The notes that follow are concerned with certain mineralogical problems which could not be discussed at length in my edition of the De Lapidibus (Oxford, 1965). For the most part, only the bare conclusions are stated there.

In handling these problems I owe much to the discussions that I had during his lifetime with Dr. Stanley Smith, and to those that I have had more recently with Professor F. Coles Phillips and Mr. Robert H. S. Robertson.

The statement of Heinsius that was the reading of all his manuscriptsis described by Henry2 as a mere blunder, and it must surely be so regarded.Henry claims to have examined seventy-four manuscripts, in none of whichdid he find , and more recent commentators and editors, though some3 prefer to adopt the emendation , are unanimous in acknowledging thelack of manuscript support for the change.

Both the meaning of and the identity of the are in some doubt here. Gow's view that ‘Lacon thinks of labourers and cicadas vying with one another in the heat’ and that means ‘provoke to further exertions, put him on his mettle’ agrees in general with the scholiast

‘Putting the cart before the horse is folly, even when disguised under one ofthose Greek phrases which are so often employed-in grammar, in medicine,and in theology-to cloak ignorance. No writer of sense puts that last whichshould come first, and to accuse a great writer of doing so is mere impertinence.’1

This paper is concerned with the position of a Roman paterfamilias with respect to his family's property in the period of the Republic. Rights over property are in Roman law strictly dominium and not potestas; but to understand the role of a family system in a society one must analyse how its property is managed and passed on.

The idea of structural analysis of the Aeneid has been attacked recently by some who believe that too complicated mathematics are involved in line totals involving a golden mean. The object of the present article is to investigate whether simpler numerical effects are discernible in the poem, and whether these effects were deliberately inserted by Virgil.

The significant numbers to be examined in this connexion are 3, 7, 12, and 30. The first three of these are among the ritualistic numbers whose use in the Aeneid was discussed by C. P. Clark, while 30 is among other things part of the series 3, 30, 300 (total 333) which we encounter in Aen. I. 261–96.

In a previous article in this journal (C.Q., N.S., xii (1962), 169 ff.) I dealt with the transmission of Quintilian Inst. 10. 1. 46–131, a passage in which the general picture of the textual fortunes of the Institutio is blurred by complicating factors. An exception to the normal rules is also provided, for rather different reasons, by the opening part of the first book.

This is one of the Horatian passages most tormented by the critics. Four points, I think, may now be safely regarded as established.

First of all, the lectio tradita can hardly be sound : those who have tried to defend it—their Nestor is Porphyrio himself—have encountered insuperable difficulties. Magnum—to use Kiessling—Heinze's word—is patently ‘sinnlos’. Secondly, none of the proposed conjectures really satisfies. Maga non, as Kiessling-Heinze rightly note, is excluded by metrical reasons alone, not to mention its stylistic harshness ; magica, favoured by Kiessling-Heinze, is scarcely better : the epithet is tautological after venena, and if we accept the emendation we are compelled to postulate a very awkward zeugma (cf. Kiessling-Heinze and Wickham ad loc.). Thirdly, the corruption is pre-medieval, because Porphyrio already read magnum : if we have to apply palaeographical methods for the solution of the problem, we must reason in terms of Roman cursive.

Yet an interval of upwards of a year, apparently, separates the two occasions; already by 4. 193–4 t n e winter is well advanced; at 5. 46 Aeneas tells his men that exactly a year has elapsed since Anchises' death—the last event (3. 714: hie labor extremus) narrated in Book 3. Dido's words, therefore, and those of the false Beroe are commonly held to be irreconcilable.

A REFERENCE by the poet Martial to an abridged version of the history of Livy has given rise to the view that this epitome provided the main source for the transmission of Livy for those later writers of history whose requirements demanded an outline history of Rome. Such a view was first set out by Mommsen in 1861; he concluded that a large number of authors drew much of their material not from Livy directly but from a lost Epitome which departed at some points from the original in its composition. Other scholars followed his general thesis; indeed they have built upon it to such an extent that the list they compile of writers of Roman history who drew upon the ‘lost Epitome’ is a formidable one. These authors range from the period of Tiberius to the end of antiquity. They include such divergent writers as Valerius Maximus, Florus, Eutropius, the Auctor de viris illustribus, and Orosius, as well as the two known abbreviations made of Livy: the Periochae of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus and the ‘fourth-century’ Periochae.

