Chariots were important weapons in ancient warfare for almost two millennia in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Chariotry in the Bronze Age Aegean was obviously of great significance, but discrepancies between epic descriptions and archaeological evidence have often led to controversy. The Etruscans, Latins and Picene tribes took rapidly to chariotry after its introduction into Italy in the 8th century B.C.—probably by Levantine interests which also persuaded Cyprus and Tartessian Spain to adopt chariots as part of an extensive aristocratic prestige system.

Since the important work of Pohlenz and Wüst there has been general agreement that Philip's Letter, preserved in the Demosthenic Corpus as [D.] 12, contains authentic material. But controversy continues on some points, and this article attempts to deal with them.

In his text Griffith wrote of the Letter as if it was an authentic document (e.g. 567) but raised his own serious doubts (553), especially in an Appendix entitled ‘Afterthoughts on the Letter of Philip’ (714-16). His chief doubt was about the exploit of Callias, the leading politician at Chalcis in Euboea, then in alliance with Athens, who was said, in Griffith's translation, to have ‘captured all the inhabited cities on the Gulf of Pagasae’.

It seems clear that the use of the optative mood declined after the classical period, so that it is less common in New Testament Greek and eventually disappeared, but there is room for some doubt about the rate and manner of its decline, especially as some of the evidence is potentially complicated by literary reminiscence, and the Attic revival apparently brought back some features that were no longer fully understood. A simple counting of occurrences is insufficient to establish statistical trends, for even in the classical period the possibilities for the use of the optative vary according to context: e.g. wishes may occur in dialogue and speeches, but are not normal in historical narrative.

The mimiamboi of Herodas reveal familiar hallmarks of the poetry of the third century: characters drawn from socially humble backgrounds; a literary re-casting of sub-literary ‘genres’; the revival of an archaic metre; the free reconstruction of an artificial literary dialect; the reaching back to claim authority for poetic practice in a great figure of the past. Obvious links between the mimiamboi and the roughly contemporary ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus (especially Idylls 2, 3, 14, and 15) have always attracted attention since the publication of the major papyrus in 1891. No subject has, however, so dominated discussion of the mimiambs as the question of how they were intended to be presented to the public, and how indeed they were so. Were they merely to be read (privately), or to be ‘performed’ either by a solo performer (with or without the assistance of mute extras), or by a ‘troupe’ of actors? We must not assume, of course, that the mode of reception of all the mimiambs was the same, or that one poem was not at different times ‘performed’ in different ways. Moreover, the history of the debate since 1891, a history of which Giuseppe Mastromarco has given a full account, suggests that it is hardly possible on internal grounds alone to prove to general satisfaction that the poems were presented in one way rather than another.

41 verse texts are extant of the original 42 poems (also described as hymns, psalms or songs) which comprise the so-called Odes of Solomon—a corpus not to be confused with the 18 so-called Psalms of Solomon. As can be seen from the Appendix, the history of the discovery and publication of these poems began with C.G. Woide at the end of the eighteenth century.1 Up to that time the only evidence for the Odes of Solomon was twofold. On the one hand, there was an enigmatic Latin quotation of three lines (i.e. 19:6-7a) in the Divinae Institutiones of Lactantius (c.240-c.320). On the other hand, the mere title was listed together with the better known in the so-called of Ps.-Athanasios and the ascribed to Nikephoros Patriarch of Konstantinopolis (c.750-828). In these two canon-lists Psalms and Odes appear in this order among the Old Testament's ‘antilegomena’ which is a category between ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal’.

A generation ago K.V. Sinclair published what is still the standard guide to medieval manuscripts held in Australia. The title defines the scope: Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Western Manuscripts in Australian Collections. The parameters are further delimited by date: included are MSS of the Xlth-XVIth centuries. Brim full with technical information, and perhaps as a result rather austere in presentation, this book is a testimony to Sinclair's perseverance: the completed manuscript was lost at the end of the 1950s, and he started again. One consequence of this setback is that the addenda to the main catalogue update a work that was largely finished over thirty years ago; yet even these additions were not able to take account of some items which came to Australia at the end of the 1950s.