new Vitalism, and that his conception of the world is one in which ‘Subjekt und Objekt, Geist und Wissen, Mensch und Gott, νος und ζω durch eine im Bewusstsein neu erwachte Kraft sich einen und durchdringen: durch die “Sympathie.”’ Among other German scholars Geffcken holds that Plotinus borrowed much from Posidonius, and Jaeger roundly declares that if Posidonius had but found a place for the Platonic Ideas, there would have been nothing left for Plotinus to find. Schmekel and Bréhier have both stated that modifying the Platonic Theory of Ideas Posidonius established an identification between the Ideas and the Spermatic Logoi of Stoicism.

Antiphon's speech on the murder of Herodes has been variously dated by several scholars, but all seem to agree that it was delivered a good many years after the revolt and recapture of Mytilene. According to this opinion the speaker in § 74 declares himself too young to know much of what happened in those days. Before going into this more carefully, it seems necessary to visualize the situation of the accused man. In order to achieve this the best we can do is to follow his own words in the Sirjyrjcris, §§ 20–24: ‘I travelled from Mytilene on the same ship as the lost man; we were on our journey to Ainos, I to see my father—he happened to be there at that time—he in order to sell some slaves to Thracian natives. These natives, who were to pay the ransom, and the slaves were on board too.—All this I will prove by witnesses.—As we, however, met with stormy weather, we were compelled to put in to a harbour in the territory of Methymna; there we found that* ship into which Herodes changed; in that ship, according to the accusers, he died. Now all this was mere chance: obviously I had not persuaded him to travel with me, no, he was travelling on his own business. Then I, personally, had a very good reason for travelling to Ainos; our putting in to that harbour was not premeditatd, we were compelled to. And again, when we were lying at anchor, the change of ship took place without any trickery or fraud: again, it was done because of necessity. The ship, viz., on which we had been travelling was not covered, the other one on the contrary had a covering; that was because of the rain.—All this I will prove by witnesses.—After boarding the other ship we drank some wine. After that it is only known that he left the ship, but did not return. I myself never left the ship that night at all. When the next day but did not return. I myself never left the ship that night at all. When the next day he had disappeared, we looked for him, I as well as the others. Probably it seemed strange to them, it certainly did to me. And it was I who caused a messenger to be sent to Mytilene, not one of the crew or the passengers belonging to Herodes, but my own servant. If I had been guilty, I would not, of course, have sent a man who might have informed against me. But when the man could not be found in Mytilene, nor anywhere else, and when the weather had improved and all the other ships were putting out, I also sailed.—All this I will prove by witnesses.

Varro's Hebdomades vel de imaginibus contained 700 pictures of illustres accompanied by short descriptions in verse and prose, all arranged by the number seven: Gellius provides a detailed excerpt from the first book on the significance of this number. Speculation on the arrangement and content of the fifteen books abounds. On the other hand explicit attestation of personages included in Varro's list is relatively scarce: the discussions in the passage of Gellius on the ages of Homer and Hesiod, and of the former's birthplace in the epigram attached to his portrait certify the rather obvious choice of the two oldest Greek poets, presumably part of a canon of seven.

At Aristophanes, Equites 230–2, one of the slaves who speak the prologue informs the audience that, when the Paphlagonian (i.e. Kleon) appears onstage, his mask will not resemble him, for the σκεϒoπoιoí (‘stage-property manufacturers’ vel sim.) were afraid to make one that depicted him accurately. In an important article, K. J. Dover argued that it must in fact have been very difficult to create easily recognizable portrait-masks, and suggested that the joke in Eq. 230–2 may be that the Paphlagonian's mask is horribly ugly but allegedly still nowhere near ugly enough. In response, D. Welsh, following an anonymous ancient commentator on Lucian, argued that Cratinus fr. 228 K-A shows that the historical Kleon had strikingly unattractive eyebrows. Had anyone wished to caricature the demagogue's physical appearance, therefore, he coule easily have done so, and portrait-masks may not have been so uncommon after all. Welsh's argument is at first glance quite appealing, and has been endorsed without further comment or argument by Sommerstein and Storey. I suggest, however, that the ancient commentator was confused, and that Cratinus’ remark is much more easily explained by reference to what is known about the use of facial expression as a communicative strategy in classical and early Hellenistic Athens, particularly as it appears in the comic poets. Kleon's eyebrows were probably no more ugly than those of anyone else, although he may have used them in an offensive way, and as Dover saw long ago, Eq. 230–2 cannot be taken as evidence for the use of portrait-masks on the late 5th-century comic stage.

Herennius Philo of Byblos is the subject of a notice in the Suda, which states that he was a grammarian born in Nero's time who lived to such an advanced age that he was still composing works in the reign of Hadrian. The titles listed include: On the Acquisition and Choice of Books; On Cities and their Eminent Citizens; and On the Reign of Hadrian (= Fr. 1 Jacoby). His name, like that of Flavius Josephus, could imply the patronage of a Roman family; we may suppose that, like Porphyry and Maximus of Tyre, he was a Phoenicean by origin who had adopted the tongue and culture of the Greeks.

