Since the appearance of Th. Birt's monumental edition of Claudian in 1892, followed in the next year by the Teubner one of Julius Koch, but little has been done for the text of a poet who for more reasons than one deserves something better than neglect. And I shall be glad if the publication of the ensuing notes draws the attention of scholars to the work that has yet to be done. The majority of my corrections were made some sixteen years ago; but only two have seen the light, and these merely in passing mention, Laus Serenae 86 sqq. in my review of the two editions, Classical Review IX p. 167 b, and Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio cons. 48 sqq in my note on Lucan VII 755 (1896).

On November 8, 1894, I read before the Cambridge Philological Society a paper in which the reading and the interpretation of this passage were discussed at length. A brief report of the paper was published in the Proceedings of the Society, Nos. 37–39, p. 16; and the cardinal correction (in v. 274) was received into the text of the Fasti which Professor G. A. Davies published in the Corpus Poetarum Latinorum. The Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society are indeed now among the periodical publications of which the Bibliotheca Philologica Classica takes account: but an acquaintance with their earlier numbers is the privilege of the elect, and the sole mention of the correction that I have seen is an entry in the diligent summary of Ovidian literature in the Jahresbericht vol. 109 p. 282 which runs as follows ‘VI 247 ut tangat ( = Text; st. et t. unnötig).’ Whether the correction is ‘needless’ is not for me to say; but there is excuse for thinking that those who wish to form a judgment on its character will not deem it needless to have the evidence before them.

Not the least interesting feature in Mr. C. C. J. Webb's new edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus are the references to the passages of Roman literature from which his author has quoted or borrowed. One cannot speak too highly of the thoroughness with which the editor has carried out this part of his task; that a few cases of borrowing should have passed unnoticed, and the sources of a few quotations evaded his inquiries, was inevitable.

For the purposes of the new text of Livy which Professor Conway and Professor C. F. Walters are preparing for the Oxford Series of Classical Texts, I undertook in 1908 to examine the Codex Leidensis, which contains Livy's first decade.

Among the multitude of commentators by which an Horatian crux is surrounded it is reasonable to suppose that one or two at least have seen some vestiges of the truth, and I will therefore preface my remarks upon the meaning of this ode and its ultimate stanza by quoting first from an annotation by Dean Wickham.

During the last twelvemonth we have been engaged in finally preparing for press the first volume (I.-V.) of our text of Livy in the Bibliotheca Classica Oxoniensis, and we now desire to submit beforehand to the judgement of scholars some of the chief alterations in the current text that we have been led to adopt. It will be seen that some proportion of them consist of little more than a defence of the MS tradition; and where we have proposed changes of our own, we have, we believe, rigorously confined ourselves not merely to such suggestions as can be readily reconciled with the reading of at least one good manuscript, but to such as provide in each case a tenable explanation of the origin of all the variants in all the MSS that we have consulted. In several difficult places we have become persuaded that corruption has arisen through slight and accountable dislocations of order, and in a still larger number from the incorporation of marginal or interlinear glosses not differing in character from those which still appear in great numbers in all the MSS of the 9th to the 12th centuries, but which have not forced their way into the text. A typical example will be found in our note on V. 2. 8.

My apology for reverting to this subject is a recent article by Mr. W. C. F. Walters in the April number of the Classical Quarterly for 1910 on the signatures in the Vatican Codex (Vat. Reg. 762). Mr. Walters does not seem to have been aware that this manuscript, though not of direct value in the constitution of the text of Livy, is one whose interest from a palaeographical point of view has long been recognized. A number of articles have been written concerning it, most of which deal with the signatures, the subject of Mr. Walters' paper, more fully and more accurately than he has done. Beyond giving the signatures, two of them incorrectly, Walters does nothing more than to conclude that there were eight scribes, who copied 42 quaternions. But a great deal more than this is known about the scribes and the manuscript. In fact, thanks to the ingenious combinations of Chatelain and Traube in piecing together the hints suggested by the signatures, more is known about this particular manuscript and the circumstances under which it was made than is the case with any other manuscript of a classical author of so early a date. It may therefore be worth while to summarize the known data concerning the manuscript, with a brief account of how they were worked out, referring the reader for the details to the articles mentioned in the footnotes.

A good edition of the Catalepton has long been wanted: and Birt's recently Published ‘Erklärung,’ despite some obvious defects, may fairly be regarded as good book. It is at any rate fresh, interesting, and stimulating. The text is the whole, though not always, sensible. The commentary is full without being too full. But, more valuable still, both commentary and introduction constantly bring home to one the probability that nearly all the poems in this collection are genuinely Vergilian— ‘Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie Vergils.’ No editor before Birt has brought before us so clearly the environment out of which these poems came.