Shortly after his arrival at Carthage, while he is waiting for Dido to meet him, Aeneas finds that the walls of her temple are adorned with pictures of the Trojan War. Sunt hie etiam sua praemia laudi, he cries to Achates, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. The description of the pictures which follows is a remarkable example of Virgil's ability to use a traditional device in such a way as to strengthen and illuminate the main themes of his poem. It is my object here first to reinterpret one of the scenes which has been misunderstood, and then to discuss how Virgil has chosen and arranged his episodes so that the description of a picture gallery becomes a part of an epic poem.

The methods of assessing a writer's spirit vary in usefulness according to his genre. If he is a satirist much may often be learned through an examination of his names. This is certainly true of Horace, and one might have thought that in recent years a fair amount of attention would have been paid to this aspect of his work. Yet to the best of my knowledge no special study has been published in the present century. Certain points have been well noted by scholars like Vogel, Becher, and Marouzeau, and a few editions contain summaries of the material. The last detailed discussion, however, was that of Cartault, and one must admit that it was not wholly unbiased. So it seems reasonable to review the evidence again, making use of the work done by Marx, Cichorius, Münzer, and others. We do not have to inquire about all the characters in the Sermones; only satirical references need be considered, and even here there is room for selection, because some of the figures are so obscure that nothing helpful can be said about them.

The writer recently examined the two palimpsest folios of the manuscript Parisinus gr. 107B, otherwise known as the Codex Claromontanus, which contain most of the surviving passages of Euripides' Phaethon. Despite the damaging effects of the chemical reagents used in the nineteenth century the text is not wholly illegible and a collation was made where possible. A comparison of this with the standard texts published by Nauck, von Arnim, and Volmer revealed some puzzling discrepancies; it looks as if recent editors have not examined the manuscript, basing their work on their predecessors' false reports of the collation by Blass. Nauck writes (p. 599): ‘quoniam vero programmata academica in paucorum manus perveniunt, haud gravabor quae Blass legit hoc loco repetere’. von Arnim shows in his preface (p. 2) that he copied from Nauck, and Volmer says (p. 9): ‘J. de Arnim omnia tragoediae Euripideae fragmenta contulit in Supplemento Euripideo, quem librum prae aliis commentationibus in fabula restituenda adhibeo’. In future scholars who turn their attention to the Phaethon would do well to go back to the collation by Blass, but this too seemed faulty to me at certain points.

This passage has been very frequently discussed, but the deductions drawn from it have been so various and the exact meaning of the Greek has often been left so vague that it seemed to merit one more attempt at analysis.

In an article in the July 1959 issue of the American Journal of Philology, Mr. William Calder III offers two suggestions for the interpretation of 11. 1271–4 of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, one concerning the reference of wv in 1271, and the other, the reference of in 1273 and 1274.

In a recent article, Dr. A. F. Norman has attributed to Eunapius the authorship of a fragment in Suidas (Adler A 2094 s.v. ), which clearly relates to the siege of Maiozamalcha. His arguments are cogent and must, I think, be accepted. Some slight additional support for the attribution is provided by the fact that it contains the adverb of which, as Vollebregt pointed out, Eunapius was particularly fond. Norman compares this fragment with the relevant passages in Ammianus Marcellinus (24. 4. 23) and Zosimus (3. 22. 4) and points out that if the attribution is correct, ‘now, and for the first time, we have a reference to the same incident of this campaign from the narratives of Ammianus, Eunapius, and Zosimus’.

Sight, and its object light, appear to be universal metaphors in human language, both for intellectual apprehension or activity and its objects and also for the experience of aesthetic and moral values. The figure is applied equally to the course or end of a rational approach to knowledge, giving scarcely-felt imagery like ‘I see’, ‘look into’, etc., or to a pictorially described ‘illumination’ or ‘vision’ that lies beyond the range of reason. Some phrases are applicable in both senses; to ‘see the light’ may connote either logical grasp of a fact or religious conversion.

