This article presents an interpretation of Cyrus’ psychology in Xenophon's Cyropaedia. Its point is that Cyrus’ psychological structure is composed by a set of three desires (philotimía, philanthrōpía, philomátheia) given by nature and a set of virtues (sōphrosúnē and enkráteia) acquired by education. The paper will argue that Cyrus, as an enkratic ruler, does not long for any kind of honours, but is guided by true philotimía, that is, the desire for true honours—honours freely given by gratitude or admiration. philanthrōpía is the key to achieve these honours, since it naturally prompts a benevolent and generous behaviour. At the same time, philomátheia provides the desire of knowledge necessary to acquire the techniques in order to accomplish ambitious and philanthropic deeds. Therefore, confronting those who have posed negative interpretations of Cyrus, the article will argue that the uncommon combination of these psychological predispositions makes Cyrus a virtuous and effective ruler.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence commonly claimed to show the presence of slaves in the audience of Plautus’ comedies (above all the evidence of his prologue to Poenulus) and to argue that it more probably shows the opposite, that slaves were not present, or at least were expected not to be. The question is given some urgency by the appearance of Amy Richlin's new book, which takes the presence of slaves in the audience for granted and builds on it to develop a view of Plautine comedy as addressing the experiences, hopes and fears of those slaves. Richlin cites the Poenulus prologue at pages 89–90, accepting it without detailed discussion as indicating the presence of slaves in the audience; and it has been cited similarly in standard handbooks from which I quote a representative sample of remarks below. Some scholars have said things in passing which suggest a different conclusion, but they too have not discussed the question in detail or examined the other evidence that has been thought relevant to the issue. I think that the time is ripe for closer scrutiny of all this evidence.

The hollow peristasis at Segesta presents two interrelated problems. The question of how Greek temples were constructed, and whether the method generally used was applied to the structure at Segesta, depends to some extent for its answer upon the Segestans' motives for building. And the problem of motive is affected by considerations of architectural method. Neither problem appears to have been fully discussed in the light of the other. The result is that at the moment the prevailing views of either problem stand quite unconnected. Thus while many scholars accept the structure as the sole surviving member of a projected scheme to build a complete temple, the theory is now widely held that it was meant to serve merely as a hellenizing decorative element round an Elymian shrine or open-air altar, and so, that the Segestans' interest in Greek temple-architecture was purely superficial.

The reconstructions of the Orthagoras genealogy are so numerous and so different that it is rarely used for chronological purposes. The aim of this paper is to show that there is clear evidence on this subject, and that it has chronological value.

The first study of Plutarch's prose-rhythm was made by Dr. A. W. de Groot, whose results were published in certain preliminary articles and in his Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm, a work which is one of the landmarks in the history of its subject. In it he insisted that to discover which forms of clausula were favoured or avoided by any author it was not sufficient to make a count and discover which were frequent, which infrequent; for a form may be frequent not because an author feels it suitable for the end of a sentence, but because he likes it at any point in his sentence, or even because we should find it frequent if we picked out words by chance from the dictionary. To discover which rhythms are specially sought or avoided at the end of a sentence we must compare the ends with the sentence as a whole. This Dr. de Groot did for a number of texts, included in which were selections from Plutarch's Lives.

On inquiring into the nature of the Charites one may be astonished at the disagreement of their compounding elements. On the one hand, they appear as the very representatives and even personification of gracefulness and charm, brightness, and joy; their name itself seems to testify this, closely allied as it is with the verb χαρειν besides the particular names of the most renowned Hesiodic trinity—Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia—that is to say, brilliancy, mirth, and florescence. Hence arose the Roman conception of the Gratiae decentes; hence also the widespread neo-humanistic idea, clothed by Goethe in the well-known verse of the Classical Walpurgis Night: ‘Grace we are bringing into life ….’ But, on the other hand, we discover the incontestable kinship of Charis with Charon, the ugly and sullen ferryman of the lower world, the still more amazing relation between Eurynome, the mother of the Hesiodic trinity, and Eurynomos, the horrid demon of decay, the vulture-skinned devourer of putrefying corpses in the Delphic Nekyia of Polygnotos.

Among the insinuations that Tacitus bequeaths to posterity in the negative segment of his post mortem of Augustus (Ann. 1.10) is the emperor's putative role as machinator doli in the death of the consul Hirtius during the fighting at Mutina in the spring of 43. The historian is thinking of a focal moment in the Aeneid when Sinon releases his fellow Greeks from within the wooden horse. I quote Aen. 2.264–7. Among the heroes who descend from the animal's belly are Ulixes, Neoptolemus

et Menelaus et ipse doli fabricator Epeos.

invadunt urbem somno vinoque sepultam;

caeduntur vigiles, portisque patentibus omnis

accipiunt socios atque agmina conscia iungunt.

