Dissecting criticism of Homer has proved to its own satisfaction that certain books of the Iliad are late, and have special affinity with the Odyssey. This Odyssean connexion is established by collecting verbal and metrical peculiarities and grammatical usages, which are found outside these parts of the Iliad only in what is held to be the later poem. The chief delinquents are I, K, Ψ and Ω but many would add the Apaté, Nestor's reminiscence in Λ, and other tracts. There is not complete agreement as to the limits of the category; but generally it is assumed that the four books, and, when necessary, other parts of the Iliad, have the Odyssean taint. Strangely enough, Θ is not so treated. Yet, as Mr. Andrew Lang has remarked, it ought to be Odyssean, if, as so many think, it was composed as a ‘prologue’ to I.

2. Latin annus, ‘year.’

I still hold firmly to the conviction, already expressed in the Classical Review (13,398), that annus is a derivative of agit ‘drives,’ and a cognate ⋯γών ‘dies festus,’ though I no longer think I was right in deriving it from agno-. Morphologically, the nearest parallel to annus, as I now understand it, is Skr. ájman- ‘Bahn, Zag,’ and annus is the route, path, cursus of the circling year, cf. anniuersarius, annus circumagitur, περιπλομένων (περιτελλομένων) ⋯νιαυτ⋯ν.

The text of the lately discovered fragment of Antiphon's last and greatest speech, as restored by Professor Nicole, has been used by its editor to sanction some novel theories regarding the orator's public career.

Ancient writers tell conflicting stories of the last hours of Agrippina, the mother of Nero. Modern commentators have been equally at variance in their attempts to harmonize them. A consideration, however, of all the evidence makes a reasonable account of the tragedy seem even yet possible. Naturally, most confidence has been put in the more circumstantial narrative of Tacitus.

Not the least interesting feature in Mr. C. C. J. Webb's new edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus are the references to the passages of Roman literature from which his author has quoted or borrowed. One cannot speak too highly of the thoroughness with which the editor has carried out this part of his task; that a few cases of borrowing should have passed unnoticed, and the sources of a few quotations evaded his inquiries, was inevitable.

Among the multitude of commentators by which an Horatian crux is surrounded it is reasonable to suppose that one or two at least have seen some vestiges of the truth, and I will therefore preface my remarks upon the meaning of this ode and its ultimate stanza by quoting first from an annotation by Dean Wickham.

A good edition of the Catalepton has long been wanted: and Birt's recently Published ‘Erklärung,’ despite some obvious defects, may fairly be regarded as good book. It is at any rate fresh, interesting, and stimulating. The text is the whole, though not always, sensible. The commentary is full without being too full. But, more valuable still, both commentary and introduction constantly bring home to one the probability that nearly all the poems in this collection are genuinely Vergilian— ‘Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie Vergils.’ No editor before Birt has brought before us so clearly the environment out of which these poems came.