At Timaeus 48e2–52d4 Timaeus sets out to establish that there are three principles or kinds (γένη) underlying the creation of the cosmos, not just the two he acknowledged earlier (27d–28a). The way he does so is not simply by adding an account of the third kind to the accounts of being and becoming that he has already given. Rather he does so by showing how each of the three differs from the others. It has not been noticed how this procedure structures the receptacle passage. The passage divides up into three parts, each punctuated by a list of the three kinds in a significant order. If we take X, Y and Z to stand for ‘becoming’, ‘being’ and ‘receptacle’ (or ‘space’, χώρα)’ respectively, the structure is (1) X≠Z, (2) X≠Y, (3) Y≠Z. By showing the distinctness of each pair, Timaeus demonstrates that all the kinds are distinct and that they are indeed three in number.

Proposition 28 from Proclus' Elements of Theology is consistently cited as saying that every producing cause first brings about effects that are like it and then effects that are unlike it. This is a theorem to which Proclus is indeed committed, but I argue that it is not what Proclus is claiming here. At this stage of his general argument, he merely argues that every cause produces things that are like it, without saying anything about other products than the immediate ones. The standard interpretation of proposition 28 is therefore wrong. This becomes clear if one pays close attention to the argumentative structure of the Elements of Theology and to the proof given for proposition 28.

Menander's lost comedy Thais with its famous protagonist, the hetaira lover of Ptolemy I Soter and perhaps Alexander himself, was plainly well known at Rome, and is alluded to several times in Latin poetry of the Augustan and later periods, as Ariana Traill has shown. My purpose here is to argue that the literary characterisation of Thais in Menander's play underlies certain aspects of Lesbia as presented in the poetry of Catullus; that Catullus' poetry uses the plays of Menander has been demonstrated by Richard Thomas, arguing that Catullus 8 shows clear traces of Demea's monologue in the Samia (325–56).

In her epistle to Protesilaus, Laodamia expresses her fears concerning Hector, the chief Trojan hero:

Hectora nescio quem timeo: Paris Hectora dixit
ferrea sanguinea bella mouere manu.
Hectora, quisquis is est, si sum tibi cara, caueto;   (65)
signatum memori pectore nomen habe!
hunc ubi uitaris, alios uitare memento
et multos illic Hectoras esse puta.

I am grateful to Edward Courtney for observing that the stichometric correspondence between the Culex and Catullus 64 is close but not exact, since Culex 132–3 really echoes not 132–3 but 133–4. The conventional line-numbering of Catullus 64 conceals the half-line 23b, progenies saluete iter<um> …, which is invisibly missing from the manuscripts but was salvaged by Francesco Orioli from the Scholia Veronensia on Verg. Aen. 5.80 and is universally accepted. Emendations vary, but all assume a haplographic error caused by an instance of the patterned repetition so typical of Catullus (which indeed is what the Culex author is imitating at 132-3). Consequently, the perfide … perfide correspondence becomes a partial and not complete overlap, belonging together with many of Knauer's Virgilian examples in the category of ‘near misses’.

Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival (ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas, 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus, as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ (inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem | signa tulit propere, 1.204-5). This has been pinpointed both as a metapoetic signpost of Lucan's engagement with the anti-Callimachean swollen river of grandiose epic (Callim. Hymn 2.108-9) at the outbreak of (his) Civil War, and as a programmatic statement that the whole Bellum Ciuile will set up a series of contrasts between Caesar's urgency in crossing boundaries and Lucan's narrative obstructions to or compliances with Caesar's progress. In fact, as Jamie Masters notes, ‘in spite of the “undoing of delay,” the perfect “tulit” and the adverb “propere,” Caesar has not crossed the river yet; or if he has, he must do it again’, precisely at 1.213–22. Within this densely self-reflexive passage, Lucan inserts a palindromic acrostic which signals both the doubling of Caesar's action (or at least the poet's double mention of the action) and Lucan's poetic representation of Caesar taming the forces of nature.

In his article ‘On the shoulders of giants', Don Fowler argues for the identification of the Aeneid with its opening arma, saying that in post-Augustan Latin verse arma is always seen as significantly intertextual. The word may apply to the Aeneid itself, or, more generally, to imperial epic or epic in the style of Virgil.