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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

In his recent book, Professor J. S. Morrison has brought to a happy conclusion a quarter of a century and more of inspired research into the problem of how the oars of a classical trireme were arranged. The essence of his solution of this perennial problem is that the fifth-century Athenian trireme had her oars and benches alike disposed at three different levels, each rower having his own oar, and each oar its separate thole set at a distance of feet, not inches, from its neighbours. The evidence is marshalled with such mastery that it may be thought unlikely that there will ever be any general recrudescence of the di (or al) scaloccio and a zenzile (or alle sensile) theories that were as fashionable once as they are seen now to have been unhistorical. In his inquiry, however, Professor Morrison has wisely confined himself to the ancient sources, and no more than touched upon the analogy of the Byzantine dromon, the direct descendant of the classical trireme and to some extent the parent of the a zenzile galley. Other protagonists, and notably Tarn, have been far from sharing his discretion, and there is still room perhaps for a brief note calling attention to the possibility that the dromon of the Middle Ages may shed indirect light upon the trireme of fifteen hundred years earlier.