There has been much discussion of the phrase ‘perpetuum… carmen’ and of its relation to Callimachus' rejection of the (Aetia fr. 1. 3 Pfeiffer). Much less has been written about deducite in line 4. However it is, I believe, equally important for the ‘programme’ of Ovid's poem.

Deducere is a metaphor frequently applied to poetry in general with the sense of ‘to write, compose something.’ In certain contexts the reference is much more specific and indicates subtle and polished writing of the kind associated with Callimachus.

In his interesting paper on babeo and aueo published in CQ 66 (1972), 388–98, Dr. A.S. Gratwick raised a number of questions bearing on my own discussion of the origin and development of the babeo+infinitive construction in CQ 65 (1971), 215–31.

First the collapse of the earlier future-tense system. As I said, this was ‘the product of a number of different linguistic events’, phonetic, grammatical, and semantic, which were summarized and illustrated on pp. 220–1 of my paper. Even so Dr. Gratwick (p. 397) believes that I assigned too much weight to ‘phonetic attrition of the future simple’.

In the creation myth of the Timaeus Plato describes God as wishing that all things should be good so far as is possible. Wherefore, finding the whole visible sphere of the world not at rest, but moving in an irregular fashion, out of disorder He brought order, thinking that this was in every way an improvement. To achieve His end He placed intelligence in soul and soul in body, reflecting that nothing unintelligent could ever be better than something intelligent (30 a—b). From this account of creation it would seem that God confronted a chaotic world whose disorderly motions existed in full independence of the principle of soul. Yet, in his doctrinal pronouncements in the Laws (892 a) and the Pbaedrus (245 e) on the origin of motion, Plato declares soul to be elder born than bodies and the prime source of all their changes and transformations.

The purpose of this note is to banish for ever from our histories of Roman literature the term elocutio nouella as a description of the style preached and practised by Cornelius Fronto.

Commenting on a speech recently delivered by the Emperor Marcus, Fronto declares (De eloquentia 5. 1 = p. 146. 13 van den Hout):

Pleraque in oratione recenti tua, quod ad sententias attinet, animaduerto egregia esse; pauca admodum uno tenus uerbo corrigenda; non nihil interdum elocutione nouella parum signatum.

The standard interpretation of the last clause is that given by Haines (ii. 81): ‘some parts here and there were not sufficiently marked with novelty of expression’. It is my contention that it means: ‘some parts here and there were insufficiently clear through new-fangled diction’.

In her masterly article on this passge, Dr. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood goes most of the way towards solving two serious problems: the text of Lys. 645, where the vulgate makes the ‘bears’ more than ten years old, contrary to all other evidence; and the meaning of of A. Ag. 239 . She argues cogently that in Aeschylus means ‘shedding’ the saffron robe, as most editors including Fraenkel have thought, and not ‘letting her robes fall to the ground’ as Lloyd-Jones, followed by Page, has argued.

As described by the ancient metricians, catalexis is a matter of arithmetic rather than rhythm. They develop the idea in their usual way, mechanically and mathematically, adding and subtracting elements, so as to produce ‘brachycatalexis’ and ‘hypercatalexis’. These are now mere metrical-glossary terms, but in catalexismodern metricians have seen a genuine relationship between cola and a rhythmic effect more or less comprehensible even to us. Wilamowitz, T.D. Goodell, and A.M. Dale explore the concept to some extent, but current hand books and general treatises give it only perfunctory and superficial treatment, while casual appearances of the term offer the reader glimpses of a theoretical substructure which hasnot been explicitly and coherently explained

The Phoenissae of Euripides was throughout antiquity an exceptionally popular play, and is generally thought to be exceptionally heavily interpolated. In the Phoenissae, as in other annotated plays, a significant feature of variance between the medieval text and the text in antiquity is revealed by the scholia: verses present in the medieval manuscripts (to attempt a non-controversial formulation) were occasionally absent from ancient manuscripts. ‘Some (many, most) manuscripts are without this verse (these verses)’. Such scholia are well known: the ancient tradition, if one may speak of such a thing, was evidently in a more fluid state than the medieval.

It seems surprising that this text—or others similar—(emending the manuscript reading found in both L and P) has been accepted without any serious search for a more meaningful alternative. Even if it be thought that Euripides was capable of adding , in an unusual sense producing an awkward tautology, to , surely this should only be accepted in the absence ofa more credible emendation which departs no further from the manuscripts? Is there such an alternative? In the corresponding last line of the strophe we have : the first syllable of is doubtful; there seems to be no convincing metrical objection to its being a long syllable here. This atonce suggests the maintenance of the manuscripts' to maintain the metrical balance.

