Ovid's great poem has held its place in the European artistic and literary tradition primarily as a collection of superbly told individual stories, in which successive generations have found inspiration and pleasure. But the poet himself clearly thought of it as something more than a series of detached narratives. In fact he describes it(i. 4) as perpetuum carmen. The object of the present essay is to inquire into the nature of this perpetuitas and to suggest some of the implications that it has both for the poem as a whole and for the appreciation of its individual parts.

The phrase perpetuum carmen has interesting ideological connotations. The mutilated first fragment of Callimachus’ Aitia clearly formed a poetic manifesto. The author proclaims his antipathy to the fashion of writing ἔν ἄєισµα διηνєκές in which the deeds of kings and heroes were extolled ⋯ν πολλαις , he declares, , so he rejects , ⋯οιδήν in favour of the delicate cicada's which is heard at its best in and other poetic genres that are . Three separate but related targets are singled out for attack: long continuous poems, epic subjects, and the grand style.

Asconius 63 (Clark), commenting on the pro Cornelio: Fuerunt enim plures Quinti Metelli, ex quibus duo consulares, Pius et Creticus, de quibus apparet eum non dicere, duo autem adulescentes, Nepos et Celer, ex quibus nunc Nepotem significat. Eius enim patrem Q.Metellum Nepotem, Baliarici filium, Macedonici nepotem qui consul fuit cum T. Didio, Curio is de quo loquitur accusavit …

Cicero and his scholiast refer to ‘duo Metelli, Celer et Nepos’ but like Asconius do not specify their relationship. Celer himself, followed by Cicero in correspondence with him, calls Nepos his frater, but since both bore the praenomen Q., this cannot be the whole story. Celer's career shows that he was the elder, yet Nepos senior, according to Asconius, entrusted his feud with Curio not to him but to Nepos iunior.

Cic. Att. i. 16. 5. Nosti calvum ex Nanneianis ilium, ilium laudatorem meum, de cuius oratione erga me honorifica ad te scripseram. …

In a recent article (CQ,xviii [1968], 296–9) Dr. T.P.Wiseman has (a) vigorously attacked the almost universally accepted view that the person to whom Cicero here alludes is Crassus, urging instead that the villain of the piece is C. Licinius Macer Calvus, and (b) proposed νєανίαις for the manuscript reading Nanneianis with which he would, I imagine, be unhappy, as others have been before him, even if he accepted the identification with Crassus.

Civilium ofnciorum rudimentis regern Archelaum Trallianos et Thessalos, varia quosque de causa, Augusto cognoscente defendit; pro Laodicenis Thyatirenis Chiis terrae motu afflictis opemque implorantibus senatum deprecatus est; Fannium Caepionem, qui cum Varrone Murena in Augustum conspiraverat, reum maiestatis apud iudices fecit et condemnavit. interque haec duplicem curam administravit, annonae quae artior inciderat, et repurgandorum tota Italia ergastulorum …

The trials of Archelaus, the Trallians, and the Thessalians are usually assigned to the period 27–23 B.C.: their position in Suetonius' account of Tiberius' early career seems to offer support to this view, though Stein connected the trial of Archelaus with Octavian's settlement of the East after Actium. Tiberius had been born only in November 42, and Gelzer more plausibly suggested that the trials occurred in Spain, where Tiberius was serving as tribunus militum during the Cantabrian war. The earthquake that Suetonius mentions in the following sentence took place in 27, and Tralles, which had been affected along with Laodicea, Thyatira, and Chios, sent an embassy to Augustus in Spain to ask for help.

‘et quid agam?’ ‘rogat! en saperdas aduehe Ponto, castoreum, stuppas, hebenum, tus, lubrica Coa. 135 tolle recens primus piper et sitiente camelo. uerte aliquid; iura.’

In 1. 136, Clausen's’ adoption of et from the best manuscripts would warm the heart of A. E. Housman, who takes exception to the e, ex, and ec of other editors (i.e. Jahn, Owen, and Nettleship): ‘Spell it as you will, the preposition is not natural: the camel carried the pepper on his back, not in any of his numerous stomachs; and it does not follow that we ought to say “tollere piper e camelo” because there exist such phrases as “desilire ex equo”.’ Instead, he takes both primus and sitiente camelo as adverbial adjuncts to the predicate which (diough not parallel in form) are parallel in force and therefore united by the conjunction et.

