The present paper concludes that P. Oxy. 2463 contains remnants of a commentary on the Aitia of Callimachus. Identifying the commentary makes it possible to reconstruct the missing part of Heracles' conversation with Molorchus (SH 256–7), confirming its place in the Victoria Berenices and settling the latter's relationship to the Aitia. The argument takes its departure from a vexed passage in Lycophron.

In Philip of Macedon (1978) (pp. 150f.), as part of a general survey of the development of the art of war in Classical Greece, I briefly adumbrated a view of the nature of hoplite fighting. It was not the conventional one, of which the following statement of Adcock in The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (1957) p. 4 is fairly representative:

The effectiveness of the phalanx depends in part on skill in fighting by those in the front rank, and in part on thephysical and moral support of the lines behind them. The two opposing phalanxes meet each otherwith clash of shield on shield and blow of spear against spear. Their momentum is increased by the impetus of the charge that precedes their meeting. If the first clash is not decisive by the superior weight and thrust of the one phalanx over the other, the fighting goes on. The laterranks supply fighters as those before them fall. At last one side gains the upper hand. Then the other phalanx breaks and takes to flight and the battle is won and lost.

Despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary, the running slave (‘servus currens’), and particularly the often lengthy entrance monologue of the running slave, is generally considered a distinctly Roman phenomenon, an exuberant growth of the Latin soil, albeit from Greek seed.1 There are two reasons for this. One reason is the frequency with which the motif appears in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in sharp contrast with the absence of any single undisputable New Comic example. The second reason is Eduard Fraenkel's Plautinisches im Plautus which, sixty-five years after its publication, remains the most authoritative scholarly work in the field of Roman comedy. In this book Fraenkel argues that Plautus' running-slave scenes, particularly the monologues of the Curculio (280–98) and the Captivi (790–828), are a veritable nexus of original Plautine traits.

That the theme of trickery and deception plays an important part in the comedies of Plautus is obvious. Although by no means absent from the comedies of Menander and Terence, it is not nearly so prominent in them as in Plautus. One reason for this difference may be Plautus' choice of Greek models, but there are good grounds for believing that changes made by Plautus to his models also served to emphasize the theme. E. Fraenkel showed that Plautus elevated the scheming slave into a comic hero in a manner alien to Menander and Terence. He identified as an important factor in this heroization of the slave certain features of style, notably the recurring use of military metaphors which equate the slave with a victorious general. He also showed that Plautus probably greatly expanded certain slave roles, this expansion being most evident in elaborate polymetric monodies such as Chrysalus' Troy canticum, Bacch. 925ff. These stylistic effects and the increased bulk of the roles give greater emphasis to the Plautine scheming slave and ipso facto to the element of intrigue in the plot. The omissions which naturally went together with Plautus' insertions could also distort the emphasis of the Greek play in favour of the element of intrigue; a probable example is the Casina, in which it is generally agreed that Plautus cut the original anagnorisis ending. Recent writers have stressed another aspect of Plautus' style which helps to give a particular prominence to the theme of intrigue in his plays, his liking for metatheatrical effects, which remind the spectators that they are watching a stage performance not real life; these effects are pervasive but particularly cluster around scenes of deception, emphasizing that the deception is in a special sense a performance, a play within a play.

The Erfurtensis (E), now lat. 2°.252 in the Staatsbibliothek Preuβischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin (West), was assembled by Wibald of Corvey in the mid twelfth century, and is the most comprehensive medieval manuscript of Cicero, containing nearly half of what was eventually to survive. The manuscript as it exists today has lost one or more folios at several different points, but in some of these places readings were recorded by sixteenth and seventeenth-century scholars before the mutilations occurred. There is, however, only one lacuna where early collations survive and where, also, E is a manuscript of primary importance for the reconstruction of the text. The omission in question, caused by the removal of folios at some unknown date between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, comprises the end of pro Caecina (beginning after vincula, § 100) and virtually all pro Sulla (ending before- tundis Catilinae, §81). No readings are known to have been taken from the end of pro Caecina, but from the bulk of pro Sulla, before the manuscript as we have it resumes, a sizeable number of readings has fortunately been preserved. The tradition of pro Sulla takes the form of two branches, one consisting of Munich, Bayer. Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18787, olim Tegernseensis, (T) and all the deteriores (to), the other consisting of just two manuscripts, E and its twin, Vatican, Pal. lat. 1525 (which will be referred to as V). V comes to a halt at §43; the early collations of E are therefore of the highest importance for pro Sulla until §81, especially from §43 onwards where they comprise our only record for one of the tradition's two branches.

