The Works and Days is contained in far more manuscripts than the other Hesiodic poems. Altogether there are something over 260, as against seventyodd for the Theogony and sixty-odd for the Shield. Over a hundred of them are later than 1480, the approximate date of the earliest printed edition of the poem; but even when these are subtracted, a formidable number remains, many of which have never been investigated. The present century has seen more done in the way of cataloguing them than the nineteenth, but less in the way of collating them. Since N. A. Livadaras published his list of Hesiod manuscripts in 1963, the disparity between what has been done and what might be done has become more apparent than ever before.

The story of the votum made by the inhabitants of Locri Epizephyrii in 477/6 is well known: they vowed to prostitute their virgin daughters at the festival of Aphrodite, if they were granted victory over the tyrant Leophron of Rhegion who was directing an attack against their city. The threat, which was very serious, was overcome thanks to Hieron of Syracuse, but the Locrians did not fulfil the votum; they were reminded of it more than a century later, but that is another story.

This paper will be concerned with Pindar's often-discussed innovations in the Pelops-Tantalos myth of the first Olympian, where Pindar explicitly rejects the traditional story of Tantalos' cooking his son Pelops and serving him up to the gods, one of whom inadvertently ate from the cannibalistic dish. Does Pindar really alter traditional features of a story from religious considerations only, as the communis opinio takes him to do? D. C. Young has recently drawn attention to the astonishing formal symmetry of the ode. As to the contents, however, the old charges against Pindar's poetry, inconsistency and irrelevance, still remain (‘His method and his conclusion are not easy to unravel’, Bowra says with regard to the central myth in O. I).

Westphal wished to transpose lines 88–90 and 93–5 of the Supplices. This transposition has been supported recently by R. D. Dawe (The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus, 163), by Holger Friis Johansen in C. & M. xxvii (1966), 43–4 (also in his edition of the play), and by Sir Denys Page (in his new Oxford Text of Aeschylus). However, the transposition gains little support from a careful examination of the language and context of the passage, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate. I discussed the whole passage previously in my article ‘Aeschylus Supplices 86–95’, Classical Philology, 1 (1955), 21–5, and much of my argument can be found in that earlier article.

In the course of the military operations at Pylos three major actions were fought. The first was the series of attacks by land and sea launched by the Peloponnesians against the forces under Demosthenes occupying the peninsulaof Pylos (Thuc. 4. 9–12); the second was the naval battle in the harbour (13–14); the third was the Athenian assault on the Spartans cut off on Sphacteria(29–39). The second of these actions does not appear to have had less influenceon the development of the situation or to have been militarily less interestingand instructive than the other two. The account of it by Thucydides is, however, less detailed than his accounts of the first and third major actions andmay be thought to be lacking in the clarity which is normally a conspicuousfeature of his battle narratives.

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play.

This paper completes a small but long desiderated act of restitution to the Euripidean scholarship of J. J. Scaliger (1540–1609).

In 1694 Joshua Barnes published at Cambridge a complete edition of Euripides; he included either in his text or notes a number of conjectures transcribed from marginalia in a copy of W. Canter's Euripides (Antwerp, 1571) owned successively by Scaliger, his pupil Daniel Heinsius (c. 1580–1655), to whom Scaliger bequeathed the book, and Jan Rutgers (1589–1625). The book passed to the Bodleian Library at Oxford (it has now the Catalogue no. Auct. S. 5. I); in the early nineteenth century P. Elmsley re-examined it for his editions of Medea and Bacchae, and complained that Barnes had not only failed to report all Scaliger's conjectures but frequently disguised the source of those he had noted or even silently appropriated them to himself.

