Paul Maas extended the law still further: ‘The following rule applies to several metres which contain the rhythm : no word can end after a long anceps, except at the caesura in the middle of the line.’ He lists the types of metre to which the rule applies as the stichic iambic trimeters and trochaic tetrameters of the early iambographers and the Attic tragedians, the dactylo-epitrites of Bacchylides, the trochaic trimeters and dimeters of Alcman's Partheneion, the end (but not the beginning) of the iambic tetrameters of Sophocles' Ichneutae, and ‘certain rare metres, whose conformity to this rule may be due to accident’

To be satisfactory, a scholarly interpretation of a Greek tragedy must enable the present-day reader to see the play, so far as is possible, through the eyes of the fifth-century audience. If it does not, if it merely substitutes the predilections of a particular scholar for those of the reader, it is useless, and indeed worse than useless; for the reader unassisted by the interpretation of others may well examine the play critically for himself, while the reader with an interpretation at his elbow is likely to make every effort to fit the ideas of the tragedian into the schema provided for him. Certainly, more and more interpretations are of the kind which assist the reader; but a significant number even of the most recent throw more darkness than light on their subject by refusing to acknowledge the whole context of value and belief in terms of which the tragedians wrote, and the audience watched, these dramas. The result of such misinterpretation is frequently, as in the case of the two I shall discuss here, to present for our admiration a more high-minded and uplifting drama than the one which (say) Euripides wrote; but our concern is presumably not to achieve this end, but to understand Euripides and his audience.

The following notes refer constantly to E. R. Dodds' Bacchae (2nd ed., Oxford, 1960), which forms a valuable basis for study of the play; the passages discussed are those where I find myself in disagreement with Dodds' notes or with some new conjecture to offer, but everywhere my debt to the material he has assembled is very great. Recently W. S. Barrett's Hippolytos (Oxford, 1964) has illuminated a number of dark corners, providing a wealth of Euripidean parallels, metrical and linguistic; not least valuable is the light it throws on the variants of a better-transmitted play, and on the ancestry of our texts. I am grateful to my colleague J. W. Roberts for help and encouragement with the first draft of these notes. Subsequently Professor D. L. Page was kind enough to read parts of my manuscript, clarifying a number of metrical problems for me and adding several invaluable suggestions. Both he and Professor K. J. Dover have saved me from many errors; for those that remain the blame is mine alone

In Part I of this article the major problems of the transmission of the Bacchae were considered, with a discussion of interpolated lines and lacunae, whether certain or merely postulated by previous editors. In the Introduction it was argued that P is a copy of a manuscript which was very like L (whether a copy or a twin hardly matters) before being supplemented with variant readings and with the whole of Tr. and Ba. 756 ff. from a lost source. The symbols λ and were used for P's exemplar and this remoter source respectively. The ancestry of in turn was traced back to Λ, the ancestor of L. This, if right, means that L and P (including the end of Ba.) both descend from a single uncial archetype, though with a fair chance that some true variants from a different tradition reached and λ. P, however, steadfastly preferred the original reading of λ (= L, in effect) whenever possible. When P differs from L, there are three possibilities: (a) that he is making a fresh error (misreading or carelessness—seldom, if ever, constructive); (b) that λ (before being supplemented) differed from L (probably only in ortkographica); (c) that λ (after contamination) included a variant which P preferred (significant variants are so rare that legibility is likely to have been P's main criterion).

The earliest extant manuscript of Polybius, Books 1–5 is A (Vaticanus Graecus 124). It was copied by a monk called Ephraim in the tenth century in a fine early minuscule hand; quite probably A should be dated to A.D. 947, though this cannot be certain, since Ephraim gave the day of the month and the indic-tion in the subscription, but not the year. A is written in two columns to the page, the average line length is 19–21 letters, and the almost invariable extreme lengths are 18 and 22 letters. There are two lacunae in A on successive pages, the first affecting the bottom six lines of the second column of f. 1v and the top line of the first column of f. 2r, and the second affecting 11. 3–9 of the second column of f. 2r. These lacunae also appear in all other manuscripts covering the same section of text, with no significant variation of the content; however, the scribe of A has clearly taken a good deal of trouble to reproduce as accurately as possible the text in front of him, while all other manuscripts reproduce the text across the page with gaps of varying length. In addition to this, it can be shown that the line length of A is the same as that of the hyparchetype of all the extant manuscripts of Books 1–5.

Orestes has returned to Argos, (89). For him to brandish at his father's murderers is natural there, where he is delivering a sort of general manifesto as to his aims, and where the strong word is justified and alleviated by the jingle with juxtaposed (‘to requite them murder as they murdered my father’). But there is no reason for Orestes to go on insisting on the bloodthirstiness of these aims, and reads oddly in 100, where he is explaining soberly his plan of campaign.

