Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described.

In determining the time of Archilochos it is useless to begin with the eclipse—an event which strongly appeals to the modern mind, as it seems open to exact astronomical and mathematical computation. Even granted from the first and as a matter of course that Archilochos saw the eclipse and that it was total or nearly total in the place where he saw it, there are two objections: (1) the astronomical data for the two eclipses of 711 B.C. and 648 (or 647) B.C. are as yet insufficient even for Paros and Thasos; (2) we do not know for certain where the eclipse poem was written: probably it was in Paros, as the speaker is Lykambes, but it may be Thasos, not to mention Euboia, Crete, or Sicily. The whole thing is elusive, and Alan Blakeway, when he stated the case for 711—perhaps ‘too emphatically’, as he concedes—is quite clear in this respect. The most he affirms is that ‘there is nothing to choose between the two eclipses astronomically’; and what he asks for is a new examination of ‘the literary evidence without that unconscious bias in favour of the 648 B.C. eclipse which so far has influenced it’. That is quite a reasonable demand, and it is only with Blakeway's re-examination of the literary evidence that I find fault.

So run two lines on the title-page of Marcianus 250 (X: xi+xiv cent.). Whether the Moralia still benefit the character or no, they may still serve to sharpen the wits; for in spite of the work of Meziriac, Reiske, and Wyttenbach, Madvig, Bernardakis, and Wilamowitz, to mention only some of those who have brought learning and sagacity to the task of emendation, there are still hundreds of passages which cry halt to the reader and challenge him to divine what Plutarch wrote.

No sooner had Pompey and the Senate fled in terror from Rome before Caesar's approach than the fears of those who remained in the city were heightened by new portents. The Etruscan soothsayer, Arruns, who was called in by the frightened townspeople to discover the will of the gods, proceeded to give such instructions as might be expected from one of his profession, and then, on sacrificing a bull, found that the omens were unfavourable. As if this were not enough, at v. 639 the famous Neopythagorean scholar and friend of Cicero, P. Nigidius Figulus, appeared in order to consult the skies, for, as Lucan observes, he was in advance of even the Egyptians in his knowledge of astrology. He began by remarking that, if this science meant anything at all, considerable trouble was in store for the Romans; and then went on in vv. 651–65 to reveal what he saw when he looked at the heavens, expressing his meaning in words which, apart from a couple of technical expressions, may be immediately translated with some incidental interpretations as follows:

‘If the cold baneful planet Saturn were kindling his black fires summo caelo’ (the inference, of course, is that he was not doing so), ‘a flood like that of Deucalion would have been pouring from Aquarius’ (or, because Aquarius is sometimes identified with Deucalion, the meaning may be ‘Aquarius would have been pouring out such a flood as could be expected from him’) ‘and the entire land would have been hidden in the spreading expanse of water.

Athenaeus, xii. 526 a, quotes three elegiac couplets of Xenophanes on the luxurious ways which the men of Colophon learned from the Lydians. Since the lines lack theological or metaphysical interest, they have not received so much attention as other fragments of Xenophanes, and few attempts have been made to unravel their exact meaning. But it is rash to hurry over anything written by Xenophanes, and these lines are in their way as interesting as anything else that he wrote. For they show what he, a penetrating and serious critic, thought about one aspect of the impact of East on West, of barbarian on Greek, and they contain his only known judgement on historical events. On examination they raise more questions than are usually found in them. They may be quoted as Diels printed them:

⋯βρоσ⋯νας δ⋯ μαθ⋯ντες ⋯νωφελ⋯ας παρ⋯ Λνδ⋯ν,

⋯φρα τνρανν⋯ης ἦσαν ἄνεν στνγερ⋯ς,

ἤϊσαν εἰς ⋯γоρ⋯ν παναλоνργ⋯α φ⋯ρε' ἔχоντες,

оὐ με⋯оνς ὥσπερ χ⋯λιоι εἰς ⋯π⋯παν,

αὐχαλ⋯оι, χα⋯τῃσιν ⋯γαλλ⋯μεν' εὐπρεπ⋯εσσιν,

⋯σκητоῖσ' ⋯δμ⋯ν χρ⋯μασι δεν⋯μενоι.

