It is appropriate that this speech should be full of quotations from Roman drama. These offered the jurymen some compensation for their enforced absence from the theatrical performances of the Ludi Megalenses; on the very day (4 April 56 b.c.) when Cicero demolished Clodia's reputation in court, her brother Clodius, as curule aedile, was nearby presiding at the opening of the Ludi. Brother and sister both had a strong interest in the stage; in Pro Sestio 116 Clodius is described as ‘ipse ille maxime ludius, non solum spectator sed actor et acroama, qui omnia sororis embolia novit’. In Pro Caelio 18 Cicero takes up Crassus' quotation of Ennius' Medea, ‘utinam ne in nemore Pelio …’ ends by calling Clodia ‘the Medea of the Palatine’. Clodius is made to address his sister in a trochaic septenarius, ‘quid clamorem exorsa verbis parvam rem magnam facis?’. A harsh parent is represented by a quotation from Caecilius, a gentle one by Micio from Terence's Adelphoe. Clodia herself is called (64) ‘veteris et plurimarum fabularum poetriae’—this phrase should not be taken to mean that she had actually written plays—and in 65 the whole affair at the baths is likened to a mime with no satisfactory conclusion (‘mimi … exitus in quo clausula non invenitur’).

Apropos congregatio Zetzel remarks ‘the metaphor is qualified by quasi…, as it more properly refers to animals rather than men’. It seems doubtful, however, that in general the -grego compounds were at this date felt as vividly metaphorical: segrego is used of human beings as early as Plautus and Terence (Mil. 1232; Heau. 386; other occurrences at OLD s.v., 1; Forcellini s.v., II); aggrego is commonly so used by Cicero (Zimmermann, TLL s.v., I). Moreover, our passage is the first attestation of congregatio. Cicero uses the word three times in De Finibus (2.109, 3.65, and 4.4), of which the latter two passages also refer to human beings but are without quasi. Hence the use of quasi in our passage is likely to be related above all to the newness of the term, albeit the etymology may be more strongly felt in a new coinage. Cf. TLL 4, 288.26ff.

Towards the start of the elegy which prefaces his third book, Propertius rejects lengthy, martial epic in favour of slender poetry (3.1.7–8): it is on account of the latter that fame (fama) elevates him above the earth, his Muse triumphant (9–10); accompanying him in the triumphal chariot are his Amores (11), and following the wheels is a crowd of writers (12 ‘scriptorumque meas turba secuta rotas’). The latter, in the race for glory, rival the poet to no purpose (13–14). Many writers will praise Rome (15 ‘multi, Roma, tuas laudes annalibus addent’) and sing of future conquests (16), but Propertius’ pages, a special delivery from the Muses' mount, are the perfect peace-time reading (17–18).

The meaning of the expression simul ultima signant in Virgil's description of the foot race in the memorial funeral games for Anchises has been controversial since ancient times. The interpretation implied by R. A. B. Mynors's Oxford text printed above is that the word simul in line 317 is a conjunction and that the expression refers to the final section of the race. The sense presumably is: ‘As soon as they trod the last stretch’ Nisus came out in front, whereas previously the runners had all been in a bunch, pouring forth like a storm cloud from the start. This interpretation, which requires a full stop in the middle of line 317, was proposed by F. H. Sandbach in response to problems generally acknowledged in the line as traditionally punctuated, that is, with a lighter pause after similes and a full stop at the end of the line—as, for example, in F. A. Hirzel's Oxford text: effusi nimbo similes: simul ultima signant. With this punctuation the last three words of the line have been taken to mean either that the runners fix their eyes on the finish, which gives a meaning to the verb which is difficult in the absence of any reference to the eyes, or that other people apart from the runners mark out the finishing line, which gives unexceptional sense to the verb but an implausible timing to the operation: it is odd indeed to leave the marking of the finish until after the race has started. These and other suggestions are discussed by Sandbach and R. D. Williams, who believe that they are untenable.

In this well-known passage of his Antiquitates Romanae, Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes how Romulus and his companions seized and married the Sabine virgins. Romulus justifies his actions by stating that this method of acquiring wives was a Greek custom:

Dionysius' report of a Greek tradition adopted by Romulus is rather enigmatic. It has previously been noted that this passage bears similarity to passages of Plutarch and in particular his description of the Spartan marriage ceremony. This Spartan marriage ceremony does bear some relation to the situation being described by Dionysius in that the women are captured before being married, but other elements of the ceremony—the bride having her hair cut off and being taken in a darkened room—are quite out of place here and would appear to be a peculiarly Spartan tradition. As Plutarch was writing some time after Dionysius, it is not possible for Dionysius to be making a parallel with the ceremony as decribed by Plutarch, but he may have had access to a common source about that ceremony, now lost. However, I would like to suggest that there is another well-known source which may have been the source of the Greek tradition referred to in Dionysius 2.30 that is connected to neither Plutarch nor marriage.

