At one stage in his account of the war against Tacfarinas, Tacitus describes the strategy of the proconsul of Africa, P. Cornelius Dolabella, as follows: ‘excito cum popularibus rege Ptolemaeo quattuor agmina parat, quae legatis aut tribunis data; et praedatorias manus delecti Maurorum duxere: ipse consultor aderat omnibus’.

There is no agreement about the supplement at the end of the first line. almost certainly refers to marriage, discussion of which is postponed till something becomes black or turns dark.

Theiler's (‘solange mir das Haar noch schwarz ist’) hardly fits thecontext, and Burkert's with the sense ‘when the grapes ripen’ (‘jetzt ist Frühling’) is not convincing. A metaphorical sense for ‘grapes’ is preferable, e.g. or, better, (Ebert-Luppe), (Slings), ‘when youwill be old enough to marry’; but the phrase comes with a jolt in the absence of any preparation or immediate follow-up: in the passages of Philodemus andHorace quoted as parallel by Ebert-Luppes the metaphor is not simply a singleword but is extended over two or three lines.

In the opening verses of P.Oxy. 2370 (= 655 PMG) Corinna declares that she is about to sing lovely to the white-robed ladies of Tanagra. These lines come from the same poem or collection of poems cited by Hephaestion (Encb. 16.3 p.56 Cons.) and Antoninus Liberalis (25) as which must be a corruption of the original at the hands of a copyist who read the unfamiliar as .

The meaning of eluded the first editor, E. Lobel, who describes it as ‘etymologically mysterious’, and has not been investigated by others, yet one does not have to look very far to find it. or better, the singular can be understood as a formation of the same type as and ) In their verbal forms, the stems of these nouns change to e-grade giving from and from .3 If the analogy is correct, we would expect that would be formed from and a verb from

Both and are guaranteed by the London scholia (Pfeiffer vol. i, p.3), so the gap is reduced to the tantalizingly small one of a monosyllabic feminine noun in the accusative case, most probably of four letters. The number of possibilities cannot be unlimited. My own suggestion must necessarily remain in limbo in the present state of our knowledge concerning the poet or poets whom Callimachus is talking about, but at least it seems to me less bizarre than other restorations currently in the field.

In 1884 Ivo Bruns began his Lucrez-Studien, on the relationship between Lucretius' treatment of Epicureanism and the exposition by the philosopher himself in the extant Epistles, with the question (p.4) for whom did Lucretius write? His answer was to show (p.l 1) that the general public, who were the poet's real objective, were very different readers from the disciples whom Epicurus addressed in the Letter to Herodotus and similar works. This conclusion, and the subsequent investigation of the ways in which this difference affected the treatment of doctrine in the two works, does not concern me. My interest is rather in the manner in which Bruns tackles the problem of the ostensible addressee, Memmius, and the extent to which this man remains in Lucretius' mind throughout the whole six books.

The simile in Sappho fr.96 LP has been the subject of much discussion. I should like to add to this discussion yet another suggestion, which I hope will commend itself by its simplicity.

The fragment opens with a mention of Sardis (probably) and a reference to a female there whose thoughts stray to Lesbos. This female honoured the addressee of the poem like a goddess, and delighted in her song. But now she is among the Lydians. Here the simile begins:

Recent years have brought to light much new evidence which has sometimes compelled considerable revision of the consular fasti of the early Empire. Of especial importance have been the large number of tabulae ceratae forthcoming from the area around the Bay of Naples and the new fragments or reinterpretations of known fragments of municipal fasti The aim of the present paper is to examine the effect which recent discoveries have had on knowledge of the fasti for the reign of Claudius and in the light of the interpretation of this new evidence to produce a revised list of consuls for the period 41–54.

When Joseph Partsch wrote ‘Flavii Cresconii Corippi de vita paucissima comperta habemus’ in the preface (p. xliii) to his long-standard edition (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1879), he was not exaggerating. Yet this has not prevented scholars (including Partsch himself!) from equipping the poet with a career, largely in Constantinople. Most recently, some of the details have been revived (albeit with decent caution) in the admirable edition of the In laudem Justini Augusti minoris by Averil Cameron. But almost every item is based solely on guesswork; the supposed career may seem to melt away under a fresh and dispassionate look at what has passed for evidence.

Such is John Stuart Mill's succinct exposition of the core of utilitarian theory. A contemporary philosopher has aptly described utilitarianism as ‘the combination of two principles: (1) the consequentialist principle that the rightness, or wrongness, of an action is determined by the goodness, or badness, of the results that flow from it and (2) the hedonist principle that the only thing that is good in itself is pleasure and the only thing bad in itself is pain. Although the consequentialistprinciple has attracted the most attention in modern discussions of utilitarianism, it is the second principle which invites immediate comparison with the views of Plato. I propose therefore to start by comparing the Platonic and the utilitarian conceptions of the good in the hope that this will enable us to see too in what sense Plato's position is consequentialist, and whether his ethical and political theories in general can properly be described as utilitarian.

We can, I think, be certain of one thing only – that when Herodotus wrote these two passages he intended to keep the promises which he was making. In addition it is perhaps reasonable to assume that his account of the capture of Nineveh, which he promises merely would as a decisive event in Assyrian history have been included in the mentioned in 1.184. Even this however must be a mere conjecture, for although Herodotus normally makes promises and keeps them, in these two cases the details promised are nowhere to be found in the Histories as we have them.

The romance of Leucippe and Clitophon had already been edited by I. and N. Bonnvitus (ed. prin. Heidelberg, 1601), Salmasius (1640), Boden (1776), and Mitscherlich (1792), but it was the work of Friedrich Jacobs, published in 1821, that provided the foundation for serious criticism of the text based on knowledge of a substantial number of representative manuscripts.

The old proverb (‘poets tell a lot of lies’) can still more accurately be applied to their biographers.‘ Even the more plausible and psycho logically tempting details in the lives of literary figures derive from these authors’ fictional works, poems, and dramas, and not from the kind of source material biographers use today, letters, documents, eyewitness testimony. Critics and readers eager to establish some historical correlation between any ancient poet's life and his work should expect to be disappointed. But even if the ancient lives are useless to the historian or critic trying to explain what in Euripides’ experience compelled him to write about Medea, these stories are of interest to mythologists. If we stop being angry at the Lives for failing to be historical, and look at them rather as myths or fairy tales, some informative patterns begin to emerge.

The orthodox explanation of the syntax of lines 453–4 is that repeated by the most recent commentator, F. Bömer (P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen. Buch IV–V (1976), p.343): ‘neque adhuc epota parte ist Abl. absol.; der Gegenstand, mit dem Ceres den Jungen überschüttet, ist mixta … polenta.‘ The ablative absoluteis in itself unexceptionable (cf. Met. 5. 172-3, 9. 574-6), but the proliferation of three ablatives in two verses is awkward writing. As transmitted, line 454 is the product of a copyist who, as is often the habit of copyists, was confininghis attention to the verse on which he was engaged and still had ‘tosta … polenta’from line 450 echoing in his head. Unless I am much mistaken, Ovid wrote.

It would be worth knowing whom the historian married. His wife's name might disclose some local tie in the Sabine country; or it might permit a guess about alliances with families at the metropolis, whether ancient in repute or newly risen to influence. Marriage is a normal device for advancement – ‘decus ac robur’. Cicero did well for himself when, about the year 79 B.C., he married Terentia. She was the half-sister of a Fabia, who was a Vestal Virgin. The Fabii are not only noble but patrician, albeit in temporary eclipse (no consul between 116 and 45).