1. 1.5.3. The unanimous manuscript reading for this passage is The idea of an looking for an seems alien to Greek thought, and the expression is not derived from any traceable proverb. A small correction produces the reading which restores sense, and produces a meaning which is much more in line with the requirements of the passage. The corruption may well have arisen from the penchant which scribes had for making minor alterations to restore what they conceived to be the required grammar of the immediate context.

E.N. 1. 6 may be divided into three approximately equal paragraphs. The first of these (A) contains four arguments against Academic positions associated with the phrase ‘Idea of the Good’. All these arguments also occur, together with others, in the Eudemian Ethics. The second paragraph (B) consists of the consideration and rejection of an objection to the whole or a part of A, and is new to E.N. The third (C), also new to E.N., consists of the putting forward and dismissal of two alternative answers to the question ;—answers different, presumably, to that or those rejected in A.

My concern is with B. This paragraph is linked with A by the words , ‘a controversy can just be seen in what has been said’. These words, referring back to arguments that appear also in E.E., suggest to me that the objection Aristotle is about to discuss is one that had actually been brought against those arguments, after they had been delivered in their Eudemian or some other earlier form, by an opponent who might have belonged to the Academy, but might equally well have belonged to the Lyceum itself. For ease of exposition, I shall in what follows assume this to be the case, and shall refer to the author of the objection as the Objector. This assumption is not, however, essential to the main argument of this article.

Plato in his discussion of the Divided Line (Republic 6) introduces a distinction between knowledge of the Forms in and by themselves () and . The first distinguishing characteristic of is that it ‘is compelled to employ assumptions, while knowledge of the Forms tries to advance to a certain first principle’ (510 b 4–9). The second distinguishing characteristic of is that it employs the ordinary objects of sense-perception as images (510 d 5–511 a 1). The geometer, in order to find out about ‘the Square’ and ‘theDiagonal’, draws diagrams and makes models.

It has been customary to believe that apart from selection and abridgement Diodorus Siculus made little contribution to his Scholars have admitted the contribution of Diodorus himself when he refers to his native town Agyrium with some pride and to Sicily in general and when he occasionally records details of his own life. Beyond statements of this character, however, the tendency has been to assume that the origin of any particular statement is to be sought in the single source which Diodorus was currently using, or, as others would argue, in the major source supplemented by a subsidiary source, or, as Tarn would postulate for 17, the medley of sources used by the Sicilian historian. An examination of the attribution of one item in 17 may throw some light on Diodorus as an historian.

The Platonic MS. Vat. gr. 225 (Δ) (saec. XII–catalogue: non ante saec. XIII–Post: saec. XV–Schanz) contains tetr. I, VI. 3, 4, II–IV, while its companion volume in the same hand Vat. gr. 226 (Θ) contains V–VI. 2, VIII. 3, VII, Spp., VIII. 1, 2. Posts states that for tetr. I and VI. 3 A is close to Vind. suppl. gr. 7 (W) (A.D. 950–1050–Maas: saec. XI–Diels, Post, catalogue: saec. XII?–Alline, Robin, Diès) and thereafter derives from the Clarkianus (B) (A.D. 895). I am here concerned only with the testimony of Δ in. 2 (ApoL).

This manuscript has been largely ignored by commentators and editors. Schanz does not quote it, nor does Bekker (at any rate for ApoL.). Alline is scornful about it. Neither Burnet nor Croiset quotes it—and indeed Burnet claims that it is merely an interpolated apograph of W. Stallbaum seems to be the only editor who quotes it for Apol. This appears to be an unwarranted neglect since A has, in fact, a good claim to be considered as a primary witness in this dialogue.

There is more evidence for Empedocles than for any early Greek philosopher before Democritus, yet the details of his philosophy remain controversial and often hopelessly obscure. Jaeger called Empedocles a ‘philosophical centaur’, which aptly sums up the seeming disparity between the and the There is no agreement about the famous simile to illustrate respiration, generally known as the Clepsydra, and the stages and nature of the cosmic cycle continue to be disputed. Perhaps we can never be certain about these aspects of Empedocles' thought, for the evidence fails at every crucial point and the imaginative reconstructions which have to serve are unlikely to win universal acceptance. It may then appear hazardous to discuss the fragments concerned with thinking and sense-perception, for these too are riddled with problems. I do so prompted partly by the timely reprint of J. I. Beare's book, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition, and also because this feature of Empedocles has been touched on by modern scholars but not studied in any detail. At the same time the significance of the is greatly affected by how we interpret the theory of sense-perception and thinking.

The literary criticism of the Greeks and Romans furnishes some of the most baffling documents which have come down to us from antiquity. Nor could it be otherwise. Few elements of language can be at once so ephemeral and so elusive as the overtones of words used in aesthetic contexts; even in our own language it is only with a conscious effort that the appropriate overtones of words used by quite recent critics can be recalled. Such recall must be much more difficult where the reader is concerned with a dead language; in the case of some terms it may well be virtually impossible; but where the ancient critic is discussing ethical criteria for literature, as Aristotle does in Poetics 13, the modern interpreter is in a somewhat better position, for ethical terms are used in wider contexts, contexts which involve action, and there is more opportunity for studying their usage and endeavouring to recapture their elusive overtones

Whittaker, following Siebeck, pointed out the important role Plotinus assigns to the functions of imagination in psychic life. Imagination is the terminus ad quern of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience. The sensitive soul is an imaginative soul below which there is Nature, or vegetative soul, which acts without being conscious. When the functions of reason are added to sensation to produce a rational human being, there is conscious discursive thought as well as conscious sensation; and since the sensitive soul cannot be responsible for the imaging of rational concepts, Plotinus asserts the existence of a conceptual imagination.

