In late c.e. 467 Sidonius Apollinaris journeyed from Lyon to Rome. An account of his journey appears in Epist. 1.5. Sidonius made his way to the city by boat and imperial post horses, arriving during the nuptial celebrations of the Emperor Anthemius’ daughter Alypia and the barbarian potentate Ricimer. The wedding linked Ricimer, who had held significant political power in the interregnum after the death of Libius Severus (461–465), to the new emperor in the West, Anthemius, whom the eastern Roman emperor, Leo I, had just appointed.

A calm has succeeded the clamour of the Virgilian Bimillenary, to be shattered all too soon by the commemoration of Augustus. In this brief interval there may be leisure to examine a question touching the career of Asinius Pollio and the history of the years 42·39 B.C. The Virgilian celebrations evoked two outstanding studies of the Fourth Eclogue, a poem dedicated to Pollio and written during—or perhaps just after—the consulate of Pollio (40 B.C.). Carcopino restated and sought to reinforce an opinion widely held in late antiquity among commentators of Virgil—the miraculous child of the poem was Saloninus, a son of Asinius Pollio: the child was born, he suggests, soon after the conclusion of the Pact of Brundisium, and shortly before the end of the year 40, while Pollio was still consul. At the time Pollio was at Salonae, on the coast of Dalmatia, which city his son's name commemorates. Tarn, however, adopting and reinforcing the theory put forward by Slater in 1912, argued that the Fourth Eclogue shows traces of being an epithalamium in form, designed to celebrate the wedding of Antony and Octavia, the seal and bond of the Pact of Brundisium which was concluded in the autumn of the year 40 between the dynasts Antony and Octavian; Pollio, a friend and a partisan of Antony, acted as his plenipotentiary in the negotiations; the new epoch was thus introduced under the auspices of Pollio, ‘te duce’; the child was the child to be expected from the marriage of Antony and Octavia; it turned out in fact to be a girl.

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.

1. IN the C.Q.xxxiv (1940), pp. 118 ff., I wrote on ‘Some Uses of the Imperfect in Greek’ (hereafter quoted as ‘Uses’). It occurred tome to check the suggestions there made by examining all the instances in one author. I had no hesitation in choosing Herodotus, who of all authors, except perhaps Homer, presents the most baffling diversity of types (I quote by chapter and the lines of Stein's annotated edition). For purposes of comparison I also read Thucydides and Xenophon's Anabasis 1–4. It would appear that Thucydides retains something of Herodotus' freedom, Xenophon comparatively little.

In the extensive cast of characters named in Isaeus' On the Estate of Hagnias are two brothers, Chaereleos and Macartatus. The speaker, their brother-in-law, is anxious to impress upon the members of the court that neither was a rich man. ‘You are all my witnesses,’ he asserts, ‘that…they were not in the class of those who perform liturgies but rather of those who possess a modest estate.’ Chaereleos on his death left land worth no more than 3000 drachmas. Macartatus left nothing at all. ‘For you know,’ the speaker reminds his audience, ‘that he sold his land, bought a trireme, manned it, and sailed off to Crete, (you know it) because it was by no means a covert act—indeed, it furnished a topic for discussion in the Assembly, namely that he might cause a state of war instead of peace between us and the Spartans.…It turned out…that he died along with this property of his that he sailed off with. For he lost everything, both the trireme and his life, in the war’.(Is. 11.48–9)

There is an almost overwhelming mass of material available to the scholar who wishes to investigate the history of the text of Terence's plays. The manuscripts themselves number over 450 and of these over 100 belong to the period 800-c. 1300. No one, however, has undertaken a comprehensive recension of even the older group of medieval manuscripts. One reason for this is that the extent to which contamination has occurred makes classification extremely difficult, another is that it is unlikely that the laborious task of examining and studying so many manuscripts will produce much new evidence for the text itself. Many of the corruptions which survive in the plays probably arose at an early stage in the tradition and prior to the archetype of the manuscripts which have been used by past editors. Any marked advance in the constitution of the text would seem to depend on the discovery of a manuscript which belonged to a different tradition.

The difficulty of τєἠν at 8 is notorious, and it has never been answered. The word refers back to Apollo, who has been invoked in the first line, but ‘it is not in accord with epic convention that, after the invocation, reference should be made to it’ (Seaton, CR xxviii [1914], 17). I suggest that we simply should not expect Apollonius to conform to the conventions of older epic: he does not do so in a number of other important respects. One is reminded here of the nervous restlessness of Callimachean poetry, particularly Cer. 25. There the goddess is addressed out of the blue with τìν δ’ αύτᾳ, and emendation is unconvincing. Perhaps τєἠν in Apollonius is even more abrupt than the example in Callimachus. Yet Apollonius seems on many occasions to carry further the devices of his master. The astonishing parenthesis at 1. 623 f. is a good example (for Callimachus see Lapp, De Call. Cyr. Tropis et Figuris (1965), 52 f, F. Bornmann, Call. Hymnus in Dianam, 1–li).