The assumption that a particular object mentioned in the Iliad or Odyssey must be described by epithets which are consistent with each other and with the narrative has complicated every attempt to relate the evidence of archaeology to the poems. It may fairly be assumed that a modern writer wants to be consistent and that, apart from oversights, he will not use an epithet unless it is directly appropriate to the object which he is creating for his immediate purpose; but this is not necessarily true of a poet who had ready to hand a rich store of phrases in meaning appropriate to the various furnishings of his heroic world, and in form adapted to the needs of his verses. As within the Kunstsprache there is a group of epithets describing the moral and physical characteristics common to all heroes and used to suit not the race or actions of individuals but the scansion of their names and the place in the hexameter, so it is natural to suppose that descriptions of things in common use will include at least some similar stock phrases appropriate to types rather than to units. Once the existence of such phrases is established, there is no difficulty in their combination, as metrical convenience requires, in composite descriptions made up of elements each of which has its own real counterpart, but which need never all have existed together in the same object or even in the same age. The following tabulations of the descriptive words and phrases applied to a few familiar objects show that such metrical clausulae are always present, though they vary in prevalence and behaviour.

As Fragment 46 of the first book of Sallust's Histories Maurenbrecher prints: Magnis operibus perfectis obsidium cepit per L. Catilinam legatum. This he takes in effect to mean that Lucretius Ofella after the completion of great siege works received reinforcements brought by L. Catiline legate of Sulla. The interpretation depends largely upon his contention that the phrase obsidium cepit is to be taken as equivalent to subsidium cepit, for which he claims the authority, ultimately, of Verrius Flaccus as represented by Festus p. 193M s.v. obsidium. Though opinions may occasionally have differed as to the precise event documented by the fragment, this central assumption seems to have gone unchallenged by historians. Yet it rests upon remarkably insecure foundations. The reading cepit has scant authority and the interpretation of obsidium as subsidium (= auxilium) none at all. It is in fact the result of misunderstanding the passage of Festus in which the text is embedded.

In Lindsay's edition (p. 210) the Festus entry which is here quoted in full runs as follows:

Obsidium tamquam praesidium, subsidium recte dicitur, cuius etiam auctor C. Laelius pro se apud populum (i.e. Orat. 9): ‘Ut in nobis terra marique simul obsidium facerent.’ Et Sallustius historiarum I (46): ‘Magnis operibus perfectis obsidium coepit per L. Catilinam legatum.’

Coepit is the reading of the manuscript F, which has been generally accepted, while cepit appears only in the Aldine edition where it may well be an emendation or even an error, there being no obvious independent source which might have provided it. For Maurenbrecher it was merely the ‘correction’ of Corte (1724) who produced the earliest roughly chronological arrangement of the fragments of Sallust's Histories.

As an Apollo-like (1.307–9) Jason leaves home to start the long journey in quest of the Golden Fleece a strange incident occurs: The first thing to be said about this scene is that it is almost certainly an invention of Apollonius Rhodius.

The staging of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae is complicated considerably by the large number of individual male citizen parts in the play. These include Praxagora's husband Blepyrus (312–477, 520–727), Blepyrus' anonymous Neighbour (327–56) and his friend Chremes (372–477), the First Citizen (564–871) and the Second Citizen (746–876), the Young Man ‘Epigenes’ (938–1111; cf. 931), and the δεσπτης who leads out the Chorus (1128–83). These are not necesarily all independent characters, but the great difficulty with the play is in deciding precisely who is to be identified with whom. R. G. Ussher, the most recent Oxford editor of the text, distinguishes four separate characters, and divides the parts in the following way:

In his recently published Propertiana, Mr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey has given what I believe to be the correct interpretation of the first two lines. He maintains that sacra has no direct connexion with poetry, that it may be virtually synonymous with Manes or possibly signify the rites paid to the dead, or that it can be taken in the sense of their physical relics, the ashes in the urn. He reminds us that nemus is more than a ‘poetic grove’; it must be a ‘consecrated grove’.

Cicero, de div. i. 107, has preserved the longest fragment of the Annals: a piece of twenty lines, describing how Romulus and Remus took the auspices to decide which of them should found, give his name to, and rule over the city. Mommsen, Ges. Schr. iv. 1 ff., declared that such auspice-taking was incompatible with Roman augural practice and indeed with the whole nature of augury: the birds could approve or disapprove but not select; selection had to be done by lot (p. 11). The impossible story, he argued, arose when the twin (Remus according to him, Romulus according to P. Kretschmer, Glotta i [1909], 294 ff.) intruded into the original version which knew of one founder only; the auspices, because they were an integral part of that version, had to be adapted to the two actors. Little is heard of Mommsen's theory now; but it seems to have been contradicted explicitly only by E. Petersen, Klio ix (1909), 42, and since his arguments, such as the finding of the large grape by Attus Navius (Cicero, de div. 1. 31), are perhaps not decisive, the point must be briefly settled.