Greek New Comedy, as we know it from references and fragmentary MSS., is the meeting-place of three confluent streams—comedy of manners, Aristophanic comedy, and tragedy. From Sicilian comedy, through Epicharmus at Syracuse and Crates and Pherecrates at Athens, it inherited certain stock stage figures, and a tradition of ‘invented’ plots and sententious speech. Old Comedy it resembled in its fun and informality and many stage conventions; and, indeed, the resemblance was so marked, in at least one of the later plays of Aristophanes, that the writer of his life, mistaking effect for cause, claimed the lost Cocalus as the original model of New Comedy. Perhaps most important of all was the influence of tragedy; and this influence may be estimated by a direct comparison between Euripides and Menander, both in the spirit and form of their plays and in the social and philosophic theories underlying them.

The genesis of the Greek prose romance is still in large part shrouded in darkness, in spite of the researches of Erwin Rohde, one of the greatest scholars of the last generation. The reasons are evident; the material at our disposal is far too scanty, the loss of early specimens of this literary form is far too great to allow of a flawless reconstruction of the history of the Greek romance. The same lacunae have also prevented us from obtaining as complete an insight into the sources of the extant romances as would be desirable. Rohde conjectured that the genre was the result of a skilful combination of mythological narrative and adventure novel; Warren thought that the Greek prose romance had about the same origin and took the same development as the old French prose romance—that is, it developed out of the epic. At all times scholars have been aware of the fact that the great role which love plays in the Greek romance has a parallel in the tragedies of Euripides, who may be considered the first tragic poet to introduce the love theme on the stage. But so far as I am aware, it has not been pointed out that Euripides was drawn upon for whole episodes in order to enrich the plot of the novel. Yet such seems to have been the case for one of the best-known passages of the Apollonius Romance, as I shall endeavour to show in the following pages.

To add without good reason to the already enormous literature surrounding the most fascinating and puzzling of all Vergil's works ought, nowadays, to be regarded as an offence against learning. My excuse for this article is that even the latest work on the subject, Ed. Norden's charming monograph, Die Geburt des Kindes (Teubner, Leipzig, 1924), appears to me wrong on one important point, inadequate on another.

‘Tu tuo praecipitante iam et debilitato tribunatu auspiciorum patronus subito exstitisti …; tibi M. Bibulus quaerenti se de caelo seruasse respondit idemque in contione dixit, ab Appio tuo fratre productus, te omnino, quod contra auspicia adoptatus esses, tribunum non fuisse. tua denique omnis actio posterioribus mensibus fuit, omnia quae C. Caesar egisset, quod contra auspicia essent acta, per senatum rescindi oportere; quod si fieret, dicebas te tuis umeris me custodem urbis in urbem relaturum.’

Just east of the Pamir mountains, and to the north of the great plateau of Tibet, lies the little-explored country of Chinese or Eastern Turkestan. In that country, towards the end of the last century, two hitherto unknown languages were discovered by European explorers and translated by European scholars. Several nations took part in the investigation, and the material discovered was amicably distributed among English, French, German, and Russian philologists. The material to which I refer, the precious sources from which our knowledge of these languages is obtained, consists partly of engraved wooden tablets, but chiefly of documents written on a kind of paper which has been miraculously preserved in the extreme dryness of the sand for some 1,300 years—just like the eggs of the dinosaur recently discovered not so very far from this region, and which, we are told, have been there for ten million years. No such antiquity can be claimed for our documents, which are, in fact, distressingly late. Historical references contained in them seem to show that both languages existed at least as late as the seventh century A.D., when they disappeared. The most striking fact about these languages is that, though very different the one from the other, they both clearly belong to that great Indo-European family to which Greek, Latin, English, Sanskrit, Persian, and so many of the languages of Europe belong.

This ancient tale has naturally been recognized by modern scholars for what it is—a story of the Great Mother and her paramour; but several features appear to me to have been given less examination than they deserve, in view of their own peculiarity and the obvious antiquity of the myth.

