Little progress has been made in classifying the manuscript tradition of Livy's First Decade since Frigell published his Livianorum Librorum Primae Decadis Emendandae Ratio (1875). This laid the foundations of a serious analysis of the manuscripts, but was hampered by the fact that full evidence was not available at that date. The deficiency was made good by the Oxford editors, who, however, failed to make use of their evidence to explore in detail the inter relation of the manuscripts. Walters indeed disclaims its importance (C.Q. ii [1908], p. 213): ‘Further in stemmata-making I decline to go, for “stemmata quid faciunt?” except much stereotyped mischief.’

The reconstruction of ensemble d–f of the Akhmîm Papyrus, better known as the Strasbourg Papyrus, which attests approximately eighteen of the over seventy new lines of Empedocles’ physical poem, has drawn the attention of scholars over recent years. Thanks to the good condition of the papyrus and the coincidence with two Empedoclean lines, already known from the indirect tradition, ensemble d–f 1–10a presents a well-restored text and an intelligible sense. In contrast, because of the damaged state of the papyrus, the restoration of d–f 10b–18 is more complicated. These lines seem to describe a life-generative process, but what process was Empedocles talking about? Some resemblances between these papyrus lines and the lines of another Empedoclean fragment, DK 31 B 62, have suggested to scholars, notably to A. Martin and O. Primavesi in 1999 and M. Rashed in 2011, that the lines of the papyrus depict, just like DK 31 B 62, the generation of whole-natured beings (οὐλοφυεῖς; cf. B 62.4). Other scholars, however, such as R. Janko in 2004 (see n. 1) and A. Laks and G.W. Most in 2016, show more caution and leave the possibility open that Empedocles is here talking about the generation of something else.

This paper will discuss the behaviour of and in the Homeric poems. These words are allotted a variety of different ‘meanings’ by the lexicographers. For example, LSJ s.v. I. pray, II. vow, III. profess loudly, boast, vaunt; s.v. I. prayer, II. boast, vaunt, or object of boasting, glory; s.v. I. thing prayed for, object of prayer, II. boast, vaunt. I shall, of course, discuss the whole range of these words; but I begin with some observations on ‘prayer’.

It may appear at first sight that ‘prayer’ is a simple word, with only one conceivable ‘meaning’, which must have that ‘meaning’ in any language. We might suggest that ‘request addressed to a god’ is an adequate representation of that ‘meaning’, and that when we have rendered (say) by ‘pray’ in what appear to us to be appropriate contexts we have conveyed the full sense of the original.

In a recent article I observed that Livy sees a dialectic at work in Roman history over the course of the reigns of the first four kings. The first king, Romulus, is associated with physical (i.e. military) strength and is devoted to war. His successor Numa is devoted to peace and to the advance of religion, law and the civilizing virtues. The Romulean thesis, having been answered by the Numan antithesis, reasserts itself in the reign of the third king, Tullus Hostilius. This time, devotion to war is even more intense: Tullus is ferocior (1.22.2) than Romulus. Excessive devotion to war, however, entailed the neglect of other things: towards the end of his reign, during a plague to which he himself eventually fell victim, Tullus turned to religion, hoping that the gods would end the pestilence if he could balance his Romulean devotion to war with a Numan concern for sacra. But his efforts were too late and inept. It was not until the reign of the fourth king, Ancus Marcius, that a synthesis was achieved. Ancus had a medium ingenium that fused the Romulean and Numan tendencies. The adoption of the ius fetiale by the Livian Ancus symbolizes this synthesis: the ius fetiale was a martial (i.e. Romulean) ritual, but it also acknowledged the Numan claims of religion and right.

