When the Macedonians had conquered Greece, city-states continued to exist along-side the more powerful kingdoms, and were often forced to accommodate their policies to the wishes of the powerful kings who were, in theory, their allies. If kings and cities were to co-operate effectively, there would need to be some way of adapting the authority of royal wishes to the theoretical rights of the cities to self-determination.

The contrast between the powers of a king, theoretically all-powerful within his kingdom, and the autonomy of a city did not need to be total. Aristotle, who was acquainted with the Macedonian kingdom, made a clear distinction between kingship and tyranny, between rule by the law and autocracy. He listed Macedonia alongside Sparta and Epirus as kingdoms which were ruled in the interests of all.

If one were to find a date for the games put on by Pompey to celebrate the opening of his theatre in 55 B.C., it would be possible to assign a more precise date to the delivery of Cicero's speech in Pisonem than seems to have been done so far. Asconius states quite firmly that the in Pisonem was delivered in the second consulship of Pompey and Crassus, a few days before the lavish games celebrating the opening of Pompey's theatre. Asconius rejects a counter-view that the speech was delivered late in the following year.

Rem tene, the elder Cato advised the aspiring orator, verba sequentur. The advice applies equally to the textual critic. Of those who have attempted to emend, repunctuate, or defend this passage, few seem to have been troubled by any doubts about the firmness of their grip on the res, the precise point Poseidon is making. The usual view of what Poseidon means is that those who sack cities are foolish because such an act results in their own subsequent destruction, presumably because they desecrate temples and thereby offend the gods. Poseidon's words are cited as encapsulating the ‘moral’ or ‘lesson’ of the play, that the destruction of others and their cities brings the victor no advantage but only his own ruin, that the sacking of cities is always and everywhere an act of criminal folly. Yet there are several features of the lines themselves that are hard to square with this reading, and the context, Poseidon's monologue and his dialogue with Athena, suggests a slightly different view of the lesson to be read from the coming destruction of the Greeks.

Pindar's Eighth Olympian celebrates the victory of Alkimedon of Aigina in the boys' wrestling at Olympia in 460. This victory was the sixth won by a member of this family (line 76). The absence of detail about most of these victories suggests that the family had had little success in the great Panhellenic competitions and that the majority were won at minor festivals. However, one of the remaining five victories was certainly won in one of the four festivals which made up the periodos. In lines 15–18, after preparatory generalizations about the diversity of paths to achievement, all with divine aid, Pindar describes the path of achievement, and the source of divine aid, which features in the victor's family:

Tιμ⋯σθενες, ὕμμε δ' ⋯κλ⋯ρωσεν π⋯τμος

Zην⋯ γενεθλ⋯ωι. ὃς σ⋯ μ⋯ν Nεμ⋯αι πρ⋯πατον,

'Aλκιμ⋯δοντα δ⋯ π⋯ρ κρ⋯νου λ៹φωι

θ⋯κεν 'Oλυμπιν⋯καν.

Timosthenes, in your case fate allotted you to Zeus as your family god, who made you pre-eminent at Nemea and Alkimedon Olympic victor by the Hill of Kronos.

‘Vergil lässt keinen Zweifel darüber, dass in Wahrheit das Fatum nichts anderes ist als des höchsten Gottes Wille.’ Thus Heinze, apparently following an observation by Seruius auctus, and in turn generally followed by scholars who have subsequently considered the nature of the fata in the Aeneid. But questions concerning the interpretation of the Aeneid are rarely simple; and the question of Jupiter's relationship to the fata may repay further enquiry.

I have not read the Thebais more than three times, nor ever with intent care and interest; and although in putting these notes together I have consulted a large number of editions—Bernartius, Tiliobroga, Geuartius, Cruceus, Gronouius, Barthius, Veenhusen, Beraldus (Delphin), ed. Bipontina, Lemaire (with Amar), Queck, O. Mueller (books I-VI), Kohlmann, Wilkins, Garrod, Klotz, and the translations of Marolles, Nisard, and Mozley (Loeb)—it may well be that profitable matter has escaped me and that some of my comments have been made before.

Catullus 6 is a short poem addressed to a certain Flavius, otherwise unknown. Flavius, so we are told, refuses to say anything about his girlfriend, and the poet can explain this only by assuming that he has taken up with a mistress who is singularly unrefined (lines 1–5). It is certainly clear that Flavius is not spending his nights alone; the state of his bedroom proves that much (lines 6–11). But, says Catullus, there is no reason for Flavius to remain silent, no matter what folly he is engaging in. He should confide in the poet, whose only wish is to praise him and his mistress in witty verse (lines 12—17).