That it is pre-Greek is fairly clear from the names of the principal actors. Anchises yields no tolerable meaning in Greek, and we do not know to what speech it belongs—possibly Phrygian. Aphrodite is, of course, no Greek goddess at all. The tale was known to Greek saga-men about the tenth century B.C., and is fully told for the first time, so far as our surviving records go, in a document possibly of the seventh century—the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Connected as it is, though loosely, with the Troy-saga, it may quite possibly go back to Minoan-Mycenaean times, as that does. The features which I think worthy of further investigation are the fate of Anchises after his enjoyment of the goddess' favours, and in particular the effect upon him of the thunderbolt with which he was smitten.

Contemporary inscriptions prove practically beyond doubt that Philip V. was the son of Demetrius II. and of the Epeirot princess Phthia. But historians have always started from Eusebius' statement (1,237 Schoene) that he was the son of Chryseis, a Thessalian captive whom Demetrius married and who afterwards married Doson, and have tried to fit other things in with Eusebius. Now it does not much matter to us which of two unknown women was Philip's mother; but it does matter how we approach our evidence, and we must start from the contemporary evidence and work downward, not vice versa. I need not here go through all the different theories based on the late evidence; what I am going to do is first to examine the inscriptions, which has not yet been done in this connexion, and then explain how Eusebius' blunder arose; for even if a definite statement be certainly wrong, we want to know how it got there.

In a previous article, I have attempted to summarize the evidence of Aristotle about the relations of Socrates and Plato in the development of the theory of Ideas. It may be of interest now to carry the enquiry further, and to see whether writers later than Aristotle have anything of importance to say about the whole question of the general intellectual relationship between the two men. In particular we must enquire whether or how far they regard or say anything to lead us to regard the Dialogues of Plato as a record of Plato's own thought or as a biographical account of the thought of Socrates or—a third possibility—as both at the same time. And, in addition to this, we shall have to attempt some estimate of the value, if any, which we can put upon such statements—an estimate which would depend in its turn on our answer to the question how far they had access to original sources of information no longer extant.

Dr. Rice Holmes has thrown a flood of light on innumerable passages in Caesar's Commentaries, but in one small matter he has, as I hope to show, darkened counsel. In his recent work on the Roman Republic and the founder of the Empire (Vol. III., pp. 369–71) his anxiety to retain the MSS. reading III. in Caesar (Bell. Ciu. I. 30. 2), ‘Mittit … in Siciliam Curionem pro praetore cum legionibus III.,’ leads him to pervert or neglect the plain meaning of other passages in Caesar. He holds that ‘Curio was not sent to Sicily with any legions,’ and that the ‘Domitian cohorts,’ which Caesar says (Bell. Ciu. I. 25. 1) he sent to Sicily straightway from Corfinium, are identical with the three legions which Caesar (Bell. Ciu. I. 30. 2, u.s.) says he sent with Curio from Brundisium. Dr. Holmes believes that this was what Caesar really meant, though he expressed himself loosely. Let us see how it agrees with Caesar's other statements.

Professor E. Linwood Lehman (of the University of Virginia) writes to point out that Professor W. M. Lindsay, following Christ, Metrik, p. 59, is in error in this note, as Gellius (N.A. VI. 7) gives Annianus, and not Probus, as his authority for the alleged older accentuation exáduersum, and Annianus only stated this as a matter of opinion.

The generally accepted explanation of the -πλος (−πλóος) in these words, that it comes from the root pel- ‘to fold’ (Boisacq, Diet. Etym. s.v. διπλóος), fails to account for the presence of the double ο in -πλóος. May not this -πλóος be identical with πλος [πλó(F)ος] [voyage]? In other languages a word for [voyage] or [journey] has faded into a word for [time] ([mal,] [fois])—e.g. Serb. jedan put [once] (lit. [one journey]); Lett,vien-reiz [once] (lit. [one journey,] reiz being borrowed from Low German, in which reise had already suffered this change of meaning, cf. Endzelin, Bezzenberger's Beiträdge 29. 179 note).