In response to a suggestion in the Class. Rev. (XXXIII. 106), the two MSS. of the Liber Glossarum preserved at Tours have recently been examined. Since they had not been seen by Goetz when he published his excerpts, the following short descriptions may be added to the introduction of Vol. V. of the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum:

1. Tours, Bibliothèque de Ville, MS. No. 850; end of the ninth century; foll. 493, of which 1, 491, 492 are mere corners; cmm. 49 by 29. The last item is an Isidore gloss, Zatenen.-gemmam. Gaps due to loss of folia occur between Abiectus and Abdolet; Dextera manus and Dialogus; Faber and Impulitum; Res diuinae and Samsacus. There are no corrections except between folia 197 and 300, where a thirteenth-century hand has checked the MS. by means of another copy of the Lib. Gloss. The items are drawn up in two columns, and the alphabetical arrangement agrees for the most part with that of Vat. Pal. lat. 1773. Marginal indications of the sources of the items are numerous except between Profanum and Remeantes; where two or three neighbouring items come from the same source, the marginal mark is repeated; and towards the end of the MS., where the scribe takes to writing two items in the same line, the indication is also carefully transferred. This is important in view of Goetz' theory that the source of an unlabelled item is that given by the last preceding label.

Since the publication of our article on Thucydides and the Plague of Athens, Dr Heinrich von Staden of Yale University has kindly drawn our attention to a paper by Eby and Evjen suggesting that the Plague was glanders. We do not think that this diagnosis can possibly be correct, though there are undoubtedly some points in its favour. The authors have argued their case as persuasively as possible, and the proposal has sufficient merit to deserve a serious reply.

Our purpose is protreptic, to broach a subject neglected by researchers and consequently by commentators on Plautus and Terence.1 We mean the relation of rhythm and dramatic meaning in the ordinary stichic iambo-trochaic metres. It is of course a longstanding convention that a commentator writing in usum scholarum will include some account of the basic rules of scansion and prosody and a conspectus metrorum of sorts. Ambitious efforts may be made to analyse the polymetric songs in Plautus, if to label cola is analysis; but there are notorious difficulties in this, for the songs are astrophic and polymorphous, the colometry is uncertain, and it cannot be said that we fully understand the range or relationship of the elements out of which the songs are constructed, or that the rules of prosody in the cantica have been definitively established. Under the circumstances it is understandable that commentators refrain except in the most general terms from relating rhythm to dramatic context in the songs. But it is different with the iambo-trochaic metres. We are on firmer ground here, and there is more of it. Commentators will draw attention to aspects of the playwright's diction such as alliteration, assonance, triadic expression, hyperbaton, and so on, by which emphasis and dramatic ‘colouring’ may be indicated. But very little attention is given to the dramatic and tonal implications of the texture of the iambo-trochaic metres as used for whole scenes or in particular exchanges. This is a pity, because Plautus and the tragedians and even Terence can be shown to have exploited the latitude of realization allowed by ‘the rules’ to underpin the sense of a passage or an exchange.

Considerable attention has been paid in recent years to Catullus 63. A number of salient features have been discussed: the psychological study of emotions; the use of animal imagery; the theme of marriage and love. There have also been some helpful studies on smaller, though important, aspects of the poem such as its use of ring composition or Catullus′ inventive treatment of the challenging Galliambic metre. But little work has been done on the literary background of poem 63 apart from the question of whether or not Catullus was following an Alexandrian model. I shall suggest that the basic narrative of the poem, and the way in which Catullus has handled it, have literary antecedents which have influenced the poet. The final product, however, still remains a very original piece of work.

Philo's attitude to the mythologizing activities of the Greeks is well known. In many passages he contrasts the practices of Greek writers unfavourably with that of Moses. In one passage (Conf. 2 ff.), for example, he condemns those who see the Tower of Babel story asa reflection of that of Otus and Ephialtes' assault on Olympus; the truth, he asserts, is quite the contrary — the Greeks have borrowed the story from Moses.

On the other hand, Philo is himself prepared on occasion to allegorize figures of Greek mythology, though never explicitly on a subject of central doctrinal importance. For instance, he appears to be acquainted with the allegorization of various parts of the Odyssey. In his treatise On Mating with the Preliminary Studies (Congr.), he makes use of the allegorization of the Suitors' mating with the handmaidens because they cannot gain Penelope, first employed, it seems, by the Cynic Bion of Borysthenes, but no doubt of wide currency by Philo's time, as a figure of those who cannot attain to Philosophy consoling themselves with ta enkyklia (e.g. Congr. 14–19). Again, the use here and there in his writings of compounds of the verb νήχω, ‘swim’, particularly ⋯νανήχομαι in connection with descriptions of our struggle through the storms and shipwreck of material existence, suggests his acquaintance with the allegorizing of Odysseus' shipwreck off Phaeacia in Odyssey V, where Homer employs this verb repeatedly. Other, more specificallegories include Scylla as ⋯ɸροσύνη a ‘deathless evil’ (Od. 12. 118), at Det. 178; Odysseus' escape from Charybdis (ibid. 219) at Somn. 2. 70, to symbolize our escape from the cares of mortal existence; and Castor and Pollux (Od. 11. 303) at Somn. 1.150, as an image of the life of the askêtês or prokoptôn.

