In Dr. T. Rice Holmes's article, ‘A Supplementary Note on the Julian Calendar’ in the Classical Quarterly of January, 1920, the following correction should be mide:

P. 47, 1, 2: For ‘26th’ read ‘25th’.

Amph. prol. 90–91. In the Amphitruo Plautus runs great risk of giving oflence by bringing Jupiter on the stage. In the prologue (spoken by Mercury) he conciliates the audience by saying that this Jupiter is no god but a mere actor. (‘Then know that I, one Snug the joiner, am a lion fell’):

26 sqq. Etenim ille quoi(u)s hue iussu uenio Iuppiter

Non minu' quam uostrum quiuis formidat malum: (i.e. a flogging, the penalty for bad acting, Cist. 785)

Humana matre natus, humano patre,

Mirari non est aequom sibi si praetimet.

The chief works of Tacitus and Apuleius have come down to us in a single Beneventan—i.e. South Italian—MS. of the eleventh century. The Annals (books XI.–XVI.) and Histories (books I.–V.) of Tacitus, and the Apologia, Metamorphoses, and Florida of Apuleius, depend solely on the authority of the famous Florentine MS. preserved in the Laurentian Library under the press-mark 68.2. Any new light that can be thrown on such a MS. is of interest to classical scholars. With the portion of the MS. containing the works of Tacitus the writer has dealt at some length in a paper read in April, 1913, in London before the International Congress of Historical Studies, which paper will be published shortly. Here it is proposed to deal with the portion containing the works of Apuleius, and with the oldest extant transcript of this portion, which is also in Beneventan writing, and is likewise preserved in the Laurentian Library under the press-mark 29.2. In the critical apparatus of Apuleius Laur. 68.2 is cited as F, and Laur. 29.2 as ø.

Donatus, after enumerating Vergil's early poems, proceeds (Vita Verg. 19): ‘Mox cum res Romanas inchoasset, offensus materia, ad Bucolica transiit.’ We have learned to distrust such statements about Vergil's early life, having discovered that an all too literal interpretation of the Bucolics provided a large part of Suetonius' data. The line quoted above may be nothing but an inference from Eclogue VI. 3:

cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem

uellit et admonuit, etc.

Alfenvs Varvs of Cremona, a quondam friend of Catullus, studied law with the great Seruius Sulpicius—some of whose lectures he published—served to the advantage of Vergil as land commissioner in Cisalpine Gaul, became consul suffectus in 39 B.C., and provided Horace with the point of a joke. He seems also—hence this note—to have been the versifier whom Catullus calls Suffenus in c. 14 and 22. If he is, we have here a somewhat rare instance of Horace's adapting to his own use a suggestion from Catullus.

Latin ‘plvs.’—To begin somewhat remotely, I am not satisfied with the current explanation of Lat. plus. As regards pleores, to pass over Cuny's mistaken derivation in MSL. 16. 322, the explanation from plēyōses is correct— IE. plēyo. (in Arm. li, ‘full’): plēyos–:: Sk. návya: compv. návyas, cf. pánya: pányas and távya: távyas. IE. plēyes also appears, not only in Sanskrit as prắyas and (from plēyen) in πλε(í)–ων (after suplv. πλεῖ–στος: Av. fraē–šta), but, by a quite rigorous phonetic, in O.Norse fleiri, from a primate flaiz-an <flā–(y)iz– <plē–yes–; cf. Lappish sājet ‘sow,’ borrowed from a North Germanic verb-stem sā–ya <IE. sē–ye/o This leaves the o-grade stem IE. plōis high and dry, for Lat. ploes–, if admitted, will come from plōyes (cf. aes <ayes). Like minus, and in point of usage even more strikingly than minus, plus is a neuter substantive. I start for plus, as Brugmann once did (cf. IF. II. 93), from IE. plewes (cf. Lat. iūs <iewes: iouestod), root p(e)leu in πολū After plūs came plūres plūrimus as from minus came minores minimus. The evidence of Festus' plisima | plurima is not evidence for plōis. It is not possible, under the same circumstances, for IE. ói to have yielded Latin ū and ī. Accordingly, if we do not merely correct plisima to plusima, after Varro LL. 7. 27, we may restore haplographic or haplologic pl[us]is(s)ima (double superlative like postremissimus). Or in view of the equation πλεȋ–στος – Av. fraē–šta I would reconstruct plisima from plei-soma—subsequently changed, after plūs, to plūrima.

