In Part I of his paper Cooper gives indisputable evidence regarding Plato's use of the man-made image as a step to the apprehension of a Form under discussion, whether that image be in fact a diagram or a model, or simply a verbal picture, such as his imaginative account of Justice within a community, which we find used to provide us with in Republic 443 c 4 ff. However, Cooper goes on to assure us that the divided-line figure offers us only three types of object: ‘We have three kinds of objects which differ from one another in clearness and esteem, firstly, the Forms, secondly, the objects of ordinary sense-perception, and thirdly, images, shadows and reflections.’ Now the admitted fact that, as he notes, Republic 10 (597 b 5-e 5) gives the same three orders of reality, does not entirely absolve Cooper from all the implications of Plato's decision to divide his line into four parts rather than three; for it is made quite clear in 509 b 6–10 that the Form of the Good, is the source of being as well as of knowledge, so the Line must also classify both.

The literary legacy of Aramaic-speaking Christianity consists predominantly of ecclesiastical works—theological treatises (both original and translations), sermons, hymns, and the like; it is for the most part, one must admit, rather dull stuff. Distinguished from the rest, and of peculiar interest to classical students, are secular works, translated from the Greek, which include, apart from medical and scientific treatises, a handful of writings by Plutarch, Lucian, and Themistius. Baumstark suggests that the translator of these three Greek writers be identified as Sargis (died 536), a learned priest and ⋯ρχιατρός in Theodosiopolis, with a somewhat chequered ecclesiastical career (he changed sides in the christological controversy, starting out as a monophysite and ending up in the Chalcedonian camp), who is known as the translator of a number of philosophical and medical treatises. Sargis has his place in the history of thought, for it was in the first place through his Syriac translations that the Arabs became acquainted with Galen, whose works eventually assumed almost canonical status with them.

Ever since the first edition of the De anima by Trendelenburg, modern scholars have been in trouble as to the exact interpretation of this phrase and especially of the expression Although the right one, as we think, was suggested a long time ago by Shorey, a restatement of it seems justified, because the later treatment of the problem in the edition of Sir David Ross has apparently established a different (and, as we believe, a wrong) communis opinio.

The first detailed examination of the whole passage was given by Bonitz, who saw no other possibility of making the text render the required sense than to alter This is indeed ‘a rather improbable corruption’. It is also clear that such an emendation of a reading defended by the consensus of all our manuscripts should only be accepted if there really is no other way out.

It is universally recognized that the Hymn to Ares stands apart from all the other poems in the Homeric collection, and that it was composed centuries later than any of those that can be assigned to a particular period with any degree of confidence. Many older scholars classed it or even printed it with the Orphic Hymns, which are transmitted together with the Homeric Hymns as well as with the hymns of Callimachus and Proclus. But the similarity with the Orphic Hymns is only superficial. It merely consists in the stylistic feature of accumulated epithets, a common characteristic of late hymns. There are three reasons for not lumping the Hymn to Ares with the very homogeneous Orphic series. First, the Orphic Hymns are courteous invocations of different gods to come to a ceremony described as τєλєτή or τєλєτταί, while the Hymn to Ares is an intensely personal prayer for the poet's own soul. Secondly, the Orphic collection already contains a hymn to Ares (65), and duplications are avoided. (There are a number of hymns, to Dionysus, but then he bears a different title in each case, Liknites, Trieterikos, etc.) Thirdly, in the Homeric hymn Ares is addressed as a planetary god. In the Orphic hymn to Ares, this aspect is totally absent, and the same is true of the hymns to Hermes, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Kronos.

Aristotle's Poetics is a treatise notoriously difficult to understand, largely because of Aristotle's treatment of his theme, with its elliptical thought and loose terminology, but also because Aristotle's influence on subsequent drama and criticism makes it difficult to isolate the original thought from subsequent attempts at implementation or interpretation. However, as Aristotle devotes most of his treatise to tragedy—despite the wider subject he professes—and in discussing tragedy deals most extensively with plot, his views on the tragic plot should be reasonably clear. The passages cited have some importance for the understanding of his views.

The evidence of ancient books points to the surprising conclusion that in texts of drama or prose dialogue changes of speaker were not usually marked by the name of the new speaker. Instead the ancient reader had a colon, sometimes combined with a paragraphus or stroke in the margin, to guide him. The inconvenience of this practice and the muddle it caused need no emphasis. The facts have been assembled for the text of Plato and Lucian by J. Andrieu (Le Dialogue antique, 288 ff.), and for Aristophanes by J. C. B. Lowe (Bull. Inst. Class. Stud, ix (1962), 27–42). As far as prose dialogues are concerned confirmation can be found in an unexpected source: the prologue to the dialogue Eranistes by the fifth-century church father Theodoret (Migne, Patrologia graeca, lxxxiii. 29 b).