Recently, Jenny Strauss Clay has put forward the suggestion that the ‘goat island’ on which Odysseus lands before crossing over to the Cyclopes is ‘none other than Hyperia, the former home of the Phaeacians from which they emigrated to Scheria under the leadership of Nausithoos on account of the depredations of the Cyclopes.’ She arrives at this suggestion by combining the former proximity of the Phaeacians and Cyclopes (6.4–6) with the fact that the island ⋯νδρ⋯ν χηρεύει (9.124), ‘is bereft of men’ (i.e. in her opinion the Phaeacians).

The argument seems debatable. First, the word χηρεύει is a hapax, which Homer may or may not have used in a metaphorical way; our words ‘desert’ and ‘deserted’ are also used of places which have not been inhabited before. Second, nothing in the description of the island suggests previous habitation. Third, the Phaeacians are said to have left Hyperia to escape the plundering of the Cyclopes (6.4–6), but the Cyclopes are also explicitly described as lacking ships and shipbuilders (9.125f.). Consequently, Hyperia will hardly have been an island, nor the ‘goat island’ Hyperia.

Modern studies of Odysseus' visit to the Cyclopes often focus on the nature/culture aspects of the episode. The wild goats of ‘goat island’ in line 124 — βóσκει δέ τε μηκ⋯δας αἶγας — have regularly been included in these analyses. For example, C. Calame has well pointed out that ‘ce dernier trait distingue le complexe sémantique que définit l'Île Petite de celui que représente Polyphème et son monde: alors que Polyphème avait avec le monde des hommes le trait commun de l'élevage du petit bétail, la figure sémantique de l'Île Petite inverse exactement les traits caractérisant le monde des hommes.’

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem (Strasbourg, 1776) and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition (Leipzig, 1813), but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969.

This article looks at the complexity of the thought processes that lead Seneca's Oedipus to choose the mors longa of blindness as punishment for his crime (in his blindness, he is to live in a kind of ostracism, separately from both the living and the dead). It offers an analysis of the consolation of this existence on the threshold between life and death, notably with reference to the end of the Oedipus, but also of the sorrow of this liminal existence. The latter is described in Seneca's Phoenissae, which suggests an escape, by death stricto sensu, from the threshold represented by blindness, by which Oedipus now feels trapped.

By examining these three topics, the article shows how the threshold between life and death which Oedipus chooses at the end of Seneca's Oedipus and experiences in the Phoenissae mirrors the ambivalence and the errors of his life before he blinded himself. Ultimately, it also illustrates Oedipus’ continuing failure to achieve self-knowledge.

One of the most baffling inscriptions has come down to us from the so-called ‘Passage of the Theôroi’ at Thasos. Situated at the north-eastern entrance of the ancient agora, and consisting originally of two walls on either side of a path paved by marble, the monumental passage way had a long list of names inscribed on the inside of its western wall; this is the so-called ‘great list of Thasian theôroi’. Two of its constituent lists bear the headings ἐπὶ τῆς πρώτης ἀπαρχῆς and ἐπὶ τῆς δευ[τέρη]ς ἀπαρχῆς| οἵδε ἐθεόρεον. The meaning of the word aparchê and the nature of the theôroi in question have been the subject of disagreement among historians. The aim of this article is to contribute further suggestions to existing discussions.

This paper deals with two fragments (34/35.2.25–6 and 2.33) from Diodorus’ Bibliothêkê that are unanimously considered to belong to the narrative of the First Slave Revolt in Sicily (Book 34). It is the main concern of this paper to demonstrate that they most likely did not, but instead originate from an unknown preface to Book 34. The article begins with a brief introduction into Diodorus’ prefaces and discusses the Byzantine transmission of both fragments. Against this backdrop, three main steps are consecutively applied to prove the hypothesis. First, the narrative order of both fragments within the Byzantine collections is re-examined. Furthermore, the paper establishes a thematic and argumentative relationship between the two fragments. In the last step, the structure and the style of both fragments are analysed.

Herodotus’ Histories begin in earnest with Lydia and the infamous tale of the fall of Candaules and the rise of the Mermnad dynasty under Gyges. Yet, for all that Gyges was evidently a transformational figure in Lydian history and, through the story of his usurpation of the throne from Candaules, came to occupy a prominent place in the received memory of the Lydian world, Herodotus tells us very little about Gyges himself or his reign. Chapters 1.13–14 tell us about the role of the Delphic oracle in legitimizing the rule of Gyges in Lydia, as well as his lavish dedications at Delphi, in which he set a precedent followed by Alyattes and Croesus, the more notable among his successors. Yet, the remainder of his reign is summarized in less than one sentence: ‘He sent an army to Miletus and Smyrna as soon as he took power, and seized the citadel of Colophon, but no other great deed was done by him during his thirty-eight year reign … ’.

This is Snell's text:

In Metaphysics Z 13 Aristotle argues that no universal can be substance. Prima facie, this appears to rule out the possibility that any universal can be substance, species as well as genera. Nevertheless, many commentators have denied that this chapter intends to rule out the possibility that any universal can be substantial. Aristotle, it is thought, cannot wish to deny that any universal can be substance because he believes that some universals are substances, viz. species.