The Messenger is relating how Menelaus and Helen escape from Egypt in a royal Egyptian ship, under pretext that they are going to carry out a ritual ‘sea burial’ of the supposedly drowned Menelaus. Helen's husband, whose identity was as yet unknown to the Egyptian crew, induced them to let his own shipwrecked crew (as though Greek strangers wishing to participate in honour to the deceased) come on board, and as the bull intended for sacrifice resisted being embarked he here cries to his men to manhandle it—in fact to carry it—on board.

I suppose we have all at some time been puzzled by Horace's substitution of boulders for the iron mass that the Phocaeans threw into the sea when they took their oath, and have wondered what poetical purpose the boulders could serve that iron could not. Would not iron in fact better cohere as an image with all the civil war that fills the poem's opening lines and with the agreeable absence of plough-shares and pruning-hooks from the Blessed Isles? Most of all, would it not cohere better with the poem's closing lines?

The Birds of Aristophanes is unique among his extant plays in that it employs a chorus in which each member has an individual identity, that is, in which each chorus-member represents a different kind of bird. The consequent variety of costume must have been a great visual embellishment to the play, and one is led to wonder how commonly the device employed in Birds featured in Old Comedy in general. Two parallels are frequently cited in the choruses of Eupolis' and Ameipsias' , both of which will be considered below, but, although those plays do indeed provide our best evidence outside Birds, I wish to argue here that we may reasonably suspect that some other old comedies known to us had choruses of the type in question, which I designate ‘individualized’ or ‘multiform’ choruses.

The myth of Hercules and Cacus is related by several Augustan writers: Vergil, Aeneid 8.185–275, Livy 1.7.3, Ovid, Fasti 1.543–86 and 5.643–52, Propertius 4.9.1–20, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.39. These accounts fall naturally into two classes, in which Cacus is represented respectively as a clever rascal and as a superhuman ogre. The former version is found in Livy and Dionysius, and the latter occurs first in Vergil, and then in Ovid and Propertius. Numerous shared details go to show that Livy and Dionysius drew on a common source, and verbal similarities that have been demonstrated between Vergil and Livy evidently establish Vergil's dependence on this same source. It would therefore appear that the ogre-Cacus is Vergil's invention. Certainly there is no evidence for a pre-Vergilian Cacus characterized as an ogre.

The primary aim of this article is to reveal a number of previously unrecorded appearances of classical Latin poetry in the poems of Ausonius, with a brief assessment of their value in understanding his text, and an incorporation of them into the general picture of his acquaintance with his predecessors; a final section will outline some ways in which his adoptions and adaptations are used. Latin poets now fragmented or lost are not included in this study; for the survival of a Lucilius or an Ennius has generally enjoyed more attention and study than the after-life of better-known authors. It is moreover doubtful if such early writers had a context to offer the borrower in Late Antiquity; while poets of the second and third centuries A.D. (often denoted by the vacuous term ‘neoteric’), who did, are poorly known today.

In the much discussed list of thalassocrats excerpted by Eusebios from Diodorosthe tenth entry remains the most puzzling.2 Although the name is missing inEusebios' Chronographia (and in the derivative Synkellos), both the Armenianversion of the Canons and Jerome's Latin Canons give this place to the Karians, and the Armenian Canons are generally followed for the period of rule of sixtyoneyears:3 ‘Zehntens führten die Seeherrschaft die Karier, 61 Jahre.’ The years apparently covered by this Karian thalassocracy are c. 735–674 B.C.4.

That Catullus’ sixty-fourth poem influenced Virgil's work has long been accepted. We approach a little nearer a resolution of the enigma of the Fourth Eclogue when we recognize epithalamian elements within it that echo not only the song of the Parcae, but also the themes of the Golden Age, of the Voyage of the Argo, and of the relations between gods and men from Catullus’ poem. Similarly, Ariadne's part in the creation of Aeneid 4, both in the ‘marriage’ scene and in Dido's reproaches to Aeneas, has been noted.

Ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nuliis spectaculorum inlecebris, nullis conviviorum inritationibus corruptae. litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant, paucissima in tarn numerosa gente adulteria, quorum poena praesens et mantis permissa: adcisis crinibus nudatam coram propinquis expellit domo maritus ac per omnem vicum verbere agit. publicatae enim pudicitiae nulla venia: non forma, non aetate, non opibus maritum invenerit. nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nee corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur.

In the Snell-Maehler edition of Bacchylides there is a very comprehensive bibliography, listing almost 300 items concerned with Bacchylides poems. It is significant that 80 per cent of these were written in the first twenty years following Kenyon's publication of the Bacchylides papyri in 1897. Of the articles which have appeared since the First World War, many are concerned with more recent papyrus discoveries and a few are stylistic discussions. For most of the poems dealt with in the pioneering days of Bacchylidean scholarship certain readings of the text and interpretations of it have become canonical. This article aims to show in just one poem, XVII, a few instances in which the accepted interpretations should be re-examined. In some cases new interpretations are offered, but in others older views have been resurrected and bolstered by further argument.

