Dissecting criticism of Homer has proved to its own satisfaction that certain books of the Iliad are late, and have special affinity with the Odyssey. This Odyssean connexion is established by collecting verbal and metrical peculiarities and grammatical usages, which are found outside these parts of the Iliad only in what is held to be the later poem. The chief delinquents are I, K, Ψ and Ω but many would add the Apaté, Nestor's reminiscence in Λ, and other tracts. There is not complete agreement as to the limits of the category; but generally it is assumed that the four books, and, when necessary, other parts of the Iliad, have the Odyssean taint. Strangely enough, Θ is not so treated. Yet, as Mr. Andrew Lang has remarked, it ought to be Odyssean, if, as so many think, it was composed as a ‘prologue’ to I.

I have always found it a sore trial of my faith to regard suam ipsam as = suam dominant, and can only join ipsam with matrem. This leaves suam stand alone, as = suam dominam. That use is doubtless defensible of a wife or mistress in the case of a lover; but it is hardly possible of a sparrow, to whom the lady does not ‘belong’ in that relation. That one who is not lover or husband may know suos is no proof that he may know suum or suam alone.

The great object of Augustus in celebrating Ludi saeculares in 17 b.c. was to encourage the belief in himself and the consequent active loyalty to himself, as the restorer of the pax deorum,—the good relation between the divine and human inhabitants of Rome. So far he had tried to attain this end by the ancient usual and proper means, i.e. by carrying out the various regulations of the ius diuinum, so many of which had long been neglected. But in that year he determined to undertake a special celebration, with the design of more effectually stamping the impression already made on the minds of the people; and it so happens that we have more detailed knowledge of this celebration than of any other Roman rite of any period. This is fortunate, for it stands on the margin between an old and a new régime, like the Aeneid of Virgil, who had died two years earlier: that great religious poem was just becoming known, and there is an allusion to it in the hymn of which I am going to speak. The Ludi were the outward or ritualistic expression of the idea immortalized by the poet, that a regeneration is at hand of Rome and Italy, in religion, morals, agriculture, government: old things are now to be put away, a new and glorious era is to open. Henceforward the Roman was to look ahead of him in hope and confidence, trusting in Augustus, the Aeneas of the actual State.

Except Goldbacher and Dee, most critics have held the latter part of the last book of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius to be almost entirely autobiographical; and many have taken the same view of the first chapter of the first book. Rohde, in particular, has championed this theory, and incidents of the last book are freely included in biographies of Apuleius.

One of the grounds for arguing that the books of the Iliad, I, K, Ψ, Ω, are late and Odyssean, is that there are found in them uses of certain prepositions, especially ⋯π⋯, ⋯ν, ⋯ξ, which appear in the Odyssey, but not, or only very rarely, in the other twenty books of the Iliad.

These notes are written with special reference to Jebb's edition, as having practically superseded every other. In spite of its many and undoubted merits, this edition contains more errors than the general public believes; and if I am compelled by the nature of the case to touch only upon the latter in the following observations, I hope I shall not be supposed to be blind to the former. In such a case one must needs appear to write, as De Quincey has it, ‘in a mood of revolting arrogance.’

2. Latin annus, ‘year.’

I still hold firmly to the conviction, already expressed in the Classical Review (13,398), that annus is a derivative of agit ‘drives,’ and a cognate ⋯γών ‘dies festus,’ though I no longer think I was right in deriving it from agno-. Morphologically, the nearest parallel to annus, as I now understand it, is Skr. ájman- ‘Bahn, Zag,’ and annus is the route, path, cursus of the circling year, cf. anniuersarius, annus circumagitur, περιπλομένων (περιτελλομένων) ⋯νιαυτ⋯ν.

The last volume of Cicero's Orations, as published in the Oxford Bibliotheca Scriptorum Classicorum, was lately entrusted to me, and will be published in the course of the present year. Meanwhile I desire to record in this paper some of the more important results of my study of the MSS., and, following on this, to indicate several places where our current texts seem to be susceptible of correction and improvement.

The text of the lately discovered fragment of Antiphon's last and greatest speech, as restored by Professor Nicole, has been used by its editor to sanction some novel theories regarding the orator's public career.

Signor Ferrero has courteously replied to the article in the Classical Quarterly of July, 1909, in which I gave reasons for preferring Caesar's First Commentary to his reconstruction. He thinks that I failed to seize his main point, which, he says, is represented by this question: Why did Caesar conclude an alliance with Ariovistus in 59 b.c. and break it in the following year? Any one who may have read my article with care will have seen that I recognized that this point was capital.

The object of this paper is partly to plead a cause, partly to proclaim a grievance. The last domain of ancient Greek life to attract the serious attention and study of modern scholars has been that of Greek Religion; and the exposition of it has revealed its many vital points of contact with the moral and spiritual energy and the artistic and poetic monuments of the ancient Hellenic race. An enthusiastic votary of this study might venture to hope that some general acquaintance with its facts and ideas would henceforth be recognized as belonging to the general curriculum of Hellenic culture. But any one merely interested in the good workmanship of the classical commentary ought at least to insist that something more than a general acquaintance with this subject should be regarded by those who set themselves to edit certain portions of the Greek classics as an essential preliminary and as a necessary part of their scholarly equipment. The authors to whom this rule specially applies are Hesiod, Pindar and the Attic Dramatists. A satisfying commentary on Hesiod is still a desideratum; and for such an achievement a long apprenticeship in anthropology and religious studies would be a necessity.

Ancient writers tell conflicting stories of the last hours of Agrippina, the mother of Nero. Modern commentators have been equally at variance in their attempts to harmonize them. A consideration, however, of all the evidence makes a reasonable account of the tragedy seem even yet possible. Naturally, most confidence has been put in the more circumstantial narrative of Tacitus.

Nec, si rationem siderum ignoret, poetas iniellegat said Quintilian of Γ ραμματική; and in the history of scholarship during the last two centuries there is much to confirm his sentence. The elements of astronomy were once part of a scholar's ordinary equipment, and astronomical allusions in the poets, if expounded at all and not left by the editor to the knowledge and intelligence of the reader, were usually expounded aright. The first three lines of Lucan's seventh book are briefly but correctly explained by the scholiast, and Oudendorp so late as 1728 was content to quote his explanation: then Cortius and Burmann and Bentley came forward to misinterpret them, and they have been misinterpreted ever since, because editors of the classics no longer know which way the sun moves.

This (Schöne's) must be the right reading, not ζυγγ⋯ν for the next line begins with a vowel, and by Headlam's canon the final dactyl must be pure. Compare also 291: