Historians of the Roman Empire have been nearly unanimous in giving the ill-fated Caesar whom Hadrian designated as his successor the cognomen Verus ascribed to him by Spartianus.2 Following the same biographer Annalists have given the names Aurelius and Annius to his father and grandfather. Noris in his Epistola Consularis3 maintained against Pagi that the original names of this prince were Lucius Ceionius Commodus, that neither he nor any of his family bore the names Aurelius, Annius, or Verus ascribed to them in the Historia Augusta, but that the name Verus has been mistakenly reflected upon him from his more famous son L. Verus Augustus the colleague of M. Aurelius Antoninus. De Tillemont4 rejected Noris’ opinion on purely literary grounds, saying, ‘il est bien difficile de croire qu'un auteur ait esté assez ignorant et assez malheureux pour nommer toujours un prince, mesme en faisant exprès son histoire, d'un nom qu'il n'a jamais eu.’ By consequence the mistake, if mistake it be, is become inveterate and is repeated5 down to our own day. Klebs6 alone rejects the jiame, and the error is not corrected in Dr. Bury's edition of Gibbon.

I will next briefly enumerate the evidence for the separate poems, beginning with the Trojan series.

There can be no doubt that the Romans were very much influenced in their use of interstate arbitration by the Greeks. This statement can be made without affecting the question as to whether the actual principle of arbitration was known to them before their contact with the Greeks. Either the practice sprang up independently in Italy and Greece owing to similarity of conditions, or else it was part of the same stock of political and social ideas inherited by each race alike from common ancestors. It would be improbable if two nations of such close relationship and such similar civilisation could not have inherited so natural an idea or developed it along similar lines, and indeed the very widespread practice of arbitration in private law at Rome has none of the signs of an imported idea.

The Pavian inscription (C.I.L. v. 6416), which is usually interpreted as indicating Augustus' last settlement of the succession, contains the name of Claudius besides those of the Julian line. Mommsen (Ber. d. säcks. Gesellsch. 1850, pp. 315 ff.) takes this fact as indicating that Claudius, though not adopted into the Julian line, was still in some way considered a member of the imperial household. I think that there is good ground for suspecting the part relating to Claudius as probably added by him at a later day, and that all arguments regarding his early life which are based upon its presence on the arch should submit to a resifting.

In the beginning of 1906 Professor S. A. Naber devoted a long paper in Mnemosyne to emendations and remarks upon Apollonius Rhodius. The Professor, following Buttmann, is of opinion that Apollonius was an ignorant imitator of Homer and rebukes him for the introduction of many ‘barbarous forms.’ This opinion, however, though it may contain some truth, is the result of much exaggeration, for Apollonius imitated Homer as a rival rather than as a servile flatterer, and naturally and deliberately introduced many late forms into his Epic poem. I have no wish to deny that the Professor's paper contains acute and learned remarks, but certainly it does not show that familiarity with his author which might have been expected from so eminent a scholar. For instance, where a particular form is objected to for any reason, it is of no use to propose an emendation for one passage only in which it occurs and to leave other passages unnoticed.

Magni uir ingenii fuerat (Maecenas) si illud egisset uia rectiore, si non uitasset intellegi, si non etiam in oratione difflueret. uidebis itaque eloquentiam ebrii hominis inuolutam et errantem et licentiae plenam. Maecenas De Cvltvsvo.* quid turpius ‘amne siluisque ripa comantibus?’ uide ut§ ‘alueum lyntribus arent uersoque uado Ĵ remittant hortos.’ quid? si quis ‘feminae cincinnos** crispat et labris columbatur incipitque suspirans, ut ceruice lassa fanantur nemoris tyranni.’ ‘inremediabilis factio rimantur epulis lagonaque temptant domos et spe mortem exigunt’ Sen. Epp. cxiv 4–5 (as printed in Hense's edition).

Among the problems of ancient history of which no solution has yet been generally recognized as definitive is that of the battle-field where the struggle between Pompey and Caesar was decided. Colonel Leake's exposition was rejected by von Göler and Sir William Napier; and the paper in which he endeavoured to vindicate it produced little effect. Napier and von Göler constructed theories which were vitiated by the misleading maps on which they worked. M. Léon Heuzey, the chief of the Macedonian mission which collected information for the contemplated final volume of Napoleon the Third's Histoire de Jules César, performed a valuable service by preparing, with the aid of an engineer officer, M. Laloy, the first trustworthy survey of the Pharsalian region; but his dissertation on the battle, published in 1886, was bitterly derided by Colonel Stoffel, who, however, appropriated his predecessor's maps without acknowledgment. About the same time Mr. Perrin published in the American Journal of Philology a valuable article, which, although it convinced many that the battle had been fought, as von Göler, Napier, and Long maintained, on the northern bank of the Enipeus, was necessarily written without any knowledge of the works of Heuzey and Stoffel.