The two central themes of Fasti are twice (1.1, 4.11) linked in this way. The association, which at once gives the poem the appearance of having a literary ancestry in the aetiological tradition, might have seemed inevitable: any verse narrative account of a festival is very likely to contain an αἲтιоν of it. Callimachus' hymns illustrate this assertion, and there are clearly defined hymnic elements in Fasti to bear out the comparison, for example the listing of Venus' ⋯αεтαί and Πρáξεις at 4.91ff. and the instructions to the devotees of Pales at 4.731–48. 4 To state the obvious fact that the poem combines Roman antiquities with Alexandrian aetiology, a blending of which more straightforward examples are to be found in the fourth book of Propertius, is only a prelude to establishing what Ovid really achieves in Fasti. Traditional elements are, as I hope to show, cunningly exploited to create ‘counter–effects’ and to subject the material to the constantly varying and wide–ranging influences of the poet's literary background. Though the notion of causa is central to Fasti, the poem is much more than an amalgam of such influences as the aetiological prose works of Varro and (possibly) Verrius Flaccus with the aetiological poetics of Propertius 4.5 These sources combined to provide material for the foundation of the finished structure, which was to be the creative manipulation of these antiquarian and literary stimuli directed at providing a vehicle for the regular themes of the Ovidian persona.

The text quoted above each note is that of the edition of Seneca's tragedies by Otto Zwierlein (Zw.), OCT 1986; numerous passages are discussed in his Kritischer Kommentar zu den Tragüdien Senecas (K.K.), Stuttgart, 1986; various textual suggestions were made in a correspondence with Zw. by B. Axelson (Ax.). Other works on Seneca's tragedies, referred to by the scholar's name only, are: (i)Text and translation: F. J. Miller, Loeb, 1917; L. Herrmann, Budé, 1924–6. (ii)Text with commentary: R. J. Tarrant, Agamemnon (Cambridge, 1976), and Thyestes (Atlanta, 1985); J. G. Fitch, Hercules Furens (Ithaca, 1987). (iii) Text with commentary and translation: Elaine Fantham, Troades (Princeton, 1982); A. J.Boyle, Phaedra (Liverpool, 1987).

The winning of the ultimate military honour of spolia opima, spoils taken personally from an enemy commander killed by a Roman commander, traditionally occurred only three times in Roman history, the winners being Romulus in the legendary period, A. Cornelius Cossus in either 437 or 426 and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 B.C.1 The dedication-place of these special spoils was the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, traditionally founded by Romulus for the purpose, and considered the oldest temple in Rome (Livy 1.10.7): the god was said to draw his name either from the fact that the spolia opima were carried (ferre) up to the Capitol by the victorious general in person, or from the fact that the general had to strike down(ferire) his opposite number before such spoils could be won.

The most recent edition of these books is that of R. M. Ogilvie (Oxford, 1974), which should be read in conjunction with his Commentary on these books (Oxford, 1965). The other modern edition to which I have referred is that of W. Weissenborn and H. J. Müller (Berlin, 1894–1908) = W.-M.

Voltaire's Pangloss, the man who held among other things that noses were clearly created in order to support spectacles, is the very archetype of the lunatic teleologist; a caricature of sublimely confident faith in the general and undeniable goodness of the world's arrangement, a faith that managed astoundingly to survive the Lisbon earthquake and his own subsequent auto dafé. Voltaire, of course, is poking fun at such conceptions; and, no doubt, in their extreme sanguinity as well as in their apparent imperviousness to devastating empirical counter-evidence, they do seem to be eminently risible notions. In the face of them we might be tempted to abandon ‘métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie’, and to agree with Candide that ‘Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’.

The relationship between the choruses of Seneca's tragedies and the action of the plays in which they occur is one of the least understood and most controversial aspects of the Roman dramatist's work. It is often asserted that Seneca's choral odes are mere act-dividers, that their relationship with the play's action is loose and unconvincing. I would not care to assert that the handling of the chorus is flawless in all instances in Seneca's tragedies (or indeed in the works of any ancient tragedian), but in his best works it is, I believe, masterly. In this paper I propose to illustrate the close and complex interconnection between ode and action in Senecan tragedy through an analysis of the choruses of Thyestes.

At one point in his treatise against the ‘Gnostics’ Plotinus treats his adversaries as men of flesh and blood, not merely as proponents of false books and false beliefs:

For I feel a certain shame (aidōs tis echei) with regard to some of my friends (philoi), who, having chanced upon this doctrine before the beginning of our friendship, have continued to adhere to it for reasons that I cannot understand. Not that they themselves show any compunction in saying what they say: they may believe what they say to be true (alethe), but perhaps they rather wish others to be persuaded of the truth of their own opinions. (Enneads II.9.10.3ff.)

