Although not tenable in details, Porphyrion's interpretation seems to me generally preferable to Bentley's, despite the very wide acceptance of the latter. Horace is in all seriousness defending his claim to originality. On the Bentleian interpretation, it is a curious defence that he is made to offer:

Two herdsmen meet and bicker; bargain over a stake; duel in balladeering; and ballot their umpire for a final decision. The first half of their poem dramatizes the process of challenge and defiance from which the bout materializes; the result is a draw. Critics attempt what none of its three herdsmen try out loud, namely to solve the pair of riddles with which the song-contest ends, before the judge pronounces the result. Solutions range between putative attribution to the bucolic minds of the riddlers, and ascription to their creator, the intellectual, urban, bookish, Hellenizing poetaster, who here, in any event, dares a touch of rustic needling that he precisely did not find in his studies in Theocritea, which include no riddles. Solution has generally seemed the self-evident challenge to scholar-readers.

This paper completes a small but long desiderated act of restitution to the Euripidean scholarship of J. J. Scaliger (1540–1609).

In 1694 Joshua Barnes published at Cambridge a complete edition of Euripides; he included either in his text or notes a number of conjectures transcribed from marginalia in a copy of W. Canter's Euripides (Antwerp, 1571) owned successively by Scaliger, his pupil Daniel Heinsius (c. 1580–1655), to whom Scaliger bequeathed the book, and Jan Rutgers (1589–1625). The book passed to the Bodleian Library at Oxford (it has now the Catalogue no. Auct. S. 5. I); in the early nineteenth century P. Elmsley re-examined it for his editions of Medea and Bacchae, and complained that Barnes had not only failed to report all Scaliger's conjectures but frequently disguised the source of those he had noted or even silently appropriated them to himself.

On or shortly after 4 February 43 b.c. Cicero delivered the Ninth Philippic in an effort to persuade the Senate to honour Ser. Sulpicius Rufus (cos. 51). He argued that Sulpicius, who had died of natural causes while acting as the Senate's envoy, was nevertheless entitled to the same recognition as legati killed ob rem publicam. In the course of the speech Cicero discussed various historic precedents, including Cn. Octavius (cos. 165) who was assassinated in Syria in 162 b.c. while doing the Senate's bidding and was consequently honoured with a statue on the rostra. The statue was still extant in 43 b.c. and Cicero reminded his audience that it was now the only memorial to this great family. Cicero's observation has unanimously been interpreted as signifying that the family of the consul of 165 b.c. was extinct in February 43 b.c. In fact, Cicero actually meant that the statue on the rostra was now the sole surviving monument associated with the family of Cn. Octavius because the other two monuments that had served as a concrete reminder of the family had latterly been destroyed.

The fragment is preserved in two sources, Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies, Strom. 5.14.112 (ii.402 Stählin), which gives the order of words printed above, and Eusebius' Praep. Evang. 13.680c, in which the second line is given as . The latter reading was preferred by Bergk, but there seems at first little reason to prefer one order over the other. I shall return to this issue shortly.

These notes are written with special reference to Jebb's edition, as having practically superseded every other. In spite of its many and undoubted merits, this edition contains more errors than the general public believes; and if I am compelled by the nature of the case to touch only upon the latter in the following observations, I hope I shall not be supposed to be blind to the former. In such a case one must needs appear to write, as De Quincey has it, ‘in a mood of revolting arrogance.’

The Chronicle of Jerome states that Gaius Lucilius was born in 148 B.C. and died in 103 B.C. in his forty-sixth year. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996) says that Gaius Lucilius was probably born in 180 B.C. and died in 102/1 B.C.

There was a time when the detractors of Bacchylides singled out his eleventh ode as inept even by Bacchylidean standards: it was like the unfortunate tenor who was so stupid that even the other tenors noticed. The time of such criticism is gone, and the unfavourable verdict against Bacchylides' ode has nearly disappeared as well. The mythical journey in time which proceeds from the building of Artemis' altar back to the madness of Proetus' daughters and back further to the quarrel between Proetus and Acrisius is no longer seen as rambling. Instead the ode's structure has been revealed as an elegant set of concentric rings. Proetus' unhappy daughters are no longer unwanted, for Bacchylides has woven images into and around their story which suggest the integration of young women into the structure of the Greek city: the girls' resistance to marriage (Hera) is overcome through the mediation of Artemis, and they are returned to their father at last fit to be wed to the men of Tiryns. The entire ode has now been described as a fitting song for a city delighting in a victory gained with the aid of Artemis.4 The ode's images have been analysed and found coherent. Epithets, once scorned as too plentiful and various to bear true meaning, have now been defended. And finally, for a wonder, the song has been singled out as an example of that very thing so routinely denied to Bacchylides: Pindaric style. But even the most complimentary treatments of the poem seem somehow to fall short of explaining how this song serves as proper and sufficient praise for Alexidamus, the boy from Metapontum who wrestled his way to victory at the Pythian games.

