The argument attributed to the Laws of Athens at Crito 50 a ff. relies on three main propositions, firstly that disobedience to law harms persons, secondly that the relationship between citizen and state is analogous to that between child and parent, and thirdly that the citizen makes a tacit compact to obey the laws. The connection between these three is not entirely clear and I shall consider how the first proposition is related to the second, and then how the second is related to the third. Both these problems, which are important for the assessment of Plato's conclusions, appear in obscurities in the structure of the speech of the Laws.

How many kisses will be enough for Catullus? That is the question that opens Poem 7. The answer: as many as are the grains of sand in the Libyan desert, asmany as are the stars in the nightime sky. Yet in this poem sand and stars do notfunction simply as quantitative symbols. Each is in fact described in a mannerthat subtly alludes to the mouth – the organ from which Lesbia's kisses couldcome.

This line, composed of only three words, occurs near the beginning of a speech in which Orestes, having revealed himself to his sister, is passing on to her and toa sympathetic chorus consisting of slaves in the royal palace at Argos, the gist of the instructions Apollo, through his oracle at Delphi, has given him about avenging his murdered father. The God, less merciful than the ghost of King Hamlet, has ordered him to kill his mother as well as her paramour.

A number of enigmatic manuscripts of Plato have been identified during the last few decades. Thus Mercati (Studi e Testi 164(1952), 35) showed that Angelicus c.1.9 (w), which L. A. Post (The Vatican Plato and its Relations, pp. 73 f.) was unable to trace, is identical to Rossianus 17(558); N. G. Wilson (Scriptorium 16(1962), 393 n.2) proved that the long-lost Hassistenianus is no other than the Lobcovicianus in Prague University Library (this had already been suspected by H. Alline, Histoire du texte de Platon, p.237, n.3) Here is the solution of a thirdpuzzle.

The various explanations and emendations so far offered for this passage do not seem to have solved its difficulties yet. While it is generally held that agrees ad sensum with the subject of the sentence (‘numerous children’), the sense of the adjective itself (‘hanging down without support’) appears far from satisfactory. Of the conjectures proposed till now only Jackson's isconsidered noteworthy by the latest editor of the play. Jackson, however, offersit as a ‘fair provisional remedy’ only.

As was first pointed out by Gercke, there are close parallels, which clearly suggest a common source, between Apuleius, de Platone 1.12, the treatise On Fate falsely attributed to Plutarch, Calcidius' excursus on fate in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus, and certain sections of the treatise de Natura hominis by Nemesius. Gercke traced the doctrines common to these works to the school of Gaius; recently however Dillon has pointed out that, while Albinus shares with these works the characteristic Middle-Platonic notion of fate as conditional or hypothetical – our actions are free, but once we have acted the consequences of our actions are fated and inevitable – he does not share certain other common features, such as the identification of fate as substance with the world-soul and the hierarchy of three providences.

In the Republic, Socrates undertakes to defend justice as being in itself a benefit to its possessor. Does he do this, or does he change the subject? In a well-known article, David Sachs pointed out that there seems to be a shift in what Plato is defending. The challenge to Socrates is put by Thrasymachus, who admires the successful unjust man, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who do not, but are worried that justice has no adequate defence against Thrasymachus. In all these passages justice is discussed in terms of the non-performance of actions which are regarded as unjust according to common morality; Sachs calls this common concept of ordinary justice ‘vulgar justice’.

Phidias’ absence from the survey of sculptors in Cic. Brut. 70 is curious, explanation in terms of differing histories of sculpture only partly convincing. I suggest that Cicero has valid literary motives and is wittily undermining the Atticist position by adaptation of what was a rhetorical topos, the parallel development of Greek prose and sculpture from archaic spareness to classical expertise and dignity: see Dem. Eloc. 14, D. H. Isoc. 3, p.59 U-R; more elaborate but partly deriving from Cicero and less homogeneous is Qu. 12.10.7–9. Cicero assumes the reader's knowledge of the commonplace, pointedly ignores the quality of grandeur and dignity, and develops a theory of technical progress on the basis of veritas and grace to attack the Atticists from their own preferences. The resulting model serves to demote Lysias, imitated by the Atticists but merely the counterpart of Calamis, strigosior (64) like archaic sculptures (cf. Dem. loc. cit. ) and superseded by later progress. The analogy thus obliquely repeats the brief but charged parenthesis in 66 that Demosthenes superseded Lysias.

