It is well known that the emperor Julian plays a central role in the life and writings of the Antiochene sophist Libanius. As a commentator on the life and reign of the emperor Constantine, he is seldom taken into account, and if he is, he usually gets short shrift as being verbose and unreliable. This neglect is, I believe, hardly justified. Even if it were true that Libanius could not teach us anything about the historical Constantine, his testimony still deserves attention as an example of the attitude of eastern pagans to Constantine. Moreover, although much of what Libanius has to say about Constantine was written down half a century after the events, Libanius himself, born in 314, was a contemporary of the latter part of Constantine's reign. Unlike Julian, born in 331/2,2 and Eunapius, born in 347/8,3 he was able to form a judgement on Constantine based on first-hand knowledge.

Thirty years ago, H. Flashar discussed the introduction to an anonymous commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The text contains an interesting picture of Hippocrates as a culture hero, who saved suffering humanity by the introduction of systematic medicine. The first section of this introduction offers some complicated problems. It ends with an extremely long and difficult sentence, which, has not yet been explained quite satisfactorily, and it contains a curious use of the verb σαρκόω, combined with τν ϕύσιν, which has led Flashar to suspect Christian influence. These two points are the subject of the first part of this paper.

My subject is two fragments of rhetorical commentary that appear both in an anonymous manuscript collection of quotations ‘From Longinus’ and (without attribution) in Photius' Bibliotheca. My purpose is to clarify some observations that have been made on them by modern scholars and thus offer a correction or two. The collection of separate quotations labelled κ τν Λογγνου in Laurentianus 24, Plut. 58, was given its title by a later hand different from that of the writer of the original. The grounds for that mistaken heading were that the name ‘Longinus’ appears in the second of the fragments. Aristotle and Theophrastus, however, are cited in other quotations, and most are anonymous, with as yet no particular resemblance found to wording in other rhetorical literature. Each begins with the word ὅτι. All are general remarks on subjects such as rhetorical tropes, style, and different types of speeches. They are, in effect, scholia without a text.

Heraclitus B 126 D.-K. (=42 Marcovich) occurs in a scholion on Tzetzes' commentary on the Iliad. According to the first edition by G. Hermann (Draconis, Stratonicensis liber de metris poeticis, loannis Tzetzae Exegesis in Homeri Iliadem, Leipzig, 1812) on which all editors of Heraclitus have based their text, it reads as follows: τ ψυχρ θρεται, θερμν ψχεται, 〈γρν〉 αὐανεται, καρϕαλον νοτζετ〈αι〉 (p. 126, 17–19).

The phrase ὑγρòν ὓδωρ in Anacreontic 33.22 requires more explanation than has until now been offered: the parallel passages cited by M. L. West in his edition (Carmina Anacreontea, Leipzig, 1984), namely Ovid, Ars Am. 3.224, ‘nuda Venus madidas exprimit imbre comas’ and Her. 18.104, ‘madidam…imbre comam’, present the same image, but with quite a different vocabulary, whilst Patricia A. Rosenmeyer (The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition, Cambridge, 1992, p. 80) regards it only as an example of tautology characteristic of the Anacreontic corpus. But it is by no means unique, and, both for this reason and in the context of the nature of the whole poem, it is capable of further elucidation.

A number of recent papers have discussed the episode at Odyssey 10.156–72 in which Odysseus, on the third morning after landing on Circe's island, sees, kills, and transports a huge stag whose meat revives his men, who are exhausted in both body and spirit. Since the incident does not advance the main action, it invites interpretation, particularly since it is so richly elaborated. Naturally, it has received several: that the stag should be understood as a transformed human, and thus prefigures the rest of the episode; that the incident marks the liminality of Odysseus, who is about to lose some of his manhood in remaining for a year on the island; that the stag derives from the magical animal which, in folktale, often leads the hero into the Otherworld or the Underworld; and that it serves, both within its immediate context and within the narrative as told to the Phaeacians, as a figure for heroic action, removed from the battlefield and rendered ‘urbane’ by its emphasis on the cleverness with which Odysseus transports the dead animal rather than on the actual killing. I would like to point to a completely different aspect of the episode and to suggest that although some of these studies may be true pointers to its origin, its function within the narrative is straightforward and does not in itself demand such elaborate interpretation: the incident with the stag belongs to a series of incidents that test the ability of Odysseus and his crew to obtain meat, and so develop central themes of feasting, social order, and leadership.

