In an excellent survey of Alexander′s campaign in western Pakistan, P. H. L. Eggermont has done a great deal to clarify local topography and toponymy and Alexander′s movements, and has improved on Sir Aurel Stein′s classic investigations and on the work of Sir Olaf Caroe on which he chiefly bases himself.1 However, he is less familiar with the critical use of Greek and Roman sources, and of Arrian in particular [henceforth cited as A.],2 than he so admirably is with the Indian sources. This has led to one or two errors in interpretation and especially in chronology, some of which are due to his following what specialists working on Alexander would regard as outdated scholarship. Since his work has opened up sources, and a point of view, hitherto unfamiliar to standard Alexander scholarship, and will remain of basic importance to our interpretation of Alexander, the chronology of this brief campaign, which has not received much attention from Alexander specialists, and the events surrounding the city of Peucelaotis3 are worth a more detailed investigation in the light of his discussion.

If Medea has attracted more readers to the Argonautica than any other character – thereby also determining which parts of the poem have become generally familiar – she has also provided critics of the poem with their major (sometimes their sole) topic for discussion. The main charge, particularly among critics writing in English, is that the various aspects of Medea – awakening love, deadly magic, fratricide – form neither a consistent nor a credible whole. One quotation, from an article which explicitly aims to summarise recent criticism, may stand as representative: ‘[Medea′s passion] produced an inconsistency [Apollonius] either ignored deliberately in the confidence of his Medea in love, or, just possibly, may not have noticed. The same emotionally immature and helpless Medea is the competent, unfrightened servant of Hecate, the cool instructress of Jason in taming the bulls, the calm soother of the dragon…the behaviour of Medea later in the [fourth] Book is, against all reason, quite untouched by what we would think of as a shattering experience, at the very least destructive of any real trust between her and Jason….It is as if Apollonius has thrown in [Apsyrtus′ murder] without care or realisation of its consequence for the consistency of her character’. Behind criticism of this kind lies both an understandable desire to relate the characters of ancient literature, if not to our own experience, at least to what instinct tells us is possible, and the whole tradition of criticism which descends from the Poetics of Aristotle. In recent years other approaches have gained currency, but in this paper I shall explore the presentation of Medea as a whole (Part I) and particularly of her flight from Colchis (Part II) within a traditional framework in an attempt to clarify what seem to me to be critical misunderstandings.

The topic of degrees of being in Aristotle is almost universally ignored. A very few scholars do discuss the topic or make use of it in passing. This situation mightbe explained by a scholarly consensus that (a) Aristotle did have a doctrine ofdegrees of being, but (b) this doctrine is too uninteresting to be worth much discussion. Conversation with a number of scholars from several countries has convinced me, however, that a rather different consensus lies behind the current silence. It turnsout that many experts in the subject deny that Aristotle believed in degrees of being.No one, to my knowledge, has defended this denial in print. But the reason forsilence is not that the topic is dull, but that it is scandalous. Both defenders andopponents of the view that Aristotle had a doctrine of degrees of being tend, in conversation, to find the topic embarrassing. Our contemporary metaphysical prejudices areso opposed to degrees of being that people find themselves unable to make anysense of such a doctrine. As a result, one group of scholars is embarrassed on Aristotle's behalf at the suggestion that he might have held such a senseless doctrine.Another group, less sure of where the philosophical truth lies, finds itself in theinterpretative embarrassment of being unable to explain and motivate the doctrine. So bothgroups avoid the subject.

In this essay I discuss an important but neglected controversy in which the Stoics sought to discredit Epicurus' teaching on justice by showing that the Epicurean wise man, if immune from detection or punishment, will commit injustice whenever he may profit from it. Under the influence of this criticism, tradition has developed a view of Epicurus' position that makes it so weak and vulnerable that it is difficult to see how Epicureans could have defended it over the course of several centuries. There is decisive evidence, however, that Epicurus' critics seriously misrepresented his position, and that the tradition influenced by their polemic stands in need of fundamental revision.1 My purpose here is to prove that the Epicurean wise man will not commit injustice, secretly or openly, because it is in his self–interest to be just; to reconstruct Epicurus' arguments for this teaching; to show how he defends his position against natural right theorists; and to clarify the larger issues at stake in his controversy with the Stoics. I begin by sketching the Stoic criticisms and the Epicurean response (section I).