These lines conclude the account of Hermes inventing the primitive method of producing fire by friction, and it is evident that the writer had in mind σ 308:

περ δ ξλα κγχανα θ;καν,

αὖα πλαι περκηλα, νον κεκεασμνα χαλκῷ,

cf. also ε 240. Gemoll accordingly in his edition (1886) read αὖα λαβών, and for so doing was rebuked by Messrs. S. and A. in their best dogmatic manner: ‘Gemoll's αὖα cannot be accepted; οὖλα is sound, though the meaning is not certain.’ In other words: ‘Whether οὖλα makes sense or nonsense, it is right.’ Finally, they say that οὖλα probably means ‘whole’, and this translation is, I think, confirmed by l. 137; but then it follows that the hymn-writer was flatly contradicting the κεκεασμνα in Homer's line, and knew no more about fire-lighting than these trenchant editors. Ignition fuel has a character of its own, and from this point of view Gemoll has the advantage.

No one who has read with reasonable attention the Works and Days, the Theogony, the Shield, and even the fragments of the lost Hesiodic poems, can have failed to notice a peculiar feature. Again and again a passage, be it longer or shorter, is followed by what may be called, if not a true ‘doublet,’ at least an ‘echo’—a second passage reproducing the general idea, and often the more prominent verbal details of the preceding lines. In fact, in these poems we have a series of variants or alternate versions. Editors of the Hesiodic works have indeed drawn attention to many of these ‘echoes,’ but (to the best of my knowledge) they have been content to let the matter rest when they have drawn a distinction between ‘prima’ and ‘altera recensio,’ and have labelled one or other of them as ‘spurious.’ Yet this feature in the Hesiodic vulgate is surely of the highest interest and importance. How came these variant passages to be ‘stitched’ together, and when was the stitching done?

The notorious line, ‘O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta, turanne, tulisti,’ is assigned to Ennius by Priscian, Isidore, and the Explanator in Donatum, as well as by Pompeius in his second quotation of it. In the first, however (287 K), he, like Auctor ad Herennium, Charisius, Donatus, Martianus Capella, and Plotius Sacerdos, gives no author's name. There is thus some reasonable doubt whether the attribution is correct; and this doubt is greatly increased by the remarks of our earliest authority, the Auctor ad Herennium (IV. 12. 18): ‘Vitabimus eiusdem litterae nimiam adsiduitatem, cui uitio uersus hic erit exemplo, nam hic nihil prohibet in uitiis alienis exemplis uti O Tite e.q.s.; et hic eiusdem poetae Quicquam quisquam e.q.s.’ This clearly indicates:

1. That it was unusual for this author to borrow his illustrative examples (cf. IV. 2. 4 sqq., where he states that he prefers to make up his own examples instead of quoting from the best prose authors and poets as most rhetoricians do).

In this paper it is proposed to be argued that the tendency in Latin known as the ‘Iambic Law’ is actuated by one cause, and one only—viz., the intensity of the prior syllable of the two. ‘Intensity’ means higher tone and increased force of utterance (plus sonat, Keil, 4, 426; acuto accentu elatum, as Charisius (K. I, p. 227) says of ut exclamatory). It is of three kinds:

(1) Initial—proper to the first syllable of a disyllabic, tetrasyllabic, or pentesyllabic word of a sentence or (as Bentley first noted) of a verse.

(2) Appropriate to the sense of interrogatives (which therefore must normally stand first) and other words of natural emphasis, such as ego, or the expletives pol, malum, or imperatives, or words like at and sed, before which there is a pause in Latin.

(3) Attaching to particular words in a particular context because of the meaning of the sentence (cf. Donat. ad Phorm. 341, acuenda uox in eo quod ait, ‘tibi’).

