In A.D. 60 Nero instituted at Rome a quinquennale certamen which he called Neronia. It was in three sections—athletics, chariot-racing, and music (which included singing, and recitations in prose and verse)—after a Greek model. This model would be that of the Pythian rather than of the Olympic Games, for at the latter there was no regular musical contest; though perhaps Nero got his immediate inspiration from the Augustalia at Naples, which was an athletic and musical festival of a religious nature.

Otto Schneider, the first editor to use II, wrote , and he has been followed by Gow-Scholfield. The form is used by Antimachus, though not elsewhere by Nicander. Nicander uses tetrasyllabic forms from the stem ; he also uses

Regarded aesthetically the Oedipus Coloneus is unsatisfactory. The plot is episodic, consisting of a series of incidents which, except that they involve a single hero, and are derived from the previous history of that hero or his ancestors, are unrelated. That is to say, while Sophocles has in all his other plays combined the two to perfection, he has here given his content precedence over his art. The aim of this paper is to consider one or two aspects of that subject-matter, which seemed to him to be so important.

‘Saepe stilum vertas’, says Horace; and he had excellent company in his friend Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid at the rate of only about 900 lines a year, and spent hours in licking his verses into shape. It would have been instructive to sit at the elbow of these two poets, to see what they altered and what they rejected. It is clear, e.g., that there were certain caesural arrangements which Virgil deliberately affected and others which he as deliberately avoided. But what of the care taken by these and other classical authors in arranging sounds in relation to mood or idea? This present incomplete essay is written frankly with scepticism in regard to dogmatic comments on certain particular points. It has been perilously easy to frame legislation on the basis of a predilection bolstered up by one or two instances. Even in the field of syntax we have seen generalizations on too narrow a foundation. An editor of Andocides enunciates ‘a very important principle of the language, which is rigidly observed by the best writers; viz., that, when a participle and a verb of different government are referred to the same object, the case of that object depends on the participle and not at all on the verb… Shilleto's remarks on this point (Dem. Fals. Leg. 152.182. 272) must be excused, as evidently written hastily.’ But a casual cast of the net brings up about a score of violations of this principle from Homer to Menander. Where does the editor propose to draw the line between the respectable and the declassé Greek writers? Aristophanes, though cited in support, is actually flagrantly lawless in the matter; and with him must go not only Homer and Hyperides but Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, Xenophon, Lysias, and Plato, leaving among the élite, as cited by this editor, only Thucydides, Antiphon, and Aeschines; and one is entitled to doubt even their rigid observance of the law until they have actually been brought to court. In problems of rhythm, also, one has to be careful to use evidence as against preconception. When an editor hacks and fits the dactylics of Ennius so as to eradicate all feet beginning with two short syllables, it is as impious as recarving a statue by Daedalus because it does not conform to the canon of Polyclitus; and one may be forgiven if now and then one interprets the editor's corr. in his apparatus criticus not as correxi but as corrupi.

In recent years, there has been considerable debate about the reliability of Herodotus: the attack on his honesty led by Fehling, the defence by Pritchett. The debate, it seems, may have begun at least as far back as Thucydides, but now Thucydides himself may have joined the school of liars. Badian has produced a new reading of Thucydides’ description of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, arguing that Thucydides deliberately set out to mislead the reader, misrepresenting the Spartans as the instigators of the War and carefully masking the Athenians’ own responsibility.

Greek art and literature follow parallel courses through the long period from Homer to Euripides. Homer and Euripides, Dipylon vases and the latest white lekythoi are as far apart from each other as it is possible for works in the same medium to be. The distance can only be explained by a similar change in the views of artists, writers, and their public.

I Want to comment on five passages where I have provoked disagreement by a previous discussion. In the first three, my discussion was in Philologus cx (1966), 152–4, and my critic is Bruno Gentili in Quaderni Urbinati iv (1967), 177–81. I was not the first to make an emendation in any of the three places, so that in defending the transmitted text Gentili is actually not only criticizing me but others such as Hermann, Naeke, O. Müller, Schoemann, Hunt, Murray, and Page.

The purpose of this article is to consider the problem of the ascribed to Varro and to attempt to show that, despite the doubts expressed by modern scholars, the balance of the evidence does support the traditional interpretation.

Appian, dealing with the ‘Triumvirate’ of 59 B.C., tells us: The usual interpretation of this passage has been that Varro wrote a political pamphlet, possibly in the form of a Menippean satire,2 against the First Triumvirate, to which he gave the title.There are obvious difficulties in this interpretation, which appears to conflict with what we know of Varro's relations with Pompey in the period before the formation of the Triumvirate and his actions afterwards.

Each of the Orphic Hymns is headed in the manuscripts by the name of the deity to which it is addressed, and in most cases a specification of the kind of incense to be used: thus 2 Only the first hymn lacks a heading. It is preceded in the manuscripts by a poem in which Orpheus addresses Musaeus and teaches him a prayer to a multitude of gods

Nisbet and Kraggerud make good cases for taking the ninth Epode as a dramatic recreation of the Actium campaign. Horace begins in fearful anticipation; then the crisis comes, first on land and then on sea; Antony turns to flight; and — even though some danger remains, and there is metus as well as joy at the end of the poem — the celebrations can finally begin. On this reading there remains the familiar problem of vv. 17–20:

at huc frementes uerterunt bis mille equos

Galli canentes Caesarem,

hostiliumque nauium portu latent

puppes sinistrorsum citae.

