The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy (Aen. 2.255). He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks were en route but shine during the battle for the city (Aen. 2.340). Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear:

Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret.

Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad:

νὺξ μ⋯ν ἔην μέσση, λαμπρ⋯ δ' ⋯πέτελλε σελήνη.

This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian.

Illusions play a central part in Epicurean philosophy. One of its fundamental assumptions is that men are the victims of a certain grand illusion and, as long as they remain so, can never aspire to a happy life. This is the illusion that pleasures can be increased in intensity without limit. It is as a result of this that men go to enormous lengths to enlarge their capacity to procure more pleasure, struggling in pursuit of goals that can rarely, if ever, be achieved. But here mankind has made a disastrous mistake: the limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of pain, and after that point it cannot be increased, only varied. The illusion has therefore led to a tragic state of affairs, a sad history of fruitless war, struggle and ambition and it is a vital part of Epicurus’ programme to rid men of this evil by teaching them the true limits of pleasure.

Crime pays, says Polus at Gorgias 473. Socrates, on the other hand, maintains two propositions in the face of universal opinion:

In the tragic senarius the divisions of the sense normally coincide with the main divisions of the metrical structure. Punctuation is most frequently found at the end of the line, or at the penthemimeral or hephthemimeral caesura. There are few traces of any desire to produce a persistent clash (as in the Vergilian hexameter) between verse structure and sentence structure. Thus at Med. 446–50 and 709–13 five consecutive lines, at Med. 364–71 eight consecutive lines, are more or less self-contained in sense. But this principle, while valid in some degree for all three tragedians, is not equally valid for all. Sophocles, as is well known, is far suppler in his iambic technique than Aeschylus and Euripides, and far more prone to write sentences which over-run the main metrical divisions.

The bilingual Philoxenus Glossary drew some of its materials from Festus de Signif. Verb. and occasionally mentions his name. Its Festus glosses have been collected in a Jena dissertation by Dammann. The Abolita Glossary (if we may so term the collection enclosed within square brackets in Corp. Gloss. Lat. IV. pp. 4–198) seems to have begun (in its original arrangement) with Festus excerpts. Before we can glean from these two glossaries every available scrap of evidence about Festus, we must try to complete and correct them. For of the Philoxenus Glossary (Philox.) we have practically only one MS., and that of the ninth century. It must have omitted many items and perverted the words of many others. The Abolita Glossary (Abol.) was associated (but not mixed up) with another, the Abstrusa Glossary (Abstr.), in Spain, and this composite collection (Abstr.-Abol.) passed into Italy. The MSS. are, we may say, only two, and of each a certain number of leaves are missing. The older and better MS. (Vat.), an uncial codex of the eighth century, was written apparently in Central Italy; the other (Cass.) was written two centuries later at Monte Cassino. They show us Abol. not in its original form, but rearranged in a not too strict alphabetical order (between AB- and ABC-). The St. Gall Glossary was compiled from (1) Philox., (2) the composite Abstr.-Abol., and supplies some of those Festus glosses of Philox. and Abol. which are omitted in our MSS. It seems to have been a Bobbio compilation (but see below). Our best MS. was written in rude uncials at St. Gall in the eighth century.

The histories of literature tell us that these three poets were out of favour with scholars during the second and third centuries and the first half of the fourth. Lucan and Statius certainly had a vogue in the first: Suetonius studied Lucan at school (Vita Lucani ‘Poemata eius etiam praelegi memini’), and Statius (Theb. XII. 814–5) can say to his book:

‘Iam te magnanimus dignatur noscere Caesar

Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuuentus.’

The ἰαματικά, a collection of seven short epigrams about healing grouped together and so labelled in the Milan papyrus attributed to Posidippus, present another useful source of information about the cult and cures of Asclepius (AB 95–101; P Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, XIV.30–XV.22). Brief though the epigrams are (all are four lines in length except the first, which is eight lines), they accord well with the picture of the cult presented by material, epigraphic and other literary evidence.