The principle that a moving body must continue to move unless something stops it was not known to Aristotle nor even unconsciously assumed by him. The effect of this ignorance upon his philosophy was discussed in C.Q. 1939, p. 129 f. It forbade him to conceive of a mechanist theory in the nineteenth-century sense. It enabled him to hold, what must seem self-contradictory to us, that all events have definable causes without there being a universal nexus of causes and effects (future events, therefore, he thought of as not yet determined in the nature of things). And it compelled him to believe that nature could not be orderly unless guided by a purposive force. Therefore he attacked those scientists who had thought that the world could be explained in terms of the compulsions and interactions of natural stuffs—a principle which they vaguely called Necessity, Ananke. In attacking their doctrine A. cannot have thought he was attacking the mechanistic determinism which modern critics have detected in their words: for he could not even conceive of such an idea. There is an a fortiori case for arguing that his predecessors cannot have conceived of it either. But it is always possible that A. misunderstood them. And there is still Epicurus to consider.

Whether any apology is possible for the form of this paper is doubtful; but perhaps a few words are allowable. The miscellaneous notes, of which it consists, are fairly well described by the title: at all events, the proposals contained in them—with, I fear, many others—have been pencilled at one time or another in one margin or another. Their age varies widely: two or three must go back to days when my only complete Euripides was Kirchhoff's editio minor and my only Sophocles a copy of Tournier; the most date from middle age or ‘quidquid est illud inter iuvenem et senem medium in utriusque confinio positum’; but, whenever they were made, they were not made by a student of the Greek dramatists commanding the equipment that such a student ought to have. The equipment, in any case, was out of my reach; but, though I have read the plays often, I have read them only because the ancients have a way of enabling one to forget the moderns—as I was informed in my youth by an excellent scholar who has now forgotten both. I hope, therefore, that anyone who may happen to read the paper will overlook some errors and ignorances of the amateur; and, above all, if I may borrow a sentence from Markland's preface to his emendations on Lysias, ‘si quando dictatoria ista, Lege, vel Scribe, occurrent, scito me nihil aliud velle quam Forte legendum vel scribendum’.

Following the example of the late Professor R. S. Conway, who in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society, vol. v, part i (1899), discussed ‘The Use of the Singular Nos in Cicero's Letters’, I examined Catullus’ employment of the idiom in an article published in Mnemosyne, series iii, vol. vii, fasc. 2 (1938), pp. 148–56. While the usage of Catullus exemplified various of Conway's indisputable types of the singular nos, such as the Plural of Authorship and the Plural of Proprietorship, my observations did not confirm his main thesis of a ‘projective’ use, which L. C. Purser reviewing his rnonograph called ‘a Pluralis Dignitatis or Fiduciae, not to say Adrogantiae’, in direct contrast to the orthodox pluralis modestiae. I found that, where the use of nos related to a state of mind of the writer or speaker, not merely to circumstances of his environment, the usage in Catullus was either a pluralis modestiae or one of several derivative types. My examination of Virgil seems wholly to confirm the conclusions reached concerning Catullus, whose types of singular nos I classified as follows: (a) the Plural of Proprietorship (see Conway, op. cit., pp. 15 and 33 ff.); (b) the Traveller's Plural (see Conway, ibid., pp. 10 and 70); (c) the Local Plural (see Conway, ibid., pp. 10, 69, and 70); (d) the Plural of Authorship (see Conway, ibid., pp. 12, 18, 33); (e) the Social and Domestic Plural (see Conway, ibid., pp. 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 40 ff.); (/) the pluralis modestiae (see Kϋhner-Stegmann, Ausfiihrliche Lateinische Grammatik, vol. ii, part i (1912), pp. 87–9); (g) the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; (h) the Plural of Pathos or Self-pity. Of these (a), (b), (c), and (e) are a product of circumstances of environment and relate to a group of which the speaker or writer is a member; (d), (/), (g), and (h) express an attitude or state of mind. Virgil's examples of the usage fall into six of these categories, (b) and (c) being absent. For the purposes of the present study I shall, in order to indicate more clearly the connexion between (a) and (e), and the subjective character of (d), number the six Virgilian categories as follows: (i) the Plural of Proprietorship; (ii) the Social and Domestic Plural; (iii) the Plural of Authorship; (iv) the pluralis modestiae; (v) the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; (vi) the Plural of Pathos, Self-pity, or Complaint.

