Aeneas ends his first speech to Dido as follows:

quae te tam laeta tulerunt

saecula? qui tanti talem genuere parentes?

in freta dum fluuii current, dum montibus umbrae

lustrabunt conuexa, polus dum sidera pascet,

semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt,

quae me cumque uocant terrae.

A number of parallels have been cited for 607–9, notably Eel. 1.59f. (an adynaton) and the positive statement (about Daphnis) at Eel. 5.76ff., which even ends with the same line:

caue, caue; namque in malos asperrimus

parata tollo cornua,

qualis Lycambae spretus infido gener

aut acer hostis Bupalo.

an, si quis atra dente me petiuerit,

inultus ut flebo puer?

Harrison observes that commentators translate ‘“inultus” not “unavenged” but “without taking revenge”, construing it with Horace as the subject of “flebo” and not with “puer”’, and he then asserts ‘This use of “inultus” is wholly unparalleled; the adjective is elsewhere always used passively of persons or objects unavenged and never in the active sense of “unavenging”’.

Here Horace's Catius lists restorative foods for drinkers. There seem to be two stages of drinking and two corresponding restoratives: the ‘marcens’ or drooping imbiber may be revived for more by prawns and snails, but not by lettuce, bad for the acidic and vinous stomach, while the man who is further gone needs ham and sausages or anything of that sort from the cook-shops. ‘Immorsus’ causes some difficulty here. It is usually taken with an understood ‘stomachus’ and translated ‘roused’ or ‘excited’ (with wine), but it is surely better to understand not ‘stomachus’ but ‘potor’, giving the elegant balance ‘marcentem…recreabis…potorem…[potor] flagitat immorsus refici’, with both verbs of restoration having the drinker for object. The sense usually given to ‘immorsus’ also seems doubtful: ‘immordeo’ is found only twice in classical Latin and only here in this metaphorical sense, and ‘mordeo’ in such contexts means not to rouse the stomach but to cause it to smart or sting, hardly the effect of wine – cf. Scribonius Largus 188 ‘[aconita] mordet autem stomachum et cor adficit’, Pliny, Nat. 27.133 ‘[radix] gustu acri mordet’.

In his final words to his son, Pallas, Evander interposes a prayer:

‘At uos, o superi, et diuum tu maxime rector

Iuppiter, Arcadii, quaeso, miserescite regis…’

Of recent commentators, C. J. Fordyce alone is bothered by the reference to Evander's Arcadian origin; he reckons that it alludes to his exiled condition and so establishes a claim on Jupiter's mercy. That may be so, but it is worth suggesting that this is rather a piece of Virgil's Callimachean learning. For at the opening of his first Hymn Callimachus had rejected the story that Zeus was born on Crete in favour of Arcadia (6–7, 10). The Arcadian birth-place was known to Cicero (De natura deorum 3.21,53: principio Ioues tres numerant…ex quibus primum et secundum natos in Arcadia). Yet Cicero is less likely to be in Virgil's mind than Callimachus, from whom he derived so much learned detail. Evander then is appealing to Jupiter as a fellow Arcadian, docte.

This is the reading of Clausen's OCT, in which no variant for line 131 is recorded in the apparatus.

No doubt the hendiadys ‘scutica et metus…erilis’ is not impossible,2 but it seems to me not to be a well chosen expression. Since the scutica belongs to the master, one is tempted to construe erilis with both nouns, not just with metus. But then the adjective must function in two different ways: ‘scutica… erilis’ is possessive, ‘his master's strap’, but ‘metus…erilis’ is objective, ‘fear of his master’. And ‘metus…erilis’ in this passage receives no support from ‘erilis…metus’ at Plautus, Amphitruo 1069, which means ‘fear for my mistress’.

tantane me tenuit vivendi, nate, voluptas,

ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae,

quern genui? tuane haec genitor per vulnera servor

morte tua vivens? heu, nunc misero mihi demum

exitium infelix, nunc alte vulnus adactum!

The answer to the basic question, quisquamne cantat?, given the rhetoric of the context (perhaps a professorial chestnut of Quintilian's: elements from 11.3.60 turn up at Pliny, Ep. 2.14.3), especially emotive in 57, should be that everyone cantat, but the form of the question seems to suggest, at first sight, the opposite.

(1) Horace, Janus, and Pighius' Acta

In PBSR 54 (1986), 213–28 Andrew Lintott dusts down the fragments of the Acta Urbana published by S. V. Pighius in 1615 and universally supposed today to be a forgery. Lintott himself, after a most learned discussion, concurs, but one senses a wistful longing for the fragments to be genuine. The purpose of this note is to offer another reason why sadly this is unlikely.

Recently in this journal, R. Shaw-Smith suggested reading ‘citra Kal. Ian.’: ‘circa, implying that the consul died either before or after 1st January, will not do.’ Will the example of citra at Aug. 43.4, adduced by Shaw-Smith (and the OLD [s.v. ‘citra’ 3)] in support of the meaning ‘(shortly) before’?