If in the various books of the Iliad and Odyssey the speeches or personated lines are separated from the rest, the metrical phenomena will, when tabulated, be found to show a perceptible divergence from those of the narrative verse. The differences are worth some notice. They throw into sharp relief the subtle rules that control the narrative type; and, what is more important, they do to some extent suggest the principle, of which these rules are the necessary outcome. There is also involved another point of considerable interest; for the contrast between narrative- and speech-verse exactly coincides, it must be remembered, with a very remarkable difference in the use of the augment; and the more this coincidence is considered, the less easy it will be found to dismiss it as accidental.

In the Classical Quarterly, vol. ii. No. 2, reviewing Breiter's recent text of the Astronomica, together with Housman's edition of Book i, I made a number of suggestions of my own on some of the principal difficulties in the text and interpretation of Manilius. I did not, however, bring my notes down beyond Book i. In the present paper I propose to traverse some of the more thorny places of ii. and iii. I shall try to make what I have to say to some extent a continued review of Breiter (and even of Housman).

v. 2. ‘Don't parade philosophy: avoid asperum cultum et intonsum caput et quidquid aliud ambitionem peruersa uia sequitur.’ So the MSS. Hense adopts Gertz's ingenious conjecture ambitio nempe. I have before me a list containing some thirty examples of the use of nempe by Seneca. It is very definitely a dialogue particle and is used (1) to introduce the answer to a question, where it is implied that the answer is obvious (‘Why, to be sure’), (2) to introduce a clause which shews that a statement just urged by the interlocutor though true in itself in no way weakens the original speaker's point ‘Yes, but’ or ‘After all said and done’ and (3) to introduce a premiss the truth of which the interlocutor must grant‘I take it,’ ‘You know.’For examples I may refer to Ira 3.26.1 quare fers aegri rabiem . . . puerorum proteruas manus ? nempe quia etc.; Ep. 4.9 ‘ at uictor te duci iubebit ?’ eo nempe quo duceris (sc. to death).; Ep. 124.6 nempe uos (the Stoics)... dicitis. There is absolutely no parallel in Seneca to the parenthetical use which Gertz assumes here, and for which I should expect rather the concessive sine dubio (which indeed is opposed to nempe in Heluia 9.7).

Mr. Garrod has earned the gratitude of all students of Manilius by his detection of the ratio of the series in iii. 599–615, and he is fully justified in his contention that tricenas in 612 is ‘one of the few emendations which can be proved mathematically.’ I owe him a special acknowledgment, inasmuch as his discovery enables me to add one more to the list and affords me an opportunity of establishing what was correct and correcting what was erroneous in my discussion of the whole passage (590–617) in Silua Maniliana, pp. 30 sqq. Let me do the last first. My suggestion of uix for bis in 616 of course disappears; bis sex is required by the series: and in 595–6 (of which more presently) the number meant is 75, not 76.

Was there a second legion in Palestine at all ? Mommsen has raised a doubt. In his note on C.I.L. iii 6641 ‘M. Iunio Maximo Leg. Augg. Leg. X Fr….’ he says ‘Quo tempore titulus positus est (about 200 A.D.) provinciam Palaestinam una sola legio obtinuerit necesse est X Fretensis; nam Augustorum vocabulum legatis legionis non solet addi nisi simul provinciae praesunt. Legio VI Ferrata quamquam a Dione (lv 23) in Iudaea collocatur, vide ne castra habuerit in Batanaea (quo ducunt milites eius duo Capitoliade oriundi, C.I.L. vi 210 anni 208 et x 532) quae fuit sub legato Syriae Phoenices.’ On C.I.L. iii 6703 similarly he says ‘legatus legionis Augusti vocabulum raro adsumit’ But the title ‘leg. Aug.’ does seem to be used with sufficient frequency of a simple ‘legatus legionis’ to invalidate Mommsen's argument: e.g. Dessau 1026 ‘leg. Aug. leg. xi C. p. f.’; 1036, 1055, 1070, 1141 etc: and the soldiers of Capitolias might just as easily have served across the border in Palestine. Zangemeister, who first published the inscription of Iunius Maximus {Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins x 1887, 49–53) took the same view as Mommsen, that he was the provincial legatus; but later (ib. xi 138) he admitted that in that case the words ‘pro praetore’ would have been added.