VI. 6. 8. In the year 386 B.C. a combination of dangers, especially the rumour of a Latin revolt, led the other Military Tribunes, on the advice of the Senate, to place the direction of affairs wholly in the hands of the aged Camillus, who happened, according to the tradition, to be one of their number. Camillus accepts the responsibility with modest diffidence, but promises to do his best:

ingens inde ait onus a populo Romano sibi, qui se dictatorem iam quartum creasset, magnum ab senatu talibus de se iudiciis eius ordinis, maximum tam honorato collegarum obsequio iniungi.

X. 13. 10, with X. 33. 3. (Fabius Maximus is protesting against his own re-election as consul in defiance of the law.)

Et ille quidem in recusando perstabat: quid ergo attineret leges ferri rogitans quibus per eosdem, qui tulissent, fraus fieret; iam regi leges non regere.

Mrs. Dall, in her article A Seventh-Century English Edition of Virgil (p. 176 infra), shows that Virgil glosses taken from marginalia in the same MS. of the poems often preserve something of their original coherence in the two kindred glossaries, Affatim and the Second Amplonian, in spite of all the reshuffling of these two collections. Thus a small group of Virgil items appears in Affatim on p. 491 of Goetz's apograph (in Vol. IV. of the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum): (no. 2) Carecta, (no. 3) Crateras, etc. The second last of this ‘Virgil cluster’ (as Mrs. Dall calls it) is (C.G.L. IV. 491, 5) Cada: vasa vinaria. It appears also in Ampl. II. (C.G.L. V. 272, 63) Ca[t]da: vas<a> vinaria, and in (the cognate) Ampl. I. (C.G.L. V. 354, 75) Cada: vasa vinaria, and is apparently taken (by all three compilers), ultimately or immediately, from a marginal annotation on Aen. 1, 195 ‘uina bonus quae deinde cadis onerarat Acestes’ for in the Virgil Glossary printed by Goetz in C.G.L. IV. 427–470 we find (p. 432, no. 24) Cadis: vasis vinariis.

A General treatment of Greek compounds seems much to be desired. It would have to be undertaken by one who had an up-to-date philological equipment, to which I cannot lay claim. But rather with the hope of eliciting discussion on the subject and learning from others I offer the following observations, and in further study of the subject should be grateful to anyone who would advise as to the exact statistics that may be desirable over and above what I give below. I was led to the subject by a feeling that the treatment of many individual compounds by editors was far from satisfactory, and that possibly a collection of the material might help to bring out the exact meaning of some of the well-known difficulties in the Tragedians. One is dealing here with a highly developed and somewhat arbitrary poetic idiom, and it may perhaps be impossible, as one must admit from the outset, always to make precise the poet's meaning, but it is worth while to make the attempt.

Everyone interested in Latin Etymology knows the last word on mehercle, that the old vocative of meus is prefixed to the old Second Declension form Herc(u)lus, Voc. -lě. Without discussing whether this explanation is wholly true or partly wrong, I wish here to disqualify two pieces of evidence. Both originate from a marginal annotation on Rufinus' translation of Eusebius' Church History (4, 9, 3 ‘illud mehercule magnopere curabis’) in, I think, a seventh-century English MS. These marginalia were used for the Leyden Glossary and for the common source of the E E (Épinal and Erfurt) and Corpus Glossaries. The compiler of Leid. transferred them unaltered to his pages; and in the section devoted to Rufinus glosses we find (§ 35, 19) Mehercule: mi fortis. The other compiler often recasts them for dictionary purposes. He gave this item the form Herculus: fortis (Ep. 11 A 26 = C.G.L. V. 364, 23 = Corp. H. 54). But of course the original annotation mi fortis was a mere lucky guess, and the substitution of ‘Herculus’ for Hercules was sheer ignorance.

The Times Literary Supplement of November 8, 1917, contained, under the title of Socrates recognitns, a review of Plato's Biography of Socrates, a lecture delivered by Professor A. E. Taylor to the British Academy in the early part of last year. The opening sentence of the review is as follows: ‘Next to the problem of the Gospels ranks that of the Platonic dialogues amongst those most vital to the history of the human spirit.’ A little further down the reviewer says: ‘It is much to the credit of British scholarship—and especially to that of the University of St. Andrews—that it should have attacked these problems with untiring energy, and propounded solutions which, although they run counter to most of the traditional tendencies of historical and philosophical criticism, have not only challenged attention, but are carrying conviction even to unlikely quarters.’ And again, at the end of the article, we read this passage: ‘It is scarcely to be thought that the ground won by the scholars of St. Andrews will be held without counter-attack; but this is slow to mature, and in the meanwhile such essays as the subject of this notice, with which we may couple the paper recently read to the British Academy by Professor Burnet on the Socratic doctrine of the soul, serve to buttress and consolidate the position.’

I Purpose in this essay to declare by means of a few chosen examples the theory and method upon which I have for over twelve years been proceeding to the restoration of the text of Propertius. I had always hoped to present my results first in their final form; but the long delays and the immediate circumstance of war compel me to a partial presentation of what is now in all essentials a finished work. The examples I choose are mostly those which I used in 1911 in a paper read before the Philological Societies of Cambridge and Oxford; nothing but detail has been changed in any part of my theory since that date.

