Critics, once so busy with Manilius, have left him alone since Housman's edition was completed a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps I shall seem rash to break the silence by challenging a few of his verdicts. I do so in no spirit of iconoclasm, but rather believing that Housman wrote for readers who will occasionally call him wrong—at their peril, and on their knees.

The present paper proposes to discuss three passages in Tacitus, Histories 3 where current interpretations have led to difficulties which can be shown to be baseless so soon as it is realized that Tacitus is willing on occasion to sacrifice truth and clarity to stylistic effect. In each of these passages the same literary device lies at the root of the matter, a device which (for want of a better term) may be labelled ‘die grouping of participles’: the juxtaposition of participles in a sentence to die detriment of strict chronological order.

A Fragment of ancient philosophy is like a code message which it is the task of the scholar to decipher. The cryptogram has come down to us, but not the key. In case this beginning should be thought obvious by anyone, let me say at once that I do not believe a word of it, though I believe that the attitude it epitomizes is by no means uncommon and is part of the explanation of a tendency to mishandle philosophical fragments. The attitude is to be found, for example, in some things M. Untersteiner has said in his recently translated book on the Sophists1 about the meaning of the well-known statement of Protagoras:

In C.Q., N.S. iv (1954), 60 Mr. D. A. Russell makes several suggestions on the text of Plutarch's de genio Socratis. In one passage he appears to me to misdirect his suspicions:

583 b:

Mr. Russell objects to on the ground that ‘since Lysis is already dead, cannot signify “beforehand”’, and proposes the pluperfect , understanding in this compound to mean ’.

Although not tenable in details, Porphyrion's interpretation seems to me generally preferable to Bentley's, despite the very wide acceptance of the latter. Horace is in all seriousness defending his claim to originality. On the Bentleian interpretation, it is a curious defence that he is made to offer:

Mr. G. B. KERFERD, in C.Q. xlviii (1954), 84 ff. writes of ‘Plato's Noble Art of Sophistry’. He suggests that Plato thought there was a ‘Noble Art’ of sophistry, other than philosophy itself; and he seeks to find this Art in the better and worse arguments of Protagoras. This suggestion is, unfortunately, based on a mistranslation of Plato, Sophist 231 a: .

In his monumental edition of Callimachus, R. Pfeiffer has questioned the authenticity of three epigrams. More than fifty years ago U. v. Wilamowitz- Moellendorff had rejected Ep. 33 and Ep. 36 4; but Pfeiffer seems to be the first critic to exclude Ep. 63 (= Anth. Pal. 5. 23) from the collection of Callimachus' epigrams. Although he sets forth his objections in a long footnote, none of the reviewers has so far discussed this point.

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i (1937; Cairo 1939, Arabic section).

The last epigrammatist named by Meleager as contributing to his Garland is Phanias, who, with Meleager's customary irrelevance, is said to be represented there by cornflowers . No inferences can be drawn from his place in the catalogue, which is neither chronological nor topographical in arrangement, and with one possible exception the epigrams give no hint of his home or date. In A.P. 6. 299.

As shown by Goodwin (Moods and Tenses, § 197, 208, and 216) and corroborated by A. C. Moorhouse (C.Q. xl (1946), 1), with the future whether indicative, infinitive, or participle is proved by manuscript authority to be a permissible, though comparatively rare, Attic usage. Moorhouse's case, moreover, is strengthened, rather than weakened, as he supposed, by the usage of Lucian, for, though the construction may be condemned in Solecist, §§ 2 and 8, there are considerably more examples of with the future in Lucian than Asinus

Harmonides, speaking to his teacher Timotheus, says, (Harmonides init.)

I suggest that should be emended to (or possibly ) for the following reasons:

1. The phrase is, in any case, very difficult indeed after , but becomes virtually impossible in view of the order, as we have as the subject of the first four infinitives, as the subject of , and then a reversion to as the subject of

Lucian's suggestions as to what was meant by the man who called him a literary Prometheus by no means exhaust the possibilities. This is perhaps to be expected, as Lucian's reply to this lawyer is probably a or introduction to the reading of a major dialogue, and he has merely taken advantage of the fact that he was called a literary Prometheus to do some self-advertisement as the founder of a new literary genre.

Thus the passage is printed in the Teubner edition of Seneca's Dialogues by E. Hermes, who, on the strength of Aen. 8. 702 f. (‘et scissa gaudens vadit Discordia palla, quam cum sanguineo sequitur Bellona flagello’), adds a note on the quotation ‘versus sunt Vergilii a Seneca licenter mutati’.

Now the imputation to Seneca of such gross alteration of Virgil can only be supported if we disregard or eject the evidence to the contrary. As only the last five words are actually Virgilian; as Seneca himself says ‘aput vate nostra?’; as out at the beginning of the second line may introduce a second quotation (so Rossbach); and as est, which Gertz secluded, has a part to play if the lines are by different poets, it is safer to take a step backwards and dispose the passage thus:

In a recent paper I discussed the origin of the concept of the climata in Greek geography, and adduced reasons for attributing the formulation and elaboration of the concept to Hipparchus (fl. 150 B.C.). The above passage in Strabo was naturally mentioned in the course of the argument, and I drew attention in a footnote to the unsatisfactory nature of the account given by him of the climata. I now propose to examine the passage in more detail