In discussing the authorship of the first suasoria preserved in Cod. Vat. Lat. 3864 I said that an argument against its Sallustian origin had been found in the words ‘paulo ante hoc bellum’ of 4, 1. By this phrase the author marks an interval of twenty-seven years, and I suggested, as had been done before, that perhaps this is hardly the way ‘in which a man still under forty would refer to so long an interval which had ended only four years before he was writing.’ The elasticity of Latin words indicating number and magnitude is familiar, but by the kindness of Dr. Rice Holmes I have been reminded of a place where some of the more interesting examples have been collected. Dr. Postgate, on p. lxxiv of his edition of Lucan VIII., mentions among other Caesarian passages B.C. 3, 106, 1, where the few days concerned in ‘Caesar paucos dies in Asia moratus’ are something like three weeks; and B.G. 3, 20, 1, where ‘paucis ante annis’ dates an event which probably happened either twenty-one or twenty-two years before the time with which the narrative is concerned. To these Dr. Holmes would add Cic. in Cat. 3, 1, 3, and, by way of contrast, Caesar B.C. 3, 25, 1. In the former the ‘eruption’ of Catiline on the night of November 8–9 is described by Cicero on December 3, twenty-four days later, as having occurred ‘paucis ante diebus’: in the latter a period of scarcely three months is ‘multi menses.’

There is no established agreement concerning the meaning of πτυχαῖς. The scholiasts give three alternatives: (1) ταῖς ποισεσιν πε διαιρεῖται εἰς στροϕς κα ντιστρΦους κα πῳδς. To the same effect, but more comprehensively, Boeckh interprets: artificiosi flexus numerorum harmoniae saltationis. Similarly Donaldson, Paley, Fennell, and Mezger apply the expression to the artistic turns of poetry; and Gildersleeve's sinuous songs is explained to mean the same thing. Myers translated sounding labyrinths of song, which Sandys modified to sounding bouts of song; but I am not sure that I understand their metaphors. (2) Embroidery of song is apparently a suggestion of the scholiast, since he remarks that πτυχαῖς is suitably (οἰκεως) attached to δαιδαλωσμεν and ποικλλειν—ὥσπερ π κατασκευσματος. But we look in vain for a justification of πτυχα so employed. (3) Then comes the counsel of despair ὕμνων πτυχαῖς: τοῖς ὕμνοις κατ περΦρασιν, for which it is perhaps unnecessary to refer to Rutherford's Annotation, p. 250. I cannot think that anyone is really satisfied with such explanations, although there are no open notes of dissent. There must be some objection which I do not see to the rendering ‘glorious pages of minstrelsy,’ and yet πτυχ is well established in that connexion: Aesch. Suppl. 947 οὐδ' ν ββλων πτυχαῖς κατεσΦραγισμνα where Schuetz rightly finds a reference to charta papyracea )( πνακες. Everyone remembers Gray's ‘Knowledge … her ample page rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll.’

The later MSS. of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius have received little attention. Hildebrand's edition, the last to give an extensive apparatus criticus, appeared in 1842, and seven years later Keil announced his belief that all the MSS. which he had seen in Italy were derived from Laur. 68. 2 (F), the famous eleventh century MS., written at Monte Cassino, and now at Florence. Since Keil, all texts have been based almost exclusively on F, with assistance from its twelfth or thirteenth century copy Laur. 29. 2 (φ), in the enormous number of places where F is now illegible.

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.

May I call the attention of English scholars to a remark by Professor Heinze in his review of Professor Frank's Virgil, a Biography, viz. that the Culex was a favourite present for schoolboys in Martial's time (Mart. 14, 185)?

How all the difficulties vanish if we regard it as Virgil's first publication, a mere tale for a schoolboy, written to help young Octavian in the Greek Mythology class-work! A peg on which to hang this memoria technica had been, we may suppose, supplied to Virgil by a recent incident in Octavian's neighbourhood, the wonderful escape of a goatherd from a serpent.