Statius' last, unfinished poem, the Achilleid, is a more varied and charming work than readers of the The baid could ever have imagined, and is perhaps the most attractive approach to this highly imitative and professional poet. It is generally agreed that both Statius' diction and his narrative form are greatly influenced by Virgil and Ovid: but if he considered the Theban poem as his own Aeneid, we might fairly see the Achilleid as more akin to the Metamorphoses; diction and epic devices may remain recognizably Virgilian, but the relaxed tone, the gentle irony and open humour take us into Ovid's world. As an illustration, the brief episode in which Thetis conveys her sleeping son from Thessaly over the sea to Scyros probably draws its original inspiration from Venus' substitution of Cupid for Ascanius in Aeneid 1: Venus' son procures his own arrival, but she spirits away the sleeping Ascanius; ‘at Venus Ascanio placidam per membra quietem/ irrigat et fotum gremio dea tollit in altos/Idaliae lucos’ (Aen. 1. 691–3).

It is gratifying to read, in a recent issue of this periodical, Mr. A. A. Barrett's informed exposition of the syntax of this passage, even though he balks at the need to extract a grammatical subject for the verb deducit in 157 from the relative pronoun qua in the previous line. However his persuasive presentation of what he relies on as evidence in support of his suggested interpretation from the mosaics from Zliten in Tripolitania, which portray scenes in an amphitheatre, may seduce the unwary into an over-ready acquiescence in his proposal to read raeda in 157 for taeda of the manuscript tradition. Juvenal's words were correctly understood by T. Maguire as long ago as 1881, and the solution was restated with clarity in a note by W. V. Clausen recently.

additum et praesidium mille legionarii, tres sociorum chohortes duaeque equitum alae, et quo facilius novum regnum tueretur, pars Armeniae, ut cuique finitima, Pharasmani Polemonique et Aristobulo atque Antiocho parere iussae sunt. Corbulo in Syriam abscessit, morte Ummidii legati vacuam ac sibi permissam.

Hoc tempore velut per universum orbem Romanum, bellicum canentibus bucinis, excitae gentes saevissimae, limites sibi proximos persultabant. Gallias Raetiasque simul Alamanni poputabantur; Sarmatae Pannonias et Quadi; Picti Saxonesque et Scotci, et Attacotti Brittanos aerumnis vexavere continuis; Austoriani Mauricaeque aliae gentes, Africam solito acrius incursabant; Thracias et diripiebant praedatorii globi Gothorum. Persarum rex manus Armeniis iniectabat, eos in suam dicionem ex integro vocare vi nimia properans, sed iniuste, causando, quod post Ioviani excessum, cum quo foedera firmarat et pacem, nihil obstare debebit, quo minus ea recuperaret, quae antea ad maiores suos pertinuisse monstrabat.

Any educated Roman in late antiquity would immediately have recognized the figure of Catiline, for the simple reason that Sallust, together with Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, formed the core of the school curriculum. When his grandson starts school, Ausonius rejoices in a second chance to read the Catiline and the Histories (Ep. 22.61 ff.):

In CR N.S. 10 (1960), 7, I supported L. Purgold's emendation of to in O. T. 230, accepted by Elmsley, wrongly discarded by all editors since, and now omitted even from the apparatus criticus of R. D. Dawe's recent Teubner edition of Sophocles. May I now add that the emendation was also defended, at greater length, by M. Furness in CR 13 (1899), 195–7? The 1899 editor of CR reproduced, at the end of Furness's article, the sueeinct and trenchant Latin in which, in the year 1802, Purgold defended his emendation.

In CQ N.S. 28 (1978), 242, Frances Mueeke, quoting Beroaldus, rightly understood this line to refer to a funerary practice. In default of ancient parallels the author offered us a modern one from a novel I vicerè by Federico De Roberto, first published in 1894. 1894. But even before De Roberto's novel was published, Vincenzo Padula, in his curious work Pauca Quae in Sexto Aurelio Propertio Vincentius Padula ab Acrio Animadvertabat (Naples, 1871), had explained Prop. 4.7.26 by reference to popular custom: