Historians of the Roman Empire have been nearly unanimous in giving the ill-fated Caesar whom Hadrian designated as his successor the cognomen Verus ascribed to him by Spartianus.2 Following the same biographer Annalists have given the names Aurelius and Annius to his father and grandfather. Noris in his Epistola Consularis3 maintained against Pagi that the original names of this prince were Lucius Ceionius Commodus, that neither he nor any of his family bore the names Aurelius, Annius, or Verus ascribed to them in the Historia Augusta, but that the name Verus has been mistakenly reflected upon him from his more famous son L. Verus Augustus the colleague of M. Aurelius Antoninus. De Tillemont4 rejected Noris’ opinion on purely literary grounds, saying, ‘il est bien difficile de croire qu'un auteur ait esté assez ignorant et assez malheureux pour nommer toujours un prince, mesme en faisant exprès son histoire, d'un nom qu'il n'a jamais eu.’ By consequence the mistake, if mistake it be, is become inveterate and is repeated5 down to our own day. Klebs6 alone rejects the jiame, and the error is not corrected in Dr. Bury's edition of Gibbon.

In the beginning of 1906 Professor S. A. Naber devoted a long paper in Mnemosyne to emendations and remarks upon Apollonius Rhodius. The Professor, following Buttmann, is of opinion that Apollonius was an ignorant imitator of Homer and rebukes him for the introduction of many ‘barbarous forms.’ This opinion, however, though it may contain some truth, is the result of much exaggeration, for Apollonius imitated Homer as a rival rather than as a servile flatterer, and naturally and deliberately introduced many late forms into his Epic poem. I have no wish to deny that the Professor's paper contains acute and learned remarks, but certainly it does not show that familiarity with his author which might have been expected from so eminent a scholar. For instance, where a particular form is objected to for any reason, it is of no use to propose an emendation for one passage only in which it occurs and to leave other passages unnoticed.

v. 2. ‘Don't parade philosophy: avoid asperum cultum et intonsum caput et quidquid aliud ambitionem peruersa uia sequitur.’ So the MSS. Hense adopts Gertz's ingenious conjecture ambitio nempe. I have before me a list containing some thirty examples of the use of nempe by Seneca. It is very definitely a dialogue particle and is used (1) to introduce the answer to a question, where it is implied that the answer is obvious (‘Why, to be sure’), (2) to introduce a clause which shews that a statement just urged by the interlocutor though true in itself in no way weakens the original speaker's point ‘Yes, but’ or ‘After all said and done’ and (3) to introduce a premiss the truth of which the interlocutor must grant‘I take it,’ ‘You know.’For examples I may refer to Ira 3.26.1 quare fers aegri rabiem . . . puerorum proteruas manus ? nempe quia etc.; Ep. 4.9 ‘ at uictor te duci iubebit ?’ eo nempe quo duceris (sc. to death).; Ep. 124.6 nempe uos (the Stoics)... dicitis. There is absolutely no parallel in Seneca to the parenthetical use which Gertz assumes here, and for which I should expect rather the concessive sine dubio (which indeed is opposed to nempe in Heluia 9.7).

Not the least pleasure in reading a book so vital and imaginative as Mr. Cornford's lies in the vitalising effect it has on the imagination of the reader. The results may or may not be correct: Mr. Cornford may or may not agree with them: but it is perhaps the best of compliments to a writer that he should produce such an effect at all. In the present instance his masterly analysis of the character and significance of Cleon as an actor in Thucydides’ historic drama has suggested an interpretation of Pericles’ position in the tragedy, which, though somewhat different from Mr. Cornford's own estimate of that great figure, is yet in accordance with his general conception of the work as a whole, designed to show Retribution following on overbearing Ambition and overweening Desire. From the time of Grote this conception has been familiar enough in outline, but Mr. Cornford fills it in with a wonderful richness of detail and illustration, and in particular draws a striking parallel with the vast scheme of Retribution in the Oresteia.

The 86 verses of Dorotheus printed at the end of Koechly's Manetho, 33 of which had already been published by Salmasius in his exercitationes Plinianae or his diatribae de annis climactericis, were edited by Iriarte from a scrap of manuscript at Madrid, into which they had been copied, as we now know, from the first book of the astrological treatise of Hephaestion of Thebes, who took Dorotheus for his chief authority. To these 86 verses nearly 300 more, by far the most of which are preserved in the second and third books, still unpublished, of Hephaestion's work, have now been added, in the catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum vol. vi (1903) pp. 67 and 91–113, by Mr W. Kroll, the best editor they could have found ; a scholar who combines critical talent, knowledge of Greek, and knowledge of astrology, more happily than any of his associates, and who has emended much of the very corrupt text with conspicuous ability and success. A good many additional corrections, chiefly grammatical and metrical, have been made by Mr Ludwich in the Rheinisches Museum for 1904, pp. 42–54

Enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle. Upon scanty quotations and a jejune epitome a tedious literature has been built. The older writers, such as Welcker, tried to ‘reconstruct’—as profitable and satisfying a task as inferring a burnt manor-house from its cellars; later scholars have gone out in tracing the tradition of the poems through the learned age of Greece—a scaffolding without ties, by which this or that conclusion is reached according to temperamental disposition to this or that fallacy. I do not intend to enter more than is needful into a controversy where so far as I can see everyone has gone beyond the evidence. If I add to the bulk of the literature, it is in the hope of putting things in their proper places and of presenting the data as they appear to a future editor.