For a defence of ‘crudum’ against Courtney's strictures, see the reviews by Goodyear and Reeve. I am presently concerned not with the unresolved crux in verse 144, but with the medical reason for the death of the glutton. Galen (xix. 692–3 K), quoted by Mayor, warned that one should not bathe after eating ἵνα μ μϕραξις κατ νεϕρὺς κα ἦπαρ γνηται. More recently, Courtney ad loc. has quoted Persius 3.98ff. and has attributed the death to ‘apoplexy’, which in more modern parlance is called a ‘stroke’ or a ‘cerebral haemorrhage’. What Persius and Juvenal are actually describing is not a stroke but what was formerly known as ‘acute indigestion’ and is now called a ‘heart attack’, as indeed ought to have been obvious from ‘nescio quid trepidat mihi pectus’ at Persius 3.88, and ‘tange, miser, uenas et pone in pectore dextram’ at 3.107. As Duff says, ‘the natural and ordinary time for bathing was just before the cena, but the gluttons of this time had discovered that digestion was temporarily promoted by the unhealthy practice of bathing in very hot water immediately after the meal’. Modern medical research has shown why this practice was very unhealthy indeed. As a meal is digested, the pulse rate is elevated, and bathing in hot water increases it even further. The consumption of alcohol, such as that described at Persius 3.92–3 and 99–100, would further accelerate the heart beat. The synergistic effect of these three circumstances, digesting a heavy meal, metabolising a large dose of alcohol, and bathing in hot water, was liable to cause a heart attack in an overweight man whose arteries were clogged with cholesterol.

I quote Griffiths' translation: ‘A crown of many designs with all kinds of flowers had girt her lofty head; in its centre a flat disk above the forehead shone with a clear light in the manner of a mirror or indeed the moon, while on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes; from above it was adorned also with outstretched ears of corn’. This is the detailed description of the crown worn by Isis in her epiphany to Lucius at Cenchreae. ‘Sulcis’ is strange; it can only refer to the tracks or furrows left by snakes, a notion wholly irrelevant here – we require a noun referring to actual physical parts of the two snakes (or rather reproductions of snakes) which border Isis' moon-disk on either side, preferably a reference to their hanging coils – so Griffiths' translation runs ‘on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes’, though this does not render his text, which keeps ‘sulcis’. Read ‘spiris’, a word of similar shape to ‘sulcis’; ‘spirae’ is twice used of the coils of snakes by Vergil, at Aen. 2.217 and 12.848; ‘serpentum spiris’ in the latter passage may influence Apuleius’ ‘spiris…viperarum’. The alliteration and assonance of ‘spins’ and ‘spicis’ would be very much in Apuleius' manner as a jingle involving the change of a single consonant between two words – cf. Florida 3 (p. 5.10–11 Helm) ‘ita Marsyas in poenam cecinit et cecidit’, Apologia 85 (p. 94, 12–13 Helm) ‘acerbiores morsus viventi et videnti offeruntur’ and H. Koziol, Der Stil des L. Apuleius (Vienna, 1872), 204–5.

Philostratus remarks on the terseness of the letters of Apollonius of Tyana (Vita Apoll. 7.35, cf. 4.27), and letter 61 is a good example of that stylistic feature. Addressed to a Lesbonax, it says: ᾽Agr;νἀχαπσις ó Σκὑθης ῆν σπφóς εí δὲ Σκὐθης, ὃτι καì ϳκὐθης (‘Anacharsis the Scythian was a sage.. And if he was a Scythian, then it was because he was a Scythian that he was a sage’). In my commentary to the letters, I observed that Apollonius is drawing here on the tradition of the Scythians as an idealized race, unspoiled by the cultivations of Greek city life, and is implicitly criticizing his contemporaries in the Greek world for not living up to the high ideals of Hellenism. I compared a critical remark in letter 34 that alludes to Euripides, Orestes 485: “ἐβαπβαπὡθ” οὐ “χπóνιος ὢν ἀφ’ ‘Ελλἁδι. More can now be said.

In 1880 Spyridon Lambros discovered in the library of the Dionysiou monastery on Mount Athos a manuscript containing, among other things, the missing second book of a compilation of zoological lore made for the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (912–59), generally referred to as the Sylloge Constantini. The first book, already known from a manuscript in Paris, proclaims in its heading that the compilation was based on the epitome of Aristotle's περ ζῴων by Aristophanes of Byzantium, with supplements from the writings of Aelian, Timotheos and others. These supplements are found exclusively in the second book, which Lambros edited, along with the first, for the Supplementum Aristotelicum. They add greatly to our knowledge of the περ ζῴων by the fifth-century grammarian Timotheos of Gaza, a work hitherto known only from the so-called Epitome Augustana, a selection of 53 unconnected chapters made in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–55).

The extract from Paul's second book de adulteriis which is quoted at Digest 24.2.9 has been the source of much discussion about its implications for Roman divorce procedure. The text reads:

nullum divortium ratum est nisi septem civibus Romanis puberibus adhibitis praeter libertumeius qui divortium faciet. libertum accipiemus etiam eum, qui a patre avo proavo et ceteris susum versum manumissus sit.

’ɛχεδημία ἢ νῦν ’ακαδημία καλοɛμένη.

Latte's obelization is unnecessary. The form finds confirmation in a text from which I this one may itself derive, a fragment of Dicaearchus' βίος ϳελλάδος preserved by Plutarch:

ὁ δἑ Δικαίαχος ’ɛέμοε φησὸ καί ναράθοɛ σɛστρατεɛσάντων τίτε τίῖς τɛνδαρίδαις ἐξ ’ αρκαδίας, ἀφ’ οὖ μέν ’ɛχεδημίαν προσαγορεɛθῆναι τήν νἑν ’ακαδήμειαν, ἀφ’ οὐ δέ ναραθῶνα τὸν Δῆμομ, ἐπιδιδίντοντος ἐπιδιδίντὸν ἑκɛτσίως κατά τι λίγιον σφαγιον σφαγιάσασθαι πρὸ τῆς παατάξɛως.