One of the curious things about Homeric studies is the way in which, although opinions in this field fluctuate violently, from time to time certain among them tend to become crystallized for no particular reason and are then accepted as something approaching orthodoxy. It is to try to delay such a crystallization, if it is not already too late, that I direct this brief coup d'ail at some current opinions on whether Homer—for the sake of clarity I apply this name in the first instance to the monumental composer of the Iliad—used the aid of writing, and in general at the value of comparative inferences based on the heroic poetry of modern Yugoslavia.

Wishing to forestall an inquiry from Quinctius about the produce of his farm, Horace says that he will describe its forma et situs (1–4). What follows is not an impersonal description, but an account directed at Quinctius who is thought of as passing judgement on the farm (cf. laudes, 8; dicas, 11; iam si credis, 15). This involvement of Quinctius in the description must be extended to the protasis of the opening sentence of the description: continui montes si dissocientur opaca/valle…, temperiem laudes where the sense is something like ‘if you were to find yourself in a place where the mountains, which crowd close to one another, are parted…, you would praise its temperate climate.

A Significant distinction can be noticed in Cicero&s contemporary references to the anti-revolutionary parties in the first two Civil Wars. For both he claims superior dignitas: Rosc. Am. 136 quis enim erat qui non videret humilitatem cum dignitate de amplitudine contendere? (cf. Phil. 8.7. ne dominarentur indigni), Lig. 19 principum dignitas erat paene par, non par fortasse eorum qui sequebantur. But in the Pro Roscio dignitas and nobilitas go together. Sulla's cause is causa nobilitatis (135,138), his party is the nobility (141, 149), his triumph victoria nobilium (142). Such expressions, frequent and casual, evidently belonged to current usage and may be assumed to have fitted the facts. Marian nobiles are indeed not lacking; but the records are meagre, and presumably they were a small minority in their class. An ironical hit at Verres (not a nobilis, though of senatorial family) tells the same tale ten years later: ut possit aliquis suspicari C. Verrem, quod ferre novos homines non potuerit, ad nobilitatem, hoc est adsuos transisse (Verr. 2. 1. 35)—for a nobilis, as such, Sulla was the only leader. Verres' true motive for changing sides, discreditable of course, is explained later on (§37); eo Sullanus repente foetus est, non ut honos et dignitas nobilitati restitueretur.

The Vatican palimpsest (A) omits the word enthymemate and leaves a lacuna, thus showing that the scribe found it written as Greek in his exemplar. Now A has been shown to belong to the fourth century, and therefore its authority must be greater than that of the other manuscripts (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) available for this part of Gellius. The same problem occurs in 12.2.14, non pro enthymemate aliquo, where Hertz (followed by Hosius) goes against the Greek of the manuscripts and adopts the reading of Carrio. Yet an examination of the use of the Greek dative in Cicero's Letters will show that it can be used fully as the equivalent of a Latin ablative, can be governed by prepositions taking the ablative in Latin, and can be qualified by a Latin adjective in the ablative.

The possibility that the Greeks used heraldic symbols or blazons was first explored a long time ago. The question has been revived recently by a French scholar in an article entitled ‘Les “blazons” des villes grecques’. It is of wide general interest, and of particular interest to numismatists who are concerned with the curious group of coins of Euboic standard bearing various simple devices (horse, horse protome and hindquarters, wheel, triskeles, beetle, gorgoneion, etc.), sometimes placed within what appears to be the circle of a shield. Various scholars, including C. T. Seltman, ascribed these coins to sixth-century Athens; Seltman's particular contribution to the problem of their identification consisted in the explanation of the diverse anepigraphic types of this group of coins as the ‘heraldic’ devices or blazons of the great gene or noble houses of early Athens. In particular he pointed out that the same devices appeared also in Attic black-figured vases on the shields of deities, heroes, and unidentified hoplites, and proposed the theory that the vase-painters were copying what they saw in the streets of Athens, namely the shield-devices of the men-at-arms of Athens' leading families.