This incident has never found its place either in the history of the Theban hegemony or in the life of Epameinondas, and even Jacoby's commentary on the the fragment sheds virtually no light on the matter.

The first problem is to determine the location of Sidai, and the only clues tothat are the fact that the pomegranate grew there in abundance and that the place was on the Boiotian-Attic border. Although the early travellers are generally silent on this subject, C. Bursian suggested that Sidai was located in the fertile Skourta plain or else in the Oropia, and in this he was followed by Zwicker in RE.

None or at most one of the emendations here proposed has any philosophical significance. They are niggling corrections that spring merely froman impertinent curiosity about what Plato actually wrote.

It is a truism to say that the study of ornithology has made great advances in the last fifty years, and that important problems affecting the classification of certain species and their distribution have been brought much closer to solution. Classical scholars, however, still tend to rely on the identifications of ancient Greek bird-names made by a few standard works such as D'Arcy Thompson's A Glossary of Greek Birds2 (1936) or O. Keller's Die antike Tierwelt (1909), apparently unaware that much of the ornithological information given there is now badly out of date, if not sheerly inaccurate. This brief paper aims protreptically to take four bird-names out of the Peripatetic corpus on natural history: and and to produce more precise identifications in the light of modern ornithological studies.

The action of Euripides' Ion takes place in front of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The chorus, maidservants of Kreusa who have come with her from Athens, enters at 184, admiring the temple and commenting on a series of mythological scenes which they see represented before them: (i) Herakles slaying the Hydra with the help of Iolaos (190–9); (ii) Bellerophon mounted on Pegasos slaying Chimaira (200–4); (iii) a Gigantomachial (205–18) which includes the figures of Athena brandishing her Gorgon shield against Enkelados (209–11), Zeus laying Mimas low with a thunderbolt (212–15), and Bakchos slaying another Giant with his thyrsos (216–18). The chorus's description recalls the temple of Apollo which stood in Delphi in Euripides' day.

This is the latter part of the Spartan Agiad king-list as given by the late Latinsource nicknamed ‘Barbaras‘ by J. J. Scaliger who detected under the seventhname in our list, Cemenelaus, the Greek which appeared to oprovide a well-known name in place of something obscure or very corrupt.

Athenaeus preserves an intriguing description by the otherwise unknown writerMoschion of a giant grain-ship, the Syracusia, built by Hiero II of Syracuse in thelater third century B.C.1 The account is extremely circumstantial. Besides a fulldescription of the ship's layout, Moschion gives such details as the name of thearchitect (Archias of Corinth), the size of the construction-force (well over 300), the construction time (a year), details of the launching arrangements devised byArchimedes, and even the procedure for judging crimes committed on board.

These lines, presented as they appear in the O.C.T., are among the most difficult and hotly disputed that Juvenal wrote. The poet defends his decision not to attack contemporary politicians directly: ‘expose a Tigellinus’, he says, ‘and you know what the consequences will be’. It has long been recognized that the consequences related are probably inspired by those suffered by the Christians in A.D. 64 during the reign of Nero, and so vividly described by Tacitus.

This paper essays a reconstruction of Livy's attitude to and treatment of the major ‘popularis’ figures of the late republic, from Ti. Gracchus to Cinna and Carbo. The opening section examines four situations involving ‘popularis’ prototypes: the careers of Sp. Cassius, Sp. Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus and the fall of Ap. Claudius the decemvir. It first considers Livy's use of what by his time had become standard themes in writing about ‘populares’, then attempts to establish the possible antiquity of these modes of expression. In passing it should perhaps be stressed that the attention directed in this section to terminology is not intended to imply that Livy's attitudes (or those of any other author) can be determined simply from the mere occurrence in his work of certain slogans or catchwords. That is one reason why there is little profit in asking how a ‘popularis’ historian might have handled the same or similar events.

nihil autem uetabat et componi materias in hoc idoneas, ut controuersiae permixtis salibus fingerentur, uel res proponi singulas ad iuuenum talem exercitationem. quin illae ipsae (dicta sunt ac uocantur), quas certis diebus festae licentiae dicere solebamus, si paulum adhibita ratione fingerentur, aut aliquid in his serium quoque esset admixtum, plurimum poterant utilitatis adferre; quae nunc iuuenum uel sibi ludentium exercitatio est.

descent represents a progression in this relationship whereby the Chorus, in finally abandoning their chariot and agreeing to approach Prometheus and listen to him, jeopardize their detachment from him and his fate, offer tentative support, and give him scope to develop his storytelling abilities and apply his persuasive powers. Although this progression does not represent an unequivocal commitment to Prometheus–for the Chorus fluctuate throughout the play between sympathy and reproach for him–it is none the less a crucial step as signalled by the intensity of Prometheus' insistence that they descend and hear his story through to the end.