Catullus has been looking everywhere for his friend Camerius. In Pompey's arcade he has accosted all the girls who were hanging about there, but they have calmly disavowed knowledge of his friend's whereabouts. At line 9 Catullus breaks into flagitatio, the beginning of which is desperately corrupt: attempts to emend avelte have been made, but it seems more realistic to assume that avelte is the result of some corruption of quas vultu at the beginning of line 8 (with which it has four letters, a v lt, in common, and e - - e corresponding to u - -u), and that it has ousted the original beginning of line 9. In terms of a flagitatio—the girls are pessimae inasmuch as they are allegedly withholding what is Catullus' own, his friend, from him—the sort of word one expects is redde or cedo. Hence reddatis here, merely exempli gratia, would be one conceivable way of introducing the demand. (The ellipse of the imperatives da and cedo which Fordyce alludes to is a well-known feature of colloquial Latin, but it would be most unnatural in a flagitatio to omit the most significant and forceful word, the imperative claiming the return of Catullus' friend.)

Much of the early scholarship on Virgilian borrowings from Theocritus offered mere lists of parallel passages and, where criticism was attempted at all, the Eclogues often attracted such uncomplimentary labels as ‘cento’ or ‘pastiche’. In more recent scholarship the tendency to concentrate on insoluble problems and arithmetical correspondences lingers and, while some critical works of the sixties are characterized by a welcome upsurge in sensitivity, one occasionally suspects that Virgil has had attributed to him concepts which are two millennia ahead of his time. To redress the balance, the following pages adhere to the text of Virgil and aim at being fairly conservative. Despite the volume of literature on the Eclogues, ample scope remains for differing interpretations, for the filling in of details and for a more methodical approach to the specific subject of borrowings from Theocritus.

From a purely historical point of view Lucan's epic is important, because it represents an intermediate stage between the contemporary account by Caesar of his defeat of the Pompeians and the later versions in Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio. However, it does not merely show us the development of the historical tradition about the war, in particular that part of it which did not stem ultimately from Caesar himself. It is a milestone in the development of Roman ideas about the fall of the Republic. For, while we can only tentatively deduce the attitude which Augustan writers, especially Pollio and Livy, adopted towards this war, Lucan represents the views of those who had not only lived under the monarchy which was the final product of the conflict begun in 49 B.c., but had experienced its less agreeable consequences under the later Julio-Claudians.

The difficulties of this poem have led scholars to employ surgery of various sorts upon it.

This article attempts to show that surgery is unnecessary and that, given a fuller exegesis and a partial reinterpretation of subject-matter, the poem can be read as a single and consistent piece.

What is the meaning of numerosa? From the fifteenth-century commentaries of Valla and Mancinelli to the most recent translation of Juvenal into English, by Peter Green, interpreters are in nearly unanimous agreement that numerosa describes a particular annoyance of the rhetor's unrewarding life, namely, the large size of his classes. A few commentaries, however, touch upon another interpretation, although without defending it. Pearson and Strong, after translating numerosa as ‘overgrown’, continue: numerosa might mean “in rhythmical cadence”, referring to the sing-song implied in cantabit. H. P. Wright too sees a possibility that the adjective might describe a musical or sing-song style of declaiming. A brief examination of Juvenal's purpose here and a consideration of some passages from other writers will show that ‘sing-song’ is certainly the primary meaning intended here and probably the only one.

In this noblest of Epistles Horace has been warning Quinctius to trust his own judgement about his happiness—is he sapiens bonusque? (20). The plaudits of the people are fickle and can be withdrawn overnight. Only a man who is flawed and in need of treatment is delighted by false honour or upset by untrue defamation: the philosophic man is impervious to both. Horace, prompted by the words ‘pone, meum est’, illustrates the idea of defamation by reference to a very ancient and traditional form of Italian popular justice—flagitatio ordefamatory dunning.The three charges made in the Horatian passage—thieving, homosexuality, and unfilial behaviour—also appear in the classic Plautine catalogue of flagitatio at Pseud. 360 ff., where the pimp Ballio is abused: ‘fur’ (365), ‘impudice’ (360), ‘parricida’ (362).

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem (Strasbourg, 1776) and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition (Leipzig, 1813), but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969.

