§ 2 Ego autem, iudices, quoniam qua uoce mihi in agendis gratiis commemorandoque eorum qui de me optitne meriti sunt beneficio esse utendum putabam, ea nunc uti cogor in eorum periculis depellendis, iis potissimum uox haec seruiat, quorum opera et mihi et uobis et populo Romano restituta est.

The credibility of Caesar's account of his campaigns against the Helvetii and Ariovistus has recently been attacked anew by Signor Ferrero, whose fame, rapidly acquired, is not only European but Transatlantic, and who has conducted his case with more ability than his predecessors and on entirely new lines. I do not think that it will be a waste of time to analyse the article in which he has set it forth.

The inscribed stone, of which an illustration is here given, was found in a wall composed of large blocks, which had all formed part of some other construction. This wall, which had certainly formed no part of the original building, separated the eastern portion of House XI into two rooms numbered 5 and 6 in our plan. The text of the inscription as given by Dr. Ashby in the report published in Archaeologia is as follows:

[Deo] Marti Leno [si]ve Ocelo Vellaun(o?) et num(ini) Aug(usti) M(arcus) Nonius Romanus ob immunitat(em) collign(i) d(onum) d(e) s(uo) d(edit) Glabrione et Homulo co(n) s(ulibus) (ante diem) x k(alendas) Sept(embres) [23 August, A.D. 152].

I may venture to offer another belated suggestion on the text of Clement.

I. Latin interpres, miles etc. and the confix -et-, ‘errans,’ cf. -etum ‘allee.’

In Am. Jr. Phil. 28, 413 I derived the suffix in Gothic fram-aps ‘alienus’, Latin com-et- ‘socius– and Greek τ (from εται) ‘comites’ (cf Lith. svetis ‘hospes’) from the root et- ‘errare, ire’; and I proposed the name ‘confix’ for a suffix whose origin could be traced back to an original compounding element. I now find further evidence for the confix -et- in Latin interpret-, ‘go-between’; and I explain pr-et- as a fusion-product (‘blend’) of the synonymous roots PER-(in English fares) and ET- ‘errare, ire’. Nor is this explanation in conflict with the current comparison between interpres and Gothic frops ‘klug, verstandig’: it is simply that ‘go-between’ is nearer the meaning. The wisdom attributed to the wanderer, to the traveller in far lands,–an idea forever embalmed for English folk in Shakespeare's counter-turn.

When Caesar sailed to Britain in 55 b.c. he was obliged to leave behind eighteen transports which had his cavalry on board and had been prevented by adverse winds from joining the rest of the fleet. These vessels, like those which carried the infantry, were of native Gallic build, and were doubtless sailed by Gallic seamen, who were familiar with the conditions of navigation in the Channel. On the fourth day after Caesar landed in Britain they set sail with a light breeze. All went well until they were approaching the British coast and were descried from the Roman camp when, as Caesar says,

‘such a violent storm suddenly arose that none of them could keep their course, but some were carried back to the point from which they had started, while the others were swept down in great peril to the lower and more westerly part of the island. They anchored notwithstanding, but as they were becoming waterlogged, were forced to stand out to sea in the face of night, and make for the continent.’

The idiomatic use of ;ἤλλ' ἤ found in classical writers is familiar in Aristotle; but there is a set of passages for which the ordinary renderings of it fail, and the difficulty is such that the text has been suspected. Bonitz, for instance, Index Aristotelicus, 33b2O, says of two of these passages, Pol. 1257b21, Metaph. 1038a 14, that ⋯λλ⋯ is enough by itself, or even that ⋯λλ⋯ without ἤ seems required (ubi ipsum ⋯λλ⋯ vel sufficit vel requiri videatur), and it has been proposed in the second of these places to read ᾖ for ἤ. It must be contended that the text is sound in all the difficult passages in question.

IN the Sixteenth Satire, the first topic Juvenal takes up in detail is the impossibility of obtaining satisfactory legal redress from the praetorians. The account has two divisions: (1) you will have a bad time yourself in the military court, (2) and what friend will come to support you ?

li. 1. tu istic habes Aetnam †et illuc nobilissimum Siciliae montem.

Chatelain's editum ac is almost certainly on the right road. But editum seems a little feeble: inclitum would be a good deal better, arid very easy palaeographically, if we bear in mind the probability of the first syllable's being absorbed in the last letter of Aetnam. But an adjective linked with a superlative like nobilissimum ought, if not itself a superlative, at any rate to have somewhat similar force: eximium would satisfy this condition. The confusion of i or single strokes of u and m with l is not uncommon in these MSS.: cp. esp. 47. 10, where all have illis for the necessary uis which Macrobius gives.

I venture to call the attention of classical scholars to two legends about Roman Emperors gleaned amid the arid waste of theological nonsense which passed for literature among the Copts, in the hope that they may have better luck than I have had in tracing them to some classical source. The first is taken from MS. Par. Copte 131, fol. 40, a single leaf of what seems to be a geographical and historical encyclopaedia.1 The writer who is treating in a very discursive way of Ethiopia, states that Nero or Domitian—a strange pair to run in double harness—caused an island in the Red Sea to be watered with oil. The description of that island is mixed up with a mention of the original divisions of the Indians—a term which as usual in early days embraces both Indians and Ethiopians,—and their subsequent changes; and as that too may be of interest to students of ancient geography, I will translate the passage in full.