Cicero's letter to his brother Quintus from February 54 is best known for containing the sole explicit contemporary reference to Lucretius’ De rerum natura, but it is also notable as the source of the only extant reference of any kind to another (presumably) philosophical didactic poem, Sallustius’ Empedoclea (Q. fr. 2.10(9).3= SB 14):

In an earlier article I reported the text Ajax offered by the so-called ‘Roman’ family of Sophocles, the manuscripts G, R, and Q. My present purpose is to give collations of G, R, and Q for Philoctetes, with some introductory comments confined to this play; I hope I may be allowed to refer the reader to my previous article for a discussion of the general problems arising from a study of these manuscripts.

Within the increasingly complex picture which has emerged in recent years of the manuscript tradition of Ovid's Amores the relationship of the two earliest MSS appears to remain firm: cod. P or Puteaneus (Par. Lat. 8242) of the 9th or early 10th century, which begins at Am. 1.2.51, was copied, probably directly, from the second half of the 9th-century cod. R or Regius (Par. Lat. 7311), whose first half now ends at Am. 1.2.50. This view, which originates in S. Tafel's dissertation of 1910 and lies behind the stemma constructed by E. J. Kenney for his OCT edition of 1961 (p. vi), has come to be taken by Ovidian scholars (with the exception, however, of Munari, who left the question open) to be the truth. My purpose in this first section is to show that this idea is unlikely to be the truth and, in the form in which it has most strongly been put forward, cannot be the truth. In the second section consequences for the manuscript tradition as a whole are explored.

First we shall need some details. P, the slightly later manuscript, consists in all of 99 folia, of which 1–54 contain most, but not all, of the Heroides — not all, because they are in a lacunose state, a point to which we shall return in greater detail later. Foll. 55–6 are blank sheets of paper, not parchment, clearly inserted at a much later date during rebinding.

Despite the discredit into which the once famous theory of Niebuhr has long sincefallen, it is beginning to appear, both to historians and to students of literature, that Epic poetry was in full process of evolution at Rome before Livius Andronicus was inspired to translate the Odyssey. There is, indeed, ample evidence to warrant such a belief; our authorities may most conveniently be considered in two main divisions. The first calls for no more than the barest mention, for it is concerned with those Naeniae and Cantus Conuiuiales the existence of which is not seriously challenged by even the most conservative criticism. They are well attested, and the evidence for their extreme antiquity is familiar to every reader of Cicero. In passing we may mention also Saturnian epitaphs like those of the Scipios, and the Tituli Triumphales set up in the Capitol. Typical lines are: Fundit, fugat, prosternit maximas legiones, from the inscription of M'Acilius Glabrio, and Summas opes qui regum regias refregit (which, however, Diomedes appears to quote as from Naevius).

Hitherto reconstructions of Empedocles' cosmic cycle have usually been offered as part of a larger work, a complete history of Presocratic thought, or a complete study of Empedocles. Consequently there has perhaps been a lack of thoroughness in collecting and sifting evidence that relates exclusively to the main features of the cosmic cycle.

The present paper proposes to discuss three passages in Tacitus, Histories 3 where current interpretations have led to difficulties which can be shown to be baseless so soon as it is realized that Tacitus is willing on occasion to sacrifice truth and clarity to stylistic effect. In each of these passages the same literary device lies at the root of the matter, a device which (for want of a better term) may be labelled ‘die grouping of participles’: the juxtaposition of participles in a sentence to die detriment of strict chronological order.

In the early years of the fifth century, the Greek cities of Asia Minor attempted to free themselves from Persian rule. Our primary evidence for the unsuccessful ‘Ionian Revolt’ is literary, a patchwork from the narrative of Herodotus iv–vi.

The main events of the Revolt need not be doubted: the Ionian cities were ruled by Greek puppet tyrants until the outbreak of the rebellion (Hdt. 4.136–7); Aristagoras was the early leader of the movement which began after the failure of the Persian-Milesian expedition against Naxos (5.30–5); Athens, petitioned by Aristagoras, and Eretria supplied limited support for-the Revolt (5.38; 55; 65; 97; 99);

The old Analytical view that the union between the Journey of Telemachus and the rest of the Odyssey is post-Homeric, superficial, and incompetently effected is nowadays widely rejected, and rightly so. However, although many defences cumulatively, I believe, successful–of the content of the second divine assembly have been put forward in recent years, no adequate answer has yet been given to the objections raised against the allegedly anomalous language of Athene's speech of 5.7–20: