In the early years of the fifth century, the Greek cities of Asia Minor attempted to free themselves from Persian rule. Our primary evidence for the unsuccessful ‘Ionian Revolt’ is literary, a patchwork from the narrative of Herodotus iv–vi.

The main events of the Revolt need not be doubted: the Ionian cities were ruled by Greek puppet tyrants until the outbreak of the rebellion (Hdt. 4.136–7); Aristagoras was the early leader of the movement which began after the failure of the Persian-Milesian expedition against Naxos (5.30–5); Athens, petitioned by Aristagoras, and Eretria supplied limited support for-the Revolt (5.38; 55; 65; 97; 99);

Trinvndinvm, best known as the minimum interval prescribed between the promulgatio and rogatio of a law by the Lex Caecilia Didia of 98 B.C., but also employed in a number of other constitutional and legal contexts, is generally supposed now to mean a period of 24 days R (I shall use this symbol to show that I am following the Roman method of counting, in which the day from which the reckoning starts and the day with which it finished are both included): in other words, it is held to be three Roman eight-day weeks.

In his speech On the Crown (330 b.c.e.), the orator Demosthenes twice refers to his opponent Aeschines as a kinados (‘fox’), both times in the context of accusing him of flattery and slandering in the service of Philip of Macedon (18.162, 242). Although a number of scholars have studied the use of invective in the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, very little attention has been paid to the significance of this peculiar epithet. In this note, I investigate why Demosthenes calls Aeschines a kinados, suggesting that, in addition to painting Aeschines as devious, the word may also have served as a pun.

In his commentary on Bacchae 439, lemma γελῶν, E.R. Dodds writes: ‘the actor who plays the Stranger no doubt wore a smiling mask throughout’. In addition to this passage, Dodds cites Bacch. 380 (γελάσαι) and Hymn. Hom. Bacch. 14 (μειδιάων). Referring to Bacch. 1021 (προσώπῳ γελῶντι), he expands: ‘it is an ambiguous smile—here the smile of a martyr, afterwards the smile of the destroyer.’ The idea seems to originate either from Dodds himself (whose commentary was first published in 1944) or from R.P. Winnington-Ingram, whose Euripides and Dionysus (published in 1948) cites the smile as well. Winnington-Ingram's book, according to the Preface, was substantially complete by 1938, and he and Dodds were in close contact at the time of writing, so the idea could have come from either one or the other, or from their conversations. Whatever its source, the smiling mask is taken as fact by both, and through their works entered the mainstream of post-war scholarship on Bacchae.

‘He who tries to play a double part, and fails in the attempt, as Histiaeus did, is not likely to occupy an honourable place in history. He seems to have been of great and selfish ambition, without the capacity to form a judgement as to the means requisite to carry it out, and without any scruple as to the means he did adopt.’ Grundy's judgement has proved widely influential among modern scholars. It has been seriously questioned only by Heinlein, who, in making Histiaeus the loyal confidant of Darius, offered a radically different interpretation of his political career. But the wild and undisciplined nature of many of Heinlein's conjectures prevented his hypothesis from winning acceptance. In this paper I venture to suggest that the accepted view of Histiaeus as a private adventurer might be false, and that a revaluation of his career along the lines proposed by Heinlein might be profitable.

Within the increasingly complex picture which has emerged in recent years of the manuscript tradition of Ovid's Amores the relationship of the two earliest MSS appears to remain firm: cod. P or Puteaneus (Par. Lat. 8242) of the 9th or early 10th century, which begins at Am. 1.2.51, was copied, probably directly, from the second half of the 9th-century cod. R or Regius (Par. Lat. 7311), whose first half now ends at Am. 1.2.50. This view, which originates in S. Tafel's dissertation of 1910 and lies behind the stemma constructed by E. J. Kenney for his OCT edition of 1961 (p. vi), has come to be taken by Ovidian scholars (with the exception, however, of Munari, who left the question open) to be the truth. My purpose in this first section is to show that this idea is unlikely to be the truth and, in the form in which it has most strongly been put forward, cannot be the truth. In the second section consequences for the manuscript tradition as a whole are explored.

First we shall need some details. P, the slightly later manuscript, consists in all of 99 folia, of which 1–54 contain most, but not all, of the Heroides — not all, because they are in a lacunose state, a point to which we shall return in greater detail later. Foll. 55–6 are blank sheets of paper, not parchment, clearly inserted at a much later date during rebinding.

The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy (Aen. 2.255). He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks were en route but shine during the battle for the city (Aen. 2.340). Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear:

Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret.

Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad:

νὺξ μ⋯ν ἔην μέσση, λαμπρ⋯ δ' ⋯πέτελλε σελήνη.

This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian.

