The Silvae of Statius have had good editing, in particular from Phillimore in the Oxford text. There is also the large commentary of Vollmer, which is very useful from the historical point of view, though not from the literary. But the most consistently valuable aid to the student seems to me to be the London Delphin edition of 1824 (Valpy), which not only gives most of the comments of the two best critics of Statius, N. Heinsius and Markland, but also offers the most consistently reliable translation of the work that I know.

This line has been thought corrupt by most editors, though there is no agreement on the remedy. The Herald is plainly asking why the people at home are despondent: picks up the Chorus's phrase . But as Wilamowitz says, ‘ de populo aut senatu Argivorum accipi non potest’: it can only mean the army at Troy, as in lines 538 and 545. The usual inference is that arparw is corrupt.

It may seem strange, in view of the spate of recent literature on the subject, that yet another article should be forthcoming on what is certainly the most familiar, as well as the most vexed, of all Platonic passages. But it is precisely this spate of literature that has impelled me to write. The time seems to have come for an article which, rather than seeking desperately for something new, sets out instead to reaffirm those facts and conclusions that even the most resolutely original of scholars could hardly venture to dispute. This article will therefore be based, not on any of the numerous modern interpretations, but on what Plato himself actually wrote. It will contain a number of tentative suggestions which, to the best of my knowledge, have not been made before. They can, and probably will, be rejected. But its primary purpose remains to restate, whenever possible in Plato's own words, a number of important facts that are at once so simple and so obvious that they seem repeatedly, and especially in recent years, to have been quite forgotten.

Recent accounts of the life of Protagoras differ widely from one another in their treatment of the ancient sources, and in the conclusions which they draw from them. A re-examination of the evidence, undertaken in 1949–50 as part of a study of the Prometheus trilogy, has convinced me that a new discussion is urgently needed if we are to place the earlier stages of the sophistic movement in the right context historically; and the purpose of this paper is to lay at least a part of the foundation for such a discussion. Since the evidence for the life of Protagoras includes some allusions to his relations with Democritus, and there are some obvious affinities between the careers of Protagoras and Anaxagoras, I have added a short account of the relevant points in the biography of Democritus and a more detailed study of the evidence for the life of Anaxagoras.

The arguments usually propounded to show that the Greater Alcibiades was not written by Plato seem to me, by themselves, inconclusive. I believe that it would be better to begin by arguing (whether we retain the doubtfully authentic lines at 133 c or not) that we are given (1) a suggestion of a generic or universal likeness between one innermost ‘self’ and another, and (2) a method of acquiring wisdom and of apprehending God that are hardly in keeping with Plato's dialogues. My present purpose, however, is to draw attention to a striking parallelism between the Alcibiades and early works of Aristotle, as well as certain other compositions that probably belong to the same period as the latter.

Faced with the many and grave difficulties of 1.565 Coulon in his Budé edition excises it, putting a colon at the end of 1. 564 and taking as absolute: ‘déplorent leur pauvreté et y ajoutent’. In this he follows Herwerden and Willems, and defends his action (Essai sur la methode de la critique, p. 169)

In a recent article Professor W. Beare casts doubt on the authenticity of XOPOY at certain places in the Plutus. Of 626–7, he observes: ‘…the editors assume an interlude and insert in Aristophanes’ text. But what the scholiast says (ad 1. 619) is . The poet “ought to have” inserted a choral interlude and “waited a little” until someone could return from the temple with news of the cure.

In a recent article on the Vettius affair (Historia, i. 45–51) Professor Lily Ross Taylor has tried to show that this letter should be dated to mid-July 59, and that it is therefore antecedent to 2. 20, 21, and 22. According to the hitherto accepted view the letters 2. According to the hitherto accepted view the letters 2. 18–25 are given by the manuscripts in the right chronological order, and since 21 is certainly later than Pompey's contio on 25 July (21. 3), 23 and 24 must fall later in the year; a terminus ante quem for the description of the Vettius affair in 24 is to be found in in Vat. 25, which shows that L. Lentulus, one of the persons Vettius implicated, was then a candidate for the consulship and that the letter is therefore antecedent to the consular elections, postponed by Bibulus' edict to 18 October (cf. ad Att. 2.20. 6). The purpose of this note is to defend this view and show that Professor Taylor's new dating is wrong.

The interpretation of in this context raises some nice problems. (i) It is a term, a very flattering one, which had been appropriated to themselves by a certain class, in many cities at least (cf. 8. 48. 6 ), and by Dorians in relation to ‘Ionians and islanders’; it had thus become a cant phrase in current usage, the kind of phrase which when used tauntingly, as here, or ironically should be given inverted commas.

It is the purpose of these notes to make a contribution towards solving a problem the difficulty of which has inhibited all modern editors of the Silvae: the apparent impossibility of establishing a satisfactory relation between the Madrid manuscript and the readings noted by Politian in his copy of the first edition now in the Corsinian library in Rome. It is the task of the editor to draw up a stemma that would reconcile the evidence of our text with the testimony of the great humanist.

It is now nearly axiomatic among Platonic scholars that the Timaeus and its unfinished sequel the Critias belong to the last stage of Plato's writings. The Laws (including, for those who admit its claims, the Epinomis) is generally held to be wholly or partly a later production. So, by many, is the Philebus, but that is all. Perhaps the privileged status of the Timaeus in the Middle Ages helped to fix the conviction that it embodies Plato's maturest theories.

The last few words involve a difficulty which only Wilamowitz has perceived. The adjective could do either of two jobs: it could mean ‘without a feast’ or it could be part of an expression like meaning ‘a feast that is no feast’ and made on the model , etc. If it is being used in the former way, follows oddly upon .