The only suggestions which attempt to deal with the reading of the manuscripts are that of Clodachzh (‘in search of spices’, which in addition to its improbability uses propter in a causal, and not in a local sense; the latter alone appears to be the Lucretian usage) and that of Ellis, ‘which does preserve most of the letters but shuffles them up in an impossible manner’ (Bailey) and for this reason has not found acceptance. Common ground for emendation is the need to provide a substantive with the meaning ‘ships’ for velivolis. It follows that if this is to be done, and if at the same time anything resembling the manuscripts' propter odores is to be retained, then a lacuna containing navibus must be presumed. (There is no help to be obtained from ii. 417, which does no more than record the existence of propter odores, words which there fit the context.)

The description of a seismic sea-wave has a long history, but the understanding of it a short one. Although the ancient Greeks did not have a name for it, until recently the moderns used a misnomer: tidal wave. Now that the phenomenon is correctly understood it has acquired a Japanese name: tsunami (soo-NAH-me), but misnomers often persist even among those who know better.

In a recent article on Menander, Professor Arnott acknowledges his debt to the conclusions of the late Armin Schäfer with regard to the construction of the Dyskolos. Schäfer's theory, briefly stated, is that Menander was faced in this play with the problem of combining two different themes—the romantic love-interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon. Menander comes near to a solution, argues Schäfer, but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action. In the following pages I shall try to show that the conflict between the two sides of the play is an imaginary one (created in our minds, perhaps, by our knowledge of the lines along which ‘comedy of intrigue’ and ‘comedy of manners’ subsequently developed), and that the carefully integrated plot reflects a unity of theme in the comedy as a whole.

The Emperor Justinian, who succeeded his uncle Justin to the throne of Byzantium in A.d. 527, probably never intended to mark an epoch. Not, at least, the epoch which the modern historian must assign him. For his reign is in a sense a watershed; he was the last Roman emperor and the first Byzantine one. The reality of a Roman Empire embracing the whole Mediterranean had suffered a little before Justinian owing to circumstances. Among the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths in Spain, it was more fiction than fact, but it was a fiction which was still cherished, and not merely in Constantinople. After Justinian, the concept was not dead; but it was clearly losing force.