In his excellent commentary on Callimachus' fifth Hymn, A. W. Bulloch has discussed the many allusions to earlier literature out of which this poem is made. He has, however, missed one: an allusion to Hesiod's Catalogue, which, as I shall show here, not only sheds light on one of the poem's most puzzling scenes – Athena's consolatio to the nymph Chariclo – but also helps to explain the articulation and function of the poem's first, so-called ‘mimetic,’ section.

Although scholars have expended increasing efforts over the last twenty years or so in either detecting or establishing large structural and thematic units within Ovid's perpetuum carmen, little attention, as far as I am aware, has been directed towards the evident care taken by Ovid in his arrangement of material within individual episodes, and the resultant over-all structure of those episodes. The aim of the present paper is to focus attention upon a single episode to which Ovid seems to have paid particular attention in these respects. I refer to the long story of Phaethon, which occupies the last part of book 1, and most of the first half of book 2, of the Metamorphoses, and intend to explore two different lines of approach in examining the structure of this episode.

In response to a suggestion in the Class. Rev. (XXXIII. 106), the two MSS. of the Liber Glossarum preserved at Tours have recently been examined. Since they had not been seen by Goetz when he published his excerpts, the following short descriptions may be added to the introduction of Vol. V. of the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum:

1. Tours, Bibliothèque de Ville, MS. No. 850; end of the ninth century; foll. 493, of which 1, 491, 492 are mere corners; cmm. 49 by 29. The last item is an Isidore gloss, Zatenen.-gemmam. Gaps due to loss of folia occur between Abiectus and Abdolet; Dextera manus and Dialogus; Faber and Impulitum; Res diuinae and Samsacus. There are no corrections except between folia 197 and 300, where a thirteenth-century hand has checked the MS. by means of another copy of the Lib. Gloss. The items are drawn up in two columns, and the alphabetical arrangement agrees for the most part with that of Vat. Pal. lat. 1773. Marginal indications of the sources of the items are numerous except between Profanum and Remeantes; where two or three neighbouring items come from the same source, the marginal mark is repeated; and towards the end of the MS., where the scribe takes to writing two items in the same line, the indication is also carefully transferred. This is important in view of Goetz' theory that the source of an unlabelled item is that given by the last preceding label.

Greek tragedy is full of rituals perverted by intra-familial conflict. To mention some examples from the house of Atreus: the funeral bath and the funeral covering, normally administered to a man's corpse by his wife as an expression of ɸιλία, have in Aeschylus' Oresteia become instruments in the killing of Agamemnon; the pouring of libations at the tomb, normally a θελκτήριον for the dead, becomes in the Choephoroi an occasion for his arousal; Euripides has Klytaimnestra ‘sacrificed’ while performing the sacrifice for her (fictitious) newly born grandchild. On the important question of why it is that tragedians pervert ritual I hope to shed some light in future publications. The purpose of this paper is to examine the radical form taken by the perversion of mourning in Sophokles' Elektra.

In the first decade of this century the comparative anthropologists Hertz and van Gennep discovered as a widespread feature of the period of mourning its character as participation in the transitional state of the recently dead, to be ended by the incorporation of the dead person into his or her proper destination and the reincorporation of the mourners into the flow of everyday social life. The mourning relatives in a sense share the condition of the dead.

Orestes has returned to Argos, (89). For him to brandish at his father's murderers is natural there, where he is delivering a sort of general manifesto as to his aims, and where the strong word is justified and alleviated by the jingle with juxtaposed (‘to requite them murder as they murdered my father’). But there is no reason for Orestes to go on insisting on the bloodthirstiness of these aims, and reads oddly in 100, where he is explaining soberly his plan of campaign.

The reconstruction of ensemble d–f of the Akhmîm Papyrus, better known as the Strasbourg Papyrus, which attests approximately eighteen of the over seventy new lines of Empedocles’ physical poem, has drawn the attention of scholars over recent years. Thanks to the good condition of the papyrus and the coincidence with two Empedoclean lines, already known from the indirect tradition, ensemble d–f 1–10a presents a well-restored text and an intelligible sense. In contrast, because of the damaged state of the papyrus, the restoration of d–f 10b–18 is more complicated. These lines seem to describe a life-generative process, but what process was Empedocles talking about? Some resemblances between these papyrus lines and the lines of another Empedoclean fragment, DK 31 B 62, have suggested to scholars, notably to A. Martin and O. Primavesi in 1999 and M. Rashed in 2011, that the lines of the papyrus depict, just like DK 31 B 62, the generation of whole-natured beings (οὐλοφυεῖς; cf. B 62.4). Other scholars, however, such as R. Janko in 2004 (see n. 1) and A. Laks and G.W. Most in 2016, show more caution and leave the possibility open that Empedocles is here talking about the generation of something else.

