Justin Stover has recently edited a collection of Platonic placita, organized by individual dialogue, which he identifies as the lost third book of Apuleius’ De Platone. The work is preserved only in a thirteenth-century manuscript, Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 1572 (= R). The manuscript is filled with trivial errors, including a large number of one-word or two-word lacunae. Stover has worked ably to clean up the text and many of his emendations are uncontroversial. But any editio princeps is likely to be susceptible of improvement. I offer here some notes on a few points where I think either the text or Stover's translation and commentary can be bettered. I am not primarily concerned here with the ascription to Apuleius (if the work is not by Apuleius, it must in any case be by a Middle Platonist roughly contemporary with him), although one or two points may have some relevance to this question.

In the Peristephanon, a collection of hymns in praise of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (a.d. 347/8–c. 405) refers back to a time more than a hundred years before he was writing, when Christianity was not the predominant influence in the Roman world but the religion of a beleaguered minority. In the course of Prudentius' lifetime, the trials that were suffered by that minority under emperors such as Decius and Diocletian became an important point of reference for increasing numbers of Roman converts seeking to identify with Christianity and its sectarian past. At the time, however, those trials were recorded in only meagre written accounts. Prudentius, whose successful administrative career might have culminated in elevation to a senior position in the imperial scrinia, displays particular interest in the extent of the official archival material in the Peristephanon. In a number of passages in this work, he comments on the fragility of historical documents, which are easily destroyed by acts of malice or the effects of time. The following discussion will examine the ways in which he reflects on the permanence, or otherwise, of his own written texts. Analysis of his imitation of elegiac verse inscriptions will demonstrate how he draws attention to the inadequacy of even the most monumental types of human writing. But I will argue that, by identifying his poems with the martyrs' perishable bodies, Prudentius claims that they too can be a medium for a divine presence not confined to any perishable physical form.

Denys Page, discussing this poem in his classic Sappho and Alcaeus, seemed unimpressed by its aesthetic merits. In his note on line 7 he says: ‘The sequence of thought might have been clearer.... It seems then inelegant to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found O Krλλιστον in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this very quality’ (p. 53). His interpretative essay phrases further objections. ‘In a phrase which rings dull in our doubtful ears, she proceeds to illustrate the truth of her preamble by calling Helen of Troy in evidence’ (p. 56). About the Helen exemplum itself he says: ‘the thought is simple as the style is artless’ and ‘the transition back to the principal subject was perhaps not very adroitly; managed’ (p. 56). Page's criticism centres on the function of the exemplum of Helen. A close reconsideration of this exemplum, with special attention to the way in which it is embedded in the preceding and following context, will result in a better understanding and appreciation of this poem.

Hunters of acrostics have had little luck with Horace. Despite his manifest love of complex wordplay, virtuoso metrical tricks and even alphabet games, acrostics seem largely absent from Horace's poetry. The few that have been sniffed out in recent years are, with one notable exception, either fractured and incomplete—the postulated PINN- in Carm. 4.2.1–4 (pinnis? Pindarus?)—or disappointingly low-stakes; suggestions of acrostics are largely confined to the Odes alone. Besides diverging from the long-standing Roman obsession with literary acrostics, Horace's apparent lack of interest is especially surprising given that Virgil, his contemporary, friend and ‘poetic pace-maker’, was at the time conducting what seems to be a systematic adaptation of Hellenistic acrostic-poetics into Latin poetry.

The irrelevance of ideology is perhaps one of the most strongly held views shared by the historians of the Late Republic. As indicated by Matthias Gelzer in 1912, in those final years of the Roman Republic, ‘political struggles were fought out by the nobiles at the head of their dependents’. In his opinion, this was nothing more than a power struggle, in which slogans or ideas were merely propaganda, without any real value. In 1931, analysing the political proposals of Cicero, Gelzer's disciple Hermann Strasburger rejected the existence of political parties, as, in his opinion, terms such as optimates or populares were merely propagandistic mottos and pure wordplay. As a result, it became widely believed that the civil war between Caesar and Pompey was nothing more than a struggle between dignitates, that is, a confrontation for leadership between ambitious politicians who were not prepared to compromise. More recently, in 1994, Luigi Loreto considered the conflict between Caesar and Pompey to be aimed at seizing power, unlike ‘ideological’ wars, where the aim was to maintain or instate a specific type of social or political order.

The philosophers of antiquity had much to say about the place of friendship in the good life and its role in helping us live virtuously. Augustine is unusual in giving substantial attention to the dangers of friendship and its potential to serve as an obstacle (rather than an aid) to virtue. Despite the originality of Augustine's thought on this topic, this area of his thinking has received little attention. This paper will show how Augustine, especially in the early books of the Confessiones, carefully examines the potential of friendship to lead us astray. In particular, friendships may prove an impediment to virtue by: derailing our practical reasoning (rather than aiding it); fostering vices (rather than virtues); and misdirecting our love. Augustine's investigation of the murky depths of friendship shows an original philosopher and keen observer of the human condition at work.

