In 2016 Justin Stover published an important editio princeps of a fragmentarily preserved text that was originally discovered by Raymond Klibansky in the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Summarium librorum Platonis which Klibansky took as a Latin translation of a lost Greek original, whereas Stover argues it was written by Apuleius, namely as the third book of his De Platone. The following notes deal primarily with details pertaining to the constitution of the text, but I will start with one remark on a detail of Stover's translation and close with a discussion concerning the alleged medieval reception of the so-called ‘New Apuleius’. Chapters, pages, Latin text, apparatus criticus entries, and translations are quoted according to Stover's edition; all bold highlights are mine, as are all translations from works other than the ‘New Apuleius’ if not indicated otherwise.

Galen's highly influential treatise On the Affected Parts (Περὶ τῶν πεπονθότων τόπων, often referred to by its Latin title De locis affectis, hereafter indicated with the abbreviation De loc. aff.) is currently being critically edited by the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Over the last decade, a team of scholars, including the present authors as well as the late and lamented Aḥmad ʿEtmān, have worked on producing a critical edition of the Arabic translation of this text, and their efforts are now drawing to a close. Here we present new insights into how this Arabic translation relates to the Greek textual tradition.

The days, not so far back, in which Arabic philosophical works were skimmed essentially with a view of ‘uncovering’ lost gems of Greek philosophy are fortunately behind us. Today these works are studied on their own, as essential building blocks of the history of philosophy. None the less, medieval philosophic works in Arabic continue to allow significant new discoveries concerning the history of Greek philosophy. The same holds, naturally enough, of medieval Hebrew works written by Jewish scholars who lived under the Crescent and accessed Arabic sources.

When dealing with manuscripts transmitting otherwise unknown ancient texts and without a subscriptio, the work of a philologist and literary critic becomes both more difficult and more engrossing. Definitive proof is impossible; at the end there can only be a hypothesis. When dealing with a unique grammatical text, such a hypothesis becomes even more delicate because of the standardization of ancient grammar. But it can happen that, behind crystallized theoretical argumentation and apparently canonical formulas, interstices can be explored that lead to unforeseen possibilities, more exciting—and even more suitable—than those that have already emerged.

In the anapaestic sequences of Eur. Alc. 93–7 and 105–11, a fast-paced exchange takes place between two choreuts (or two groups of choreuts) eager to learn about Alcestis’ fate. The two passages pose several metrical and textual problems. The most serious is the presence at lines 94 and 106 of the ᴗ ᴗ – – sequence (a ‘catalectic monometer’), which finds no parallel in anapaestic poetry from any age or literary genre. The same sequence occurs at the beginning of the short anapaestic coda of lines 132–5, which, whether authentic or not, from a metrical point of view presents certain affinities with the two previous sequences.

Two well-known ancient witnesses report that Aristophanes of Byzantium was responsible for the arrangement of Pindar's poems into seventeen book-rolls according to lyric genres (dithyrambs, hymns, etc.). These witnesses form fr. 381 in the edition of Aristophanes’ fragments by W.J. Slater (Aristophanis Byzantii fragmenta [Berlin and New York, 1986]):

A much-debated question is whether the order of the poems attested by the papyrus can be credited to Aristophanes, since an ordering principle is apparently not to be found in the list transmitted by it. Moreover, there are some disagreements with the list of Pindar's works transmitted by the Vita Ambrosiana, which is generally deemed the most authoritative catalogue of the poet's corpus, on account of its well-recognized criterion of classification: the poems are divided between those for gods (from hymnoi to hyporchēmata) and those for men (from enkōmia to epinikia), and both of these categories of songs are arranged from the most general (respectively, the hymns and the enkōmia) to the most specific (the remaining genres). This catalogue has been thought to reproduce the order established by Aristophanes in his edition of Pindar.

The διακριτικὴ τέχνη (the art of separating or discriminating), from which the sixth definition of the Sophist starts (226b1–231b9), is puzzling. Prima facie the art of separating does not fit the initial division of art between ποιητικὴ τέχνη (production) and κτητικὴ τέχνη (acquisition) at 219a8–c9. Therefore, scholars generally agree that, although mutually exclusive, ποιητική and κτητική are not exhaustive and leave room for a third species of art, διακριτικὴ τέχνη, on a par with ποιητική and κτητική. However, I argue that textual evidence suggests otherwise.