[Lichas] ‘videbatur mihi secundum quietem Priapus dicere: “Encolpion quod quaeris, scito a me in navem tuam esse perductum”.’ exhorruit Tryphaena et ‘putes’ inquit ‘una nos dormiisse; nam et mihi simulacrum Neptuni, quod Bais <in> tetrastylo notaveram, videbatur dicere: “in nave Lichae Gitona invenies”.’ ‘hinc scies’ inquit Eumolpus ‘Epicurum hominem esse divinum, qui eiusmodi ludibria facetissima ratione condemnat.’ <*> ceterum Lichas ut Tryphaenae somnium expiavit: ‘quis’ inquit ‘prohibet navigium scrutari, ne videamur divinae mentis opera damnare?’

(Petr. Sal. 104.1–4)

Priapus and Epicurus have frequently been claimed to be major influences, each in their particular way, on the plot and composition of the Satyrica.

Many have written of imperial qualities perceived or publicized, particularly of those attached to the emperor Constantine. Although only a tediously exhaustive volume could do justice to the whole subject, and any essay which does not embrace the whole runs the risk of being faulted for some omission or other, one may yet justify a particular concern. The subject of the present paper is the tension between form and function, which appears nowhere so readily as in a series of similar literary exercises spanning a number of years, and the demonstration that form will always yield to practical necessity. For example, the rise, fall, and rehabilitation of Maximian through seven of the Panegyrici Latini clearly illustrates the many functions of a standard form. Constantine's is a more complicated case which involves two kinds of form and a certain amount of Augustan posturing.

In recent times, a previously unchallenged and longstanding communis opinio concerning the extant manuscript tradition of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica has been shattered by Prof. W.-W. Ehlers in his revelation that the fifteenth-century Laurentianus plut. 39.38, L, written by the Florentine scholar, Niccolò Niccoli, is independent of the much exalted oldest witness, Vaticanus Latinus 3277, V, copied in Fulda in the second quarter of the ninth century. With equally silent subservience to the hazardous and now discredited principle, vetustissimus et optimus, second place in the tradition had commonly been given to a manuscript of similar age to that of V, namely S, discovered in 1416 at the monastery of St. Gall by three humanist scholars, Poggio Bracciolini, Cencio Rustici and Bartolomeo da Montepulciano, and subsequently lost, except through reconstruction from six extant fifteenth-century apographa, each instantly recognizable from the fact that they contain only 1.1–4.317. Between V and S, however, as Ehlers and others before him have argued, a common exemplar, a, must be deduced to exist.

Certain proximities between two distinguished but very dissimilar contemporaries, Quintilian and Tacitus, may be stated. Contemporary they were, though the former, born probably a little before A.D. 40, was older by about twenty years. Both were from outside Rome, Quintilian certainly of provincial, Spanish, origin, Tacitus very probably from one of the Galliae, yet both exemplars of Romanitas.

J. T. Hooker argues that at Il. 24.649 ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων must mean ‘taunting’ and, since ‘taunting’ makes no sense, that ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων must have entered our Iliad at this point from a version of the Iliad slightly different from ours in which it did make sense. I wish to argue that ⋯πικερτομ⋯ων has a meaning different from ‘taunting’, which makes good sense of this, and every other, context.

City archives, mined by Aristotle for his Didaskaliai, preserved a reasonably complete record of dramatic productions in the fifth century. But how far back did these archives go? The so-called Fasti, an inscription set up c. 346 and listing dithyrambic, comic and tragic victors year by year, must have been based on the same archives, but went back, it is thought, only as far as 502/1. Its heading πρ⋯]τον κ⋯μοι ἦσαν τ[⋯ι διονὑσ]ωι τραγωιδο⋯ δ[, however supplemented, implies an intention of going back to the beginning of things, in other words to the beginning of the archival record. This raises serious doubt as to whether that record went back to the alleged date of Thespis' première, or indeed to those given for Choerilus' and Phrynichus'.

Plutarch's essay de fortuna Romanorum has attracted divergent judgements. Ziegler dismissed it as ‘eine nicht weiter ernst zu nehmende rhetorische Stilübung’. By Flacelière it was hailed as ‘une ébauche de méditation sur le prodigieux destin de Rome’. It is time to consider the work afresh and to discover whether there is common ground between these two views. Rather than offering a general appreciation, my treatment will take the work chapter by chapter, considering points of interest as they arise. This method will enable us to compare what Plutarch says on particular subjects and themes in de fort. Rom. with what he says or does not say about them elsewhere. We shall thus be able to see clearly that for the most part the ideas he presents in the essay correspond with his thoughts about the rôle of fortune expressed in more serious writing, and that, where there is no correspondence, this is attributable to the rhetorical background. I do not intend to address directly the frequently discussed but insoluble question of whether we have in de fort. Rom. only one of two original works, that is whether there was once a de virtute Romanorum which Plutarch composed or answered. De fort. Rom. itself in fact gives almost as much prominence to άρετή as to τúχη, and their competing roles will be carefully evaluated. Nor do I look at the dating of the work (an early date has been suggested on grounds of genre, a later one on grounds of the essay's familiarity with Rome, but there is not enough evidence for a firm conclusion).