uenena magnum fas nefasque, non ualent

conuertere humanam uicem.

In his article entitled ‘Two Horatian Problems’ (CQ, N.S. xvii [1967], 327–31) Dr. Guiseppe Giangrande argues persuasively on palaeographical and other grounds for the reading miscent in place of magnum. ‘In conclusion,’ he summarizes, ‘the emendation proposed here solves all the difficulties which have puzzled scholars so far and at the same time is capable of a palaeographical explanation’ (loc. cit. 328).

Several of the treatises and lectures that make up the Hippocratic corpus begin with more or less extended statements about the physical composition and operation of the world at large, and approach the study of human physiology from this angle. We see this, for example, in De Natwra Hominis, De Flatibus, De Carnibus, De Victu; it was the approach of Alcmaeon of Croton, Diogenes of Apollonia, and according to Plato (Phaedr. 270 c) of Hippocrates himself.

The work known as De Hebdomadibus would appear to be a prime example of the type. The first twelve chapters are cosmological. They are dominated by two ideas: that everything in nature is arranged in groups of seven, and that the human body is constructed on the same pattern as the whole world. In the later part of the book (13–52) we pass to the subject of fevers, their causation and treatment. But as Roscher observed, the cosmology and the pathology do not belong together.

AT Historia Animalium 561b27, during the course of his account of chick embryology, Aristotle notes (Bekker's text):

.

D'Arcy Thompson (Oxford, 1910) translated this passage as follows:

About the twentieth day, if you open the egg and touch the chick, it moves inside and chirps, and it is already coming to be covered in down when, after the twentieth day is past, the chick begins to break the shell.

Histories of literature tend to treat Stesichorus as just one of the lyric poets, like Alcman or Anacreon. But the vast scale of his compositions puts him in a category of his own. It has always been known that his Oresteia was divided into more than one book; P. Oxy, 2360 gave us fragments of a narrative about Telemachus of a nearly Homeric amplitude; and from P. Oxy. 2617 it was learned that the Geryoneis contained at least 1,300 verses, the total being perhaps closer to two thousand. Even allowing for the shorter lines, this was as long as many an epic poem. Indeed, these were epic poems, in subject and style as well as in length: epics to be sung instead of recited. What was behind them ? Who was this Stesichorus, and how did he come to be, in Quintilian's phrase, ‘sustaining on the lyre the weight of epic song’ ?

The biographical problem must be tackled first. The question of Stesichorus’ historical setting and date is confused by legendary elements as well as by contradiction in the sources. On the whole scholars remain spellbound by the specious precision of the Suda's dates (632–556), although it has long been realized that they are founded on nothing but the assumption that Stesichorus was younger than Alcman and older than Simonides. There have been excellent discussions by Wilamowitz and Maas, but they seem to have had little influence.