The word dona is an embarrassment here. If Agricola was appointed to ‘check the gifts of the temples’, that is, gifts which temples had received, it seems an odd restriction in a phrase which one would expect to refer to temple possessions in general. What the context, especially in the word sacrilegium, makes clear, as commentators have duly noted, is that the temples suffered losses through the plunder of their works of art by Nero and also by others, although the result (effecit commends itself) tended to obliterate the guilt of others. This was after the fire at Rome in A.D. 64. See H. Furneaux rev. J. G. C. Anderson (1922), pp.55 f.; R. Till (1961), p.62; I. Forni (1962), p.108; R. M. Ogilvie and Ian Richmond (1967), p.152.

‘The reading of the MSS, and not the Renaissance correction e, is certainly what L. wrote.’ So Kenney in his edition of Lucretius 3.1 I believe that he is right, but that the case for o (apart from manuscript authority) rests on different grounds from those which he adduces.

Kenney quotes D.A. West 's statement that e is ‘not worthy of the precise and vivid imagination of this poet’, and himself finds it anaemic by contrast with the sonorous o.2 These are subjective judgements. One can only reply by expressing disagreement and pointing out that e has seemed unexceptionable to the numerous editors who have printed it and have preferred it to o (which Lachmann thought valde ineptum).

In his very valuable study of generic patterns in ancient poetry Francis Cairns assigns Propertius 2.28, [Tib.] 3.10 (4.4), and (tentatively) Ovid Am. 2.13 to the genre Soteria, that is works of congratulation and thanksgiving on the recovery from illness (or rescue from danger) of a friend, and he sees the resemblances between the poems as due to the elegists’ attempts to produce ‘dramatized’ examples of the genre, with the situation developing from the girl's illness at the beginning of the poem to her recovery at the end (Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp.153–7). Cairns's arguments and interpretation of the poems should, I feel, be scrutinized carefully, especially since his classification of the poems has been accepted recently without demur by at least one scholar (Jennifer Moore-Blunt ‘Catullus XXXI and Ancient Generic Composition’, Eranos 72 (1974), 118 and n.50).

In Cornford's opinion, the theory of Forms as put forward in theParmenides is identical with the theory as stated in the Pbaedo—both of them expressing thethat concrete things are the bearers, simultaneously, of contrary characters. Christopher Kirwan has recently denied this identity, in a paper which, if hisis accepted, will upset many traditions and greatly alter our understandingLthe middle dialogues.

In an earlier article I sought to analyse the metaphor of withdrawal in the last argument of Plato's Phaedo for the immortality of the soul.1 The key to the metaphor lies, I believe, in recognizing the paradox that in terms of Plato's metaphor something stays as it is, for example continues to be fire and to be hot, or to be cold and to be snow, by running away. Plato's argument is that fire will either ‘run away’, i.e. it will escape the onslaught of cold, and so continue to be fire, or else it will perish. For in terms of Plato's metaphor if something which is characterized essentially by one of a pair of opposites, in the way that soul is, were to ‘stay behind’ then it would have to ‘accept’ the opposite of the form by which it is characterized, and that it cannot do. Fire cannot be cold. Snow cannot be hot. The soul cannot be dead.

‘And if I must make some mention of the virtue of those wives who will now bein widowhood, I will indicate all with a brief word of advice. To be no worse thanyour proper nature, is a great honour for you; andgreat honour is hers, whose reputation among males is least, whether for praise or for blame.’

Modern research has done much to elucidate the question what the reforms of Kleisthenes in fact achieved, and the work continues, but that does not settle the question what he was trying to achieve. Herodotos gives him a political motive in outline, that he brought the people over to his side because he had been defeated in a struggle for power against Isagoras (5.66.2); and in resuming this proposition after a digression he describes the Athenian people as (5.69.2). But he gives us no clear insight into the nature or mechanism of the struggle with Isagoras, and in particular he does not say that the latter's election to the archonship in 508 constituted his victory, though the dating of the reform to the archonship of Isagoras ('A.21.1) makes that highly probable; nor does he explain in what sense or by whom the Athenian people had been ‘previously excluded’.