Late in the campaigning season of 198 B.C., the Achaean League abandoned its traditional place within Macedon's Hellenic Symmachy and entered into war on the side of Rome against the Macedonian king, Philip V. The Achaean politician Aristaenus, strategos of the League in 199/198, played a crucial role in bringing about this reversal of policy. The strategic impact of the Achaean decision is not in doubt: the Macedonian political-military system in Greece was weakened, while the Romans and their allies gained a firm base in southern Greece from which to threaten the Macedonian homeland next summer. What has been in some question among scholars, however, is the extent to which the Achaean decision was controversial among Greeks in the second century, both in the 190s and later. It is the purpose of the present paper to re-examine this question, with particular attention being paid to Pol. 18.13–15: the famous discussion ‘On Traitors’ by the historian Polybius, himself an Achaean statesman of a later period. I will suggest that – contrary to current scholarly opinion – the discussion ‘On Traitors’ was evoked, precisely, by Polybius' reflections (and unease) about the behaviour of Aristaenus and the Achaean League in 198, behaviour which was, in fact, highly controversial.

There are two passages in which the poet introduces a full moon to accentuate a particular aspect of a scene in his narrative; 1.1228–33 and 4.166–71. I shall concentrate on the second. Commentators have contributed various suggestions but failed to understand the specific erotic-nuptial connotation of the full moon. The same applies to the more specialized contributions of Drogemiiller and Rose. I shall (1) first present the evidence for the nuptial associations of the full moon, then (2) apply this idea to the Apollonian passages, especially 4.166–71, and finally (3) add a remark about the special effect obtained by Apollonius here in relation to an Homeric passage (Od. 23.231–9).

In Lucan′s second book, an old man looks back to the atrocities perpetrated in the civil strife of the eighties, chiefly on the return of Marius and Cinna to Rome in late 87 and on that of Sulla in 82 (lines 70–233). The episodes that Lucan briefly refers to are all otherwise known, and there seems no particular reason to assume that he is not drawing on Livy as his principal source, as he does for the events of his main narrative, the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. The scholia to the passage may be a different matter.

This is, in effect, an extended footnote to CQ 34 (1984), 271. There, having occasion to discuss the ‘Aristophanic’ synopsis of Aeschylus' Eumenides, I expressed doubt about the value of such synopses in general; and I must now seek to justify this aspersion. I am not claiming any expertise in the study of Hellenistic scholarship, and shall largely be leaving it to others to decide what conclusion to draw from the facts I am pointing out; but my note will have served its purpose if it stimulates discussion.

Ovid's Tristia4.10 has in the past chiefly been considered as a source of biographical information rather than as a poem, but increasing interest in the poetry of Ovid's exile has now at last started to promote serious efforts to appreciate its literary qualities. The poem presents a formidable challenge to the critic: at first reading it seems a singularly pedestrian account of the poet's life and, although one may adduce plenty of parallels for details in its phrasing elsewhere in the poetry of Ovid and the other Augustans, it is clear that Ovid's thought-processes are not to be explained solely in terms of the main stream of Greco-Roman poetic tradition. Prose biography and autobiography, rhetorical apology and eulogy, subliterary epitaphs and inscriptional lists of achievements: all these types of writing could have influenced Ovid's selection of data.

The above passage, from Maternus' first speech, poses a number of rather intricate textual problems. J. F. Gronovius rightly divined that the meaningless vaticiniireferred to a person whose evil power Maternus had broken. Who else but Vatinius, Nero's notorious jester? To read Vatiniifor vaticiniiis intrinsically attractive, and in default of a better alternative has found almost universal approval. The contextual implications of this acclaimed conjecture have not, however, always been appreciated. It is with these that the present paper is concerned. Discussing (I) the conjecture imperante Nerone(L. Miiller), and (II) the interpretation of J. Stroux, it will attempt in the final section (III) to relate the Vatinius incident to its original political and ideological context.

The last play of the Varronian canon, Vidularia, is transmitted to us through two different channels. Some pages of it survive in the Codex Ambrosianus, containing the prologue and a couple of scenes from the beginning of the play. On the other hand grammarians quote fragments of a few lines out of context, as examples of idiosyncratic Latin syntax and morphology. From the combination of these two disparate sources classical scholars have reconstructed a Vidularia that is parallel to Rudens on all major points. The plot is not very different, and on the whole the consensus philologorum is correctly summed up by the Terentian sentence of Leo: qui utramve recte novit, ambas noverit (p. 10).