In this paper I shall offer an hypothesis to explain the process by which the inventories of the contents of the three chambers of the Parthenon were inscribed in the fifth century and to account for all the surviving fragments of those inscriptions. At the end of their annual term the treasurers of Athena prepared separate inventories of the Pronaos, the Hekatompedon, and the cella which they called the Parthenon. But the four boards of treasurers whose terms filled a Panathenaic penteteris co-operated with each other in stewarding the sacred possessions and began in 434/3 to have their inventories inscribed on the same stelai. The four inventories of the Pronaos filled one face of one stele, the four of the Hekatompedon one face of a second stele, and the four of the Parthenon one face of a third stele. In the course of time the treasurers began to post their records on the backs of stelai erected by their predecessors. This process was apparently changed in 410/09 to allow the four inventories to fill both the obverse and reverse faces of a smaller stele. In 406/5, with the creation of the unified board of the treasurers of Athena and the Other Gods, the inventories began to be inscribed year by year on individual stelai, and the Four Archai disappear.

‘Quid vero fit, quod poeta hanc plantam, tanquam munus locustae inprimis gratum, commemoret, nemo dixit; nee ego dicere possum’—so Jacobs in his note on the seventh line of this epigram (vol. 6, p. 123). Among later commentators, Mackail thinks ‘can hardly mean “leek” here’ and he assumes it to be ‘groundsel’; Dain in the Budé edition is satisfied with the rather prosaic explanation that it is an ‘observation très juste … la cigale ne se nourrit que des sues des plantes’. I hope to show that the diet of leeks and dewdrops from the mouth is promised by the love-sick swain of Meleager's poem for the same specific reason—to refresh the grasshopper's ‘voice’ for a new day's beguilement by song and persuasion to the sleep which will again free him from the cares of love. Although the ancients were aware of the means by which such insects produced their incessant sound, they remained faithful to the poetic tradition, which made them drink dew as a prelude to their singing, first found in Hesiod, Scut. 395, and clearly expressed in a couplet of Antipater of Thessalonica (A.P. 9. 92):

I Begin with quotations from two authoritative works, both of which require modification in the light of the evidence which I have assembled concerning the language of the inscriptions of Attica of the period 323–146 B.C. These quotations are: (a) LSJ s.v. B: ‘in early Attic inscriptions only is used …; without only once in cent, iv B.C., IG 22. 226. 42 (343 B.C.), after which it becomes gradually prevalent.’ This is very near the truth. (b) Goodwin, Moods and Tenses, § 328: ‘ final with the subjunctive appears first in Aeschylus, and remains in good use in Attic poetry and prose, being almost the only final expression found in the formal language of the Attic inscriptions.’ This, although absolutely correct in relation to the fifth and fourth centuries, is too sweeping for the period 299–146 B.C., and definitely misleading for the period after 146 B.C.

The fourth of Herodas is entitled in the papyrus —a title which very well describes the beginning and end of the poem, but disregards the middle, the most important part. The poem divides naturally into sections as follows: (i)1–20a;(2) (i)20b–38, (ii) 39–563, (iii) 56b–78; (3) 79–95.

In (1) we hear one of the women of the title carrying out the offering to the god. This section has been examined in detail by R. Wünsch, ‘Ein Dankopfer an Asklepios’, Arch. Rel. Wiss. vii (1904), 95 ff., who shows that it corresponds closely to the form of prayer used in real life, starting with the invocatio of the god, comprising greeting () and mention of his dwelling-places (Trikka, Kos, Epidauros), family (parents, Koronis and Apollo;

The Agricola of Tacitus differs from other surviving biographies of antiquity. It exhibits some features more characteristic of an oration, yet the preface and composition of the biography as a whole recall Sallust's Iugurtha and Catiline. Then, the central biographical section of the work is interrupted by an excursus on the geography and peoples of Britain, and an historical outline of the Roman occupation of the island. It has been argued that the style of these chapters would be more appropriate to history than to biography, and this same historical style recurs in the pair of commanders' speeches which precede the account of the battle of Mons Graupius.

The fact that the enclosing word order is not common in Latin prose, and is first found to any extent in the neoteric poet Catullus and in Cicero's Aratea, raises the possibility that they may owe this feature of their style to Alexandrian influence. In one way at least, in the inversion of connecting particles, atque, nam, etc., Alexandrian influence on Catullus' word order is generally admitted, e.g.