In the fourth chapter of the Hippocratic treatise De mortis II 1 an unnamed illness is discussed which arises allegedly from an overabundance of blood in the vessels around the brain. The author of the chapter, however, disputes this aetiology:

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators (who may have been inhibited by the very brutality of the actions described). In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. (This observation goes back as far as Eustathius' commentary ad loc. (1934.43f.):πότομος αὕτη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ἧς εἰκς κα θανεῖν τν Μελάνθιον, εἰ κα ποιητς κα αὐτ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful.

There is a standard tradition in the ancient sources, which makes its first appearance at Thucydides 1.138.5, that, when Themistocles had fled into exile and been given the equivalent of political asylum by the Persian King Artaxerxes, he was ‘given’ the three Asiatic Greek cities of Magnesia, Myus and Lampsacus. There has been a fair amount of scholarly controversy over how the King could ‘give’ Themistocles Lampsacus, a city of great strategic importance on the Hellespont, which, by the mid-460s, was almost certainly within the ambit of the Delian League, i.e. no longer his to give. My concern in this paper is not with that political problem, but rather with a different, though related, issue – whether valid conclusions can be drawn from the Thucydides passage and the subsequent tradition for the social and economic history of these three cities in the classical period. I suggest that they cannot.

Anyone who studies antiquity is surely accustomed to the tenuousness and often wild variances of the dating of many of our texts. But even if this is taken for granted, the dating of Demetrius' On Style seems more problematic than most: the text has been assigned a date anywhere from the late fourth century B.c. to the late first century C.e. Attempts to narrow this wide range have been made using internal linguistic data, but these have not proved definitive, although a late date is now tentativel accepted by most. But a possibly more convincing argument for a late date may be found in a reference to architecture in paragraph 13 of On Style.

The transmitted text of line 13, ‘inter geminas…frontes’, has long presented an anomaly in the description of the decorated papyrus roll. If, in the context of book production, frons means the flat, round cross section located at either end of the rolled up book (TLL 6.1.1362, 84) and if cornu means an ornamental projection attached to the ends of the umbilicus and extending beyond the plane of the frons, then the transmitted text is a physical impossibility. For it is the frontes that lie between the cornua and not the other way round. In the words of Heyne's paraphrase: ‘geminae frontes inter duo cornua, non duo cornua inter geminas frontes.’ Emendation is required not only because an author is unlikely to be inaccurate or imprecise about the physical details of his book but also because the transmitted text can be salvaged only by recourse to tortuous theories about the meaning of cornu and frons, about their locations with respect to one another, and about the interpretation of inter with geminas.

An. 19 has a metrical form which is quite peculiar and anomalous if compared either with hemiambics or with anaclastic ionic dimeters (anacreontics), i.e. the metres of all the other Anacreontea.

Some of the more difficult archetypal corruptions to detect are those that occurred, not when a scribe was mindlessly copying what was before him, but when he was paying some attention to the sense of his text and departed from his exemplar by wrongly anticipating how the sequence of thought would develop. The resulting text may give sense, even though it does not reflect what the author wrote. It is suggested here that such a process led to corruption at Seneca, Thyestes 33 and Lucan, B.C. 2.279. In the former what was originally the subject of a verb has been transformed into the object; in the latter, the reverse has occurred.

M. Bonnefond-Coudry has performed a great service by compiling a list of senators who are known to have spoken in the senate (‘intervenants’) in the first century b.c. Yet her list for the year 50 invites a thoroughgoing revision. Beside the rubric ‘supplicatio à Cicéron’ she gives the following list: Cato, Hirrus, Balbus, Lentulus (Spinther?), Domitius (Ahenobarbus or Calvinus), Scipio, Favonius. She also notes that Pompey spoke at a session late in the year (App. b.c. 2.28–9, instead of her reference, 2.29–30), and maintains that Scipio spoke on 1 December (Plut. Caes. 30.4–6).

