At Book 5.324–37, the DRN’s narrator says that the world is young, claims that the nature of the world has been understood only recently (with the advent of Epicureanism), and asserts that he is either the ‘very first’/‘most pre-eminent’ or, as I suggest here, ‘among the first’/‘among the most pre-eminent’ to turn (vertere) Greek Epicureanism into Latin. It is the last of these three claims that concerns us:

denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast   335
nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus
nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces.

Denys Page, discussing this poem in his classic Sappho and Alcaeus, seemed unimpressed by its aesthetic merits. In his note on line 7 he says: ‘The sequence of thought might have been clearer.... It seems then inelegant to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found O Krλλιστον in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this very quality’ (p. 53). His interpretative essay phrases further objections. ‘In a phrase which rings dull in our doubtful ears, she proceeds to illustrate the truth of her preamble by calling Helen of Troy in evidence’ (p. 56). About the Helen exemplum itself he says: ‘the thought is simple as the style is artless’ and ‘the transition back to the principal subject was perhaps not very adroitly; managed’ (p. 56). Page's criticism centres on the function of the exemplum of Helen. A close reconsideration of this exemplum, with special attention to the way in which it is embedded in the preceding and following context, will result in a better understanding and appreciation of this poem.

The concept of mimēsis was ‘shared by most authors, philosophers and educated audiences in the classical period, in antiquity as a whole, and even later’, although it has probably never been developed into a well-articulated theory. As far as we can judge from the extant evidence, the meaning of the expressions μίμησις and μιμέομαι differs from author to author and sometimes even from passage to passage. Ancient Greek views on mimēsis have often been discussed in modern scholarship, mainly within the field of history of art, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the traditional English translation ‘imitation’ is not always appropriate for the ancient texts and that in many contexts it is rather misleading. In the following study I aim to focus on this concept as it was employed in the oldest Greek cosmological and philosophical theories. As a rule, the study of these theories is complicated by their fragmentary state of preservation and by their distortion through the specifically Platonic views that were dominant among the later doxographers. I shall suggest that the Platonizing tendency still prevalent today, which tends to translate and interpret mimēsis as ‘imitation’ or ‘copy’, should be carefully revised in the light of the Hippocratic evidence and specifically in view of De victu, probably the oldest authentic, non-fragmentary, and non-Platonic document attesting the concept of mimēsis.

In comparison to the speech of the Laws, the dialectic between Crito and Socrates at the beginning of the Crito has received little attention. In this paper I argue that it contains an important philosophical message. It illustrates that the many's failure to follow Socrates' principles, like his principle of non-retaliation, is due to the intrinsic fragility of true beliefs. Though the many can understand Socrates' values and may accept his principles if he argues with them long enough, they may fail to hold on to his principles when confronted with the difficulties of life. Crito's failure to deliberate Socratically at the beginning of the Crito exemplifies the many's predicament.

When Joseph Partsch wrote ‘Flavii Cresconii Corippi de vita paucissima comperta habemus’ in the preface (p. xliii) to his long-standard edition (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1879), he was not exaggerating. Yet this has not prevented scholars (including Partsch himself!) from equipping the poet with a career, largely in Constantinople. Most recently, some of the details have been revived (albeit with decent caution) in the admirable edition of the In laudem Justini Augusti minoris by Averil Cameron. But almost every item is based solely on guesswork; the supposed career may seem to melt away under a fresh and dispassionate look at what has passed for evidence.

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth.

Of the early Roman historians who wrote in Greek, A. Postumius Albinus was not necessarily alone in realizing that his Greek was not the best Greek; while, on the other hand, Cato and those who followed the new fashion of writing in Latin would have resented, we may assume, could they have foreknown, the statement of Q,. Catulus in Cicero's De Oratore that they had no literary or rather ‘oratorical’ merit; though Cato might have approved Catulus' caustic comment on Roman historical writing, ‘Satis est non esse mendacem’. That an historian should not, consciously and deliberately, lie all second-century historians would no doubt have agreed; and they would have endorsed Polybius' condemnation of masquerading as history in a story whose falseness was self-evident, because it assumed, on the part of the young sons of senators at Rome, a gravitas such as no young boy could possibly possess.

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.

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

The codex Cromwellianus 12 (saec. XV–XVI), one of the most interesting astrological manuscripts of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, contains on p. 450 f., under the heading 'Ιμβρασίου 'Εϕεσίου περί ⋯ρρώστων, the first part of the first part of Ps.-Galen's περι κατακλίσεως νοσούντων, which is, together with a work of Hermes Trismegistos, our principal source for iatromathematics, that is, for diagnosis and prognosis based on certain constellations, above all on the Moon's position in a particular sign of the zodiac. It is not the text itself that calls for notice—since we possess older and better manuscripts of it—but the mention of the author, Imbrasios of Ephesus, which only occurs here.

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.

What seems to be the prevailing doctrine of the particle num is thus set forth in the most recent of major Latin grammars:

‘num ist wahrscheinlich die unerweiterte Form von nunc … num diente also zunächst dazu, dieFragein der lebendigen Rede lebhaft an die Situation anzuknüpfen; es steht oft in erregten Erkundigungsfragen mit unentschiedener Erwartung (z. B. Pit. Merc. 173 obsecro, num nauis periit ?:: saluast nauis); auch bejahende Antwort wird vielfach erwartet … Der in der klassischen Sprache alleinherrschende Gebrauch in Fragen mit erwarteter Antwort ‘nein’ setzte sich zunächst in lebhaften Fragen der Entrüstung oder des Erstaunens fest wie Pit. Asin. 619 sed num fumus est haec mulier quam amplexare?’

Our information about the early stages of Greek music is so slight that these references of Aristides Quintilianus (p. 28, Meibom) to an the Pseudo-Plutarch to a scale employed by the legendary figure Olympus take on an immense value for us. The dialogue itself is an unskilful patchwork, but the author's sources are often good. These particular passages are almost certainly both derived with small alteration from Aristoxenus, in whose time the traditional music ascribed to Olympus was still in use. For the elucidation of the scale's history and structure we have three1 pieces of evidence to help us. There is the first passage mentioned above, which deals with the discovery of the enharmonic genus by Olympus, which is connected, at first sight obscurely, with the Spondeion scale; and the second passage, which discusses the scalar limitations of theσφoνδειξων τρόφoς with especial reference to an elementary polyphony. There are also the ancient scales quoted by Aristides Quintilianus (ed. Meibom, p. 21).

In JRS (1968), Shelagh Jameson discussed the relative chronology of the campaigns of Aelius Gallus and C. Petronius: her discussion has rightly met with broad acceptance. She argued that Petronius began his first Ethiopian campaign in or by autumn 25 B.c., while Gallus began his Arabian campaign in or by August 26 B.C. and ended it in October or November 25 B.c.

Commentators on Epode 11 generally begin by comparing the opening couplet with Archilochus (frg. 215 West): κα⋯ μ' οὔτ' ἰ⋯μβων οὔτε τερπωλ⋯ων μ⋯λει, and sometimes also Catullus 68. 1–40. In both of these the poet explains that grief at the death of a loved one has expelled all desire to compose verses. According to the comparison, Horace, in 1–2, is stating that the onset of love (‘amore percussum gravi’, 2) has, similarly, so absorbed his attention that he cannot write verse. The translation will then run ‘Pettius, I have no pleasure any longer in writing verse, smitten as I am with a heavy love’.

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):