My purpose in this paper is to reassert the traditional view that Athenian women of the classical period regularly had an association with phratries (and incidentally to clarify the nature of that association). As part (though not an essential part) of my argument I adduce an overlooked piece of evidence, a much discussed passage from the Donatus commentary on Terence; for this I provide a new interpretation.

There is some evidence that Athenian women were introduced to their fathers phrateres at birth, or to their husbands' phrateres at marriage, or both. The speaker of Isaeus 3 repeatedly asserts (73, 75, 76, 79) that a certain Pyrrhus would have presented his daughter to his phrateres if she had been legitimate (which he denies). A scholium on Aristophanes, Acharnians 146 (= Suda s.v. Apatouria) may refer to such a practice. Euxitheus calls as witnesses of his mother's citizenship phrateres for whom his father celebrated the wedding feast, the gamelia, on her behalf (Dem. 57.43, 69, Isaeus 3.79); celebration of the gamelia is regarded as proof of the legitimacy of the speaker's mother at Isaeus 8.19. Neither Demosthenes nor Isaeus says that women were formally registered among the phrateres or even present at the feast; but notices in the lexicographers do connect the gamelia with registration among or introduction to the phrateres (Harpocration s.v. gamelia, Suda s.v. gamelia, Etym. Magn. 220.50 s.v. gamelia, Pollux 8.107, Anec. Bekk. 228.5, Schol. Dem. 57.43). Many scholars have accepted these passages as evidence for normal practice at Athens in the classical period.

Codex Louaniensis, or L, the best MS. of Caesar in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 10,084), which is assigned to the eleventh century, has been collated by Alfred Holder for his edition of the Bellum ciuile and by Mr. R. L. A. Du Pontet for his edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum and the Bellum Africanum; but for the Bellum Gallicum no collation has hitherto been available. Last year I made one, which I sent to Dr. Meusel. He urged me to publish it, remarking that it would be very useful, as ‘wir haben nun ein sichereres Urteil über die Familie φ.’ Relying upon Holder's collation, he had described L in his own edition of the Bellum ciuile (1906, p. viii) as ‘a twin-brother of Ashburnhamianus’ (S); and so it is in the Bellum ciuile, but, as he acknowledged after reading my collation, not in the Bellum Gallicum. The first folio, comprising i, I–6, §3 (… bono animo in), is by a later hand. The MS. is described in the Catalogue thus: ‘c. Jvlii Caesaris commentariorum libri. Desinit cum verbis “res eis suppeteret” in libro de Bello Africano, cap. 33. Codex membranaceus, sec. XL, sed folium primum a manu recentiori suppletum est. Folio [10,084.].’

Eudemian Ethics II 6 is meant to introduce Aristotle's discussion of voluntary action in II 7–9. The majority of II 6, however, consists of a somewhat obscure discussion of the ways in which humans, alone among animals, are origins of action (ἀρχαὶ πράξεων). It is not at all clear how that topic is meant to relate to the topic of voluntary action until the following passage, towards the end of the chapter, in which Aristotle relates being the cause (αἴτιος) and origin of action to praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and to the voluntary (1223a9–16):

Manuscripts are listed in alphabetical order of library designation, and then, where necessary, in order of catalogue number. The date refers strictly to the cited folia or pages of the manuscript. Defective manuscripts are marked with an asterisk.

The lack of stage directions in surviving Greek comedy which might give a clue to comic ‘business’ not clearly signalled or confirmed in the text is a considerable disadvantage to us, not least in some of the opening tableaux of Aristophanes. One thinks of restless father and snoring son in bed at the opening of Clouds, the jokes involving the incongruous entry of master, slave, donkey and baggage in Frogs, the preparations for launching the dung-beetle into space in Peace – all scenes which demand visual as well as verbal effects in order to engage immediate attention and get the audience into a lively humour for what is to come. In the opening scene of Wasps between the slaves engaged in their nocturnal vigil over Philocleon, there are a number of points implied by the verbal references which seem to me to depend for clarification on their actions, and perhaps also the stage properties involved.

‘Who wrote the scurrilous iambic poems of the first stanza?’, asks David West at the start of his commentary on the ode. ‘The culprit’, he declares, ‘must be Horace.’ This answer accords with that to be found in other commentaries: ‘my scurrilous verses’ (Page), ‘my scandalous lines’ (Gow), ‘my scurrilous iambics’ (Wickham), ‘my abusive iambics’ (Shorey), ‘miei ingiuriosi giambi’ (Colamarino and Bo), ‘my libellous iambics’ (Nisbet and Hubbard), ‘my libellous iambic verses’ (Quinn), ‘miei giambi ingiuriosi’ (Fedeli). What, then, are these iambic verses? Some earlier scholars suggested that Horace is referring to various of his epodes, such as those addressed to Canidia (5, 17); but our knowledge of Canidia (cf. also Serm. 1.8) indicates that she would scarcely make plausible the accent on beauty in the first line of the ode. Most commentators, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, have believed that Horace is referring to some iambics which he had targeted at the ode's addressee but of which we now have no further knowledge: Kiessling and Heinze, for example, refer to ‘the satirical poems which Horace … has levelled at her’, while in the most recent commentary in 2012 Mayer says that Horace ‘assures an unnamed young woman that it rests with her to put an end to his vituperative attacks’.