The verb λάω is attested in two passages of early epic poetry, (a) Homeric Hymn to Hermes 360, where the infant Hermes is hiding in a dark cave, and (b) τ 229 ff., of a hound seizing a fawn on the brooch of Odysseus. Of the several meanings suggested by the ancient lexicographers for λάω, seeing, gazing, or crying, screeching would suit (a). These senses recur in their explanations of (b), with gripping or devouring as additional possibilities. The most extensive modern treatment of λάω is by Leumann, who explains it as a present falsely formed from the perfect λ⋯ληkα (X 141, of a hawk), and originally intended to describe the cry of a bird of prey. The unfamiliarity of the form led to its being associated later on with the sharp-sightedness of such birds, as well as with the bark of a hound fastening on its quarry.

Heracleides Ponticus, a pupil of the schools of Plato and Aristotle, who lived from about 390 to 310 B.C., shared the wide interests of many of his pre-Platonic predecessors. Diogenes Laertius gives a long list of his works, many of them now known only by their titles, which he divided into writings on ethics, physics, grammar, music, rhetoric, and history. Like most of his predecessors he gave some attention to the heavens and speculated about the nature of the moon (frg. 114a), comets (frg. 116), the infinity of the cosmos (frg. 112); he was best known in antiquity, in this field, for his suggestion that the phenomena could be saved if the heavens were at rest and the earth revolved about the central axis (frgs. 106, 108).2 One of two pieces of evidence for his involvement in anything more than this general, inexact speculation in the field of astronomy is contained in the commentary on Plato's Timaeus written in Latin by Chalcidius somewhere at the beginning of the fourth century A.D.; it is this passage which this paper will discuss.

The following notes on the In Pisonem are largely based on the commentary of R. G. M. Nisbet (Oxford, 1961) (‘N’). The references to the speech are by section and line of his text, and where my note is based on one of his I add a reference to the page of his commentary.

1. 20 (p. 58) voltus …, qui sermo quidam tacitus mentis est: ‘thoughts are usually revealed by the face.’ Add to Otto's, Seyffert-Muller's, and N.'s examples: Curtius 8. 6. 22 ‘voltus haud sane securi animi index’, Juv. 9. 18 ff.

K. J. Mckay includes Sappho i u in his interesting discussion (CQ. N.s. xvu [1967], 184–94) of doors that open spontaneously at the advent of a god. He glides without mention over the fact that workmen are ordered to do the opening (which detracts considerably from the element of spontaneity) and that the workmen's task—an extensive one, justifying a use of the plural —is not simply to open the door but to increase the whole structure's height (). Later in his essay (p. 91), while discussing Psalm 24, McKay remembers that the idea of gates opening upward is found in Oriental literature, not in Greek. It is odd that, three pages earlier, he forgot to apply this information to Sappho.

These three Ciceronian references, each used only once, have given rise to a most confusing variety of interpretations. In this article I hope to show, as far as the evidence will allow, who these poets were and what sort of poetry Cicero probably had in mind.

οί νєώτєροι

The latest volume of the Antinoopolis Papyri (iii [1967], no. 115) contains fragments of some 40 iambic lines in praise of a certain Archelas. The papyrus is dated by J. W. B. Barns, the editor of the piece, to the sixth century A.D., and the poem itself can be no older, since corrections and alterations show it to be an author's draft. According to Barns it is ‘an iambic encomium of a type not uncommon in late Greek occasional poetry from Egypt’ (p. 20). I would suggest rather that the surviving lines come in fact from an iambic preface to a hexameter encomium.

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries it was standard, if not universal, practice to preface a hexameter poem with an iambic prologue. Since details are not readily available, and are relevant to my argument, I tabulate them here. First the four examples that have come to us by manuscript tradition, as it happens the same manuscript (Palatinus 23), and all dating from the second half of the sixth century.

The present paper consists of emendations in the text of Maximus Tyrius. For convenience in citing the text I shall refer by page and line to Hobein's edition.

All the known codices of Maximus, as M. Mutschmann and F. Schulte have shown, most probably (many say certainly) derive from the Parisinus 1962 which belongs to the tenth or the eleventh century. In Hobein's edition and in the present paper the codex is indicated by the letter R.

THE first Epode provides no clear indication of date. We learn only that Maecenas is about to join Octavian on a dangerous expedition and has suggested that Horace should not accompany him, while Horace retorts that he will be unable to enjoy himself in the absence of his patron and would be ready to follow him to the ends of the earth, whatever the danger, in the hope of earning his gratitude.

