Ancient and modern scholars are so unanimous in their condemnation of Varro as a writer, that a study of his ‘style’ may seem to be valueless. Cicero paid ready tribute to his great contemporary's learning, but studiously forbore to say anything about his writing, a fact which was observed by Augustine, who admitted Varro's inferiority in this respect. Quintilian, in a guarded way, makes the same criticism; for him Varro is ‘plus scientiae collaturus quam eloquentiae’. In recent times Norden has castigated the De, Lingua Latina as exhibiting the worst Latin style of any prose work, and his opinion of the Res Rusticae is not much higher.

Editors and commentators ancient and modern have not responded very well to the challenge of the two riddles which round off the contest between Damoetas and Menalcas at the end of Eclogue 3 (104–7). The first is generally regarded as impossibly difficult; the second as impossibly easy. Critics take refuge in quoting Servius' despairing statement: sciendum aenigmata haec sicuti pleraque carere aperta solutione. Yet it is most unlikely that Virgil would introduce insoluble or meaningless riddles into the Bucolica. If there is no solution the lines become pointless, even tasteless; and these are not epithets to be applied lightly to Virgil's poetry.

The lettering of this inscription begins at the very top of the block, just below the straight edge, and stops half-way down the block, the lower part being smoothed but uninscribed. As the inscription is not set centrally on the block, it is probably the continuation of an inscription which ran on a block once superimposed upon it. Doubtful letters are those which are marked by the dot underneath; and W. Peek reported in Ath. Mitt. lxvi (19,41), 200 n. 2, that he had seen the top of the v which Vollgraff suggested in the restorationThe inscription is dated to the seventh century B.C. by epigraphists. The stone itself was seen in 1729 by Fourmont and rediscovered in 1928 by Vollgraff; it was in the wall of a Venetian tower on the Larissa or acropolis of Argos. No one knows whence the Venetians had taken it. Therefore Vollgraff's suggestion that it had originally been set up in porta arcis regiae is no more than an attractive speculation.

The problems of this passage were concisely stated by M. Platnauer more than thirty years ago and his suggestions for their solution have been adopted and developed in A. S. F. Gow's magnum opus. Its authority—so the present writer suspects—is liable at this point to eclipse the meaning of the text

People who trust modern indexes will suppose that the name of Sex. Clodius, the disreputable henchman of Publius, comes twice in the Ad Atticum letters, 14. 13. 6 and 14. 13 A. 2. The manuscripts give it as follows:

‘Auctoritas’ was naturally one of Cicero's favourite concepts. In the ideal republic power lay with the people, auctoritas with the Senate (‘Cum potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu sit’, De leg. 3. 28). Alternatively, in a balanced state, potestas would lie with the magistrates, libertas with the people, but still auctoritas would be the property of the Senate, ‘in principum consitio’ [De rep. 2. 57).

Professor Kamerbeek in a recent article raises some interesting questions about the value of the manuscript of Sophocles Parisinus gr. 2712, universally known as A. Ever since the time of Brunck, who was the first to use this manuscript extensively, it has been considered second only to Laurentianus XXXII 9 (L) as a source of correct readings and as a witness of the old, i.e. pre-Byzantine, tradition of Sophocles. But the importance of A has been seriously challenged by Alexander Turyn, who has sought to show that in Ajax, Electra, and Oedipus Tyrannus—the three plays which constitute the Byzantine Triad of Sophocles—A's text is principally that of the recension of Manuel Moschopulus (fl. c. A.D. 1290)—or, more strictly, the version of that recension which includes scholia by Maximus Planudes and some slight variations in the poetic text.

Believing that there is still something to be said about the early history of clausulae in Latin prose, I set myself to trace the practice of the early orators, then that of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, accepting its conventional dating to 86–82 B.C., and lastly that of Cicero in De Inventione, assuming it to be roughly contemporary with the ad Herennium, and in his early speeches. But clausula-study itself, besides shedding light on the methods of composition used by the still unidentifiable Auctor ad Herennium, cast doubts on the conventional dating of his work. I gave a brief outline of my conclusions in C.R., N.S. vi (1956), 134–6.1 propose to attempt here a detailed justification of those relating to the date of the work, with a few modifications of some points.

Are we to restore ‘sit on eggs’ after Hesychius or ‘cry ’, ‘lament’ after Nauck? In his recent supplement to the Loeb Aeschylus, Mr. Lloyd-Jones says that the latter ‘is far better suited to the context’, by which I am given to understand that he means that Aeschylus would have been very unlikely to employ the brooding metaphor in this passage. Admonished by Wilamowitz (Interpretationen, p. 57 n.) that ‘es unverzeihlich ist, das Bild der briitenden Henne zu vertreiben’, I fall back in some bewilderment on the fact that I personally like it very much and that the tomb-nest symbolism, though not absolutely presupposed by Cho. 247 ff. and 501(), would certainly have encouraged the poet to write these later passages. But there is a dearth of objective argument on this matter which I want, if possible, to supply.

The following suggestions for the interpretation of Parmenides and Melissus can be grouped for convenience about one problem. This is the problem whether, as Aristotle thought and as most commentators still assume, Parmenides wrote his poem in the broad tradition of Ionian and Italian cosmology. The details of Aristotle's interpretation have been challenged over and again, but those who agree with his general assumptions take comfort from some or all of the following major arguments. First, the cosmogony which formed the last part of Parmenides' poem is expressly claimed by the goddess who expounds it to have some measure of truth or reliability in its own right, and indeed the very greatest measure possible for such an attempt. Second, the earlier arguments of the goddess prepare the ground for such a cosmogony in two ways. For in the first place these arguments themselves start from assumptions derived from earlier cosmologists, and are concerned merely to work out the implications of this traditional material. And, in the second place, they end by establishing the existence of a spherical universe: the framework of the physical world can be secured by logic even if the subsequent introduction of sensible qualities or ‘powers’ into this world marks some decline in logical rigour.