It is well known that the future indicative and conditional (or future-in-thepast) paradigms of most Central and West Romance languages reflect a Latin infinitival construction with habeo, e.g. Italian canterd <cantare habeo, cantaria < cantare habebam.Although the development was essentially a Vulgar Latin one and so belongs to the subliterate register of the language, it is reflected now and again in the written material from the classical and post-classical periods. It is, therefore, possible by a study of its occurrences in the written material to make inferences about its origins within the antecedent morpho-syntactic system and the structural pressures that gave rise to its development.

LIFE offers various amusements, and anyone these days who can choose among them will come late to the study of hiatus in Greek prose. Germany in the 1880s, so it seems, was less fortunate, and few greater excitements were known to young or old than the hunt for hiatus; but now that we no longer strait-waistcoat our classical authors and the austerity of those times is discredited, few collectors of hiatus are to be found, and there are people even in Germany who have never identified a single specimen.

Yet there is nothing to be said for underrating an author' stylistic pretensions, still less for encouraging others to do the same; and the textual critic, whose path is slippery enough at the best of times, can ill afford to dispense with footholds.

There has been no broad study of hiatus in Greek prose since 1841, when Benseler in a long and original book De hiatu in oratoribus et historicis Graecis went through the text of 27 authors and attempted to determine their practice.

Once we have accepted that the Ciris stems from neither Virgil nor Gallus, but was written by a post-Virgilian poetaster, the obvious task for us is to try and formulate some more specific idea of the date of the poem. I think that it has been sufficiently proved that the Ciris is not only post-Virgilian, but post-Ovidian in origin, including as it does unquestionable imitations of that author. But this, to date, is really as far as we have got. It is the purpose of this paper to put forward the thesis that the author of the Ciris lived late enough to know and be influenced by Statius and other poets of the later first century A.D.

Now of course any theory that the Ciris knew and used Statius and other Silver poets is rendered highly unlikely if it can be maintained that Suetonius considered it, with the other minora, a genuine Virgilian work. And so we are brought back again to the famous list in the Donatan Life:

deinde Catalepton et Priapea et Epigrammata et Diras, item Cirim et Culicem, cum esset annorum XXVI. cuius materia talis est. pastor fatigatur aestu; cum sub arbore condormisset et serpens ad eum proreperet, e palude culex provolavit atque inter duo tempora aculeum fixit pastori. at ille continuo culicem contrivit et serpentem interemit ac sepulchrum culici statuit et distichon fecit:

The locus classicus for Plutarch's own views on his methods is in the Alexander He has begun by asking for the indulgence of his readers if they do not find all the exploits of Alexander and Caesar recounted by the biographer or if they discover him not reporting some famous incident in detail (); and he goes on to compare his own search for evidence which will indicate the kind of soul, with the activity of the painter, who, in order to create a likeness, concentrates on the eyes and pays little attention to the other parts. Commentators and critics have been right to take this as a key text for the purpose of understanding Plutarch's attitude towards his biographical work; nevertheless there are other passages in the Lives where we can at least glimpse his attitude to his subject, and we can only see the Alexander-remarks in correct perspective if we take these other passages into account. I propose therefore, starting with the Alexander, to see how far these critical remarks apply to Plutarch's theory and practice elsewhere in the Lives

The private physicians of the Roman emperors with the exception of Galen are shadowy figures whose origins, friends, and political influence can only rarely be glimpsed. G. Stertinius Xenophon obtained immunity from taxation for his native island of Cos, and ‘L’. Statilius Griton may have secured certain privileges from Trajan for the Museum of Ephesus, but these are isolated instances. Their social position is similarly hard to define: no doctor entered the senate and equestrian rank was the most that could be obtained. But, if social prejudices prevented them from becoming senators, their descendants were free from such restraints, and in the turbulent Roman society of the late second century upward mobility was not difficult.

That the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' Metamorphoses is a version of a common world-wide folk-tale has long been recognized. Scholarly debate has concentrated on the conclusions to be drawn from this with regard to the significance of the story—mythological, religious, allegorical, and so on. With the additional information provided by Swahn's comprehensive monograph on the subject an attempt can now be made to study some of the aspects of literary technique involved in the adaptation of the folk-tale. In what follows I have tried to avoid making any assumptions about a possible literary source of Apuleius' tale. I am concerned with the ways in which the literary version which we possess modifies the folk material, and not with the author of this modification.