‘sed ad hunc bolum ut pervenias, opus erit tibi aut epulum aut triumphus alicuius, ut tune fuit Scipionis Metelli, aut collegiorum cenae, quae nunc innumerabiles excandefaciunt annonam macelli.’ Varro, RR 3. 2. 16. (‘But to make such a haul as this, you will need a public banquet, or somebody's triumph, like Metellus Scipio's then, or the dinners of the collegia, which are innumerable just now and send the price of provisions in the market blazing up.’)

So begins one of the most engaging, and variously controversial, musical scenes in Euripides. The Messenger's narrative of the Phantom Helen's disappearance has proved to Menelaus that the Helen standing before him is the real Helen, altogether innocent of elopement to Troy, from whom he has been sundered for seventeen laborious years. The ensuing embrace is developed in a duet (Hel. 625–59) which is followed without a break by the so-called ‘Interrogation’ (660–97), the two together constituting the so-called ‘Recognition Duo’.

Incongruity and anachronism characterize Ovid's treatment of the gods and mythological figures in the Metamorphoses; frequently the resulting discrepancy between the superhuman world of mythology and characteristic aspects of Roman society serves to pillory that society as well as to undermine the dignity of the traditional mythology. Linguistic parody is one of the tools Ovid uses to highlight these discrepancies. An example recently noted is that of the serenade delivered by Polyphemus the landlubber to his marine beloved, Galatea (Met. 13.789–869): by casting this in the form of Gebetsparodie, Ovid mocks the literary topoi of the paraclausithyron as well as reducing the heroic status of the mythological protagonists. I suggest that in Tiresias’ brief appearance in Metamorphoses 3 Ovid imitates the pedantic locutions of jurists’ language in order to demonstrate how trivial and undignified are the preoccupations of the bickering Olympians.

At one point in his treatise against the ‘Gnostics’ Plotinus treats his adversaries as men of flesh and blood, not merely as proponents of false books and false beliefs:

For I feel a certain shame (aidōs tis echei) with regard to some of my friends (philoi), who, having chanced upon this doctrine before the beginning of our friendship, have continued to adhere to it for reasons that I cannot understand. Not that they themselves show any compunction in saying what they say: they may believe what they say to be true (alethe), but perhaps they rather wish others to be persuaded of the truth of their own opinions. (Enneads II.9.10.3ff.)

The story of the death and catasterism of Chiron is one of the most charming and skilfully-presented episodes in the Fasti. Ovid relates how Hercules, in the course of his twelve labours, came to Mount Pelion, and was hospitably received by the centaur Chiron and his pupil, the young Achilles. While admiring Hercules' splendid arms, Chiron drops one of the hero's poisoned arrows onto his foot. Despite desperate attempts to find a remedy, he fails to recover, but is transformed into the constellation of Centaurus.

It is generally stated that diaeresis after the first metron, obligatory in recitative dimeters, is not the rule in catalectic dimeters, or paroemiacs. An examination of the material, however, yields the following results. The paroemiacs of Tyrtaeus' consistendy observe metron-diaeresis. Out of a total of 348 recitative paroemiacs in the Attic dramatists, only 34 disregard metron-diaeresis altogether. A further 75 overlap metron-diaeresis by one short syllable (the licence of which the dramatists sometimes avail themselves in full dimeters). Apparently, the practice with regard to metron-diaeresis is fundamentally the same in paroemiacs as in full dimeters, only the licences are a little more frequent. The poets occasionally take advantage of the interruption in the movement produced by the catalectic colon in order to break away still farther from regular anapaestic rhythm. Aristophanes, in particular, rather likes to round off an anapaestic period with a rattling, and often abusive, polysyllable: Vesp. 326:

The vast majority of the extant mss of Euripides consists of ‘Byzantine’ mss of the ‘school triad’, Hec, Or., Phoen. The value of this mass of material for textual criticism is problematical: it has been declared to be nil by numerous modern scholars, and this is no doubt a natural reaction against the excessive importance attached to certain of the ‘Byzantine’ mss by the scholars of the earlier part of last century, men like Porson and Dindorf, who, however, did not collate their mss with a view to such things as Leitfekler. In fact, until our knowledge of this class of mss is far more thorough than it is at present, it would be premature to pass judgement on it as a whole.

