That both parts of the sentence refer to the same person is now generally agreed; it is not so much that a change of subject would be, as the commentators are wont to say, ‘un-Sophoclean’, but simply that it would be awkward and clumsy. But to whom do the lines refer?

D. B. Gregor (C.R. lxiv [1950], 87–8) argues for Clytaemnestra, but despite the apparent force of some of his arguments (e.g. that the clause refers to Clytaemnestra because it is she who picks up Electra, in 616, picks up Clytaemnestra's of 615; but could still be Electra's) I cannot agree. He adds too that the reference to echoes the motif of Electra's speech, but it is just as much the motif of Clytaemnestra's speech, in fact more so. Finally, the first part of the sentence, it is true, could be asserted by the chorus on the strength of some such gesture as the heaving of the bosom, but I cannot see how they could then deduce that Clytaemnestra ‘no longer cares whether justice is on her side’

as Denniston pointed out in his note on the passage, ‘is difficult’. Various suggestions have been made to explain it, from Kvicala's emendation on the analogy of Medea 923, to Parmentier's note, ‘la joue blanche ou claire, c'est-à-dire en sa fleur de jeunesse’; but none is altogether convincing or satisfactory. May one, then, advance the idea of retaining as the Oxford recension does, not on the ground of faute de mieux, but for the sake of the very striking image it contains?

This would be admirably clear and would give excellent sense, but it does entail the deletion of as an interpolation before Marshall is aware that is a word that is not likely to be used by an interpolator, but still feels able to propose its deletion and gives a detailed account of the way in which an interpolator might have approached the sentence. When one attempts to read the mind of an ancient scribe, all sorts of possibilities are opened up; in this instance, it seems equally possible that a reader who, as Marshall suggests, was faced with … and was not able to understand the sentence because he failed to separate from and to see that was to be taken in the second clause, would have been inclined first at least to see whether sense could be obtained by separating from rather than to conjure up the word

There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald (1933), almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius (1935). These two contributions of the thirties remain standard to the present day.

It is generally accepted that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was not conceived as a single poem but is a combination of two: a Delian hymn, D, performed at Delos and concerned with the god's birth there, and a Pythian hymn, P, concerned with his arrival and establishment at Delphi. What above all compels us to make a dichotomy is not the change of scene in itself, but the way D ends. The poet returns from the past to the present, and takes leave of his audience; farewell, he says, and remember me ever after. He is quite clearly finishing. Whereupon there is an abrupt and unsatisfactory transition to P.

In their mangled versions of this poem Baehrens and Housman have both anticipated the first of these changes whilst lines 19–20 are placed as I suggest by Housman and Postgate and lines 21–4 are placed before line 39 by Scaliger, Housman, Butler, and others. Nevertheless I recall these transpositions here, primarily because my third change is intelligible only through them, but also because their correctness has been generally neglected amid the confusing assortment of wholly unnecessary transpositions that this poem has suffered. My reasons for recommending the above changes are these.