We must return to the transmitted reading, which is beyond objection. The persons referred to in want to establish that passivity, the experiencing of desire, grief, and the like, is a thing of the body and not of the soul, which, they maintain, is The climactic structure makes it plain enough that what is in dispute and has to be proved is that the soul is , and that what is assumed for the proof is that it is . It is, therefore, wrong to change the text so as to make those engaging in the proof try to argue from instead of the other way round.

Marriage is a subject of perennial interest, and we should like to be able to assess the exact degree of importance which the Greeks attached to this institution. One of the chief questions is how the formality of marriage, or the lack of it, affected the children of a union; above all, was illegitimate birth a bar to citizenship even in democratic Athens? Unfortunately there is still no general agreement about the answer to this question.

In 404 Sparta stood supreme, militarily and politically master of Greece, in concord with Persia. By 362, the year at which Xenophon terminated his history on the sad note of ‘even greater confusion and uncertainty’, she was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again; and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local wrangler. The reasons for all this which are to seek are of absorbing interest and prime importance for the history of Greece, but it is hard to resist the temptation to connect the change with the policies of Agesilaus whose reign virtually coincided with the period in question. He was king for forty-one years and over thirty of them well before the battle of Leuctra (Plut. Ages. 40) and he had influence in the state unequalled as far as we can tell by any other king.

In speaking of Demosthenes' conduct in the period between his return to Athens after the peace agreement with Macedon (late 338 B.C.) and Philip's death (July 336) Aeschines refers to only one specific incident, the attempt by Demosthenes to have himself elected What this position was has never been satisfactorily explained.

Arrian is regarded as the most authoritative of the extant sources for the reign of Alexander the Great. It is his work that is usually chosen to provide the narrative core of modern histories, and very often a mere reference to ‘the reliable Arrian’ is considered sufficient to guarantee the veracity of the information derived from him. What gives Arrian his prestige is his reliance on contemporary sources, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. It is recognized that Arrian's narrative is based primarily upon Ptolemy, and, as long as Ptolemy is regarded as an impeccable mine of facts for Alexander's reign and Arrian's work is accepted as a faithful reproduction of Ptolemy, the Anabasis Alexandri stands out as a uniquely authoritative record of Alexander's reign.

Nonnus, as well as being soaked in Homer and, no doubt, earlier epics on his particular theme (enough survives of Dionysius, Bassarica, to show the debt), had a great affection for the Hellenistic master—above all Callimachus, Apollonius, Theocritus, and Euphorion. For this reason he can provide valuable help towards the study of fragments and new papyri. Pfeiffer, in his edition of the Callimachus fragments, is of course fully alive to this point, and regularly quotes Nonnus. From the other side there is a useful collection of parallels in Keydell's Dtonysiaca (1959) and the new Nonnus lexicon (ed. Werner Peek) will be invaluable, though not a complete substitute for actually reading the poem because imitation need not involve more than a small amount of verbal reminiscence.

Neither can stand. ‘Argos of the land’ (or, ‘of land’) is nonsense, and even if it were not, is absurd as an apostrophe of the River Inachus. ‘a plain’, indistinguishable from is similarly impossible: the audience would be baffled; in 6 has to be the first occurrence of the vox; ‘streams’ cannot be apposed to a ‘plain’, even if could have been understood as meaning this.

Tacitus is writing about Ireland. In 1967 Ogilvie commented, ‘In melius cannot be taken either with differunt, since it contradicts haud multum, nor with cogniti, since it cannot be imagined that Tacitus was so ignorant of the truth as to suppose that Ireland was better known than England.’ He therefore followed earlier editors in deleting in melius as a possible interpolation by ‘patriotic Irish monks’.

Professor Cairns has suggested (CQ 68, 1974, 95—7) that the use of modo in Propertius 1.1.11, which has long been seen as problematic, can be understood in terms of some instances of the Greek modo, he says, here means not but , and the modo clause is prior in time to the clause that follows it just as, in his view, a Greek imperfect with can have the force of a pluperfect and refer to a time prior to that of the verb of a following clause.

In his recent second supplement to his invaluable catalogue of manuscripts of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Munari reports two manuscripts from the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana in Rome. The second of these, number 405 in his cumulative list, is Bibl. Vallicelliana F 25. According to the description supplied to Munari and so quoted, the manuscript is a miscellany, 23Ox 142 mm., membr. fourteenth century, and the Ovidian material is the last or number 7 of the miscellaneous pieces, fols. 117–34. So far, the information is correct. However, on a crucial point, namely the exact contents of the Ovidian poem preserved, the data are in error.