In spite of the labours of Sedlmayer,1 Ehwald2 and Palmer,3 it cannot be said that there exists a completely satisfactory edition of Ovid's Heroides. One or all of these editors sometimes leave a corrupted text, sometimes adhere too closely to a manuscript reading, and sometimes introduce untenable emendations. A new edition is called for, with revised collati ons of the known manuscripts, and an augmented apparatus criticus, exhibiting the large class of what I may term the ‘Vulgate’ manuscripts, which represents a tradition different from, and probably later than that of our chief authority, the excellent but unfortunately incomplete eleventh-century Parisinus (P), which, like all primary manuscripts of this type, contains many readings or corruptions which should not on account of its mere authority be accepted slavishly. Light is often thrown on the text from less important sources, and the truth may be recovered from manuscripts of the ‘Vulgate’ family, where our better authority fails. In this connexion the study of my own manuscript (O) has led me to some conclusions in certain passages which I venture to set forth as suggestions towards an improved constitution of the text of the Heroides. Though it is clear from the preceding investigation into its nature that O is no primary manuscript, but belongs rather to that large class which has passed through various stages of reproduction involving alterations (as is natural in the case of so popular an author as Ovid) due either to carelessness of copyists or, more rarely, to deliberate alteration, it presents at the same time a phenomenon not unusual with such manuscripts, inasmuch as it often supports the best tradition, and in some cases preserves a reading which yields the truth, or from which the truth can be elucidated. I have used the following symbols:

P = Parisinus 8242 s. xi.

E = Etonensis s. xi.

G = Gueferbytanus s. xii.

V = Schedae Vindobonenses s xii.

O = my manuscript s. xiv.

D = Dresdensis s. xiii.

ω = all or the majonly of the ‘Vulgate’ manuscripts.

ζ = some of these manuscripts.

Amongst the people who pester Peisthetaerus (or Peithetaerus or whatever his name is) with unwanted help and advice in the latter part of the Birds is Meton, famous astronomer and mathematician, who produces and demonstrates with instruments a method of laying out the plan of the new town. Peisthetaerus makes no attempt to follow him and quickly bundles him out again without much ceremony. Commentators and readers with few exceptions treat him in a similar way. ʹΕπίτηδες ⋯δɩανόητα, δɩόλου ⋯νοηταίνεɩ, παίζεɩ—such are the comments of the scholiast, and editors are mostly content with that. Van Leeuwen (on 1002–1005) says, ‘Metonis haec verba intellegere velle, id est operam dare ut suo ioco frustretur cbtnicus.’ The passage is of course highly comical; to make it didactic and attribute to Aristophanes a serious excursion into geometry and town-planning would be perverse and pedantic; but in Aristophanes more than in most comic writers there is commonly a grain or two of truth among the chaff. These grains, though of little or no importance for the appreciation of the play as comedy, may still have some possible value in other ways, and should be carefully sifted.

The traditional text of Thucydides, II. 1, dates the surprise of Plataea by the Thebans, which began the Peloponnesian war, έπì ΠυΘοδώρου ⋯τι δύο μ⋯νας ἄρχοντος Αθηναίοις. It has long been recognized that the two months are too short a time, and that the facts of the history demand four. The day cannot be precisely determined, but the narrative of Thucydides fixes it near the end of a lunar month, and the choice has lain between the new moons of March 8 and April 7, 431 B.C. Now that Meritt has shown that the year of Pythodorus was not intercalary and ended on July 2, the former must be accepted. Accordingly the Theban attack may be put on the night of, let us say, March 3, which by Attic reckoning would be the early hours of Anthesterion 27.

A calm has succeeded the clamour of the Virgilian Bimillenary, to be shattered all too soon by the commemoration of Augustus. In this brief interval there may be leisure to examine a question touching the career of Asinius Pollio and the history of the years 42·39 B.C. The Virgilian celebrations evoked two outstanding studies of the Fourth Eclogue, a poem dedicated to Pollio and written during—or perhaps just after—the consulate of Pollio (40 B.C.). Carcopino restated and sought to reinforce an opinion widely held in late antiquity among commentators of Virgil—the miraculous child of the poem was Saloninus, a son of Asinius Pollio: the child was born, he suggests, soon after the conclusion of the Pact of Brundisium, and shortly before the end of the year 40, while Pollio was still consul. At the time Pollio was at Salonae, on the coast of Dalmatia, which city his son's name commemorates. Tarn, however, adopting and reinforcing the theory put forward by Slater in 1912, argued that the Fourth Eclogue shows traces of being an epithalamium in form, designed to celebrate the wedding of Antony and Octavia, the seal and bond of the Pact of Brundisium which was concluded in the autumn of the year 40 between the dynasts Antony and Octavian; Pollio, a friend and a partisan of Antony, acted as his plenipotentiary in the negotiations; the new epoch was thus introduced under the auspices of Pollio, ‘te duce’; the child was the child to be expected from the marriage of Antony and Octavia; it turned out in fact to be a girl.

These suggestions for the betterment and elucidation of the text of the De Beneficiis are additional to those already published in the Classical Quarterly in January, 1934. They are based on a conviction much deepened since that time that Buck1 is right when he says: N (i.e. codex Nazarianus) allein, und zwar ohne seine Ueberarbeitungen von späteren Händen, darf die Grundlage des Textes von de beneficiis bilden. Préchac3, the latest critical editor in this field, substantially confirms Buck's sweeping conclusion by an independent survey of the evidence. The readings designated in the Teubner text3 as N2 and N3 are themselves conjectures, not readings drawn from independent sources of testimony, and as conjectures they must be judged. Gertz4 had long before discerned the truth even if he seemed somewhat cavalier in his attitude toward other manuscripts than N.