In this article I shall argue for an interpretation of Odyssey 19.393–466 as a flash-back taking place in the mind of Eurykleia at the moment she recognises Odysseus' scar. That Eurykleia somehow forms the connection between main story and digression has been suggested before, but so far other interpretations have been defended with more fervour.

Most famous of these interpretations is the one given by E. Auerbach in the first chapter of his Mimesis. He had chosen 19.393–466 to illustrate his thesis that in Homer everything is ‘fully externalized’ and that there is no background, only a ‘uniformly illuminated’ foreground. According to Auerbach the digression on the scar stands in complete isolation to its context. It is meant to ‘relax the tension’, to make the hearer/reader ‘forget what had just taken place during the footwashing’, and although it might have been presented as a recollection of Odysseus (by inserting the story ‘two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar’), this ‘subjectivisticperspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background’ was not chosen, being ‘entirely foreign to the Homeric style’.

Some twenty years later this interpretation was challenged by A. Köhnken, who, however, stuck to the idea that the digression is not told from the restricted perspective of one of the characters but from the perspective of the omniscient narrator; he claims that foreground and background are marked as such through a difference in narrative style: ‘berichtende Erzählung’ for the digression itself and ‘szenische Darstellung’ for the context. I disagree with both points.

Greek tragedy is full of rituals perverted by intra-familial conflict. To mention some examples from the house of Atreus: the funeral bath and the funeral covering, normally administered to a man's corpse by his wife as an expression of ɸιλία, have in Aeschylus' Oresteia become instruments in the killing of Agamemnon; the pouring of libations at the tomb, normally a θελκτήριον for the dead, becomes in the Choephoroi an occasion for his arousal; Euripides has Klytaimnestra ‘sacrificed’ while performing the sacrifice for her (fictitious) newly born grandchild. On the important question of why it is that tragedians pervert ritual I hope to shed some light in future publications. The purpose of this paper is to examine the radical form taken by the perversion of mourning in Sophokles' Elektra.

In the first decade of this century the comparative anthropologists Hertz and van Gennep discovered as a widespread feature of the period of mourning its character as participation in the transitional state of the recently dead, to be ended by the incorporation of the dead person into his or her proper destination and the reincorporation of the mourners into the flow of everyday social life. The mourning relatives in a sense share the condition of the dead.

The publication of Mr. R. S. Bluck's stimulating Phaedo prompts me to ask the following questions concerning the traditional interpretation of the cosmographical passage beginning 108 e. (1) Do the terms of 108 e-109 a in combination with 110 b 5 ff. and Timaeus 40 b-c and 62 d ff. prove conclusively that in the Phaedo Plato thinks of the earth as a spherical body? (2) Granted that he does, need his description of the earth, as a setting for his eschatological myth, conform with the spherical theory?

In 209 b.c. P. Cornelius Scipio captured the city of New Carthage. The victory was crucial for the Roman war effort in Spain, and indeed in Italy too, but Scipio's campaign is especially memorable—and the subject of much debate—on account of the manner in which the city was taken. New Carthage had in effect been built on a peninsula, with the sea to the south and a lagoon to the north, and with a canal joining the two to the west. The city, therefore, could only be approached by land from the east; but, according to Polybius, Scipio had learnt from some fishermen that the lagoon was shallow and could be forded in most places and, moreover, that the waters in it usually receded each evening (10.8.7). It was this knowledge that Scipio exploited to take the city. But this same knowledge he also kept from his men (10.9.1, 10.9.4–5). In his address to his soldiers prior to the attack, Polybius says, Scipio told them that Poseidon had visited him in his sleep and had promised to assist the Romans in their operations in a way that would be apparent to all (10.11.7).