One would expect venditabat to imply that the rustic is attempting to sell the tunic in a fairly aggressive manner: he is not merely ‘offering it for sale’ (Loeb trans.), but ‘crying it up’. Yet he is doing so fastidiose and tamquam mendici spolium. These two latter notions do not cohere at all well with the former; and in any case, we are not particularly concerned with the vehemence of the rustic's salesmanship, but rather with how much he has manhandled the tunic. I therefore propose to read ventilabat for venditabat: ‘was waving it about’, an expression which gives an intelligible picture of the scene. The corruption, which is easy enough in itself, may have received an additional stimulus from vendentis two lines below.

The main outlines of the story of the textual transmission of Quintilian's Institutio have long been clear and well known. A series of French manuscripts, dating from the ninth century on, present a mutilated text in which perhaps a third of the whole work is missing. One such manuscript, the Bambergensis (Bg), was taken from France in the tenth century and supplemented from a separate unmutilated stream that is also available to us in a ninth-century Ambrosian manuscript (A), now itself unfortunately damaged. The Bamberg manuscript generated in the following centuries further complete texts, but all these, as well as their earlier relations A and Bg, escaped scholarly detection in the fourteenth century: Petrarch and his contemporaries had to make do with mutili of the French type.

In his historical writings, Cluvius Rufus evidently found cause to criticize Verginius Rufus for his conduct on a particular occasion

‘Scis, Vergini, quae historiae fides debeatur; proinde, si quid in historiis meis legis aliter ac velles, rogo igmoscas’.

From his reply, it is clear that Verginius automatically understood Cluvius to be referring to an event to which he himself (Verginius) attached great significance:

‘Tune ignoras, Cluvi, ideo me fecisse, quod feci, ut esset liberum vobis scribere quae libuisset?’

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes (byrri) commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs (tapetia) were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing achievement.

This couplet has escaped critical attention, even though it contains two anomalies. First the combination ut iam has lost its normal meaning ‘even granted that’ (e.g. Ars 1. 346 ut iam fallaris tuta repulsa tua est) and must be split into its two elements and iam translated as though it were tandem. Second, the reflexive adjective is used in a dependent clause to refer to the subject of the main-clause verb: though there is no reason why Ovid should not have used this licence for metrical convenience.

The only evidence we have concerning the date of Porphyry's is that it was written during his stay in Sicily, which lasted from 268 until his return to Rome after Plotinus’ death in 270. How soon after is unknown. Castricius’ lapse from the vegetarianism of the Plotinian school and Porphyry's attempt to recall him to the fold with De Abstinentia should presumably be placed after Plotinus’ death, and Porphyry was still in Sicily at the time. Cassius Longinus’ letter from Phoenicia, apparently written after Plotinus’ death, seems to have found Porphyry still in Sicily. Thus he may still have been there in 271, or possibly even later. There is nothing to support the common view that he returned to Rome immediately or even soon after Plotinus’ death.

In addition to the technical writers on music, a number of ancient authors, notably Plutarch and Athenaeus, have recorded several musical terms, either by way of illustrative material—Plutarch is particularly given to musical similes and metaphors—or in the course of anecdotes about music and musicians. As musical terminology in different ages contains words or phrases not only of general acceptance and familiarity, but other more ephemeral expressions which belong to the jargon of a narrower circle of executants and critics, it is possible that the musical significance of such words, when used in an apparently non-musical context, has escaped notice.

Despite Lachmann's attempt to place them in the second century, it is now generally agreed that the Fables of Avianus cannot have been written before the late fourth or early fifth century. The linguistic and metrical evidence is decisive. For these matters I merely refer to the material collected in the prefaces to the editions of Ellis and Hervieux. Though these works appeared in 1887 and 1894 respectively, when the study of Late Latin was in its infancy, I suspect that a fresh study with the aid of modern tools would serve only to confirm their conclusions.

In recent years, the starting-dates of both the Historiae and the Annales of Tacitus have been criticized. In the case of the Historiae, Hainsworth has claimed that Tacitus chose to start his narrative with the events of A.D. 69, because for various reasons the events of A.D. 68 were an embarrassment to him. Syme has suggested, in the case of the Annales, that by starting with the accession of Tiberius, Tacitus has barred himself from a proper understanding of that principate.

The grammarian Caesellius Vindex, writing under Trajan, criticized Furius Antias for his newly coined verbs lutescere, noctescere, opulescere and vīrescere. Their meanings in classical Latin are classified by Nicolaie as follows: (a) becoming, (b) the intensification of a quality, (c) the acquisition of a quality. Their number increases in post-classical Latin, in which we also find them used causatively as transitive verbs, e.g. innotescere ‘make known’; Gellius' causative use of inolesco is mentioned below. Incohative verbs descend to Romance languages, where forms in -o and in -sco both contribute to some conjugations, e.g. Fr. finir, finissant; It. finire, finisco, and to English (‘finish’).