As in literature poetry precedes prose, so in poetry a special and ‘heightened’ diction seems to precede everyday language. Mr.T.S.Eliot has put it thus: ‘Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech.’ How does this apply to Greek and Latin ? There are objections to considering words in isolation from this point of view, since neutral ones are apt to go now grey, now purple, according to their company; but if we do not do so, we deny ourselves the only considerable method of investigation (unsatisfactory though it is) that is still open to us. Again, we must recognize that most poems are composed largely of ordinary words, though these are often used in a way that is not ordinary.

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.):

Little, if anything, in Justin scholarship has been as controversial as the dating of the so-called Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. Suggested dates have varied from the time of Antoninus Pius through the third century to the end of the fourth. The latter was proposed in 1988 by Sir Ronald Syme, but has in fact received little support in subsequent literature on Justin, which has tended to accept the earlier dating (late second/early third centuries). An exception is T. D. Barnes, who has voiced support for a later dating based on a linguistic parallel to Justin in the Historia Augusta.

Barnes observes that Oscar Hey, author of the article ducatus in TLL (5.2129.30–2131.42), drew attention to the similarity between Justin 30.2.5 Agathocles regis lateri iunctus civitatem regebat, tribunatus et praefecturas et ducatus mulieres ordinabant and HA Heliog. 6.2 militaribus… praeposituris et legationibus et ducatibus venditis. Hey, he notes, refers at the head of that particular section of the article (Section 2 [2130.5–63]) to Seeck's article on dux. Seeck had demonstrated—and this is now taken for granted by scholars—that from the time of Diocletian dux is used technically as a formal title, and, in drawing attention to the parallel between HA Heliog. 6.2 and Justin, Hey must have been intimating that Justin is, like the author of Heliog. 6.2, using ducatus as a (post-Diocletianic) formal title. He then seems to suggest that Hey was right and Justin is to be dated to at least some time after 260.

Rather than apologize for taking up this battered subject once again, let me compare scholarly treatment of the passage to such ancient rites as singing the skolion, where every member of the symposium was supposed to give his variant of a given theme. First we must have the passage before us. Phaidra, after first appearing on stage in a delirium where her speech is by no means coherent, addresses the chorus of women of Troizen from line 373 on in rational terms, explaining her predicament and behaviour. Peoples' lives, she says, are not ruined by lack of intelligence, but by failure to live up to their recognition of right and wrong. Some fail to realize (381 ⋯κπονεῖν) their high ideals through laziness or inertia (381 ⋯ργ⋯ας ὓπο), others by putting some dubious pleasure before the good (382–3 οἱ δ' ⋯δον⋯ν προθέντες ⋯ντ⋯ το⋯ καλο⋯ / ἂλλην τιν').

In the late spring of 400 b.c.e., when the Ten Thousand were encamped outside the city of Cotyora, Xenophon addressed the soldiers gathered in assembly in order to defend himself against accusations that he was planning to lead them on a colonizing expedition to the land of the Phasis river. Having demonstrated that he was not misleading the soldiers (that is, that his true intentions were not to lead them to the Phasis) by proving that he could not hope to deceive them into travelling east, Xenophon then moved on to what he presented as a more serious matter for the assembled mercenaries: the problem of growing indiscipline in the army, and its consequences (both potential and actual). Xenophon illustrated the extent of the problem by describing to the men two incidents in detail.

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i (1937; Cairo 1939, Arabic section).

There has been a tendency, even among authors who have regarded Valerius Maximus as worthy of independent study, to use the Facta et Dicta as a neutral conduit of information about other wider areas. Valerius has thus sometimes become a sourcebook mined for nuggets of information but effectively invisible to those who work it. The past thirty years have seen valuable contributions that raise awareness of the importance of the genre of the Facta et Dicta and (to a lesser extent) the personal input of Valerius, but traces of the ‘conduit’ approach are still preserved in some authors’ attempts to justify their study of the work. For instance, Valerius provides an insight into the historical image of Marius, and is valuable precisely because he has no opinion or personal ideas to offer, because he preserves the language of school rhetoric, because his collection gives us strictly conventional material about religion, because he presents an unadulterated mirror-image of imperial policy and propaganda and because he is ‘middle-brow’ and thus depicts common attitudes. The text has also sometimes been studied for what it reveals about Early Imperial Latin, non-Republican culture and the organisation of Roman knowledge. Most recently, Tara Welch has argued that Valerius deliberately strips exempla of all authorial input, including his own, in an attempt to make himself a conduit for traditio. Alternatively, study of the text is justified by interest in the time period in which it was written.

Several explanations have already been put forward to account for the origin of the use of and with the subjunctive (and occasionally the optative) in indefinite relative, temporal, and conditional clauses in Greek. Therefore, before I add one more to them, it is necessary for me to give the reasons which there are for thinking that the views already put forward are unsatisfactory, and that a new explanation is required.