I AM glad that Dr. Fotheringham in the interesting paper which appeared in the Classical Quarterly (April, 1920, pp. 97–8) adhered to the view that ‘Caesar calculated the new moon for January 1 [45 B.C]…and that this calculation determined the inaugural day of the Julian calendar.’ As the object of my brief note, on which he commented, was merely to show that Groebe had failed to prove that the day in question was January 2, I have only a few questions to ask. But first, in justice to Judeich, I ought to say that his calculations, which Dr. Fotheringham notices, were made with the help of the assistant-astronomer attached to the observatory of the University of Strassburg. While Dr. Fotheringham admits that I was right in maintaining that the new moon of January 2, 45 B.C. (1.26 a.m.) was not visible on the evening of that day, he holds that Groebe was ‘fairly entitled to say’ that the new moon of March 24, 58 B.C. (4.40 p.m.), was visible on March 25. Dr. Fotheringham may be justified in saying that it ought ‘in normal [or abnormally fine ?] weather to have been visible that evening’; but, as I observed in my note, Groebe affirmed that in calculating the time of visibility of the crescent we should accept the mean of the Babylonian estimates, 36 hours—less, I should have added, in the early spring and the winter, more in the summer and autumn. Was he entitled to deduct 9 hours from the mean for an observation made not in the clear atmosphere of the East, but in Switzerland? Dr. Fotheringham tells us that ‘the shortest interval between a new moon and the observation of the moon by Schmidt's naked eye comes’ not, as Groebe said, to 29, but ‘to 25.7 hours.’ But forty-eight of Schmidt's forty-nine observations were made at Athens, where the atmosphere is clearer than in Switzerland. The great difference in visibility which a clear atmosphere makes must strike everyone who goes from this country or from Switzerland to the East or to Northern Africa. I realized it for the first time when I was exploring in Tunisia before the war. Has Dr. Fotheringham or any other trustworthy observer ever seen with the naked eye in an atmosphere no clearer than that of Geneva a moon not more than 27 hours old? If so, is it not remarkable that, as Dr. Fotheringham has said, ‘Hitherto it has been the practice to assume that [in the early spring or the winter and in favourable weather ?] the moon becomes visible on the first evening when she is more than 30 hours old at sunset’?

As is well known, this poem, which stood in the Anthologia Latina, is preserved in two MSS. only, the Salmasian (or S) and the Pithoean (or T), Nos. 10318 and 8071 in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; ‘the handwriting dates’ the former ‘as written at the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth century; the other…is about two hundred years later in date. Modern scholars regard both MSS. as traceable to a common archetype, probably of the sixth century’ (Professor Mackail in Catullus and P.V., Loeb Classical Library). At first sight these MSS. seem quite untrust-worthy, for they differ from each other in more than one hundred words, while the scribe of S copied the refrain incorrectly twice, the scribe of T twice as often. Strangely enough, however, these variations are comparatively unimportant, for most of them disappear when the spelling of the two clerks is assimilated to some recognized usage. Each manuscript in turn corrects the other in many of these passages, and conjecture has successfully emended nearly all of the remainder—the variation S peruiclanda, T peruigila in v. 47 is perhaps the only passage of this kind which still causes anxiety. The grave corruptions of the text are found in passages in which the MSS. are in agreement; they agree exactly (I) in five lacunae, T having an additional one; (2) in two or more misplaced passages; (3) in the placing of the refrain, with all of which matters I deal below; they agree exactly in an error in the title ‘Peruirgilium’ for ‘Peruigilium,’ and in about twelve lines, of which vv. 51 and 79 have almost certainly been preserved in an incorrect form.

I have not had the advantage of seeing H. C. Muller's treatise on word-composition in Greek (Leiden, 1896) referred to in his note on Greek Dvandva compounds in the January issu of the Classical Quarterly. But I venture to add a fee more words, chosen without special research, to confirm the curious facility, which he notes, of mediaeval and modern Greek in the formation of these compounds.

In the Monumentum Ancyranum Augustus makes some interesting and, if we can unravel them, undoubtedly important statements, from which certain deductions seem possible as to the number of his legionary soldiers, the rate of mortality among them, their length of service and the provisions made for them after their dicharge. Quite early in the Monument (I. 16–19) we get the following general assertion: ‘About five hundred thousand Roman citizens were bound to me by the military oath. Of these, after the due expiry of their service, I settled in colonies or sent back to their own municipia somewhat more than three hundred thousand. And to all of them I gave land purchased by myself, or in lieu of land sums of money out of my own resources.’ From the place of this statement in that part of the record relating to his earlier career we might be tempted to infer (a) that the five hundred thousand legionaries were those who formed his armies at the time of Antony's collapse, and (b) that the discharge of three hundred thousand of them, whether planted in colonies or sent back to their domiciles, took place at one and the same time. With regard to the second point, we shall see presently that the vague and indiscriminate statement made here is cleared up by a later passage (III. 22 sqq.), from which it appears that the assignation of land belongs to two distinct schemes of colonizations, separated by sixteen years, and that the restoration of discharged soldiers to their municipalities, to whom alone the words ‘pecuniam pro agris dedi’ are applicable, belongs to a still later date.