Among the most prominent supporters of Perdikkas, son of Orontes, were his brother Alketas and Attalos, son of Andromenes, their brother-in-law. That the latter was an unwavering supporter of Perdikkas has not been challenged, nor that his career was advanced by the prestige of the ‘chiliarchos’ at the time of Alexander's death. Crucial to the discussion of the career of Attalos, therefore, is the date of his marriage to Atalante, for which we have only the ambiguous testimony of Diodoros (above). And, while modern scholars claim that the marriage cannot be dated, they have had a tendency to assume that it was contracted during Alexander's lifetime. There is, however, a case to be made for a later date, one that will give us cause to reconsider Attalos' role in the last years of Alexander's reign and in the struggle for power that followed the King's death.

Dikaiopolis, having borrowed a beggar's disguise from Euripides, is about to return to the place where he has set the butcher's block over which he will make his defence of his private peace-treaty. He finds, however, that his (or ) is reluctant to take the plunge. ‘Forward now, my soul,’ he says to it, ‘here's [or ‘there's’] the . What does mean here? Plainly we are meant to think of a foot-race; but is the ‘line’ in question the starting line or the finishing line? The question has implications for production. If it is the starting line, Dikaiopolis must point to an imaginary line on the ground just in front of him; if the finishing line, he must point to the block. The scholia take ypanfiri to mean ‘starting line’ here; but this sense has no fifth-century support. At this date ypanfiri in connection with races meant always ‘finishing line’ (Pind. Pytb. 9.

Columella in his Res Rustica always speaks of the bailiff (uilicus) as the slave of the owner of the farm, but in his Preface he states that the owner sometimes sent a mercenarius to be bailiff, and this has by some scholars been taken to mean that a freeborn labourer could be appointed. Since such a possibility is not mentioned by Columella elsewhere or by any other Roman writer, it is probable that the term mercenarius in the Preface has been misunderstood. Hired labourers in ancient Rome included slaves as well as freemen.

The most characteristic feature of all satirical writing appears to be its elusiveness. Though much work has been done in recent years on satire, no definition has as yet been offered that has met with general approval. However, to some extent Roman verse satire seems to be the exception that proves the rule. For in view of the statements which the main representatives of this genre themselves have made on their satires, most modern critics are agreed on their major characteristics. Yet some poems which the ancient satirists included in their collections have not been accepted as satires by contemporary scholars, while others seem to have eluded satisfactory interpretation, as e.g. Horace's fourth satire of the second book.

Löwe and von Hartel (loc. cit. in n. 3) have drawn attention to the striking similarity between R's contents and those of a lost manuscript bequeathed by Philippe d' Harcourt (bishop of Bayeux, 1142–64) to the library at Bee. This manuscript is described in a twelfth-century catalogue as follows:7 ‘in alio Seneca de naturalibus questionibus et Adelermus Batensis [Adhelardus Bathonensis Becker), Proba vates, Aurea Capra, et liber Hildeberti Turonensis archiepiscopi de dissensione interioris et exterioris hominis, et sermones eius et uita ipsius.’

In the third book of Cicero's De re publica L. Furius Philus, one of the protagonists, is assigned the task of putting the case against justice. Among his arguments he makes the familiar claim that justice is a product of society, not of nature (3.13: ‘ius… civile est aliquod, naturale nullum’). If, he explains, justice and injustice were natural phenomena, they would be the same for all men, but in fact people hold very diverse views on what is just. This argument is supported by a motley collection of exempla: the Egyptians worship Apis, a bull; while the Greeks and the Romans fill their temples with statues in human form, the Persians consider such practices to be sacrilege; various nations indulge in human sacrifice; the Cretans and Aetolians hold the view that brigandage is perfectly respectable; the Spartans used to claim as their own all the territory which their spears might touch; the Athenians used to take public oaths that all land which produced olives and grain belonged to them; the Gauls despised corn-growing and raided the fields of others instead. All these instances would be familiar to Cicero's audience.