Pease ad loc.: ‘Roman writers often use axis… in a figurative sense… for the caelum as a whole, and in our passage, while the force is applied by Atlas to the axis of the sphere, yet the whole sphere is apparently in mind, as the phrase stellis ardentibus aptum indicates.’ It is lexicographical commonplace that axis is used, especially in the poets, as a synonym for the sky, yet the oddity of the synecdoche by which a scientific, or pseudoscientific, term for the axis of the universe is transferred to mean the heavens in general has been little commented on; unanalytic recognition of the semantic fact is the norm (e.g. ‘aus einem bestimmten mathematischen Begriffe eine… allgemeine, unbestimmte Vorstellung’). I believe that a more precise account of this transference can be given, and in particular I will argue that Virgilian usage in the Aeneid is central to the history of this process.

The Hellenistic poet Lycophron, who wrote tragedies and assembled the texts of comedy under Ptolemy Philadelphus for the Library at Alexandria, was probably also the author of the long poem Alexandra, which deals mainly with the theme of Troy. Recent studies by Stephanie West have appreciably advanced our understanding of this rather difficult poet. For the passages where Lycophron surprisingly presents phases of Roman history she cogently adduces a later poet, a ‘Deutero-Lycophron, …to be sought among the artists of Dionysus in southern Italy’. A theme in Graeco-Egyptian mythology is the subject of the present paper; and one of my main points is that recent Egyptological research has a clear bearing on one of the problems.

The purpose of this note is to revive Servius Auctus' interpretation of Aeneid 8.363, which has been overlooked or dismissed without argument by recent scholars. It concerns the identification and location of Evander's regia. The relevant lines are worth quoting in full (359–67):

There has been general agreement amongst scholars this century that the building is to be understood to be occupying the same place—or thereabouts—as that later to be taken by Augustus' house. It is now established that this was on the South-West of the Palatine.

THE book which Eudoxus of Cnidos was stated by some to have translated from the Egyptian is entitled in the manuscripts of Diog. Laert. 8. 89, a reading which R. D. Hicks retains in his Loeb edition (vol. ii, 1925, revised ed. 1931, repr. 1950, p. 402). It was retained also in the edition of C. Gabr. Cobet (Paris, 1878) and in the Tauchnitz edition (Leipzig, 1895); so also H. S. Long in O.C.T. (1964). Egyptian religion was richly theriolatrous. But does it proffer a suggestion of ‘Dialogues of Dogs’ ?

The contrary belief is suggested by the proposal of various emendations.

In his analysis of the social and economic conditions of intellectual activity in ancient Greece, Gentili argues that the value of poetry underwent a notable change in the late archaic period. Poetry came to be produced within a contractual relationship between patrons and poets, it became a commercial good available to the one who could pay for it and its value was expressed no longer by honouring the poet but by paying for his product. At the time of Solon and Theognis the producers of poetry had been aristocratic members of the polis giving political advice to their peers and gaining renown by the quality of their advice. Yet Simonides and Pindar wrote under different social conditions. Gentili writes:

Fully conscious by now of the dignity and importance of his role, the poet also becomes aware of its [i.e. poetry's] ‘commercial’ value. He puts his own sophia at the disposal of the highest bidder, thereby creating a basis for the tendency to regard wealth and poetic ‘wisdom’ as interchangeable moral equivalents.

In this country and in those with which we are best acquainted, that large part of the human diet which is derived from grain is mainly eaten in the form of bread. Bread, in order to be palatable and digestible, must be leavened; and this means that the dough must be able to retain some of the carbon dioxide gas produced in it by the agency of yeast or some similar substance. Its capacity for doing this depends upon the presence in the grain of a sufficient amount of proteins of such a kind that when mixed with water they form the elastic substance known as gluten. It is largely because wheat—and especially the species of triticum vulgare to which all our bread wheats belong—is superior to all other grains in this respect that wheat has become the main bread grain of a large part of the world.

In CQ n.s 32 (1982), 237, Howard Jacobson comments on Lucretius' expression fingere somnia, for which he can find only two parallels, both later than Lucretius. He suggests that the phrase can best be understood as a reference to the actual practice of dream control, or oneiropompeia, for which he provides several useful references. A fragment of Luciiius, however, provides not only a parallel, but perhaps even a model, for Lucretius' phrase, and for his criticism in 1.102–35 of the lies or fictions of both religious figures and poets.