Plutarch's dialogue De facie in orbe lunae contains a mention of an eclipse, the identification of which would give a terminus post quern, for the composition of the work. The speaker is the Etruscan Lucius, the Pythagorean friend of Sulla the Carthaginian, and his words are as follows (93ID): ‘Concede me this, remembering this recent eclipse, which, beginning immediately after midday (εύθùς έκ μεσηβρίας άρξαμένη), caused many stars to appear in many quarters of the sky.’ For such a phenomenon to occur the eclipse must have been nearly or quite total.

Phaedra's long speech is one of the most important elements in Euripides’ most intricate play; we may confidently assume that with his surpassing interest in women and in rhetoric the dramatist will have lavished more than usual pains upon it. Interpretation of it has suffered in the past from false preconceptions and lexicological imprecision; the nature of the speech is such that we can be led far astray by a small misjudgement of the connotation (whether for Phaedra or the audience) of such words as at the same time there are some profoundly significant variants in the manuscripts, and it will be argued that the text of 405–12 has suffered from ancient garbling and interpolation. In the following discussion I am everywhere indebted to W. S. Barrett's commentary, whose detailed approach at least draws attention to numerous difficulties that have been hitherto neglected, but the conclusions reached differ radically from his.

THE surviving century of epigrams by this tedious writer was edited with a commentary by J. Geffcken in 1896, and they were included in A. Veniero's Poeti de l'Antol. Pal. (1905) and A. Olivieri's Epigrammatisti Gr. d. Magna Grecia (1950?), but the inquirer who is not content with Geffcken's explanations or with his frequent silences will rarely find satisfaction in Veniero, and Olivieri's comments are almost exclusively translated from Geffcken. I have not a great deal to offer by way of supplement, but as a preliminary it may be worth while to consider the five epigrams which have been held to throw light on the poet's date, and first A.P. 6. 334, on which the authorities rely with varying degrees of confidence for placing his birth in or before 315 B.C.

The following remarks are frankly speculative, and their subject one on which certainty is unlikely to be attained. It seems worth offering them because, though the conclusions are only tentative, they were reached by way of some observations which have a certain interest of their own.

Anaximenes, we are told, said that the sun is flat like a leaf, and that it and the other heavenly bodies ‘ride upon’ the air owing to their flat shape, as does the earth also.

The interrogation of Meletus in the Apology at 24c4–28al is not infrequently seen as a typical case of all that is intellectually and artistically dissatisfying in Plato's practice of the genre of philosophical dialogue: not only are we presented with a philosopher who makes some claim to being committed to setting a particularly stringent standard for honesty in argumentation making sophistical arguments, but we are presented also with a cardboard interlocutor who is forced by the hand of Plato to acquiesce to those arguments in a fashion that is completely dissatisfying to the reader. The best anyone seems to do to save Plato from these charges of artistic incompetence and intellectual dishonesty is to appeal to such a level of historical accuracy for the text that the stupidity of Meletus' responses can be attributed to the stupidity of Meletus himself, or to point out features of the political and legal situation that might prevent Meletus from answering the questions by drawing on his true motivation—which is presumably more coherent. Taylor says of this passage:

The humour of the situation is that the prosecutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges without betraying the fact that, owing to the ‘amnesty’, the matters complained of are outside of the competency of the court… Hence, when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take refuge in puerile nonsense.

There is a touch of foolhardiness in the attempts to establish a precise identification for the great majority of birds mentioned by the authors of classical antiquity. Only a small minority of the ancient references and descriptions contains features which are indisputably diagnostic, while a probably not much bigger minority of the Mediterranean avifauna possesses characteristics of appearance, behaviour, or voice that would have enabled an ordinary Greek or Roman immediately to distinguish a member of one species from absolutely all others, using the sole aids of his eyes, ears, and the largely inaccurate medley of lore handed down from one generation to the next. Thus any modern attempt to pin down the identity of this or that bird in an ancient author is fraught with many dangers and difficulties which must be recognized at the outset

In a paper where we tried to show in how many different meanings the term is chiefly used in the philosophy of Aristotle, we discussed the relation between and , but neglected the relation between and , which seems to be yet more important. The neglect, however, was purposeful; for to answer the question what the latter relation is requires a special research. This we are now going to carry out.

Horace addresses Torquatus again in Carm. 4.7. There the poet distinguishes three cardinal qualities: Torquatus's genus, his facundia, and hispietas. Since Horace distinguishes them they were no doubt qualities on which Torquatus prided himself, but they are, in any case, the key by which Torquatus slips into Horace's lyric. I suggest that we can use the same key to open up the Epistle, and that by taking up these qualities we have ready access to the wit of the poem, carefully predicated upon its addressee.