The main outline of the events and chronology of the Claudian invasion of Britain are familiar enough, despite the loss of Tacitus' Annals for the period in question. A Roman force of four legions was assembled, along with auxiliaries, at Boulogne and crossed the channel under the command of Aulus Plautius. Dio states unambiguously that this occurred in A.D. 43. He provides no explicit information on the month, but certain assumptions can safely be made. It is inconceivable that the Romans would have attempted a crossing of a dangerous stretch of sea like the English Channel before the sailing season technically opened, on 10 March, and it is almost inconceivable that they would have ventured to transport a large army over that passage before the seas were considered safe, on 27 May. Moreover, the expeditionary force was delayed by two unforeseen factors. Suetonius tells us that the expeditionis Britannicae dies was postponed because of the illness of Galba. Also, the troops initially refused to embark from Gaul, and if Dio's account is correct, this led to a delay while Narcissus was summoned from Rome to the Gallic coast. How long these two factors might have held back the invasion cannot be known. Even after the successful landings the Claudian forces faced another hold–up. The Britons refused to engage the Romans, hoping to wear the invaders out, and Plautius had great difficulty tracking his enemy down.

Hippolytus' declamation on the progress of human depravity brings him from the invention of weapons to the climactic horror of stepmothers (553–8), after which he turns to the vices of women in general and Medea in particular (559–64):

The information transmitted on the numeration of the books of Petronius' Satyrica is notoriously contradictory. Parts of the extant fragmentary text are variously assigned to Books 14–16: the testimonia are clearly set out in Muller's recent fourth edition (whose numeration I use here), and briefly discussed by Sullivan: of Müller's testimonia, no. 10 places Sat. 89.1 in Book 15, no. 13 puts Sat. 20.5 in Book 14, no. 21 identifies the Cena Trimalchionis (Sat. 26.7–78.8) as Book 15, and no. 22 suggests that excerpts from Sat. 6–141 and the complete Cena all come from Books 15 and 16. My main purpose here, however, is not to reopen the general question of the numeration or the overall number of the books of the Satyrica.

Chapter 68 begins the account of the last year covered by Tacitus in Annals 4: A.D. 28, when Junius Silanus and Silius Nerva were consules ordinarii. The new year, Tacitus informs us, was marked by a disgraceful event, the arrest (postponed since A.D. 24, cf. 19.1) of Titius Sabinus, loyal friend to Germanicus and his family. After the naming of the consuls at 68.1 and the brief preliminary account of Sabinus' arrest, 68.2–69.3 revert to the period before the beginning of a. d. 28 and describe Sabinus– entrapment by a group of ambitious praetors wishing to gratify Sejanus and so secure the consulship, an office ad quern non nisi per Seianum aditus, ‘to which the only access was through Sejanus’ (68.2).

Continuing previous studies of medieval and modern false quotations from Gellius,1 I present two more misascriptions, one by an early modern editor, the other by a medieval author.

In one of his latest papers, published the year before his death, Sir Ronald Syme surveyed the modern scholarly literature on ‘The date of Justin and the discovery of Trogus’ and argued that Justin's abbreviated version of the Historiae Philippicae of the Augustanhistorian PompeiusTrogus (not an epitome in the strict sense of that word) was composed in the later fourth century, specifically in ‘the vicinity of 390’ not in the Antonine or Severan period, as so many have contended. Syme's central argument was lexicographical: he drew attention to a number of words in Justin's vocabulary which point to a date in the fourth century rather than the second or third.

The investigations of Fletcher and Owens have documented the breadth of Ammianus’ familiarity with Latin literature; however, neither scholar was able to demonstrate a debt to Pliny the Younger. At the same time Alan Cameron has shown that in the later fourth century the Letters of Pliny enjoyed a certain vogue. The issue of Ammianus’ knowledge of Pliny is discussed by Cameron on two occasions. The evidence he cites inclines him to the duly circumspect view that Ammianus may perhaps have been familiar with Pliny's Letters after all. The aim of the present note is to argue that the grounds which have so far been adduced for entertaining such a possibility would in fact appear to be inadmissible.

The importance of the role of the empress Eusebia1 in the watershed years (354–5) of the life of Julian is not in question. The narrative runs as follows. When Julian was summoned to Milan in 354 to the court of his Christian cousin Constantius (337–61) in the aftermath of the execution of his half-brother Gallus for treason and was questioned about his loyalty to the emperor, it was the empress who secured an audience for him with the emperor and who effected his liberation in 355. His subsequent residency at Athens was also the suggestion of the empress. Not much later in the same year, when Julian was again recalled to the court at Milan to be appointed Caesar on 6 November, the empress supported his promotion, if not indeed being the very proponent of it. Thus began Julian's imperial career, which led him to succeed Constantius as emperor in 361.

The confusion of the MSS is well justified; something has gone very wrong here. Even if ‘horrendis... profundis’ could be plausibly construed, the repetition ‘horrendis... horrendi’ is impossibly clumsy, and it seems obvious that one or the other does not belong here. I suggest that the interloper is the ‘horrendis’ of line 286, which probably derives from a simple eye-skip to ‘;horrendi.sociis’ below. The likely corollary is that the correct reading at the end of the line is ‘profundi’, later altered in an attempt to accommodate the intrusive ‘horrendis’. This approach would seem to be confirmed by the frequency of the clausula ‘stagna profundi’ in the Latin hexameter (cf. Lucan 2.571, 8.853, 9.305, Sil. 7.282, 378, 10.590, Avien. Arat. 991, Claud. 8.596, Coripp. Ioh. 6.23).