This paper is an attempt to show that considerations similar to those which have been applied by the present writer to the Suppliants throw more light than is generally admitted on the construction and dramatic value ox the Septem. The criticism of Dr. Verrall, whom I cannot mention without a deep sense of gratitude and sorrow, and the edition by Prof. Tucker, have made it unlikely that any careful student will without argument dismiss the play as uninteresting. We are no longer content to remark that ‘the scene between Eteocles and the Chorus is dramatically unnecessary,’ that ‘in the episode, vv. 370–708, which is the centre and kernel of the Seven against Thebes, we look in vain for action,’ that ‘there is no drama proper except between Antigone and the Herald.’

A much-discussed fragment of Phrynichos’ comedy Monotropos, together with the comments of the scholiast on Aristophanes who preserves it, have often been taken to indicate that at some point before the production of the play, in spring 414 B.C., the Athenian politician Syrakosios moved a decree that restricted the right of comic playwrights to satirize individual Athenians. The relevant passage (schol. ad Arist. Aves 1297 = Phrynichos F 27 K–A) reads as follows (I reproduce the text of Kassel and Austin):

The text is taken from the edition of D. E. Hill, Mnemosyne Supplement 79 (Leiden, 1983). The following works are referred to by author's surname only: H. W. Garrod, P. Papini Stati Thebais et Achilleis (Oxford, 1906); L. Håkanson, Statins Thebaid (Lund, 1973); A. Klotz, P. Papini Stati Thebais (Leipzig 1908; revised edn by T. C. Klinnert, 1973); R. Kühner, C. Stegmann, and A. Thierfelder, Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache (Leverkusen, 1955; 2 vols.); R. Lesueur, Stace Thébaïde (Paris, 1990, 1991, 1994; 3 vols.); J. H. Mozley, Statius (Loeb edition, London, 1928; 2 vols.); E. C. Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax (London, 1959).

The following excerpt from Proclus' Commentary on the Timaeus appears as Fr. 37 in the edition of the fragments of Numenius by Des Places.1 It is the aim of this study (1) to ascertain the original place of the fragment in his work, and (2) to show that it belongs to a second-century school of allegorical commentary on the ancient theologians, and particularly on Pherecydes of Syros, of which Numenius will have been one of the brightest luminaries.

In 1918 Conway and Walters published a restoration of Livy 9.40.3. The passage in question describes how the Samnite army of 310 was composed of two differently equipped corps.

The Sallustian Suasoriae are far from being works whose origin and authenticity can be claimed as matters of earth-shaking importance. As forms of composition their interest is mild; linguistically they are less valuable than bizarre; and as historical records theysuffer from the defect of most Suasoriae—that the author cannot advise about the past and is compelled to deal chiefly with the potentialities of the future. But in spite of this it is not without reason that in Germany much attention has been paid to these few pages of Latin during the last twenty years. If they are what they seem to be, their evidence, such as it is, must at least be taken seriously. And this evidence is not without promise; for not only do these pieces contain several scraps of otherwise missing information largely about the prosopography of the last century B.C., but in general they purport to express the views of Sallust—a man who was no fool, even if his ability was not so great as has some-times been alleged—on the political and economic difficulties of Rome during the closing phase of the career of Julius Caesar. Material of this kind cannot lightly be neglected; but at the same time the significance, both of the author's suggestions and of his casual references to events inthe past, will depend to a great extent on the author having been Sallust himself, and not a member of some rhetor's establishment writing perhaps a hundred years or more after the events with which he pretends to be contemporary. So though there may be no welcome for yet another addition to the literature of a subject whose bibliography is already long, it may still be worth while to make some observations which will perhaps help to show that, wherever the true conclusion about the authenticity of these pamphlets may lie, at least it does not lie in the direction which has been taken in recent years by several scholars—in particular by Pöhlmann and Eduard Meyer.

When Wordsworth was eighteen he embarked on a series of translations from Virgil's Georgics. All that survives of them today is a series of rough drafts and jottings, among which is a short note in which he attempts to resolve the well-known crux at 4.228–30

Suppose we read it thus – ‘prius haustu parcus aquarum / Ora fove, etc.’ – and construe it thus:

First sparingly steep the mouth (‘ora’) of the hive in water (‘haustu … aquarum’).