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to prove that Virgil was one source of the Glossary which is printed within square brackets in Goetz;' Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, Vol. IV. pp. 4–198, and to which Professor Lindsay, in his article on the Abstrusa Glossary and the Liber Glossarum in the Classical Quarterly for July of last year (Vol. XL No. 3), has given the name of Abolita (Abol.); secondly, to show, as the result of assigning batches of glosses to Virgil, that certain corrections must be made in the Thesaurus Glossarum Emendatarum. The corrections there made likewise hold good for the Latin Thesaurus, so far as it goes, which has taken over the errors without question from the Thes. Gloss.

Bergk in his Griechische Litertur geschichte, Vol. I., pp. 708, 709, 710, 715, and elsewhere, rejected all verses in the Odyssey where reference is made to Eurynome, a servant or attendant in the palace of Odysseus. His comments on p. 715 concerning the first verses of the twentieth book are typical: ‘Right at the beginning of this book the appearance of Eurynome shows the activity of the imitator. This very passage proves beyond a doubt that Eurynome had no part in the original poem, and that a later bard arbitrarily used her name instead of the name of Eurycleia, who was the true female attendant in the old form of the Odyssey.’

This poem, first printed by Scaliger in his Ausonianae lectiones, lib. II c. 29, from a MS in the possession of Cuiacius, will also be found in Burman's anthologia Latina, vol. II p. 321, in Meyer's, no. 1032, and in Baehrens' poetae Latini minores, vol. V p. 350. In date, combining as it does the prosody of plānetae with the syntax of sex (for sexiens) denos, it can hardly be earlier than Prudentius and may easily be much later. It is edited by Riese from eight MSS better than the Cuiacian, three of the 9th century, three of the 10th, one of the 11th, and one of the 12th: the best of these, and the only one of which he professes to give a full collation, is C, Aug. 167 at Karlsruhe.

How any editor of Plautus can become one of the slash-cut-and-carve critics I cannot understand. The fair garden-beds of Plautus are scored all over with the hoof-prints of the reckless emender. Take this line of the Poenulus for example. Hanno gets a sight of his two long-lost daughters and is surprised to find how they have grown:

Haecine meae sunt filiae?

Quantae e quantillis iam sunt factae!

His would-be son-in-law, not a very refined youth, says with a smile:

Scin quid est?

Thraecae sunt: in celonem sustolli solent.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the famous inscription from Heraclea (around which so many controversies have raged) is the opening section of the extant text, where from a given form of procedure it is required to determine the subject matter. A solution of this puzzling problem, which I proposed some months ago, has recently been made the subject of an interesting article in this journal by Dr. E. G. Hardy. Mr. Hardy has long been engaged in this field, and has rendered much useful service. In this article, however, he seems to be interested in my views chiefly in their relation to his own theory. This is apparent in his agreements with me. For example, one aim of my study was to identify the professiones of Cicero's letters ad Att. xiii. 33, 1, and ad Fam. xvi. 23, 1, with those provided for in the first section of the inscription. It appeared that the returns mentioned by Cicero were registrations of property, that they were to be made yearly, and that they had their prototype in the annual property census of Egypt. It also seemed clear that Caesar's recensus populi of 46 was modelled on the Egyptian kατ' oίkíαm άπoγραφήiKíαν. With these preliminary conclusions (by no means unimportant in themselves) Mr. Hardy is not unwilling to agree. He even goes so far as to say that I have made a good case for ‘a new system of professiones somehow relating to property and introduced in 46.’ He thinks too that the settlement of the frumentations as a part of a more comprehensive legislative scheme (as my view implies) would be most appropriate. So far so good, but when it comes to the vital point of admitting a connection between these matters and vv. 1–19 of the Tablet he draws back as if from some fatal step.

Georg. I. 36 sq.:

quidquid eris,—nam te nec sperant Tartara regem, nec tibi regnandi ueniat tam dira cupido;—

Mr. Page's note puts well what seems the customary view of this famous parenthesis: ‘The force of nam deserves attention. Having used the phrase quidquid eris, which sums up the whole passage from line 24, as though there were no other form of deity left which Augustus could assume, Vergil adds this explanatory sentence to show why he had not mentioned the fourth division into which deities were divided, viz. those of the underworld. The fourfold division of deities being well known, Vergil cannot omit the fourth without stating the reason for which he does so.’

There is a note of uneasiness in many modern appreciations of Sophocles, and particularly of his Electra. A symptom is the familiar apology that, after all, he was the perfect artist. Jebb himself betrays a certain moral discomfort in the midst of his enthusiasm for the brightness of the morning sun that greets the righteous avenger. Professor Murray has the courage to state as a challenge the criticism which less candid writers hint by inuendo. By the very frankness of his indictment he helps us to face, instead of shirking, the issue. Unlike Euripides and Aeschylus, he says, Sophocles takes the story exactly as he finds it:

He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences: they killed in the fine old ruthless way.

Since the time of Burman it has been amongst the aims of Phaedrian scholarship to endeavour to make good the imperfections of the direct tradition by recourse to the indirect. That losses have been sustained, one piece of evidence is enough to show. In the sixth line of his Preface to Book I. Phaedrus says that trees speak in his fables; but no trees speak in any fable now left to us, either in the five books as handed down in PR or in the Perottine Appendix.