DR. G. Zuntz's excellent paper on these verses in Proc. Brit. Acad. xlii (1956), 209–46, deserves all our thanks for the clarity and good sense of its exposition, and for clearing away much unnecessary comment that has been encumbering the fragment, especially Bignone's theory (Atene e Roma, i [1933], 30, and L'Aristotele perduto, i [1936], 94) that it derives its philosophy directly from Aristotle's Protreptikos, with Körte's supplement that (since all of it derives from this same source) it is indivisible—that there is no break at v. 7; see Körte's Menandri quae supersunt (1953), ii. 147–8. There is, however, I think, room for further comment on Zuntz's interpretation of the lines, and on his view that die fragment known as Papyrus Didotiana b (Körte, i. 145) may belong to the same play, Hypobolimaios.

This passage concerns the bird-colony on the Diomedean islands, now called Tremiti, off Gargano in Italy; it is said to have been formed by the companions of Diomede, when they became birds. ‘They shall hunt fish-spawn with their beaks, dwelling in an island bearing their leader's name they shall fashion the streets for their close-packed nests with firm blows (of their beaks), on an earth-covered slope, tiered like a theatre, imitating Zethos’ (i.e. building to music, the birds are noisy when breeding). ‘They shall set out to hunt and return to the hollow, together and at night. They shall flee all together from a crowd of barbarous men, but on the way home to their accustomed bivouacs they will take offscourings of bread and after-dinner fragments of barley-cake from the hand, provided they come from the pouches of Greek robes; they will murmur softly. in friendly fashion, sadly remembering, poor birds, their former way of life.’ In [Aristotle]'s account the birds dive-bomb the heads of barbarians. That passage does not describe shearwater but it may easily refer to other birds on the Tremiti. Evidently the observers did not drag the shearwater out of their burrows, which is the only way to be certain of their appearance. The Lockleys tell us of gulls marauding round the Skokholm colony. Black-headed gulls feed from the hand on the Embankment, and dive-bomb intruders near their eggs.

The distribution of parts between the available actors in ancient comedy has frequently engaged critical attention, but it has only recently become possible to test the principles believed to be at work against a play of Menander which is for practical purposes preserved complete. The present inquiry will suggest that either four principal actors are needed or, alternatively, that three actors can carry the major roles between them, provided that the part of Getas is split between two of them and that a supernumerary actor is available for two small parts, together with parachoregemata in a few places and a kophon prosopon twice. It is not easy to choose between these two possibilities, but there may be sufficient hints in the dramatic economy of the play to warrant preference for the three-actor alternative.

Palladas can hardly be credited with either a religious creed or a philosophical system, but he held some powerful convictions which were not necessarily consistent but certainly reflected his emotional responses to a life embittered by poverty (A.P. 9. 169, 175; 11. 302, 303), a nagging wife (9. 168; 11. 378), and a profession which he detested (9. 171, 173, 174). In so far as he believed that a single power controls circumstances, it was Tyche, to whom he refers with frequent comments, usually hostile. By the latter part of the fourth century A.D. the ancient belief in Tyche had become intellectually respectable in certain Pagan circles. There were of course those who followed the Cynics in denying any importance to her (Stob. 2. 7. 21), and their rejection of her can be seen, in different forms and at different levels, in a Hermetic text which regards her as (Stob. 1. 41. 1), in an anonymous couplet,1 which looks as if it came from the last years of Paganism:

All commentators on these lines make two assumptions about the first clause, (i) that means ‘sitting in judgement’, ‘punishing’, or the like, (2) that the which is its subject as well as that of is the second in a series of two: the subsequent slaying punishes or sits in judgement on the previous; thus the slaying of Cly taemnestra herself will sit in judgement upon that of Agamemnon, just as that had sat in judgement upon the of Iphigenia. Then opinions differ as to whether is to be taken as the object of both verbs, or of one but not the other.

For the historian who aspires to the study of Scipio Aemilianus one of the happier features of his material is the considerable number of Scipio's dicta which have been preserved: sayings which are distinct from the extracts from formal speeches yet which in most cases were uttered in public. This paper is concerned with a small group of such dicta which belong to the last period of Scipio's life, between his return from Numantia in 132 and his death in 129. The intention is not to provide an historical interpretation (which must be reserved for an extended discussion of Scipio's career) but simply to establish die content, context, and relationship of the sayings concerned. At the request of the editors I do not quote in full the passages which provide the evidence, most of which are reproduced, at least in part, on pages 131 f. of the second edition of Malcovati's Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta.

Prodelision or Inverse Elision takes place when a word ending in a long vowel or diphthong is immediately followed by another word beginning with a short vowel. Though it is very occasionally found in inscriptions and in the manuscripts of certain prose authors, particularly those of Plato—almost uniquely and its cases—it is to be considered as essentially a verse phenomenon, affecting as it does the metre of the line in which it occurs. Prodelision was unknown to Homer and Hesiod, is rare in lyric, and seems only to come into real use with the dramatists of the fifth century. An examination of the practice of the three tragedians and of Aristophanes is not without interest in itself and may occasionally throw some light on points of textual criticism.