In the last number of C.Q. (XXV., p. 207) Mr. A. D. Knox has drawn up a list of Theocriteans who, he suggests, ‘have all of them made the most elementary mistake’ of failing to consider the possibility at least that it is the Boy, and not the Fox, who is the subject of καθξῃ in Id. I. 51. From that list he will have to with-draw two names, Gow and Campbell. This construction, which Mr. Knox propounds as a novelty, had been suggested by Mr. Gow in C.R. XLIV., pp. 9–10. For my part, I am not ingenious, and that syntactical possibility would no more have occurred to me independently than would Mr. Gow's three renderings of it, two of which are ‘until he sets her vinous breakfast upon a more solid basis’ and ‘until he sets her grapes on toast’; as little could I ever have thought, with Mr. Knox, of ‘the obvious necessity’ for this fox ‘of rest after a heavy meal’; still less of those further (I must admit) inevitable eventualities1 at which he hints with such delicacy in his quotation (p. 209, item g) of Aelian V. 39. In regard to these and all such matters, to my mind ‘it were to consider too curiously to consider so.’ For even in Greek which represented for my ears some such English as ‘until she set him a-breakfastant upon the dries,’ if there was one thing with which I was completely satisfied it was with the Fox as subject; that seemed so perfectly in keeping both with the happy playfulness of the passage and with the richly idiomatic φατ as applied to a graven image of an animal. But from the fact that I criticized Mr. Gow's note it is obvious that I was familiar with his idea.

Tsc question of the date of Ctesibius has been much obscured of late years by those German scholars1 who assert that Ctesibius the pneumatic and hydraulic engineer mentioned by Vitruvius IX. 8. 2 is distinct and separate from Κτησίβιος Κτησίβιος μηΧανικός who is mentioned by Athenaeus Mechanicus (Βελοπιικά, p. 8, Thevenot), Philo of Byzantium (pp. 56, 67, 72, 77, Thevenot), and Hedylus ap. Athenaeum Naucratitam Deipn. XI., p. 497, d-e = Anthologia Graeca ed. Cougny, Paris (Didot), 1890, Vol. III., p. 298, n. 67.

ἘγχώΣεμλη ӣὕτως καλεῖτо, says the lexicographer, from a source which is unknown, but would appear to be late, since it uses a past tense. Where or by whom Semele was so named is not stated, nor has any explanation been given, so far as I know, that is at all satisfactory, for she certainly has nothing to do with swords. I suggest that she was never called anything of the kind, and the statement arises from a comedian's jest. Aristophanes (Ran. 22) speaks of Διννσоς Σιαμνоν, and the scholiast is careful to inform the humourless who read this play that it is a joke, παρ' ὑπνоιαν, instead of νἱς Δις. So no lexicographer ever tells us that Stamnios is a title of Zeus. I suggest that somewhere, by Aristophanes or another, Dionysos was called νἱς Ἐγχоς, ‘son of Pour-Out,’ a comic formation from γχεῖν. If such a passage came into the late classical or the mediaeval world unguarded by a scholiast, it would be taken with the same seriousness which has attended sundry witticisms directed at Kleon and other butts of Comedy. The reasoning would be most syllogistic and accurate, as thus:

Encho is the mother of Dionysos.

But Semele is the mother of Dionysos.

Therefore Encho is Semele, Q.E.D.

In Italy, at the end of the tenth century, a pedant named Regulus (?) who had a copy of the De Verborum Significatu (or had made extracts from one), wishing to read Plautus (so often quoted by Festus), took the opportunity of an illness to appeal to certain prelates whose church-library contained a MS. of the comedian. Through their stupidity he received not Plautus, but Plato, i.e. Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus. Disappointed, but not deterred, he wrote the following letter (in a sort of rhyming prose, affected by the litterati of that time) on the fly-leaf and returned the MS. (now Bamberg. Class. 18), hoping that by much repetition he might hammer into their dull heads the difference between PL-AU-TUS and PL-A-TO and yet save them from chagrin and resentment (the material for the letter was supplied by Festus, although the opening illustration comes from Chalcidius):

Differentia est qua differunt singula: in Timeo Platonis legitur ANIMA-M post ANIMA-L non perire: in Plauto legitur CANCRUM imitaris, item aeneis COCULIS excocta est mihi omnis misericordia.

Professor Housman states (C.Q. IX, p. 33) that stella never is used to mean sidus, and for authors of the best age I believe he is right; at least I know of no examples except those which he convincingly explains away in the article quoted. There seem, however, to be instances of this usage perhaps as early as the age of the Antonines. Hyginus, fab. cxcv, says of Orion, ab Ioue in stellarum numenim est relatus, quam stellam Orionem uocant. Again, fab. ccxxiv, Crotos…in stellam Sagittarium. Hyginus, it is true, was a fool, and his book is crammed with mistakes, including astronomical blunders; thus, just after the last-quoted passage, and also in fab. cxxx, he names the star Arcturus when he means the constellation Arctophylax, or Bootes. But I cannot think him quite so grossly ignorant, since he was interested in star-myths, as not to know that Orion and Sagittarius are constellations. It may be, however, that the use of stella in these passages is due, not to Hyginus himself, but to the epitomators whose extracts from the original work are all that has come down to us. Of these gentry I can believe almost anything that implies false Latin or general ignorance.

Ancient Greek music was purely or predominantly melodic; and in such music subtleties of intonation count for much. If our sources of information about the intervals used in Greek music are not always easy to interpret, they are at any rate fairly voluminous. On the one hand we have Aristoxenus, by whom musical intervals were regarded spatially and combined and subdivided by the processes of addition and subtraction; for him the octave consisted of six tones, and the tone was exactly divisible into fractions such as the half and quarter, so that the fourth was equal to two tones and a half, the fifth to three tones and a half, and so on. On the other hand we have preserved for us in Ptolemy's Harmonics the computations of a number of mathematicians, who realized correctly that intervals could only be expressed as ratios (e.g. of string-lengths), that the octave was less than the sum of six whole tones and that this tone could not be divided into equal parts. These authorities are Archytas, the Pythagorean of the early fourth century, Eratosthenes (third century), Didymus (first century) and Ptolemy himself (second century A.D.). To these we must add the scale of Plato's Timaeus (35B) and, closely related to it, the computations of the pseudo-Philolaus (ap. Boethium, Mus. Ill, 8) and of Boethius himself (IV, 6). Aristoxenus is less easy to understand than the mathematicians because of the unscientific nature of his postulates. His importance, however, is very great, not only from his comparatively early date but because he claims to champion the direct musical consciousness against the scientific approach of some of his predecessors and contemporaries.

MY ‘Further Considerations on the Site of Vergil's Farm’ have drawn from Professor Rand two more long but lively articles in which he seeks again to defend Pietole and to controvert the evidence of the manuscripts of Probus. The effect of his articles on the mind of any reader who has not both time and inclination to test Professor Rand's statements by comparing them with the passages in his own and in my writings, to say nothing of others to which he refers, is almost certain to be twofold. First an impression that the whole question depends on highly technical points, of manuscript criticism and of the interpretation of puzzling scholia, on which no one but an expert can hope to form a judgement. And, secondly, the feeling that if so devoted a student of Vergil as Professor Rand, declaring himself quite content with the mediaeval tradition, can accept with a perfectly light heart interpretations of what Vergil wrote about his own farm which leave the reader in the end quite in the dark as to where it was and what it was like, then the non-specialist scholar may safely leave the matter in that obscurity, only thanking Professor Rand cordially for the charming gaiety with which he has handled and appears to have dismissed a troublesome enigma.