The Epodes were published about 30 B.C. and, perhaps for that reason, the scholiast Pseudo-Acron confidently assigns the poem to the period immediately before the battle of Actium with the comment: ‘Maecenatem prosequitur euntem ad bellum navale cum Augusto adversum Antonium et Cleopatram.’ It is curious that in referring to the activities of Octavian in 31 the author uses the title Augustus, which was not conferred on him before 27,: but the substance of his comment accords with the known facts. In the spring of 31 Octavian asked all Romans of influence to meet him at Brundisium, thereby to demonstrate their willingness to take part in the war against Antony and Cleopatra, and more than seven hundred senators are known to have offered their services.

I Agree with R. G. Austin, who in his recent paper (CQ, N.S. xviii (1968), 107 ff.) showed that Virgil did not write this proem to the Aeneid, and suggested (p. 115) that it was produced in the first half of the first century, perhaps prompted by the problem mentioned by Servius on A. I. I: ‘multi varie disserunt cur ab armis Vergilius coeperit.’ I wish here to comment briefly on the content of the lines.

(a) gracili

qui... carmen refers to the writing of the Eclogues. As Austin points out (p. 112), Virgil has gracilis only in E. 10. 70 ff., the conclusion of the whole of the Eclogues:

Haec sat erit, divae, vestrum cecinisse poetam,

dum sedet et gracili fiscellam texit hibisco,

Pierides…

The Thirteenth Epode is an intriguing poem. Like Carm. i. 7 it concludes dramatically with a highly condensed episode from epic tradition, in this case drawn from the early life of Achilles; but, unlike the Ode to Plancus, Epodes 13 does not reveal even the name of the addressee. And whether in spite of or because of this, the poem has been highly praised for its purely lyrical qualities. The now famous critique of E. Fraenkel, for example, represents the view of many: ‘A perfect poem,’ he calls it; ‘… its depth of feeling and beauty of expression and the harmonious blending of ideas of very different origin, make this ode superior to Odes 1. 7.’ The general approval of its poetic qualities might encourage a fresh attempt to discover any deeper significance it might have held for Horace's contemporaries.

The introductory ode of Horace's fourth book has been given comparatively little critical attention, although it might have been expected to arouse exceptional interest, being the first-fruits of the lyricist's autumnal harvest. The neglect is due partly to the poem's deceptive simplicity but much more to the unease which it arouses in Horace's admirers: Venus does not seem the most fitting deity for the poet laureate to invoke, and moreover this is not so much an invocation as an appeal to be left alone; the young man who is the subject of Horace's eulogy was hardly a person of much eminence at the time of writing, though he became prominent later and is now prosopographically well endowed; above all, there is the disturbing picture of the elderly poet testily acknowledging an amorous urge and surrendering his dignity in pederastic dreams.

It was natural and inevitable that his two Aethiopias, in the eastern and western extremities of the world, should be identified with the countries of the two dark-skinned peoples in the Far East and the Far West of the Ancient World: India and Mauretania.

There was the difficulty that the real Aethiopia was in Africa, neither in the Far East nor in the Far West. Serious writers on geography tried to reconcile Homer and the geographical facts.

I wish to excerpt from Strabo three theories concerning Aethiopia and the Aethiopians which will then be used to elucidate passages in Latin literature.

Of the capital manuscripts R and V have nexantem, M and P nixantem. The good minuscules favour nexantem on the whole, though Paris lat. 7906 has nixantem. nexantem is found in the Latin grammarians (Keil ii. 469 and 538 (Priscian), v. 485 (Eutyches)), who quote the line because it contains this verb in its first conjugation form. Editors vary, and recently R. D. Williams, in his commentary on A. 5 (Oxford, 1960), has preferred nixantem. So it seems worth restating the case for nexantem, especially as its defenders have not used all the arguments open to them

10. 2. lugentem timentemque custodire solemus, ne solitudine male utatur.

Reynolds does not mention Haupt's conjecture amentemque, which is certainly on the right lines. Bereaved persons may need watching because in the violence of their grief they may do themselves an injury (cf. Ben. 2. 14. 2 ut frigidam aegris negamus et lugentibus ac sibi iratis ferrum), and the same applies to madmen (cf. Macer, Dig. 1. 18. 14 nam custodes furiosis non ad hoc solum adhibentur ne quid perniciosius ipsi in se moliantur, sed sqq.) or to anyone suspected of suicidal inclinations (cf. Sen. Contr. 3. 5 minantem sibi ipsi (sc. filiam) custodio). It does not apply to persons afraid; they may sometimes be glad of company, but do not require surveillance. My only doubt is whether amentem, seldom used of actual insanity, is the right word. Perhaps dementem or furentem, which makes a better match with the participle lugentem.