IBIS 131-132

quam dolor hie umquam spatio euanescere possit,

leniat aut odium tempus et hora meum.

Here “spatio” means “lapse of time” : it is illustrated by A. A. II. 113

forma bonum fragile est, quantumque accedit ad annos,

fit minor et spatio carpitur ipsa suo.

As regards the whole couplet, besides at this place, it is found also after line 40 in all the MSS. except the Galeanus Vaticanus and Phillipps MS. There, though it fits in with the context, it is not required: here (after 130) it is indispensable. It should therefore be omitted from the text after line 40, where its presence is due to that species of interpolation which consisted in the insertion of other portions of a writer's work kindred in meaning, on which see Mr. Hall's Companion to Classical Texts, p. 198.

ὃσον κατ’ ⋯ρχ⋯ς το⋯ πολ⋯μου οἱ μ⋯ν ⋯νιαυτ⋯ν, οἱ δ⋯ δ⋯ο,οἱ δ⋯ τρι⋯ν γε ⋯τ⋯ν οὐδε⋯ς πλε⋯ω χρ⋯μιζον περο⋯σειν αὐτοὺς, εἰ οἱ Πελοπονν⋯σιοι ⋯σβ⋯λοιεν ⋯ς τ⋯ν χώραν.

C. i., p. 2, 12 (Meister's paging) dicit Peliae regi se eo uelle ire si uires sociique non deessent. Pelias … Argum … iussit … nauim aedificaret.

Considering the next sentence read perhaps n a u e s for uires.

C. ii., p. 3, 25. Graeci aduentare nauibus. mittit ad portam.

M reads nauibus uti. May this conceal e t i t a ? cf. p. II , 2. For change of tense cf. opening lines of C. iii.

In recent years important contributions to the interpretation of the eighth book of Lucan have been made by Professor Postgate (C.Q., vol. I., pp. 75–79, 216–222), and by Mr.J.D.Duff (Journ.of Phil., vol. XXXII., pp.125–135).The following notes make a further attempt to solve some of the many problems presented by the book.

Since the publication of my critical edition in 1889 the Tristia of Ovid has received some attention. A paper in Hermathena, vol. vii. (1890) by Professor R. Ellis contains several conjectural emendations, and in a public lecture on The Second Book of Ovid's ‘Tristia’ (Clarendon Press, 1913), this veteran scholar analysed the intricate contents of Book II. Two learned pamphlets by Dr. R. Ehwald, Ad historiam carminum Ouidianorum recensionemque symbolae (I. Gotha, 1889 ; II. Gotha, 1892) deal with the history of the text, and the textual criticism and interpretation generally. Dr. Paul Vogel's Kritische und exegetische Bemerkungen zu Ovid ‘Tristien’ (Festschrift, Schneeberg [Sachsen] 1891) is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the text and its interpretation.

A New text of the Naturales Quaestiones, prepared by A. Gercke, was issued by the Teubner Press in 1907. Thirteen years earlier Gercke had, in his Seneca-Studien, prepared the way for a new recension by an elaborate classification of the MSS. An Appendix to the Seneca-Studien is the Studia Annaeana (1900), now unfortunately out of print. These works are an indispensable introduction to the study of the text; and they have cost their author an amount of labour which it would be ungracious to utilize, as I propose to utilize it, without very ample recognition. In what follows I shall be largely occupied in criticizing Gercke. I wish, therefore, to begin by allowing the immense debt under which he has put all students of the Naturales Quaestiones.His classification of the MSS. is in itself a fine achievement, and not, I conceive, likely to be challenged. Gercke has, moreover, a very fair perception of the relative merits of his numerous MSS. He has, for example, done excellent service in exposing the inferior character of what used to be regarded as our primary authority for the text, the Berlin MS. E. He cherishes, again, no delusions about the rather perplexing Geneva MS. Z. He has rightly called attention to the paramount importance of the Paris MS. H. I fancy, indeed, that if he and I were to place the codices which he enumerates in an order of merit there would not be any great disagreement between us. I differ from Gercke, in fact, not upon the question which MSS. are the best, but upon the hardly less important question which are essential for criticism.

Reading the Rhesus again the other day, I was struck by something strange in the rhythm of its trimeters. Whatever this was, it seemed to have nothing to do with metrical punctuation (caesura, diaeresis, and like); nor with the use of trisyllabic feet, though on that I shall have something to say. By listening hard I found a clue. The Rhesus is very spondaic at the beginning and the middle of the line.

In the April number of the Classical Quarterly, Mr. H. J. Cunningham calls in question my interpretation of a passage in the speech of Claudius on the claims of the Gallic chieftains, which I will follow his good example by quoting in full. It forms the first legible sentence of Column II.

