A. E. Housman has written that the context of Juvenal 5.140 is ‘the most obscure in Juvenal’ (p. xxxii). I am primarily concerned with the following five lines, but the entire passage (132–145), and its position in the poem, must also be examined.

Pauly's Real-Encyclopädie knows of two women named after the attractive looking,but allegedly unappetising fish, c⋯λπη. The first is mentioned several times in theelder Pliny, who on one occasion refers to her as an obstetrix, while the second features in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus as a writer of πα⋯γνια. In a recent issue of this journal J. N. Davidson has made the suggestion that they were one and the same person. Salpe's πα⋯γνια, Davidson argues, would not have consisted of light or frivolous verse, but of a compilation of prose recipes of a kind that is to be found in a section of a London magical papyrus which is headed πα⋯γνια Δημοκρ⋯του. Such recipes might well have cohabited with the kind of practicalmedical advice reportedly given by the Salpe referred to in Pliny. His case is superficially attractive since, as will be seen, such a collocation of practical help and frivolity is easy to parallel in magical and other subliterary texts. It needs to be scrutinized, however, in the light of a fuller presentation and consideration of the evidence than is to be found in his note. First, it is worth describing at greater length the phenomena in question, which are much more common than one would gather from a reading of Davidson and which are, I suspect, not as yet as familiar to the scholarly world as they should be.

The ancient law school about which we have the most information was at Beirut. Editors of legal papyri have occasionally speculated about possible connections between particular ancient texts and the activities of professors of law in that city, but no one has examined the evidence in a body. It is likely, I think, that legal papyri reflect the state of contemporary legal education at Beirut, and that they preserve, moreover, primary evidence for the history of scholarship in general. With so broad a topic, it would be useful first to consider what we know about legal instruction in antiquity, particularly at Beirut, then to review the relevant papyrological evidence, and finally to draw the two subjects together by considering the possible relation between the marginal commentaries of legal papyri and the extensive scholia which fill the broad margins of many medieval manuscripts.

The fragment is preserved in two sources, Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies, Strom. 5.14.112 (ii.402 Stählin), which gives the order of words printed above, and Eusebius' Praep. Evang. 13.680c, in which the second line is given as. The latter reading was preferred by Bergk, but there seems at first little reason to prefer one order over the other. I shall return to this issue shortly.

Punning on names was common in Old Comedy. Aristophanes punned on the name of Lamachus, who died at Syracuse (μαχ⋯ν / κα⋯ Λαμ⋯χων, Acharnians 269–70; cf. 1071). In the same play he made the famous joke, ‘some went to Kamarina, others to Gela, and some to Katagela’—‘an invention of the poet's from the fact that the men's officers laughed at them’ (schol. Ar. Ach. 606).

The appearance of Nan Dunbar's important commentary on Birds is to be welcomed. Inevitably, however, such a volume requires addenda et corrigenda; and already the author must be collecting material for a second edition. Here is some pabulum. On the passage cited, Dunbar comments, ‘The difficulties of this sentence stem from uncertainty over (a) the form and sense of the main verb … and (b) the point of χαραδρι⋯ν μιμο⋯μενος and its connection with what precedes …’

This gives the received text and punctuation. No generally agreed meaning has been found in the opening sentence as it thus stands; nor have any of the numerous alternative versions which have been proposed gained widespread support. In this paper I suggest that good sense can, after all, be made of this passage in its received form.

The scholiast is clearly busy glossing a rare word. Here, as elsewhere in the scholia, Homer is cited for just that purpose. There is also an effective tendency to build judgements on a writer's style around the label ‘Oμηρικ⋯ς. Curiously, in our case the scholiast seems to have hit upon the right reading of the passage. The detail about decaying timbers in the context of Nicias' letter could not help striking educated Greek readers, who, like Thucydides himself, had Homer at their fingertips, as an echo of Agamemnon's words in Il. 2.135.1 argue that Thucydides intends the reminiscence to be perceived, and moreover, uses it to trigger off our understanding that the figure of Nicias should be read against that of the Homeric Agamemnon.

Catullus' cunning dinner invitation to Fabullus continues to generate a rich variety of interpretations of its memorable central image, the promised gift of a certain unguentum Veneris (13.12). Three Latomus articles, by Littman, Hallett, and Case, have explored possible origins of and uses for that mysterious substance, suggesting, for example, that it might even contain female secretions with powerful aphrodisiac properties, or some other unmentionable sexual lubricant.

