Greek literature embodies a number of instances of the optative in main clauses that are acknowledged either definitely or probably to have a reference to past time. These are mostly well known, but the object of this article is to reconsider them and to attempt an explanation. They are certainly commonest in the Homeric period, but later examples are by no means wanting.

Over the past century or so, questions concerning the word ‘meaning’ have been understandably prominent in the field of the philosophy of language. There is, however, a historical aspect to the debate that is of especial interest to literary critics – the fact that verbs and expressions of meaning have been applied to different kinds of things in a number of languages spanning the western literary tradition. I shall introduce the topic by focussing on the Latin expression sibi uelle and on how Roman authors exploited its ambiguities for the purposes of humour (§§ I and II). I shall then move on to a discussion of a later Latin phrase familiar from the pages of the Virgilian commentator Servius, hoc uult dicere, and argue that the assumptions we have about expressions of meaning may lead us to adopt a particular interpretation of it (§§ III and IV). In the final part of the paper (§§ V, VI and VII) I shall proceed to a discussion of why it is important for modern literary critics to pay attention to how they use verbs such as ‘to mean’: I argue that the different functions of the verb facilitate a personification of the text that allows us to equivocate about the role of the author.

The prospect of human immortality is manifest in many of Plato's writings, appearing as early as the Apology (28c, 41c–d) and the Crito (54b–d), and as late as Book 12 of the Laws (967d). But nowhere is immortality given so much attention, nor as central a place in Plato's philosophical projects, as in what have traditionally been referred to as his Middle Period works, so it is hardly surprising that we find an extensive treatment of the subject of immortality in Socrates’ own encomium in the Symposium (206e–209e). Eros, Socrates tells us, is not merely a desire to possess the good, but one that pushes us towards possessing the good forever (205a, 206a) and, because of this, eros is necessarily a desire for immortality (207a). However, it is evident that Socrates’ presentation of immortality in the Symposium is fundamentally different from those found in other dialogues. This is not merely because in this work alone Socrates attributes the desire for immortality to eros; rather it is also because the nature of the immortality that Socrates recommends here, and the means by which he suggests it is achieved, are wholly unique to this work. Whereas in other dialogues Plato casts his discussions in terms of the persistence of the soul in some super-sensible realm, here he offers a picture of lovers achieving human immortality by creating memorials (μνῆμαι) that will outlast them.

All editors and translators of Propertius seem convinced that the Roman poet has endowed the horse Arion with the power of speech. I present a few sample translations of the two lines:

The following notes on the In Pisonem are largely based on the commentary of R. G. M. Nisbet (Oxford, 1961) (‘N’). The references to the speech are by section and line of his text, and where my note is based on one of his I add a reference to the page of his commentary.

1. 20 (p. 58) voltus …, qui sermo quidam tacitus mentis est: ‘thoughts are usually revealed by the face.’ Add to Otto's, Seyffert-Muller's, and N.'s examples: Curtius 8. 6. 22 ‘voltus haud sane securi animi index’, Juv. 9. 18 ff.

Polybius II. 39. 9: ο μν λλá γε καί πεр тŵν μφσβηтοтμΈνων πÉрεψαν θηβαîοι καί λακεδαιμόνιοι μόνοις рŵν Έλλήνων Χαιοας, ο πρòς рήν δùναμν ἀποβλÉψανрες, σΧÉδον γαρ λαΧασрην рòрε γεрων έλλήνωνεîΧον рó δÉ πλεαον, εας νήν πασрν καα ὅλην καλοκαγαθααν Strabo VIII.

In the much discussed list of thalassocrats excerpted by Eusebios from Diodorosthe tenth entry remains the most puzzling.2 Although the name is missing inEusebios' Chronographia (and in the derivative Synkellos), both the Armenianversion of the Canons and Jerome's Latin Canons give this place to the Karians, and the Armenian Canons are generally followed for the period of rule of sixtyoneyears:3 ‘Zehntens führten die Seeherrschaft die Karier, 61 Jahre.’ The years apparently covered by this Karian thalassocracy are c. 735–674 B.C.4.

This line has long been a crux in the interpretation of Pindar, and there is still no consensus on its syntax or meaning. The conclusions reached by Stefan Radt (Mnem. n.s 19 (1966), 148–74) and Richard Stoneman (Quad. Urb. 31 (1979), 65–70) in the most recent studies of the problem are in all respects at variance. The cardinal difficulty of0 the line is the sense of , which must be elucidated before one can attempt to disentangle the syntax. I believe that previous commentators have overlooked or misapplied crucial parallel passages because of their preconceptions about the nature of the metaphor here.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the time appointed for the arrival of Lucian's leviathan was intended to bring to the reader's mind Nearchus' account of an alarming encounter with a school of whales in the course of his famous voyage from the Indus to the Persian Gulf (Arrian, Ind. 30.1−3 = FGrHist 133 F 1 (c. 30)):

My recent edition of Antigone (Warminster, 1987) was not intended primarily as a contribution to textual criticism. I did no work on the manuscripts, and little work on tracing the sources of old conjectures. Nevertheless, some of my thoughts on the text may merit fuller discussion than I was able to give them in a beginners' edition. And there have been more recent developments: in particular we now have a new Oxford Text of Sophocles with a companion volume of Sophoclea, and I have benefited from stimulating discussion with Dr David Kovacs, who has kindly allowed me to see a draft of some forthcoming notes of his own.