One of the major prophecies in the Aeneid is given to Aeneas in the underworld by Anchises, who had ordered his son to come to him to learn of his whole race and the city which would be given to him (5.737). In the prophecy (6.756–886), which covers more than a thousand years, Anchises identifies the spirits who will be born as his descendants, from Aeneas' son Silvius to the young Marcellus, and describes how they will win glory and world dominion for Rome. Aeneas sees the spirit of each man as he will appear in life, and hears Anchises' admonition to the Roman who embodies the race, in which he tells him how to rule the world (6.851–3). The speech is stirring, and one would expect that this vision of the future glory of his race would have some effect on Aeneas, but we may ask whether in fact it does.

First, consider Aeneas' behaviour during his meeting with Anchises. At their first encounter all he asks is to embrace his father (6.697–8). Next, when he sees the spirits near the river Lethe, he shudders and asks who they are. When Anchises tells him that they are waiting to be reborn and that he is eager to point out his descendants, so that Aeneas will rejoice to have found Italy, Aeneas shows no curiosity about the spirits, but protests against the idea that they should have to leave Elysium and go back to the life of the body.

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.

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.

In seeking to understand the development of philosophy in later antiquity it is important to take account of Clement of Alexandria, perhaps the first Christian writer to be greatly influenced by the systems of Greece. Accordingly in this article certain aspects of Clement's doctrine will be selected for examination where his obligations to the philosophers have apparently hitherto received insufficient attention. In a valuable paper Mr. R. P. Casey has dealt with many important points, but there is room for further exploration, both by the philological method and by a careful comparison of corresponding ideas in Clement and Plotinus. I am here concerned to stress resemblances rather than to prove, for instance, that any direct connection exists between Neoplatonism and Alexandrian theology. It is nevertheless not irrevelant to mention that Ammonius Saccas, the professor whose lectures both Origen the Christian and Plotinus were to attend, and who, besides being a Platonist, if not the founder of Neoplatonism, was also an apostate Christian, had probably begun to attract attention in Alexandria at the time when Clement was head of the Christian School there, in which perhaps Ammonius himself had been originally educated. There seems nothing to prevent the assumption that Ammonius and Clement were known at least by name to each other, and perhaps the philosopher under whom Plotinus was to study for eleven years had even sat by the side of Clement at the feet of Pantaenus, the erstwhile Stoic and founder of the Catechetical School. However that may be, both Neoplatonism and Alexandrian theology show a markedly similar tendency, and in the Enneads and the Stromateis there are many equivalent features.

The matter which I wish to discuss is a discrepancy between two accounts of the origin of the philosopher in the myth of Plato's Phaedrus. Before their incarnation the souls of all humans are imagined as having enjoyed the vision of reality, but not all in the same company or to the same degree. For, in the first place, the souls are distributed among the companies that severally follow eleven different gods, 247 a-b, a distribution which is regarded as important for the type of character an embodied soul will subsequently have, 252d. In the second place, some souls are more successful than others in following their god, and accordingly they manage to see more of reality than do the others, and on this variation depends the sort of life each soul will subsequently have on earth, 248 d-e. And here arises the problem about the philosopher, corresponding to the two differences of company and degree in the soul's pre-natal vision of reality.

Since the poem of Sappho, which was first published as No. 7 of the Oxyrhynchus series, has been the object of a good deal of attention and ingenuity (some of it frivolous), it is perhaps not too early to publish a number of new readings, the result of repeated examinations of the papyrus (now P. 739 in the British Museum), that may provide a surer foundation for future attempts at reconstruction. I have submitted my suggestions to Professor Hunt, who does not reject them (though in fairness it must be added that he has not re-examined the original), and I have to thank him and Mr. H. I. Bell, of the Department of MSS., for the readiness of their help whenever and under whatever form I made appeal to it. But, of course, neither of them is in any way committed to any of my readings or deductions.

This article attempts to provide a plausible explanation of a series of expressions used by Pliny the Elder to designate a significant number of communities in Hispania: [oppida] Latio antiquitus donata, [oppida] Latinorum ueterum, oppidani Latii ueteris, [oppida] Latii antiqui and oppida ueteris Latii (Plin. HN 3.7, 3.18, 3.24, 3.25, 4.117). These phrases, commonly explained from a chronological or typological viewpoint, encompass fifty Augustan ciuitates, the most important feature of which was the enjoyment of Latin rights before the sources used by Pliny were written under the Early Principate. To address this issue, the meaning and the use of the term oppidum are first examined. In a second stage, the origin and the sense of the adjectives uetus and antiquum, as well as the adverb antiquitus, are analysed. The results suggest that oppida ueteris Latii and its variants may express, in a simple and comprehensible way, the administrative changes that a group of Republican Latin colonies in Hispania underwent through their transformation into municipia Latina during the reign of Augustus.