The informal character of political parties at Athens and the consequent absence of clearly defined party programmes often obscures the principles and aims of Athenian politicians. This obscurity is naturally greatest in the case of ‘moderates’, whose activities consisted largely of opposition to extremist elements of the Left or Right. Hence modern attempts to reconstruct their policies and assess their merits are liable to reach widely differing conclusions. A figure about whom there have been fluctuations of opinion, as well as some misconceptions, is Nicias. A passage in Aristotle used to be accepted as evidence that he was an oligarch, and he was believed by many to have been a pacifist and a friend of Sparta. In an article which has had a deep influence upon subsequent accounts Allen B. West showed that he could be considered neither an oligarch nor a philo-Laconian pacifist. On one point, however, West echoes a commonly accepted view, though he expresses it in very moderate terms: he believes that Thucydides treats Nicias too sympathetically and is inclined to be blind to his faults. This view has been reaffirmed with much greater emphasis by other scholars who have strenuously challenged the impartiality of Thucydides in this respect. Such charges appear to me to have little foundation, and I shall attempt to substantiate my opinion by examining Thucydides’ account of Nicias. First, however, it is pertinent to ask whether the historian can have had any cogent reason for partisanship, and also to seek the source from which the commonly accepted view may have originated.

For the senseless inira some manuscripts have inire or in arva, and the latter stands in the text of Baehrens (Poetae Latini Minores, v, 1883, p. 67). The attempts at emendation may be divided into two groups, those altering only inira and those tampering with ibat as well. I pass over the latter group, as Robinson Ellis, in his commentary, p. 125, has defended ibat sufficiently by reference to the frequent ñει in Babrius, Avianus’ model. The former group is represented by Withof (ibat honore) and Robinson Ellis himself (ibat in ora); and the editors of the Loeb text of the Minor Latin Poets, in 1934, had the verse printed with this in ora. Nobody seems to have seen that the verse-maker had to express the idea of the panther's pride. Therefore I propose ibat in (astra, a metaphorical phrase for the animal's conceit. For this metaphor cf. Horace's famous feriam sidera, for ibat Virg. Aen. 9. 641 sic itur ad astra, for in astra at the same place of the pentameter after a verb of motion Prop. 3. 18, 34 cessit in astra; Ov. Fast. 2. 478 and 3. 186 venit in astra. Avianus himself has this in astra before the last word of the pentameter in two more passages, 15. 8,19. 6.

The regular increase in the proportion of resolved feet in the iambic trimeters of Euripides' later plays was first commented upon in 1807 by J. Gottfried Hermann, who therefrom deduced the principle that the date of any play of Euripides could be directly determined from the frequency of its resolutions. This criterion he restated in several of his works in the following years, and when Elmsley objected that it was of uncertain value on account of the small number of plays of certain date by which it might be verified, he replied with a strong defence of his case: he did not, however, develop his principle in detail or give figures in its support. The first scholar to publish the totals of trisyllabic feet in each play was Zirndorfer: relying largely on these, he produced a chronology of Euripides' dramatic composition in several respects superior to any predecessor's. His conclusions were questioned by C. F. W. Müller, who, while accepting Hermann's thesis as being in general correct, doubted its reliability for determining the exact period of a tragedy's composition. Consequently, although he gave the totals of trisyllabic feet en passant, Müller made no attempt to suggest dates. At almost the same time as Müller's treatise appeared, J. Rumpel published an article giving a full and detailed list of references to all trisyllabic feet in Euripides: from this evidence he divided the dramas into four age-groups, but did not go so far as to assign specific dates.