The scene in Aristophanes' Frogs where Dionysus rows Charon's boat across the Styx to the accompaniment of the chorus of frogs is, of course, one of the most famous passages of Greek Comedy, and an essential element of the humour of the passage is the ineptitude of Dionysus as a rower. As a large part of the Athenian audience would have served in triremes as rowers, Dionysus' inability to perform this familiar task adequately will have been immediately ridiculous. Aristophanes was thus exploiting an easy source of humour in depicting Dionysus as an unaccomplished rower battling against the difficulties and discomforts of the task. Had so obvious a source of humour been neglected by the playwrights of Athenian Old Comedy till the time of Frogs? We should have been obliged to answer that we had no positive indications to the contrary till the publication in 1968 of Pap. Ox. 2740, but this now furnishes us with grounds to infer that some other Old Comedy, very probably the Taxiarchs of Eupolis, contained a scene where some person was represented as rowing ineptly.

The relatively plentiful sources for the year 346 pose several questions which have never been satisfactorily answered. Why did Philip insist on an alliance with Athens as a precondition of the peace ? Did Demosthenes simply invent the promises of Philip which he claims Aeschines reported to the Athenian assembly in Skirophorion? Why were the Athenians frightened when Philip got control of Thermopylae? They had long expected him to settle the Sacred War, and such action surely required occupation of the pass. The correct answer to these questions indicates that Philip had two alternative plans in 346. ‘Plan A’ was with the aid of the Athenians to turn on Thebes. By this move, he would reduce the power of the second greatest city in Greece and thus eliminate the possibility of a combination of Athens and Thebes, which might be sufficiently powerful to block his ambitions.

1. 4. 9. Fugite delicias, fugite enervantem felicitatem, qua animi permadescunt et, nisi aliquid intervenit quod humanae sortis admoneat, †velut perpetua ebrietate sopitif†.

Although it is possible to produce a tolerable sentence by deleting et after permadescunt, it is generally agreed that a verb is missing in the last clause. Koch suggested <iacent> sopiti, Gertz sopiti <torpenty<, Feldmann sopiuntur, but the excellent clausula suggests that the end of the sentence should not be tampered with. Others rightly insert their supplement after admoneat: manent Hermes, vivunt Schultess, languent Viansino. One would hesitate to add to the growing clutter of suggestions, did not one of Seneca's favourite verbs seem to meet all requirements, namely marcent. Cf. ben. 4. 6. 3 ‘quies in qua putrescis ac marces’; 4. 13. 1 ‘vobis voluptas est… securitatem sopitis simillimam adpetere e t … animi marcentis oblectare torporem’; dial. 1. 3. 10 ‘hunc voluptatibus marcidumet felicitate nimia laborantem’; 9. 2. 6; 10. 2. 2; epist. 74. 1; 89. 18 et al.

All the extant letters of Seneca are addressed to a single correspondent, Lucilius. They are among the latest of his writings and are entirely taken up with the discussion of philosophical questions, principally to do with Ethics1—hence the title Epistulae Morales. The 115th letter could, one supposes, be taken to exemplify this particular kind of epistolary composition at its best. The objectof the following discussion is twofold: first by a detailed analysis of the letterit self to establish precisely in what its distinctive literary excellence consists, and secondly by attending to its more representative qualities to form a clearer view of the genre to which it belongs.

It is my intention in the first section of this paper to examine the available evidence in order to determine the lengths of tenure of the ordinarii and known suffecti for the reigh of Nero. According to the latest published fasti, twentyeight ordinarii and some sixty suffecti are attested for the reign, although not all of the latter can be definitely placed in a particular year. It will prove most convenient for our investigation if, first of all the relevant evidence is set out in full.

Tacitus' portrayal of the emperor Tiberius has called forth a superabundance of comment. This note, therefore, will be brief and directed to a single question, provoked by some of this recent work; namely, how far are we entitled to draw conclusions as to Tacitus' powers of psychological analysis or as to his philosophical outlook on the basis of this portrayal? A generation ago Marsh concluded that Tacitus' psychology was superficial: ‘That a man could successfully conceal his real character till he was nearing seventy and then throw off the disguise did not seem to Tacitus in any way improbable.’ Arruntius, he concluded, must be regarded ‘a better psychologist than Tacitus’ in view of his different judgement of Tiberius as recorded by the latter.