Varro's Hebdomades vel de imaginibus contained 700 pictures of illustres accompanied by short descriptions in verse and prose, all arranged by the number seven: Gellius provides a detailed excerpt from the first book on the significance of this number. Speculation on the arrangement and content of the fifteen books abounds. On the other hand explicit attestation of personages included in Varro's list is relatively scarce: the discussions in the passage of Gellius on the ages of Homer and Hesiod, and of the former's birthplace in the epigram attached to his portrait certify the rather obvious choice of the two oldest Greek poets, presumably part of a canon of seven.

At the end of the singing contest of Thyrsis and Corydon in the seventh Eclogue, the narrator Meliboeus summarizes its result in the poem's last lines (69–70):

Horace had good reason to know these lines (quoted by Diodorus Siculus 8.21) since they come from the foundation oracle of one of his favourite places, Tarentum, delivered to the founder Phalanthus whom Horace mentions in Odes 2.6.11–12, ‘regnata petam Laconi | rura Phalantho’. It is a regular feature of such oracles that, however absurd and impossible they may seem, they will be fulfilled in a quite unexpected way.

R. G. Austin's translation of these famous imprecations of Dido's seems to me perfectly representative, ‘and then do you, my Tyrians, hound with hate and hate again all his stock and all his race to be’. I see no strong arguments against such an interpretation of this sentence, but I think that an alternative—and very different—understanding of these words is likely.

Servius was surely not the first to show discomfort with Vergil's choice of the word violaverit. Observing that the simile in lines 67–8 derives from Homer (Il. 4.141), he seems to be apologizing for Vergil when he explains that the poet's violaverit translates Homer's νι⋯νη. And discomfort there should be. The notion of ‘tainting, spoiling, damaging, defiling’ that violare should carry seems out of place both for the ivory-image and for the picture of the beautiful girl. Modern commentators have been no less troubled than Servius. Unwilling, however, to see Vergil as blindly enslaved to Homer, they have offered another explanation: violare here is tied to the violentia of her lover Turnus. ‘Vergil connects the violentia of Turnus with the staining of the ivory in the simile used to describe Lavinia's blush.’ should like to add a third explanation for Vergil's choice of violare.

The several verbal responsions of this couplet to the preceding one are clear, and as mando produces mandata, so testor derives, I think, from testis. Read me teste ‘Idaei…’; ‘with me as witness…’. This reading adds greatly to the humour of the situation, where the hen is charged, in his presence, with caring for the fox. For testis as a witness to the audible (rather than the visible) cf. (e.g.) fors me sermoni testem dedit (Am. 1.8.21).

In Dio we first encounter Caligula in connection with the crimen maiestatis in the course of 59.1–5. This forms an introduction to Caligula and, at the same time, looks forward to some of the changes which occurred in his character and behaviour as the reign progressed.

The text is taken from the edition of D. E. Hill, Mnemosyne Supplement 79 (Leiden, 1983). The following works are referred to by author's surname only: H. W. Garrod, P. Papini Stati Thebais et Achilleis (Oxford, 1906); L. Håkanson, Statins Thebaid (Lund, 1973); A. Klotz, P. Papini Stati Thebais (Leipzig 1908; revised edn by T. C. Klinnert, 1973); R. Kühner, C. Stegmann, and A. Thierfelder, Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache (Leverkusen, 1955; 2 vols.); R. Lesueur, Stace Thébaïde (Paris, 1990, 1991, 1994; 3 vols.); J. H. Mozley, Statius (Loeb edition, London, 1928; 2 vols.); E. C. Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax (London, 1959).

The relative and absolute chronology of Middle Platonic philosophy is often uncertain, causing problems in connecting a philosopher either to other philosophers or to the surrounding culture.

The definition here ascribed to Philo is entirely in line with what we know of Philo from else where: Alex. Aphr. in APr. 184.6–10; Simp, in Cat. 195.33–196.5; Boethius, in de Int. 234.10–15. The same is not true of the definition here ascribed to Diodorus. For Diodorus, we are told elsewhere, defined the possible as that which either is or will be so: Cic. Fat. 13, 17; Plu. de Stoic rep. 1055d-e; Alex. Aphr. in APr. 183.42–184.5; Boethius, in de Int. 234.22–4,412.16–7. Something has therefore got garbled.