The distribution of the parts among the actors in the O.C. is a problem that has long defied solution. In all the other extant plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides the dramatis personae can without difficulty be divided between three actors: but the construction of the O.C. is so complex that it does not admit any such simple allocation. When the part of Oedipus (1–1555) has been assigned to the first actor, and that of Antigone (1–847, 1099–555, 1670–end) to the second, the roles of the Stranger (36–80), Ismene (324–509, 1099–555 mute, 1670–end), Creon (728–1043), and Polyneices (1254–446) must clearly belong to the third: who, then, is to play Theseus (551–667, 887–1043, 1099–210, 1500–55, 1751–end)? It seems impossible to allot the part complete to any one of the three actors. Faced by this crux, all those who have dealt with the subject have chosen one or the other of two clear-cut alternatives, either the assumption of a fourth regular actor, or else the splitting-up of the single part of Theseus between two or three actors. These two alternatives, both of which are far from satisfactory—the former infringing the three-actor rule, the latter offending against scenic probability and realism—are fully examined below; at the end of the paper a new part-distribution is suggested, which, it is hoped, avoids both these faults.

Professor H. J. Rose's article in C.Q. xxxiii. 69 f. has advanced the study of this perplexing passage in two important respects. He has observed that, in order to determine the ‘eye’ as metaphorical, ỏΦθαλμός requires a dependent genitive, and he has therefore restored μεϒαλ⋯ν πολ⋯ων to this relation by punctuating as above instead of after πολίων And he is surely equally right in maintaining that this plural genitive must have a plural reference; it must mean ‘of great cities’ and not ‘of Cyrene’. For although there is a figure called pluralis maiestatis, such obscurity in the use of it seems too affected, such ambiguity too perverse; a poem honouring the prince of Cyrene will refer to this famous city in unmistakable terms.

The root *pent-1 has achieved wide distribution in the IE. languages. In the course of its long history considerable modification of meaning has affected it, both as a primary verb and as it appears in derivative nouns, and here I refer particularly to Go. finpan ‘find’ (with the other verbs of like meaning) and to Gk. πάτη ‘deceit’. With little ingenuity—against mere ingenuity, of course, the etymologist is bound to be on his guard—it is possible to trace the train of thought that connects the various forms. But though the explanations here offered may well seem obvious, they have not, so far as I am aware, been previously published. The familiar dictionaries of Boisacq, Walde-Hofmann, and Walde-Pokorny do provide attempts at explanation, but these have little power of convincing.

Eur. Hel. 1032 ff. Ελ. Μενέλαε, πρ⋯ς μ⋯ν παρθένου σεσῴσμεθα.

τοὐνθένδε δ⋯ σ⋯ τοÙς λ⋯υς ϕέροντα ϰρ⋯

κοιν⋯ν ζυν⋯πτειν μηϰαν⋯ν ωτηρίας.

If the text as given above is sound (and it may possibly be so), then Helen effaces herself from the discussion which is to follow: σ⋯ is stressed, τοὺς λ⋯ους is roughly equivalent to ‘all that is to be said’, and the simple øέροντα does duty for a compound like εἰσø⋯ροντα. There is evidently a tinge of artificiality about this interpretation, and, if the unbroken usage of the tragedians counts, then τοὺς λ⋯ους ø⋯ρειν should mean ‘to bring the message“, and no more: cf. e.g. Ion 1110 τιε προθυμία | ποδ⋯ν ἔϰει σε, κα⋯ λ⋯ους τίνας ϕ⋯ρεις; El 228 ἤκω ø⋯ρων σοι σο⋯ κασιγν⋯του λ⋯γους, Or. 853 λ⋯γους | ᾃκουσνν, οὓς σοι δυστυϰε῕ς ἣκω ø⋯ρων, Soph. Track. 493 ώς λ⋯γων τ’ ⋯πιολ⋯ς ø⋯ρῃς, and so with ø⋯μας or ø⋯μην Eur. Hel. 1282, ø⋯τιν Soph. O.R. 86, Aesch. Ag. 9, Soph. At. 826, μ⋯θον O.C. 357, and with various periphrases. For other senses a compound is called in (e.g. ἰσø⋯ρειν Bacch. 650, Andr. 757, Ion 1340; προσø⋯ρειν I.A. 97, Ion 1002), or a prepositional phrase is appended (e.g. εἰς ὦτα Soph. Ai. 149, or—what one expects here—εἰς μ⋯σον Eur. Tro. 54). Hence, in this passage, the credibility of the tradition is not exactly enhanced by the fact that the difference between ΔHCε and ΔΗС—or, for that matter, ΔεΙʗ—is, to all intents and purposes, negligible.