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.

Greek had held an important place in Roman society and culture since the Late Republican period, and educated Romans were expected to be bilingual and well versed in both Greek and Latin literature. The Roman school ‘curriculum’ was based on Hellenistic educational culture, and in the De grammaticis et rhetoribus Suetonius says that the earliest teachers in Rome, Livius and Ennius, were ‘poets and half Greeks’ (poetae et semigraeci), who taught both Latin and Greek ‘publicly and privately’ (domi forisque docuisse) and ‘merely clarified the meaning of Greek authors or gave exemplary readings from their own Latin compositions’ (nihil amplius quam Graecos interpretabantur aut si quid ipsi Latine composuissent praelegebant, Gram. et rhet. 1–2). Cicero, the Latin neoteric poets and Horace are obvious examples of bilingual educated Roman aristocrats, but also throughout the Imperial period a properly educated Roman would be learned in utraque lingua. The place of Greek in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria reveals the importance and prevalence of Greek in Roman education and literature in the late first century a.d. Quintilian argues that children should learn both Greek and Latin but that it is best to begin with Greek. Famously, in the second century a.d. the Roman author Apuleius gave speeches in Greek to audiences in Carthage, and in his Apologia mocked his accusers for their ignorance of Greek.

Aristotle's brief accounts of some swifts and hirundines in Hist. an. 1.1 (487b24–31) and 9.30 (618a31–b2) list several species whose identification has always been taken for difficult, and continues to vary from translation to translation. This note clarifies this small issue on the basis of Aristotle's text alone. I therefore assume that both passages, each introduced by a slightly different use of the term ἄποδες, offer sufficient information for recognizing the species in question. I will first translate and briefly comment upon the passage from Book 1, then do the same with the text from Book 9.

In the course of describing the events of the 160s b.c.e., 2 Maccabees presents the texts of four letters: the Seleucid general Lysias to the Jews granting some concessions and referring their other demands to the king (11.16–21); two letters of Antiochus, to Lysias (11.22–6) and to the Jews (11.27–33), granting various concessions; and Roman envoys to the Jews (11.34–8) endorsing Lysias’ concessions. The third and fourth letters have at their ends (suspiciously) the same date, 15 Xanthikos of Seleucid year 148, c. March 164 b.c.e. The second has no date. The first, Lysias’ letter, is dated ἔτους ἑκατοστοῦ τεσσαρακοστοῦ ὀγδόου, διοσκορινθίου τετράδι καὶ εἰκάδι: year 148 on the 24th of a month; but the month name, standardly printed as Διὸς Κορινθίου, is impossible.

By the mid fourth century c.e., violently divergent Christian communities had developed across the Roman empire: Nicene or Homoousian (God and Jesus ‘are of the same substance’), Homoiousian (‘are of similar substance’), Homoian (Jesus is ‘like’ God), Anomoean or Heterousian (God and Jesus ‘are of different substance’) and others. The first emperor to be a strong supporter of traditional cult in more than a generation, Julian ruled over an empire of numerous religious groups that were often at variance with one another, both extra- and intra-communally, and how all of these should be treated was one of the chief problems pressing the emperor upon his accession in late 361. Julian's religious thought and action during his short sole reign (3 November 361 to 26 June 363) has long exercised scholars, its impact on Christians and Christianity in particular. To be sure, Julian tended to be hostile to Christians and Christianity, but he was by no means hostile to all, and he even favoured some Christians, some of whom he counted among his friends and officials. The emperor's Christian policy thus was complicated. One of the best examples of this complexity is Julian's epistle to the Heterousian Christian leader Aetius (Ep. 15 Wright = 46 Bidez). In a shorter note published in this journal, Pierre-Louis Malosse focussed his attention on Julian's letter to Aetius, which dates to early 362 and which is the only such epistle to this future bishop that is extant. As transmitted, Julian's missive to Aetius is critical for the light it helps to shed on the emperor's views and treatments of Christians at the outset of his sole reign, and my conclusions on this missive differ from those of Malosse.