An ambiguity in this passage apperas to have gone unnoticed. The ambiguity in line 27 ( ═ ‘arms’ or ‘genitals’) is well known; and when Xanthias at once continues ‘But you tell me about yours’, many a listener might well not immediately realize that the noun to be supplied was from 25 rather than from 27, and might therefore momentarily suppose that Xanthias was saying ‘Tell me about your penis’; a supposition that would be temporarily confirmed when Sosias replied ‘It's a big one’. The reaction of such a listener would be the same as that of Kalonike at Lys. 23. She has been told (14) that the women have been summoned to deliberate . Now she asks and on receiving the answer at once jumps to the conclusion that Lysistrata is using in its phallic sense and asks .

Or future of Professor Skutsch (CQ N.S. (1973), 60, 378), calling the contraction ‘impossible’ (but see Ardizzoni's note), insists on the latter; F. Vian in his Bude Apollonius (p.82) leaves the question open. A.R.1.685 ~ 693 (Polyxo speaking; note the context of 683–8):

Jebb is right. The two lines are a comment by the Chorus; and they are a comment on the apparent shamelessness of the remarks which Electra has just been making about her mother. The dissentients have been deceived by two pseudo-problems, hitherto unexploded:

Although scholars have expended increasing efforts over the last twenty years or so in either detecting or establishing large structural and thematic units within Ovid's perpetuum carmen, little attention, as far as I am aware, has been directed towards the evident care taken by Ovid in his arrangement of material within individual episodes, and the resultant over-all structure of those episodes. The aim of the present paper is to focus attention upon a single episode to which Ovid seems to have paid particular attention in these respects. I refer to the long story of Phaethon, which occupies the last part of book 1, and most of the first half of book 2, of the Metamorphoses, and intend to explore two different lines of approach in examining the structure of this episode.

Among the Christian Latin poets Paulinus, Bishop of Nola in the early fifth century and for Gronovius the ‘swan’ of that city, occupies a prominent place and his work throws important light on contemporary tendencies in language and literature as well as on religious customs. In editing both his epistles and poems (C.S.E.L. xxix-xxx, 1894) W. von Hartel performed a valuable service. Yet, great as was the improvement upon the Migne edition (Patrologia Latina lxi, 1847), numerous questions of text and interpretation have remained to be dealt with and these have received comparatively small attention. The passages discussed below are a sample of those that call for elucidation or amendment. The text quoted at the head of each note is that of Hartel. At or near the beginning of the first note on a new poem, where a point of reading is considered, the manuscripts available are specified.

In his article (CP 71 (1976), 97–105) R. Reneham rightly classes Sail. Cat.20.9 as a conscious imitation of Cic.Cat.1.1, but adopts the unsatisfactory explanation of parody. Such parody is, as he notes, without parallel in Sallust and ineptly distracts attention from the vigorous development of Catiline's rhetoric. Elsewhere mimesis is regularly a compliment to the author imitated, often closely functional by reinforcing a point from the parallel of a similar context (e.g. Sail. Cat.4.1 ~ Pl. Ep.324 b). Similarly I suggest that here Sallust recalls Cicero's words to illustrate that perversion of vocabulary which is the keynote of Catiline's speech: just as he misuses, for example, the terms virtus fidesque at the beginning of his speech, in stark contrast to Sallust's own definition, so he perverts the famous words of the attack which revealed his true villainy in similar savage indignatio.

In his philosophical works Seneca often refers to the views of his predecessors, and sometimes is the sole or the earliest authority for what he says about them, which makes it important for the student of earlier thought to know whether what he says is likely to be true. This I believe can be roughly assessed–and this paper is an attempt to do it–by considering how reliable he is in places where he can be checked: that is, in places where he refers to earlier writings which survive. I shall be principally concerned with his Naturales Quaestiones (hereafter N.Q.) and with early meteorology: with considering how accurately Seneca reports Aristotle's Meteorologica (hereafter Mete.), and trying to estimate therefrom the reliability of his statements about pre-Socratic meteorology; but I believe that my conclusions should also be applicable to what Seneca says on later thinkers and other subjects.