The following emendations are a selection from adversaria made during repeated readings of Athenaeus. The material to hand during the several perusals has consisted chiefly of Kaibel's recension (to which the references are made throughout), the variorum edition of Schweighhauser, and Meineke's Comic Fragments. The editor of the Classical Quarterly has been kind enough to check my suggestions by reference to other material, and I have to thank him for the excision of sundry emendations for which I cannot claim priority. As the full discussion of the several passages here touched upon would require considerable space, I have contented myself with a brevity which is not intended to be in any way dogmatic; but which aims simply at economy of paper and type. I hope at an early date to enter more fully and systematically into the emendation and interpretation of this interesting and instructive writer.

At the Seventh Congress of German Historians held at Heidelberg in April, 1903, Prof. Eduard Meyer delivered an address on the subject of Augustus, in which he expressed his view that the restitution of the republic was a genuine act of renunciation. ‘Augustus desired to dwell among his fellow-citizens not as a ruler but as a citizen, of course as the first among them all, as the princeps, like Camillus and the Scipios of old.’ If with Mommsen you described the dual control of Caesar and Senate as a Dyarchy you ought not to forget that’ of the two the Senate in theory held complete predominance,1 the Emperor was ‘its executive, or as Tiberius expressed it, its servant, the Senate was the master (dominus).’

Menander Gallograecvs, as one may call the text constructed by the joint labours of Messrs Gustave Lefebvre and Maurice Croiset, did not come into my hands till three months after its publication, and I am not surprised to find that over sixty of the corrections which I made on a first reading were proposed by Mr Leo in November last, five-and-twenty more by Mr Wilamowitz in December, and another five-and-twenty by other scholars at other dates. The remainder, and the fruits of a second perusal, are the following:

This MS contains Bk. i. to Bk. x. ch. 22 id senectuti sue adminiculum f; but two leaves are missing between 145 and 146, i.e. Bk. viii. 38 alii deinde—ix. 2 expedire quosdam utilia, seven columns in all + one column for the title of ix. which is here the usual allowance.

The latest elaborate work on the Saturnian goes back definitely to the view that the metre is quantitative in character, not accentual, or halfaccentual. This theory then, which is at the same time the oldest, may at present be considered to hold the field, and the burden of proof will presumably lie on those who advocate a counter-theory. In putting forward such a theory I shall make two, as I think, justifiable assumptions: (a) that that theory should be accounted the best which throws most light on the origin of the Saturnian, and (b) that the Saturnian is an exceedingly primitive metre, and that an explanation of a primitive metre need not be very complicated to be intelligible.

Not the least pleasure in reading a book so vital and imaginative as Mr. Cornford's lies in the vitalising effect it has on the imagination of the reader. The results may or may not be correct: Mr. Cornford may or may not agree with them: but it is perhaps the best of compliments to a writer that he should produce such an effect at all. In the present instance his masterly analysis of the character and significance of Cleon as an actor in Thucydides’ historic drama has suggested an interpretation of Pericles’ position in the tragedy, which, though somewhat different from Mr. Cornford's own estimate of that great figure, is yet in accordance with his general conception of the work as a whole, designed to show Retribution following on overbearing Ambition and overweening Desire. From the time of Grote this conception has been familiar enough in outline, but Mr. Cornford fills it in with a wonderful richness of detail and illustration, and in particular draws a striking parallel with the vast scheme of Retribution in the Oresteia.

The 86 verses of Dorotheus printed at the end of Koechly's Manetho, 33 of which had already been published by Salmasius in his exercitationes Plinianae or his diatribae de annis climactericis, were edited by Iriarte from a scrap of manuscript at Madrid, into which they had been copied, as we now know, from the first book of the astrological treatise of Hephaestion of Thebes, who took Dorotheus for his chief authority. To these 86 verses nearly 300 more, by far the most of which are preserved in the second and third books, still unpublished, of Hephaestion's work, have now been added, in the catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum vol. vi (1903) pp. 67 and 91–113, by Mr W. Kroll, the best editor they could have found ; a scholar who combines critical talent, knowledge of Greek, and knowledge of astrology, more happily than any of his associates, and who has emended much of the very corrupt text with conspicuous ability and success. A good many additional corrections, chiefly grammatical and metrical, have been made by Mr Ludwich in the Rheinisches Museum for 1904, pp. 42–54

In the following pages the references are to the lines of Immisch's text (Teubner 1897), and the MSS and groups of MSS are indicated by his lettering.

1. Some scholia on the Odyssey (γ 284–490), very brief but so far the most valuable as the oldest, have been published from a papyrus, parts of which have found their way to London and Vienna, by Kenyon (J. Ph. xxii. 238) and Wessely (Mittheilungen aus der Sammlung der Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer vi. 1894), and commented on by Ludwich (Homerica vi. 1894 and Ueber die Papyrus-Commentare zu den Homerischen Gedichten, 1902, p. 20 sq.).

Enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle. Upon scanty quotations and a jejune epitome a tedious literature has been built. The older writers, such as Welcker, tried to ‘reconstruct’—as profitable and satisfying a task as inferring a burnt manor-house from its cellars; later scholars have gone out in tracing the tradition of the poems through the learned age of Greece—a scaffolding without ties, by which this or that conclusion is reached according to temperamental disposition to this or that fallacy. I do not intend to enter more than is needful into a controversy where so far as I can see everyone has gone beyond the evidence. If I add to the bulk of the literature, it is in the hope of putting things in their proper places and of presenting the data as they appear to a future editor.

People are beginning to think of Manilius as the spoilt child of Latin Scholarship. In England alone there have appeared editions of, or works upon, Manilius, in the seventeenth century by Sherburne and Creech, in the eighteenth by Bentley and Burton, in the nineteenth by Ellis and Postgate, and in the current century by Housman. The contribution of France also has been considerable in quality, if not in quantity—Scaliger, Huetius, Pingré: though to-day there is no eminent French student of Manilius. Of the German editors we might say what Aristophanes says of the Athenian generals:

only that Prof. Breiter, whose recent recension of the text of Manilius lies before me, has rendered services to the student of the Astronomica which entitle him to be mentioned only with respect. He is mentioned with something approaching respect even by Mr. Housman, who respects few scholars save Bentley and never fails to lay ‘significant stress upon the difference between himself and a jackass’—by which he usually means a German.

The Professor of Latin Poetry in the University of Paris has addressed himself to a piece of work which badly wanted doing, and he has done it, on the whole, very well. His object, as the first words of his preface declare, was not simply to produce a bibliographical repertory, however serviceable this might be, but a study in history and methodology. The labour of giving a summary of the contributions of scholars to the criticism and elucidation of the collection which passes under the name of Tibullus during the nineteenth century is, as he rightly says, ‘enormous,’ and M. Cartault has thrown in besides, to the great advantage of his readers, a chapter of 74 pages upon the century and a quarter preceding, which stretches from Scaliger 1577 to Heyne 1798.