Parisinus 1672 (E in Wyttenbach and all subsequent editions), executed at the instigation of Maximus Planudes, is the only manuscript which contains all seventy-eight extant moralia of Plutarch. It may be dated soon after 1302, the year in which Planudes appended to his manuscript of the Greek Anthology (Marc. 481) a πίναξ Πλουτρχου containing the titles of the first sixty-nine of the seventy-eight treatises and concluding with the words τατα πντα εὑρθη. The addition of nine further treatises to the Corpus was made possible by the discovery of two further sources, one containing Nos. 70–7 and the other No. 78. The tradition of No. 78 is established beyond doubt: we are concerned here only with the remaining eight, Nos. 70–7.

The celebration of the revived Olympic games in London in the summer of 1948 gave to ‘records’ an unusually prominent place in men's thoughts and in their speech and writing, and we instinctively turn back to the ancient Greek world, which witnessed the foundation of the Olympic festival and its long history of wellnigh twelve centuries, to seek traces of any similar phenomenon.

The amount of criticism heaped upon persuadent (13) has obscured consideration of the meaning of picta; for it is this word which carries the weight of the line. Tracing the sequence of thought in the passage will show where the emphasis lies. There is throughout a comparison, either expressed (melius 10, formosius 11, dulcius 14), or implied (9 and 12), between the artless manifestations of nature and their cultivated, trained, or man-made counterparts; ‘wild flowers are more beautiful to behold than cultivated ones; similarly ivy and arbutus which grow as they will are more attractive than those in gardens; natural rills more charming than artificial fountains, … birds which sing from the heart delight us more than those which have been taught.’

Burent's and Robin's collations of W (cod. Vindob. 54 Suppl. Gr. 7) differ for the text of the Phaedo in about 130 readings of a more than orthographical interest.✝ A new inspection of the manuscript has shown that Robin very often corrected Burnet, but added some twenty mistakes. The actual readings of W and of its second handW2 are given in the following list; each of them is followed, after a colon, by Burnet's (b) and Robin's (r) misreadings. The Stephanus numeration refers to Burnet's edition.

Orientius, Bishop of Auch (Augusta Ausciorum) in the early fifth century, possessed a talent for elegiac verse of no despicable order, and this he exercised in a didactic poem of 518 distichs, (known without indeed any good authority) as the Commonitorium. This poem, consisting of two books, describes and exhorts the reader to follow the Christian mode of life, and is characterized by its unassuming simplicity, some effective description, a number of well-turned lines (one of which has attained a modest renown, viz. 2. 184 ‘uno fumauit Gallia tota rogo’), and a sincere belief in the truths he was preaching. The language is in general clear and direct, though tinged here and there with turns of a decidedly late flavour.

In C.Q. xliii (1949), p. 39, Mr. J. H. Quincey quotes the opening lines of Catalepton 5 as,

Ite hinc,-inanes, ite, rhetorum ampullae,

inflata rhoso* non Achaico verba,

and adds, ‘the second line is corrupt and no satisfactory emendation has been proposed’.

The MS. readings are: rhorso B, roso Mu, om. in lacuna Ar. In face of these voces nihili many have fallen back on the rore of the Aldine edition of 1517. But this does not really help, for one does not inflate with dew: orators are not dew-bags, but wind-bags. It occurred to me some years ago that what is needed is some word meaning breath or wind to go with inflata, and that in view of the rh in rhorso it was probably a Greek word which a scribe had failed to recognize. I conjectured ῥοζῳ, and found subsequently that this had been proposed by K. Münscher in Hermes, xlvii (1912), pp. 153–4. ῥοȋζος used of any rushing sound, is applied to speech by Philostratus (V. Soph. 2. 15, p. 98, Kayser), and by Pollux (6. 148). It is easy to see how rhoezo could degenerate into rhoeso-rhoso-roso.

The Twofold Exhalation. Aristotle explains in Book I of the Meteorologica (341b6 ff.) that the heat of the sun causes the earth to give off an exhalation (ναθνμασις), which is of two kinds. One kind, derived from the moisture within the earth and on its surface, is a moist vapour (cf. De Sensu 443a26–7), ‘potentially like water’ (340b28–9); the other, which comes from the earth itself, is hot, dry, and smoky, highly combustible ‘like a fuel’ (οἷον ὑπκκανμα 341b18–19), ‘the most inflammable of substances’ (341b16–17), ‘potentially like fire’ (340b29), and compounded of Air and Earth (De Sensu 443a21–2, 27–8).