A new look at Thucydides’ account of the debate at Sparta motivating the Spartan declaration of war (1.67–88) may provide a footnote to valuable past discussion. Chief concerns about the debate have always been (1) the uniqueness of the four-speech set-up; (2) the oddity of an Athenian embassy in attendance at a Peloponnesian League meeting; and (3) the unlikelihood that any detailed report of speeches made to the Peloponnesian League or Spartan assembly came to Athens. Thucydides' judgement concerning the cause of the Peloponnesian War is far more likely to have been based on his knowledge of past and present relations between Athens and Sparta and members of the Peloponnesian League (Ξυμπ⋯σα γνώμη) than on any information about an actual debate (τ⋯ ⋯ληθ⋯ς λɛχθ⋯ντα). But for τ⋯ δ⋯oντα he needed a confrontation which would not only dramatize both opposition I and characters of Sparta and Athens but also put them in historical context, that is, in their Persian War roles as recorded by Herodotus. Only in this way is it possible to explain peculiarities of this confrontation which appear to duplicate characteristics of the Herodotean debate involving Athens and Sparta before the battle of Plataea. Thuc. 1.67–88 is like Hdt. 8.140–4 in comprising four speeches of which the first (A) 1 is answered by the third (Cl) and the second (B) is answered by the fourth (C2). In each case Cl and C2 are spoken by representatives of a single people: with the Athenians in Herodotus’ debate answering two different peoples, and with two different Spartans in Thucydides answering two different peoples.

‘To attempt to say anything new about Horace may seem absurd.’ To attempt to say anything new about the Roman Odes may seem still more absurd; my purpose, nevertheless, is to reconsider the lines of Carm. 3.3 set out above, and to reinterpret an argument begun by the editor of the Delphin Horace (1691) in which the authority of Bentley is against me. My question is: what does Horace mean the reader to understand by describing Augustus as drinking nectar ‘purpureo ore’?

The word νóoς (νoύς) must, if it is inherited from Indo-European, be a word of the λóγoς type, and come from Indo-Eur. nósos, nówos, or nóyos, since a consonant must have been lost, and it is known that only s, w, and y vanished between vowels in Greek. Neither nóyos nor nówos can be traced with a suitable meaning in any Indo-European language; nóyos, on the other hand, would be a very probable ancestor of Skr. nayas. The senses of nayas are, I submit, sufficiently close to those of νóoς to lend some support to the identification. They are: ‘leading, performance, behaviour, worldly wisdom, policy, fundamental principle, system, theory.’

This article has been prompted by two recent interesting papers on the reading off Heraclitus' fragment B 125 as quoted by Theophrastus, De uertig. 9. Here are, with; full apparatus (such as they will appear in the Theophrastean chapter of my Traditio Heraclitea) the three main texts I shall be dealing with.

Allusions to the Panathenaia 1 in the final scene of the Eumenides have been pointed out by a number of scholars.2 Headlam identified the red robes of the Eumenides (, E. 1028) with the cloaks worn by the Metics in the Panathenaic procession.3 In Athena's pronouncement at 1030–1

In his prefatory epistle dedicating his Naturalis Historia to Vespasian, the elder Pliny takes great pains to plead that his magnum opus (which at praef. 1 he compares with Catullus' nugae!) is unworthy of the emperor: ‘maiorem te sciebam, quam ut descensurum hue putarem’ (praef. 6). Continuing in this vein, Pliny goes on to say ‘praeterea est quaedam publica etiam eruditorum reiectio’, and appeals for support to the great Cicero: ‘utitur ilia et M. Tullius extra omnem ingenii aleam positus, et, quod miremur, per aduocatum defenditur’ (praef. 7). Cicero's aduocatus is the satirist Lucilius, from whom a mangled fragment in trochaic septenarii is then quoted: ‘nec doctissimis. Manium Persium haec legere nolo, Iunium Congum uolo.’ The sense of this fragment, which Pliny very probably quoted from the now-lost beginning of Cicero's preface to his De Re Publica, can be restored from Cicero, De Oratore 2.25: ‘nam ut C. Lucilius…dicere solebat ea quae scriberet neque ab indoctissimis se neque a doctissimis legi uelle, quod alteri nihil intelligerent, alteri plus fortasse quam ipse; quo etiam scripsit “Persium non curo legere” (hie enim fuit, ut noramus, omnium fere nostrorum hominum doctissimus), “Laelium Decimum uolo” (quem cognouimus uirum bonum et non illiteratum, sed nihil ad Persium): sic ego…’. This latter passage has allowed the former to be restored, to some extent exempli gratia, to the following form in Warmington's and Krenkel's editions of Lucilius

What follows is a list of corrections to my ‘Discordia taetra: the history of a hexameter-ending’, CQ 41 (1991), 138–49. Most of these are owed to the researches of Dr Nigel Holmes, author of the preceding article, and I am most grateful to him for his material, and to the editors of CQ for giving me this opportunity for correction; my humble apologies for human error in my pre-CD-ROM era. I am glad to say that none of the article's conclusions are substantially modified by these corrections.