In this country and in those with which we are best acquainted, that large part of the human diet which is derived from grain is mainly eaten in the form of bread. Bread, in order to be palatable and digestible, must be leavened; and this means that the dough must be able to retain some of the carbon dioxide gas produced in it by the agency of yeast or some similar substance. Its capacity for doing this depends upon the presence in the grain of a sufficient amount of proteins of such a kind that when mixed with water they form the elastic substance known as gluten. It is largely because wheat—and especially the species of triticum vulgare to which all our bread wheats belong—is superior to all other grains in this respect that wheat has become the main bread grain of a large part of the world.

THE book which Eudoxus of Cnidos was stated by some to have translated from the Egyptian is entitled in the manuscripts of Diog. Laert. 8. 89, a reading which R. D. Hicks retains in his Loeb edition (vol. ii, 1925, revised ed. 1931, repr. 1950, p. 402). It was retained also in the edition of C. Gabr. Cobet (Paris, 1878) and in the Tauchnitz edition (Leipzig, 1895); so also H. S. Long in O.C.T. (1964). Egyptian religion was richly theriolatrous. But does it proffer a suggestion of ‘Dialogues of Dogs’ ?

The contrary belief is suggested by the proposal of various emendations.

In his analysis of the social and economic conditions of intellectual activity in ancient Greece, Gentili argues that the value of poetry underwent a notable change in the late archaic period. Poetry came to be produced within a contractual relationship between patrons and poets, it became a commercial good available to the one who could pay for it and its value was expressed no longer by honouring the poet but by paying for his product. At the time of Solon and Theognis the producers of poetry had been aristocratic members of the polis giving political advice to their peers and gaining renown by the quality of their advice. Yet Simonides and Pindar wrote under different social conditions. Gentili writes:

Fully conscious by now of the dignity and importance of his role, the poet also becomes aware of its [i.e. poetry's] ‘commercial’ value. He puts his own sophia at the disposal of the highest bidder, thereby creating a basis for the tendency to regard wealth and poetic ‘wisdom’ as interchangeable moral equivalents.

The word is generally regarded as having two distinct and separate meanings: (1) threshing-floor, and (2) garden, orchard, or vineyard. Like the classical the word must originally have denoted a threshing-floor. How the second, and apparently incongruous, meaning became attached to it has never been explained. Both are found in Homer. In the Iliad the horses of Achilles trample down the dead like oxen treading the barley on the well-built threshing-floor; the arrow rebounds from the breastplate of Menelaos like beans or chickpeas flying off the blade of the winnowing shovel on the great threshing-floor; the dust of the conflict that lay white on the Achaeans is likened to the whitening heaps when the wind drives off the chaff on the holy threshing-floors when men are winnowing and Demeter separates the chaff from the grain.

According to the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Ath. Pol. 43.4), the Assembly in Athens met four times every prytany. At each one of these meetings certain topics had to be discussed or voted on. For instance, a vote concerning the conduct of magistrates presently in office was to be taken at the κυρ⋯α ⋯κκλησ⋯α. At another meeting anyone who wished to could request a discussion of any matter, be it private or public. Nothing is said in this passage or anywhere else in the Constitution of the Athenians about the possibility of holding additional meetings of the Assembly in times of emergency, but in a few passages in the Attic orators we find the term ⋯κκλησία σύγκλητος used. The scholia to these passages and some entries in the ancient lexica indicate that this term refers to an extra meeting of the Assembly which could be convened at short notice in order to deal with emergencies.

On the basis of this information, scholars have in the past concluded that the Assembly normally met four times each prytany in the Classical period, but that extra meetings, called ⋯κκλησίαɩ σύγκλητοɩ, could also be held if the need arose. Recently, however, M. H. Hansen, whose work on many aspects of the Assembly has greatly increased our understanding of Athenian democracy, has challenged this communis opinio. Hansen argues that the evidence found in the scholia and lexica is unreliable and should be disregarded. In his view, several passages in the speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes and some fines in IG ii 212 indicate that the Assembly met a fixed number of times each prytany, no more, no less.

Rem tene, the elder Cato advised the aspiring orator, verba sequentur. The advice applies equally to the textual critic. Of those who have attempted to emend, repunctuate, or defend this passage, few seem to have been troubled by any doubts about the firmness of their grip on the res, the precise point Poseidon is making. The usual view of what Poseidon means is that those who sack cities are foolish because such an act results in their own subsequent destruction, presumably because they desecrate temples and thereby offend the gods. Poseidon's words are cited as encapsulating the ‘moral’ or ‘lesson’ of the play, that the destruction of others and their cities brings the victor no advantage but only his own ruin, that the sacking of cities is always and everywhere an act of criminal folly. Yet there are several features of the lines themselves that are hard to square with this reading, and the context, Poseidon's monologue and his dialogue with Athena, suggests a slightly different view of the lesson to be read from the coming destruction of the Greeks.

In C.Q. xxiii. 2 (1929) Dr. C. M. Bowra examined the Ennian phrases in the Aeneid which Virgil adopted but transformed. Bowra, whose object was to investigate the reasons which led Virgil to make slight changes in these echoes, naturally had nothing to say about those borrowings which remained unaltered in Virgil. Of these, perhaps the most striking is the allusion to Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator in v. 846 above. The following points can be noted about the line:

1. It is not a subconscious, or apparently purposeless, reminiscence of familiar words, a habit of which the best-known example is Aen. vi. 460, invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi, cf. Cat. lxvi. 39.