Greek New Comedy, as we know it from references and fragmentary MSS., is the meeting-place of three confluent streams—comedy of manners, Aristophanic comedy, and tragedy. From Sicilian comedy, through Epicharmus at Syracuse and Crates and Pherecrates at Athens, it inherited certain stock stage figures, and a tradition of ‘invented’ plots and sententious speech. Old Comedy it resembled in its fun and informality and many stage conventions; and, indeed, the resemblance was so marked, in at least one of the later plays of Aristophanes, that the writer of his life, mistaking effect for cause, claimed the lost Cocalus as the original model of New Comedy. Perhaps most important of all was the influence of tragedy; and this influence may be estimated by a direct comparison between Euripides and Menander, both in the spirit and form of their plays and in the social and philosophic theories underlying them.

This ancient tale has naturally been recognized by modern scholars for what it is—a story of the Great Mother and her paramour; but several features appear to me to have been given less examination than they deserve, in view of their own peculiarity and the obvious antiquity of the myth.

That it is pre-Greek is fairly clear from the names of the principal actors. Anchises yields no tolerable meaning in Greek, and we do not know to what speech it belongs—possibly Phrygian. Aphrodite is, of course, no Greek goddess at all. The tale was known to Greek saga-men about the tenth century B.C., and is fully told for the first time, so far as our surviving records go, in a document possibly of the seventh century—the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Connected as it is, though loosely, with the Troy-saga, it may quite possibly go back to Minoan-Mycenaean times, as that does. The features which I think worthy of further investigation are the fate of Anchises after his enjoyment of the goddess' favours, and in particular the effect upon him of the thunderbolt with which he was smitten.

Contemporary inscriptions prove practically beyond doubt that Philip V. was the son of Demetrius II. and of the Epeirot princess Phthia. But historians have always started from Eusebius' statement (1,237 Schoene) that he was the son of Chryseis, a Thessalian captive whom Demetrius married and who afterwards married Doson, and have tried to fit other things in with Eusebius. Now it does not much matter to us which of two unknown women was Philip's mother; but it does matter how we approach our evidence, and we must start from the contemporary evidence and work downward, not vice versa. I need not here go through all the different theories based on the late evidence; what I am going to do is first to examine the inscriptions, which has not yet been done in this connexion, and then explain how Eusebius' blunder arose; for even if a definite statement be certainly wrong, we want to know how it got there.

The generally accepted explanation of the -πλος (−πλóος) in these words, that it comes from the root pel- ‘to fold’ (Boisacq, Diet. Etym. s.v. διπλóος), fails to account for the presence of the double ο in -πλóος. May not this -πλóος be identical with πλος [πλó(F)ος] [voyage]? In other languages a word for [voyage] or [journey] has faded into a word for [time] ([mal,] [fois])—e.g. Serb. jedan put [once] (lit. [one journey]); Lett,vien-reiz [once] (lit. [one journey,] reiz being borrowed from Low German, in which reise had already suffered this change of meaning, cf. Endzelin, Bezzenberger's Beiträdge 29. 179 note).

The notorious line, ‘O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta, turanne, tulisti,’ is assigned to Ennius by Priscian, Isidore, and the Explanator in Donatum, as well as by Pompeius in his second quotation of it. In the first, however (287 K), he, like Auctor ad Herennium, Charisius, Donatus, Martianus Capella, and Plotius Sacerdos, gives no author's name. There is thus some reasonable doubt whether the attribution is correct; and this doubt is greatly increased by the remarks of our earliest authority, the Auctor ad Herennium (IV. 12. 18): ‘Vitabimus eiusdem litterae nimiam adsiduitatem, cui uitio uersus hic erit exemplo, nam hic nihil prohibet in uitiis alienis exemplis uti O Tite e.q.s.; et hic eiusdem poetae Quicquam quisquam e.q.s.’ This clearly indicates:

1. That it was unusual for this author to borrow his illustrative examples (cf. IV. 2. 4 sqq., where he states that he prefers to make up his own examples instead of quoting from the best prose authors and poets as most rhetoricians do).

The later MSS. of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius have received little attention. Hildebrand's edition, the last to give an extensive apparatus criticus, appeared in 1842, and seven years later Keil announced his belief that all the MSS. which he had seen in Italy were derived from Laur. 68. 2 (F), the famous eleventh century MS., written at Monte Cassino, and now at Florence. Since Keil, all texts have been based almost exclusively on F, with assistance from its twelfth or thirteenth century copy Laur. 29. 2 (φ), in the enormous number of places where F is now illegible.

Lvcretivs II. 263 ‘nonne uides etiam patefactos tempore puncto.’ ‘Tempore puncto’ occurs only here in Lucretius and in no other author; but ‘puncto tempore’ is read in II. 456, 1006, IV. 214; ‘puncto in tempore et,’ VI. 230. ‘Temporis puncto’ is found at I. 1109, and ‘temporis in puncto’ at IV. 164, 193. ‘Puncto… diei’ occurs in IV. 201. ‘Punctum’ as a noun corresponds to ἂτομος, for a point has no dimensions; St. August. Ep. 205, 14, ‘atomo temporis, inquit, hoc est in puncto temporis quod diuidi non potest.’ ‘Inquit’ refers to St. Paul I. Ad Corinth. XV. 52, where the N.T. has ν τόμѡ and the present Vulgate ‘in momento.’ And in Ep. 190, 15, St. Austin says ‘summa celeritate atque atomo temporis’; and St. Jerome, Ep. 119, 2, ‘in atomo et in puncto temporis atque momento,’ 5 ‘atomus… punctum temporis est’; J. Cassian, Inst. II. 7, 2, ‘puncto breuissimo’; Lact. Inst. VII. 12 ‘uno temporis puncto.’ ‘Punctum temporis’ or ‘atomus temporis’ means an instant of time that cannot be divided.

In 820 the corrections of Buecheler and Scaliger are accepted. In 822 the MSS. have quom penes me potestas; quom for quos from v. 823, lacuna supplied by Klotz, met <fuit nulla>, by Leo, mei <fuit saepe>. I conceive an intermediate stage: quom penes mei <positast> potestas, which would account for the lacuna by haplography, as well as for the change of mei to me (posita pot- is, of course, a proceleusmatic foot).

The Twelfth Ode of the Third Book of Horace consists of four stanzas in this metre, each stanza consisting of ten feet. How these feet should be distributed into verses is a matter of much dispute; but inasmuch as it does not concern me at the present time I shall avoid it by following certain editors of Horace and printing each stanza continuously.

In the encyclopaedia portion of the Liber Glossarum the compiler introduced numerous historical and geographical excerpts of varying length. The writers from whose works the geographical extracts are primarily taken are Isidore, Orosius, and Eutropius; but though the compiler has in many cases appended the labels ESIDORI, PAVLI HOROSI, or simply OROSI, and EVTROPI to the entries, this is by no means always the case. A few of the excerpts are of great length; thus, the longest of all, Hispania (HI 233), which is labelled PAVLI HOROSI, SVLINI, OROSI, fills a whole column of the Paris MS. (P.). Other long geographical entries are IT 12 (Italia), GA 52–4 (Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Gallia), and RO 105–8 (Roma). The length of HI 233, coupled with the fact that the next entry (HI 234) fills half a column of P., and contains Isidore's remarks on Spain (Etym. 14, 4, 28–30), has been used as an argument by those scholars who maintain that the Liber Glossarum is the work of a Spanish compiler. To this the obvious retort would seem to be that the presence of three passages about Gaul might with equal justice be used to support the view that the compilation was made in France. Other evidence of a ‘Spanish hand’ in certain geographical items will be given below, but it is of such a character that it adds nothing to the evidence for the vexed question of provenance.

Mr. Last's very interesting note (Class. Quart. XVII., pp. 35–36) is so ingenious and the Egyptian evidence falls so pat that it deserves to be right, but I very much doubt if it is. In fact the Aithiopians do not stand alone, and the context of their longevity deserves consideration. If that context is recalled, it may appear that ‘to say that the legend was attached by the Greeks to the Aithiopians through their remoteness from the Mediterranean world is no explanation’ is itself a hard saying.