The first couplet clearly relates to the defection of Amyntas' Galatians, the decisive moment in the fighting on land; the second must describe the crucial battle on sea. There is no problem in portu latent. The fleet has withdrawn, and is skulking in harbour instead of fighting. But what of nauium…puppes sinistrorsum citae? The difficulty is notorious: the secondary sources do not clearly describe any movement ‘toward the left’, and it is hard to see why Horace chooses so enigmatic a phrase to capture the fighting. His audience would not make much of the topographical detail in any case: unless they had been at Actium themselves (and most of his readers of course had not), their reaction to the words would centre on other associations — the contrast between these magnificent puppes (Antony's ships were probably already famed for their size and grandeur) and their undignified sideways movement; the suggestions of ill omen in sinistrorsum.

‘And now invoking as our helper overseas Zeus' calf and the son of the flower-browsing ancestress cow by conception from the on-breathing of Zeus—’: so begins the appeal of Danaos' daughters to their forefather Epaphos; the opening sentence is interrupted by a digression and never completed. In 43 M reads (Porson) is almost universally adopted. However, (Tucker) is printed in the current Oxford text (1955). Porson's emendation was attacked by Tucker on various grounds: (1) it was palaeographically unsatisfactory, (2) it added an otiose epithet to but left unqualified, (3) it involved a ‘scarcely Greek’ use of the participle, and (4) it coined a form in having the unique sense ‘graze’ instead of ‘handle’. My purpose is to defend as the true reading and to explore its contextual significance. I begin by taking Tucker's objections in order.

‘VERANIUS’ is an uncommon gentilicium, with brief and transient notice in Loman annals. The earliest Veranius on record is the friend of Catullus. iccording to Catullus (28; 47), he was abroad on the staff of a governor while, or just after, the poet was with Memmius (pr. 58) in Bithynia. The governor was Piso, clearly L. Piso (cos. 58), proconsul of Macedonia till the summer of 55. Veranius, it emerges elsewhere (9. 5 ff.; 12. 14 ff.), had also been in Hispania Citerior, accompanied here too by his inseparable Fabullus. Veranius may, or ray not, have been an author, identical with the Veranius who wrote on religious antiquities—who again might be the Veranius Flaccus whom Caesar Augusstus derided for his affected and archaic style.

Herodotus tells us in book vii, ch. 220, that the Pythian priestess gave the Spartans a warning couched in hexameters, of which the second line begins ἢ μ⋯γα ἄστυ ⋯ρικυδ⋯ς. To this text the admirable commentary of How and Wells takes exception in the following note: ‘The synizesis ἄστυ ⋯ρικυδ⋯ς is intolerable. Read δ⋯μ' ⋯ρικυδ⋯ς, ἄστυ being a gloss, H. Richards, Cl. Rev. xix. 345.’ Doubtless this union of vowels is harder than that of υω in Ἐριν⋯ων (Eur. Iph. Taur. 1456) or in γεν⋯ων and δυωδεκ⋯μηνον, accepted by Christ in his edition of Pindar (Pyth. iv. 225; [Nem.] xi. 10). Let us grant that from the point of view of elegance it is even intolerable; the question still remains, should the line be altered?

The amount of criticism heaped upon persuadent (13) has obscured consideration of the meaning of picta; for it is this word which carries the weight of the line. Tracing the sequence of thought in the passage will show where the emphasis lies. There is throughout a comparison, either expressed (melius 10, formosius 11, dulcius 14), or implied (9 and 12), between the artless manifestations of nature and their cultivated, trained, or man-made counterparts; ‘wild flowers are more beautiful to behold than cultivated ones; similarly ivy and arbutus which grow as they will are more attractive than those in gardens; natural rills more charming than artificial fountains, … birds which sing from the heart delight us more than those which have been taught.’

Galen in a celebrated passage remarks that there were three ‘choirs’, in early Greek medicine: the choirs of Cos, of Cnidus, and of Sicily. The word is vague and suggestive, and we do well to keep it so. If we look in the Hippocratic Corpus for schools of medical theory, with distinct sets of doctrine marked off clearly from the doctrines of rival schools, we shall be lucky indeed if we can find them, and, having found them, succeed in convincing others of their existence. But we shall find, now and again, an individual voice proclaiming itself from among its impersonal surroundings with clarity and vigour: some treatises in the collection have their author's personality stamped on them as distinctly as on a work of art.

additum et praesidium mille legionarii, tres sociorum chohortes duaeque equitum alae, et quo facilius novum regnum tueretur, pars Armeniae, ut cuique finitima, Pharasmani Polemonique et Aristobulo atque Antiocho parere iussae sunt. Corbulo in Syriam abscessit, morte Ummidii legati vacuam ac sibi permissam.

occurs in two classical contexts. They are: (i) Alc. 320 L.-P. (23 Diehl) (ii) Democr. 156 Diels (in Plut. Adv. Colot. 4, . Further, Diels adds two other passages showing Democritus' use of the word. Simpl. De Caelo, p. 294. 33 f. Heiberg (Diels, Frag. d. Vorsokr. ii. 93) Elm. Sec. Hipp. 1. 2 (Diels, op. cit., p. 97)