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.

The interpretation of both the sulphur offered by the ambulator in line 3 and the glass he collects in exchange has long been a problem. Post′s opinion, offered in 1908, that broken glass could be, and was, mended with a sulphur glue has been subsequently eclipsed by scholars such as Leon and Smyth. They correctly discerned that Pliny, in HN 29.11.51 and 36.67.199, adduced by Post, does not refer to a sulphur-based adhesive, nor does Pliny suggest sulphur has any such property. Basic problems persist, however, which have not been properly resolved by recent commentators on Martial, regarding the form and function of sulphur as well as technical and cultural changes which would have bestowed some value on broken glass. New evidence and rarely cited evidence can be brought to bear on the earlier suppositions, which Citroni and Howell repeat, in order to solve the riddle of Martial 1.41 and add to our knowledge of ancient society.

‘A property’, according to the author of De Rerum Natura in 1.451–4, ‘is that which can never be sundered and separated without fatal dissolution, as weight is to stone, heat to fire, liquidity to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to void’, seiungi seque gregari. As elsewhere Lucretius, that most committed practitioner of word-play, makes his verb mirror the very separation which it describes.

An inscription found in the theatre of Hierapolis(Pamm UKkale)in Phrygia and recently published is of interest both in itself and because it may help to elucidate a passage of Arrian′sDiscourses of Epictetos.

It is often assumed that we know very little about how literary texts circulated in the Roman world because we know very little about the Roman book trade. In fact, we know a great deal about book circulation, even though we know little about the book trade. Romans circulated texts in a series of widening concentric circles determined primarily by friendship, which might, of course, be influenced by literary interests, and.by the forces of social status that regulated friendship. Bookstores and ‘public’ libraries, which made a text available to individuals personally unknown to the author and his friends, were comparatively late developments. To trace the circulation of a Roman literary work, we shall use a schematic model to follow a literary text from its initial conception through the widening circles through which it moved.

A textual problem in Virgil, Aen. 2.349–50 has puzzled scholars since antiquity and still divides editors and commentators today. Aeneas is exhorting his comrades to join him in the final battle for Troy, but the variants audendi and audentem leave it uncertain whether he says, ‘si vobis audendi extrema cupido/ certa sequi, quae sit rebus fortuna videtis’, or ‘si vobis audentem extrema cupido/ certa sequi, quae sit rebus fortuna videtis’. The variant audendi has been discussed and defended in several commentaries and articles, whereas audentem, though often the choice of editors, has yet to receive a detailed defence. In this note, I will demonstrate that audentem is the correct reading and that the false reading audendi came about through a common scribal error.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses , whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas , and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia , first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by Kenney.I have given above the beginning of Ovid's longest poem as it ought to stand in all modern editions and as it stands in fact in only one, the French school edition of selections edited by Lejay in 1894: ‘Gods, on my undertakings (for you have changed them as well) breathe your favour.’ To be sure, all of Ovid's MSS read illas in line 2, and ilia is attested only as a variant in two of them.But majorities, in textual as in other matters, are frequently wrong.Even before the minority report of the Urbinas had been heard, Lejay adopted ilia , av.1.in the Erfordensis.1

Critics comment on the simplicity of the jest here, not without reason.1 But the levity also has some sophistication, of a literary kind. For a start,andare aptly long and are carefully left to the end of their clauses and lines for maximum effect. In addition, these striking words, which appear for the first (and last) time in Sappho, may well have been deliberate adaptations of two adjectives which had previously occurred only in Homer,2 and they would in any case have called to mind the Homeric ones, because of their close similarity and because there are no other variants of these compounds in surviving literature down to the time of the j poetess.3 At Odyssey11.312 the poet had said of Otus and Ephialtes and at Iliad 7.220, 222, 245, 266 and 11.545 he had described the shield of Ajax asSo, given the epic flavour of Sappho′s epithets, it was amusing of her to include them at all in such a light and frivolous context. There is also pawkiness in the poetess′s application of these terms I with their Homeric tinge to quite different and very mundane objects; and the humour is increased when one takes into account the associations that these words had (in connection with the feet of a human she uses an adjective that recalls the extent of the whole bodies of two Giants; and with reference to the sandals of an ordinary man she uses one which conjures up the huge shield of a hero).This strikes me as an early instance of witty adaptation of epic diction such as is found in Anacreon 358 and 417 PMG.4