Scholars of the ancient world are increasingly recognizing the importance of ancient collections for our understanding of antiquity. In his afterword to Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (2015), Jaś Elsner argues that much of our knowledge of antiquity is based on collections assembled within the ancient world, and that the study of these collections provides us with a unique opportunity to uncover the mentalities of the people whom they surrounded. Pointing out that they ‘packaged the past and the present for its own needs, much as modern museums do now’, Elsner argues that ancient collections may be approached as ‘significant engine[s] for social and cultural self-definition’.

A recent piece in this journal by Morgan and Taylor made the case that C. Memmius is not to be seen as an active prosecutor of Epicureanism but rather as an Epicurean himself, who merely has disagreed with the grimly orthodox Epicurean sect in Athens. As such, Memmius’ building intentions for Epicurus’ home could have been to create an honorary monument or possibly even construct a grander locus for pilgrimage and the practice of Epicureanism. This note adds to their findings by considering allusions to De Rerum Natura found in Fam. 13.1 and the implications of Cicero speaking to Memmius in Lucretius’ striking language. Cicero expresses his judgement on De Rerum Natura, famously, at QFr. 2.10.3, Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum ueneris, uirum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris, hominem non putabo, and Memmius, of course, is the addressee of De Rerum Natura. This Lucretian language, unremarked on by previous scholars, points to the shared literary culture of Cicero and Memmius as well as Memmius’ own ability to recollect and contextualize the references. By echoing Lucretius in this letter, Cicero hints at Memmius’ sophistication and learning (Cic. Brut. 247), underscores Lucretius’ own fervent devotion to Epicurus’ strictures, and suggests the need for Memmius to achieve ataraxia, at the very least, in regards to his building plans and the furore it is causing in Athens.

In his Res Gestae, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptian city of Thebes and the obelisks that can be found there. There is an unusual passage in which he describes hieroglyphic writings. He goes on to show, through two examples, how hieroglyphs might seem bizarre, but in fact contain their own logic which can be explained (Amm. Marc. 17.4.10–11, translation mine):

Textual difficulties as well as problems of content are sometimes prone to being overlooked in famous passages, because their very familiarity tends to stifle reflection on their actual meaning. orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano (Juv. 10.356) escaped detection as an interpolation until 1970. In di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa) | aspirate meis (Ov. Met. 1.2–3), the reading illas has held its place against the correct illa until 1976.

45 τόλμᾳ γὰρ εἰκώϲ
θυμὸν ἐριβρεμετᾶν θηρῶν λεόντων
ἐν πόνῳ, μῆτιν δ᾽ ἀλώπηξ,
αἰετοῦ ἅ τ᾽ ἀναπιτναμένα ῥόμβον ἴϲχει·
χρὴ δὲ πᾶν ἔρδοντ᾽ ἀμαυρῶϲαι τὸν ἐχθρόν.

In his recent monograph on textual criticism, Richard Tarrant discusses the history, problems and practices of diagnosing interpolations in Latin texts, and persuasively argues for ‘restor[ing] interpolation to the editor's armoury’. In the hopes of better arming future editors, I identify a possible interpolation in the second book of Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae (= DRP). The passage in question describes the celebrations in the underworld that attend the wedding of Pluto and Proserpina; joining in the holiday mood, the Furies let their snaky hair down to enjoy a drink of wine while they light festive torches for the nuptials (DRP 2.343–7):

oblitae scelerum formidatique furoris
Eumenides cratera parant et uina feroci
crine bibunt flexisque minis iam lene canentes 345
extendunt socios ad pocula plena cerastas
et festas alio succendunt lumine taedas.

εἰ δέ τιϲ ὄλβον ἔχων μορφᾷ παραμεύϲεται ἄλλουϲ,
ἔν τ᾽ ἀέθλοιϲιν ἀριϲτεύων ἐπέδειξεν βίαν,
θνατὰ μεμνάϲθω περιϲτέλλων μέλη, 15
καὶ τελευτὰν ἁπάντων γᾶν ἐπιεϲϲόμενοϲ.
ἐν λόγοιϲ δ᾽ ἀϲτῶν ἀγαθοῖϲί νιν αἰνεῖϲθαι χρεὼν
καὶ μελιγδούποιϲι δαιδαλθέντα μελίζεν ἀοιδαῖϲ.