In his very valuable study of generic patterns in ancient poetry Francis Cairns assigns Propertius 2.28, [Tib.] 3.10 (4.4), and (tentatively) Ovid Am. 2.13 to the genre Soteria, that is works of congratulation and thanksgiving on the recovery from illness (or rescue from danger) of a friend, and he sees the resemblances between the poems as due to the elegists’ attempts to produce ‘dramatized’ examples of the genre, with the situation developing from the girl's illness at the beginning of the poem to her recovery at the end (Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp.153–7). Cairns's arguments and interpretation of the poems should, I feel, be scrutinized carefully, especially since his classification of the poems has been accepted recently without demur by at least one scholar (Jennifer Moore-Blunt ‘Catullus XXXI and Ancient Generic Composition’, Eranos 72 (1974), 118 and n.50).

Shortly after his accidental transformation into an ass, Lucius attempts to return to his human form by grabbing some roses decorating a statue of the patron goddess of the quadrupeds, Epona. But his servulus feels outraged at the sacrilegious act. Jumping to his feet in a temper and acting as a faithful defender of the sacred place, he addresses his former human owner as a new ‘Catiline’ (Apul. Met. 3.27):

Gorgias’ On Not-Being survives only in two divergent summaries. Diels–Kranz's classic edition prints the better-preserved version that appears in Sextus’ Aduersus Mathematicos. Yet, in recent years there has been rising interest in a second summary that survives as part of the anonymous De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia (= MXG). The text of MXG is more difficult; it contains substantial lacunae that often make it much harder to make grammatical let alone philosophical sense of. As Alexander Mourelatos reports, one manuscript has a scribal note that reads: ‘The original contains many errors; no one should blame me; I just copy what I see.’2 The treatise's state of preservation has aptly prompted Michael Gagarin to liken it to a black hole: ‘something we cannot see directly but know must exist because of certain effects it has on other objects.’3

The generally accepted explanation of the -πλος (−πλóος) in these words, that it comes from the root pel- ‘to fold’ (Boisacq, Diet. Etym. s.v. διπλóος), fails to account for the presence of the double ο in -πλóος. May not this -πλóος be identical with πλος [πλó(F)ος] [voyage]? In other languages a word for [voyage] or [journey] has faded into a word for [time] ([mal,] [fois])—e.g. Serb. jedan put [once] (lit. [one journey]); Lett,vien-reiz [once] (lit. [one journey,] reiz being borrowed from Low German, in which reise had already suffered this change of meaning, cf. Endzelin, Bezzenberger's Beiträdge 29. 179 note).

I Now turn to an examination of the grounds for arguing supernaturalism in the Phaeacian story, but for their proper appreciation it is necessary to consider an element in the narrative which unfortunately has had little attention of recent years. There is in it more than mere unseasoned description. The poet is evidently taking off these settlers in Scheria, the centre about which his humour plays being the figure of their king, Alkinoos. This is no new thing, but all, as Blass once slily remarked of a scene in the Iliad, do not perceive it. It was clear to Mure. On pp. 404 sqq. of Vol. I. of his Hist, of Gk. Lit. he describes the fun at length, deplores the misapprehension by ‘profound commentators,’ and thinks the episode ‘the most brilliant specimen of the poet's combined talent for the delineation of character and for satirical humour.’ See also Samuel Butler's The Humour of Homer. No one was better qualified than Butler for such an appreciation; the pity is that he spoiled it all by his great Homeric joke about Nausikaa's authorship. Some points are noticed by Perrin and Hayman, and Trenkel sees that the community is Gegenstand des Spottes. But generally the humour is lost on the commentators, who, intent only on the jigsawing of the Phaeacian story, mark the uerborum minutiae and are blind to the rerum pondera.

In the Introduction to his Old English Glosses, published in 1900, the late Professor Napier asserted that Aldhelm glosses are to be found in the Corpus Glossary. He did not attempt any elaborate argument, but contented himself with giving a list of sixty-four instances in which the lemmata of the Corpus Glossary (none of the words, it is important to remark, being in the normal dictionary form, but all in inflexional forms differing from this) coincide entirely (i.e., including the inflexions) with words occurring in the text of the De Virginitate. Of these lemmata, twenty-three occur also in the Epinal and Erfurt Glossaries, and must therefore have existed in the common archetype of the three collections. Napier's conclusion was that the compiler of the archetype had before him one Aldhelm glossary, and that the author of the Corpus Glossary, who rearranged the material of the archetype and made extensive additions, had among his sources another and an independent glossary.

1. The use of the imperfect ἔτικτε ‘was the mother of’, with ἡ τíκτουσα; ἐνίκων, οἱ νικντες; ὁ διδούς is well known, and no doubt correctly explained. Reference is frequently made to Virgil's quem dat Sidonia Dido, but ἐδίδου seems not to be used, no doubt because it is so extensively used in the sense of ‘offered’.

In T. 7. 56. 3 περιεγíγνοντο seems to be a substitute for ἐνíκων, ‘were victorious’; cf. ἔφερε in Find. O. 10 (11), 74 ‘was prizewinner’ (‘panoramic’ use, Gildersleeve—using Shilleto's term)—the other winners all have an aorist. So too Pyth. 3. 44.

It was a generally accepted tenet of ancient literary criticism that an excess of sibilants was cacophonous. To discover if and to what extent this antipathy is discernible in the actual practice of the main Latin poets, random samples of 50 lines from each were analysed. The results of this analysis are set out in Table I.