In Plutarch's two narratives (Vita Pelopidae XIII. and De genio Socratis) of the recapture of the Cadmea by the Thebans, 379/8 B.C. (winter), he speaks of three harmosts as in command of the Spartan garrison. This is the only instance in Spartan history where more than one harmost is mentioned as exercising authority in the same city, and it suggests the question: Was Thebes for some reason receiving different treatment from the other cities where we hear of harmosts in residence ?

Many attempts have been made to define the precise philosophical outlook of Ovid's account of cosmogony from the beginning of the Metamorphoses, while numerous different and interconnected influences have been identified including Homer, Hesiod, Empedocles, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius and Virgil. This has led some scholars to conclude that Ovid's cosmogony is simply eclectic, a magpie collection of various poetic and philosophical snippets haphazardly jumbled together, and with no significant philosophical dimension whatsoever. A more constructive approach could see Ovid's synthesis of many of the major cosmogonic works in the Graeco-Roman tradition as an attempt to match textually his all-encompassing history of the universe that purports to stretch from the first beginnings of the world up to the present day (Met. 1.3−4). Furthermore, if the beginning of the Metamorphoses is designed to be both cosmologically and intertextually all-encompassing, it is surprising that the influence of arguably the major philosophical work on cosmogony from the ancient world, Plato's Timaeus, remains to be evaluated.

Scholars continue to make progress addressing the lacunae in our papyrological sources for Callimachus’ prologue to the Aetia, both by lending additional support to old supplements and by discounting others or demonstrating their weaknesses. To the first category belongs the crucial verb at the end of line 5, where, in my view, Callimachus first characterizes the making of his poetry (Aet. 1–6):

πολλάκι μοι Τελχῖνες ἐπιτρύζουσιν ἀοιδῇ,
νήιδες οἳ Μούσης οὐκ ἐγένοντο φίλοι,
εἵνεκε]ν οὐχ ἓν ἄεισμα διηνεκὲς ἢ βασιλ[η
⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅]ας ἐν πολλαῖς ἤνυσα χιλιάσιν
ἢ⋅⋅⋅⋅⋅]⋅ους ἥρωας, ἔπος δ᾽ ἐπὶ τυτθὸν ἑλ[ίσσω
παῖς ἅτε, τῶν δ᾽ ἐτέων ἡ δεκὰς οὐκ ὀλίγη.

Often the Telchines mutter at my poetry,
being ignorant and no friends of the Muse,
because I have not completed one continuous poem
in many thousands … on kings and …
… heroes, but I … my poem only a little
like a child, though the decades of my years are not few.

The fifth book of the Iliad contains a curious story about the fight between Heracles and Hades at Pylos, told by Dione (395–7): τλῆ δ' Ἀΐδης ἐν τοῖσι πελώριος ὠκὺν ὀϊστόν, | εὖτέ μιν ωὐτὸς ἀνὴρ υἱὸς Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο | ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι βαλὼν ὀδύνῃσιν ἔδωκεν; the tale seems to have no clear mythological reference or at least not any known to us. Neither can one be found for the most puzzling element of this passage: the bizarre phrase in line 397 that Hades was wounded ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι, as we know nothing about a myth which might have been connected with this event. The lines in question have not been of great interest to scholars hitherto and tend to be mentioned only cursorily; even if some attempts at explanation have been made, no satisfactory solution has yet been offered. In this paper I would like to address two issues: (a) the myth(s) involved in the story and the meaning of ἐν Πύλῳ ἐν νεκύεσσι within it, and (b) the mechanisms through which the confusion of the transmitted versions of the motif of Heracles fighting various gods might have originated, amalgamating separate tales into an apparently unitary story. The motif of Heracles’ fight with Hades is particularly interesting and deserves careful examination.

One of the most famous allegations made against the emperor Caligula was that he had intended to appoint his favourite horse, Incitatus, as consul. While Suetonius and Cassius Dio both preserve this allegation, neither explains the basis for it, what exactly Caligula had said or done to lead those about him to believe that this is what he had intended to do.