The excellent article in the January number of the Classical Quarterly upon a mistaken interpretation of Philebus 31 c contains the somewhat incorrect statement that this interpretation is the general one: and the article itself is anticipated by a short note in a paper which I published in the Transactions of the Oxford Philological Society for 1881–2. I have nothing to complain of, for (as will appear) it may partly serve me right. Besides, my paper, though duly registered in the Revue de Philologie, is omitted from the index of that periodical; the aforesaid Transactions are out of print, and by some mischance my correction of the wrong rendering did not appear in the last edition of Jowett's Plato, though Jowett intended it should.

The object of this paper is to supplement Dr. Zielinski's admirable articles on Hermes und die Hermetik (Archiv f. Religionswiss. viii. 321 and ix. 25) (1) by calling attention to a passage in Aristotle where the triad–Hermes, Pan, Logos –appears, and (2) by showing that there is some probability that the passage refers to a lost work of the rhetorician Alkidamas, the pupil of Gorgias.

Dissatisfied with current views upon the exordium of Tibullus II. i. (vv. 1–24), I proposed in Selections from Tibullus (1903) to make the occasion of the poem the Sementiuae Feriae instead of the Ambarualia. This proposal, criticised, amongst others, by Mr. Warde Fowler in an interesting article in the Classical Review (xxii. 1908, pp. 36 sqq.), I have now abandoned (ib. p. 40 b). But the difficulties which led me to break away from previous exegesis still remain, and to them I address myself in the present article.

In a recently-published work of much learning and great interest, La Frontière de l'Euphrate de Pompée à la Conquète Arabe (Paris, Fontemoing, 1907), M. Victor Chapot has dealt at some length with the history of the eastern legions. But neither he, nor, so far as I can find, any other writer, has attempted to fix their camps with full regard to chronology, and many points have been left uncertain. Although there is little direct evidence—less than for any other part of the Roman Empire—it may be possible to construct with reasonable probability a more exact military map of the eastern frontier.

Mr. Agar has collected his adversaria on the Odyssey which have been enjoying cold storage these many years in the blue depths of the Journal of Philology, and increased them by about three-quarters. He has produced a very interesting and valuable book, the most important contribution to the linguistic history of the Homeric text that has been made for a long time. Mr. Agar holds that the language of Homer represents the original ‘Achaean’ speech, and that its abnormalities in vocabulary, word-formation and metre are the result of natural unforced processes of transmission. This position, held by so well equipped and so trenchant an investigator as Mr. Agar, is reassuring. It does not involve any of the mythological factors of the Higher or the Lower Criticism still recommended among us by Mr. Leaf, Father Browne and Mr. Verrall–Pisistratus, Onomacritus, the Ionian conquest of Smyrna, the Thessalian Iliad, the original Achilleis,–and disagrees with Professor Murray's sinister diagnosis clear away the Attic surface and there rises beneath another surface with another set of corruptions, where Ionic rhapsodes have introduced just the same elements of confusion into an Aeolic or at least a pre-Ionic language. The confusion of tongues is deep down in the heart of the Homeric, dialect, and no surgery in the world can cut beneath it’ (Rise of the Greek Epic p. 214). The last ten years’ work in Comparative Philology (especially Kretschmer's researches K.Z. xxxi. 1898, Glotta i. 1907) has made it clearer and clearer that the rule-of-thumb for distinguishing the historical non-Dorian dialects does not apply to the heroic and post-heroic age, and that the terms ‘Aeolic’ and ‘Ionic’ in their usual sense should disappear from the history of Homer. The Homeric tongue derives directly from the pre-colonial language of Greece wherein two elements are discernible, the original Ionian (or Pelasgian) and the Achaean or North-Greek which overlaid it.

As the apparent variant is in the text, Ludvvich alters the scholion into , which has not been found in any MS. so far. The only noticeable point prima facie about is that it (of I pers. pi.) is an (we have and ). Therefore I would read . Ludwich's index to his A.H.T. gives cases of the omission of ov or OVK in the scholia. We need not restrict There is too much tendency to restrict usage in matters of language. At one time it was believed that μ⋯ποτε was the property of Didymus! ‘passage’ does not occur (apparently) in the scholia we possess, τόπος however does (Ludwich, Index). Compare the note on H 96

⋯ν ἄλλῳ ὑβριτα⋯. We must supply in sense χωρ⋯ῳ, for the reference is to Callim. Del. 69, where this is the meaning of ⋯πειλητ⋯ρες.

Since P. Thielscher, in Philologus, 1907, pp. 117, 128, supplies us with information about the Manilian MS. Palatinus 1711 (P), the importance of which he himself does not seem to comprehend, I should like to point out what an interesting MS. this is. ‘It is to be suspected,’ says Thielscher, ‘that it offers interpolated readings.’ It is not a matter of ‘suspicion’ at all. If Thielscher did not know it for himself, he could have learnt from Scaliger (1600), from Bentley, from Jacob, that the readings of P long ago received sufficient publicity to enable scholars to assign it to the ‘ interpolated’ class of MSS. The Variae Lectiones of Junius (1589) is mostly occupied with the readings of P, and tells us all about P that we need know, save what Thielscher has himself added. From Thielscher we for the first time learn that P belonged to ‘Johannes Archiepiscopus Strigoniensis,’ and that it contains this subscription: ‘legi et emendaui cum magistro Galeotto 1469.’ Now just as Thielscher seems to know nothing of Junius, so he seems to have no idea who Johannes Strigoniensis is, though the reference to Galeotto and the year 1469 should at once have told him. If he had troubled to look at Schmitt's Archiepiscopi he would have found that, while Schmitth enumerates no less than six archbishops of Gran who bore the name John, yet the only one of them who fits the date 1469 is John IV. And John IV. is a famous person, being none other than that leader of the Hungarian Renaissance whom we commonly call Vitezius.