Mommsen, writing in 1866,1 dated the marriage of Tiberius Gracchus and Cornelia to 165/4 on the basis of this passage, understanding it to mean that their twelve children came in an alternating series of boys and girls. Tiberius, with his father's praenomen, would then be either the first or second child of the marriage, and as he was born in 163/2, Mommsen concluded that the marriage must have taken place not much more than two years before that date.

The Lives of the Ten Orators (), preserved in the manuscripts of Plutarch's Moralia (832b–852e) but almost universally acknowledged not to be the work of Plutarch himself, have been much maligned by modern scholars, and the information they provide has been treated with extreme caution, not to say disdain. My purpose here is to demonstrate that the first of these biographies, the Life of Antiphon (832b–834b), repays close study and, far from being worthless, reliably preserves a tradition which provides useful material on its subject. Some of what appears below is inevitably going over well-trodden ground, but there is, in my opinion, sufficient material in the Life which has been overlooked or misinterpreted to justify the following re-examination.

A. E. Housman has written that the context of Juvenal 5.140 is ‘the most obscure in Juvenal’ (p. xxxii). I am primarily concerned with the following five lines, but the entire passage (132–145), and its position in the poem, must also be examined.

Towards the end of Book 2 of Tacitus' Annals, Germanicus, great-nephew of Augustus, grandson of Mark Antony, and nephew, adopted son and heir of the emperor Tiberius, falls ill and dies at Antioch (2.69-72). His travels in the eastern Mediterranean in a.d. 18 thus reach a sad conclusion. They had begun when, after being recalled from the wars of conquest in Germany described in detail in the opening books of the Annals (1.50-1, 1.55-71; 2.5.2-26), he was sent from Rome by Tiberius to preside over the installation of a new king of Armenia (2.43.1; cf. 2.3-5.1).

Thucydides' account (8.50–1) of the Athenian general Phrynichus' secret correspondence with the Spartan admiral Astyochus is both troubling and obscure. It may be summarized as follows: Phrynichus, having eloquently opposed Alcibiades' efforts to be recalled from exile and fearing that a repatriated Alcibiades would take vengeance on him, wrote to Astyochus revealing Alcibiades' pro-Athenian (anti-Spartan) activities. Astyochus handed the letter to Alcibiades, who then wrote to the ranking Athenians on Samos concerning Phrynichus' ‘treason’ and demanded his execution. Phrynichus then wrote again to Astyochus, now proposing to make it possible for the Spartans to destroy the whole Athenian force at Samos.

At line 1025 of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus,

σὺ δ᾽ ἐμπολήσας ἢ τεκών μ᾽ αὐτῷ δίδως;,

This brief enquiry concerns two main questions: how and why Sulpicius' law differed from a similar prior rogation of the same year, which he had vetoed; and the probable authorship of the latter.

My suggestion that the H.A. was written during the reign of the Emperor Julian and in his interest has had, on the whole, ‘a bad press.’ Reviewers who have not thought it necessary to support with argument their doubts or their rejection of the theory are in a strong position: they remain practically unassailable. ‘The theory seems on a priori grounds improbable:’ a historical student can only reply that so is human nature—distressingly improbable, as he knows to his cost. ‘After reading this book one puts it down “met een zekere onvoldaanheid:”’ what can an author do save express his regret for having caused Dr. Van de Weerd this discomfort? But two stalwart defenders of the conservative position—De Sanctis and Lécrivain’—have sustained with detailed argument their unqualified rejection of my theory; in their cases it is possible to attempt a rejoinder.

The publication of Mr. R. S. Bluck's stimulating Phaedo prompts me to ask the following questions concerning the traditional interpretation of the cosmographical passage beginning 108 e. (1) Do the terms of 108 e-109 a in combination with 110 b 5 ff. and Timaeus 40 b-c and 62 d ff. prove conclusively that in the Phaedo Plato thinks of the earth as a spherical body? (2) Granted that he does, need his description of the earth, as a setting for his eschatological myth, conform with the spherical theory?