Recent discussions of Aristophanes' early career raise again the question who was recognized as a victor with the Babylonians and the Acharnians and his name officially recorded, Aristophanes the poet or Kallistratos his didaskalos. This old-new controversy has brought back into focus the City Victors' list (IG II 2325) and the reconstruction of' API [in the second column of the comic poets. The inscription itself has not been studied anew and the reader is referred to earlier examinations of it, especially to two articles of E. Capps and to the verdict of A. Pickard-Cambridge, who maintains that it is needless to follow the controversy in detail: ‘For the fifth century, the name of Aristophanes is restored with practical certainty in the list of victors at the Dionysia, between those of Hermippus and Eupolis, it now being proved that the first victory of Aristomenes, the other candidate for the place, fell much later. One can hardly blame Pickard-Cambridge and others for evading the intricate calculations and boring details. Yet, it seems that they deserve, or rather require a re-examination, for Capps, although a meticulous and distinguished epigraphist, had the tendency to jump easily to rash conclusions. Indeed, his frankness in readily admitting his mistakes and recanting untenable positions evokes admiration, but, since his work belongs to a period in which hypotheses were more easily advanced and less rigorously defended than today, an attempt should be made to take a look at his argumentations and see whether they are still valid.

Mr. Bishop's article in C.Q., xlix (vi. 3/4). 187–92 on Palatine Apollo calls for an answer from me, since I am still alive to give it, though my own study dates from 1910 and was published in J.R.S. for 1914, pp. 193–226. So far away is this publication, and my offprints have for so long been exhausted, that scholars of my generation need to go to university libraries to refer to it, and recent generations do not know it at all. From Lugli's book on Rome they do not gather the details which convinced Boni that I was right, because he omitted some of the most cogent from mention.

There is still something to be said about these figures for the Athenian hoplite force, the more so as the most reasonable discussion of them, Meyer's, is spoilt by some unsound inferences and has in consequence not found support. Their difficulty is apparent: a muster πανσημει in 338 meant calling up all classes up to the age of 50 (Lycurg. c. Leocr. 39), and since Socrates fought at Delion and Amphipolis when he was in his late forties, and not at Mantineia when he was over 50, we may assume that it meant the same in the fifth century; we also assume (though this is by no means proved) that ‘the youngest’ are those in their nineteenth and twentieth years, as in the fourth century, certainly after the reform of the Ephebeia, perhaps earlier (Aeschin. II. 167); military service ceased at 60. But how could the number of men in these twelve classes, 19-20 and 51-60, stand in the proportion of 13: 17 (16,000 less 3,000 metics, 13,000 plus 1,000 cavalry and 3,000 metics) to the men between 21 and 50 ? They could not be more than a third, and might be less. (Beloch, 1923, tries to make the problem more difficult by the arbitrary assumption that the 13,000 citizen hoplites are all the men of 21-60, instead of 21-50. Meyer, who accepts Thucydides’ figures, forgets that there must have been ‘oldest and youngest’ metics, besides the 3,000 who marched into Megara. Busolt and Meyer also argue that the classes 51-60 will have suffered specially heavy losses in the battles of 459-445, while the eight youngest classes would have seen no fighting;

‘Alexander, it is said, starting from Amphipolis and keeping on his left the city Philippi and the mountain Orbelus, invaded Thrace, that part occupied by the so-called self-governing Thracians. He crossed the river Nestus, and in ten days, they say, he reached the mountain Haemus.’

The text of a Laconian inscription recorded by Fourmont is re-examined and found to be part of an early lex sacra relating to the cult of a goddess, probably Demeter.

Restoration of the text is attempted and, despite many uncertainties, the general structure and meaning are established. The first sentence deals with the weaving or dedication of certain garments by the votaries; the second excludes unmarried women from participation in the rites.

The expression used in the Periplus M.E. has attracted a certain amount of attention. It is generally held to mean ‘a legal mart where foreign trade was officially allowed and taxed’ (E. H. Warmington, Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, pp. 53, 57): and this translation has sometimes been made the ground of comparison with the treaty ports of China or the échelles of the Levant. On closer examination of the usage of the Periplus M.E. it seems difficult to accept this meaning, and possible to suggest another.