In his recent book, the well-known Cypriote scholar K. Hadjioannou comes back to a disputed verse of Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13.432. For a long time the usual text (for instance in the edition of R. Keydell, 1959) has mentioned two obscure Cypriote heroes, Litros and Lapethos: Κνπριδας δ φλαγγας κσμεε Λτρος γνωρ | εὐχατης τε Λπηθος. Obviously the second is the legendary eponym of the town of Lapethus (north coast of Cyprus). But what are we to say of the first one, Litros? Hitherto the name is unknown, either for a figure or for a city. Nevertheless we know something which is not very different, in the ancient name of Λδρα, Λδρα, previous designation of the modern city of Nicosia, which was for a few centuries the capital of a small kingdom in central Cyprus. Thus, independently, Pierre Chuvin in his study of the geography of Nonnus and the present writer in a detailed discussion of the name of Ledra, etc., both put forward the hypothesis that ‘Λτρος’ is nothing but a light distortion of Λδρος, which could simply be the eponymous hero of the city (nowhere else mentioned, as is the case with Lapethos). As P. Chuvin observes: ‘Les deux formes sont pratiquement homophones: Lapéthos et Lèdros auraient été fabriqués de la même façon’. We thus think that the easy correction here is not misplaced. But now K. Hadjioannou objects that the poet did not allude to the town of Ledra and that the singular κσμεε cannot support two subjects. On the first point I would answer that the poet is not obliged to afford symmetrical allusions, on the second that the verb is here correctly in agreement with the nearest subject (and preceding it). And what does our Cypriote colleague propose? Another kind of correction by which the first hero completely disappears in favour of a new epithet of Lapethos, the text being; κσμεε λνγρς, γνωρ/εὐχατης τε Λπηθος. The idea is indeed ingenious, but does not convince: the rather negative adjective λνγρς

So Shackleton Bailey in his recent Teubner edition (Stuttgart, 1991). Housman's remarks (Classical Papers, 148–9) are germane

Acontius rhetorically addresses the young man to whom Cydippe's parents have betrothed her, whom he imagines as showing excessive familiarity while visiting the girl's sickbed. In line 146, ‘spes’ may be considered the vulgate reading; the noun can be used concretely, of the object of one's hopes (OLD 4), a person in whom hopes are centred (OLD 5), or sometimes as an endearment (OLD 5c). For application to a girl with suitors, cf. Ovid, Met. 4.795 ‘multorumque fuit spes invidiosa procorum’. Or one could take ‘spes’ in Her. 20.146 generally, = id quod spero. But, in any case, ‘spes’ is somewhat disappointing. After the strong imagery of 145 (cutting crops), we expect something no less definite in the pentameter, and, in particular, a word which will cohere with, and reinforce, the notion of providing access (‘quis tibi fecit iter?’). In this respect ‘spes’ fails to contribute anything. Nor does the manuscript evidence point unambiguously to ‘spes’. Some manuscripts have the unmetrical ‘spem’, while Heinsius found in a Medicean manuscript the reading ‘sepem’, which was taken up by Burman, and by a number of other editors. To this, however, A. Palmer made an objection which seems not merely pedantic: ‘I should rather have expected per sepem; for a man has a right to go up to, as far as, another man's boundary.’

Trimalchio is such an established figure of fun in the Satyricon that commentators have been content to note the myths that he jumbles together in his description of his tableware here, without going much further. Clearly his scyphoi portray Medea and her dead children, not Cassandra, and we assume that he can recognize gladiatorial fights when he sees them. Heretofore lacking is any discussion of what scene was actually represented on the capis he acquired from his patron and whether the reader of the Satyricon is meant to be able to decode the scene which Trimalchio so flagrantly misinterprets.