When this was already in print, I came across an article on ‘Porsons Gesetz’ by K. Witte in Hermes xlix. (1914), pp. 229–245, which led me to another article with the same title by J. Krái in Sitzungsberichte der königlböhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Klasse für Philosophic usw., Jahrgang 1909, ix. Král reckons the percentage of spondees in the fifth foot of the tragic trimeter at 43·4, and he has forestalled me in finding therein a partial explanation of Porson's Law. This suggestion is curtly dismissed by Witte, who sees in the predominance of iambs not a cause but a consequence of the Law.

Owing to the illegibility of parts of the Fronto palimpsest and the carelessness of its first editor, Cardinal Mai, it was impossible, even after the critical labours of Niebuhr and his colleagues, to come to any satisfactory conclusion as to the chronology of the Letters. But the edition of S. A. Naber in 1867, which had the advantage of a fresh collation of the MS. by G. N. Du Rieu, further reinforced subsequently by a new examination of the Codex due to W. Studemund, held out a better prospect of success. The labours of C. Brakman in the same direction, published in 1902, have also thrown fresh light upon the subject. Yet the critical world has long been awaiting the appearance of the authoritative recension by Professor E. Hauler of Vienna, who has spent infinite pains over a further, and what may well be a final, inspection of the Codex. A great desideratum, which it is much to be hoped that the new edition will supply, is an exact indication, as far as may be, of the extent of each lacuna in pages, lines, words, or letters. A knowledge of how much is lost in each case is essential for the true understanding of the sequence of thought and time in what remains.

The five chapters which Quintilian has devoted to ‘Grammatica’ are in many ways the most valuable discussion of the subject which we possess. They are older than any other surviving account, except the remains of Varro De lingua Latino, and the grammar of Dionysius Thrax, and this last, though far more complete than Quintilian in its examination of the parts of speech, has nothing that compares with the other chapters on analogy, etymology, etc., nor does it give so clear a view of ‘grammatica’ as a whole. These chapters do not appear to have been treated by any scholar since Nettleship published his article on ‘Latin Grammar in the First Century’ in the Journal of Philology, vol. xv. If, in the course of this paper, I traverse on certain points the opinions of so distinguished a scholar, let it be understood that I do so with much diffidence, and only after much consideration of the facts as they appear to me.

Our best MSS. agree upon salapantium. But they also agree upon desertum for disertum. Seneca, who quotes the last two words of the line, has salaput(t)ium disertum ; and since he is right about disertum it is supposed that he is right about salaputium ; and salaputium stands in all our texts of Catullus. What it means nobody knows. It is mostly relegated to that numerous class of Latin words of which we conjecture that they are obscene and are content that they should remain obscure.

Lines 53 to 56 stand thus in Weil, Bulletin de Corr. Hell. xix. 393 sqq., and Weir Smyth's Greek Melic Poets, p. 525:

There are two undoubted instances of this use of Neaera in Prudentius which are cited by Mr. Ullman in support of his contention that in Horace another proper name may be similarly employed. I imagine however that to an unprejudiced sense of Latin usage these instances will themselves seem to be strange and in need of explanation.

The opinion has been expressed frequently of late, notably by Professor Mackail and Miss Stawell, that the Odyssey may well be the work of the advanced years of the Homer of the Iliad. Miss Stawell remarks that one of an alert mind must feel that the Odyssey is the poem of an older man—one who has conceived and written a poem before. She suggests that that poem may have been the Iliad. So Professor Mackail argues that a “different mind may come to a poet with the lapse of years and with fresh experiences,” and that “the poet who produced the Iliad in the early prime of his life was a poet capable of the artistic and poetical change that is felt in the Odyssey, among new surroundings, with an altered view of life, with an imaginative ardour burning less strongly and with increased constructional mastery.”

IN the heroic Latin hexameter, after the essential alternation of long and short syllables, by far the most important feature is unquestionably the caesura. Nevertheless, ancient writers on metre dismiss it with the most cursory notice; all we get from them is that the chief caesura is the penthemimeral, the trochaic and hephthemimeral coming next; the fourth trochaic and the bucolic are usually rejected, and the trihemimeral is mentioned only by Ausonius, Modern writers, among whom are Müller and Winbolt, deal with the question at greater length, but do not agree even on fundamental points, and often base their statements on an insufficient analysis of the extant remains of Latin hexameter verse. The purpose of the following paper is to attempt a more complete analysis, at least in the case of Virgil, the acknowledged master of the Latin hexameter. But before we proceed further there are two preliminaries which must be settled—what are the main types of caesura, and how many caesurae are admissible in one verse?

I. In Skr. medín we have an Indo-Iranian -in derivative of a proethnic start-form (s)met-sdos ‘co-sedens,’ whose initial s may have been lost by haplology, but cf. Av. mat ‘μετά.’ Homeric ἂoζoς ‘attendant’ (start-form sm-sodyos) is a like compound, meaning co-sedens and not ‘mitgänger’ (pace Johannson IF. III. 199), but has suffered psilosis. Out of composition, unless the ‘suffix’ conceals a posterius, we may have a further cognate in Lat. sodalis ‘boon-companion,’ wherein sodā- may have meant something like ‘session’ (the council or board of elders in the Scotch kirk).