Spranger's Preliminary Skeleton List of the Manuscripts of Euripides (C.Q. xxxiii [1939], 98–107) mentions four gnomological manuscripts:

The first and the third of these manuscripts contain miscellaneous excerpts of many classical and scriptural authors, arranged under various subject headings; though some of the excerpts are Euripidean, these manuscripts have no more right to be classified as Euripidean than have the manuscripts of Orion or Stobaeus. They are, therefore, wrongly included in Spranger's list.

The form of this paper, which has more than one purpose, needs a word of explanation and perhaps of excuse. I had had it in mind to bring together and discuss a number of passages of Plautus in which gratus or gratia occurred. Then I came across an interesting paper by Professor L. R. Palmer in Hommages à Max Miedermann (Collection Latomus vol. xxiii), Bruxelles, 1956, pp. 258–69, entitled ‘The Concept of Social Obligation in Indo-European: A Study in Structural Semantics’. There Palmer dealt, among other things, with gratus and related words; he seemed to me, however, to treat the Latin evidence, the greater part of it from Plautus, in a way which I felt to be mistaken. In addition it seemed that a preconceived theory, derived from a special interpretation of the Mycenean tablets, was being read into Roman thought and institutions against the evidence. I have therefore taken the opportunity to discuss the passages of Plautus in which I was first interested within a general examination of Palmer's treatment of the Latin evidence for his theory.

It is immediately evident that the second sentence in this passage is incomplete; as it stands is fails to tell us what it was that Dieuchidas said execept in so far as it implies some connexion between either Solon of Peisistratus and the lines which we now reat at Iliad 2.558 ff. Many scholars have striven to fill the lacuna in accordance with their own views of what Dieuchidas ought to have written, and some have sought to use the resulting text as a substantive argument for Dieuchidas' knowledge of the so-called ‘Peisistratean recension’.

‘He was of Rutulian blood, born of a Saguntine mother; but he had Greek blood too, and by his two parents he combined the seed of Italy with that of Dulichium’. So Duff, and Ruperti's ‘Murrus matre Graia et patre Romano progenitus’ is not the whole story. To Silius Saguntine = Greek (cf. 3. 178 Graia Saguntos) because, as Duff says, ‘men of Zacynthos had taken part in founding Saguntum’. prole = ‘with his children’—van Veen's Itala may well be right

Before venturing to emend 39 it is as well to be certain of the meaning of 40. Here are some suggestions: ‘fill out their tale of years’ (Showerman); ‘accomplissent toute [om. Ripert] leur destinee’ (Ripert, Bornecque); ‘compiono interamente il loro destino’ (Munari); ‘¨berdauert die Frist’ (Harder and Marg). This is no doubt what the words, in the context of 41–42, might be expected to mean, but is this sense in the Latin? Riley was bolder with his ‘fills its destined numbers’, but it was left to Némethy to state explicitly that the passive and the active voices of the Latin verb are interchangeable and that inplentur numeris suis means ‘implent numeros annorum suorum’

That the Eudemian Ethics is a genuine work of Aristotle, belonging to a middle stage in his development, is now widely accepted on the various grounds advanced by Jaeger and others from 1909 onwards. (From 1841 there had been universal acceptance of Spengel's ascription of the work to Eudemus himself.) I want to show (in section A) that, quite apart from those considerations, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of E.E. on the ground of peculiarities in its vocabulary, as these can be explained in various ways. A presentation of the evidence as regards special vocabulary may in any case be of interest, and may throw some light eventually on its position among Aristotle's writings, if it belongs among them; and for this reason I add a further section (B) on words in E.E. uncommon in Aristotle.

In C.Q. N.S. vii (1957), 164 ff. Professor Demos raises the question in what sense, if at all, the state which Plato describes in the Republic can be regarded as ideal, if the warrior-class and the masses are ‘deprived of reason’ and therefore imperfect. The ideal state, he thinks, appears at first sight to be composed of un-ideal individuals. But ‘the problem is resolved by separating the personal from the political-technical areas of control. In so far as they are citizens, men in the ideal city will indeed represent one part of the soul and one function.…

Until 1923 most critics were content to interpret as ‘a reversal o fortune’. Then, in ‘The Reverse of Aristotle’ (C.R. 1923, pp. 98–104), Mr. F. L. Lucas argued persuasively for Vahlen's interpretation of the term as ‘a reversa of intention’, ‘any event where the agent's intention is over-ruled to produce an effect the exact opposite of his intention’. The result has been wide acceptanct for Vahlen's theory. This may be a case of truth prevailing after two thousanc years of error, but it looks to me more like an instance of quid facundia posset I suggest that we simple-minded Ajaxes have fallen victims to the wit of Odysseus.

Mr.Mitford has kindly provided me with a photograph and impression of a Cyprian text of uncertain provenance, which he assigns to the fifth or fourth century B.C. An account of the text has been published by Mr. Mitford in Minos, VI. i (1958), 37–47. I print below my interpretation, which differs in some respects from his.

The characters on the stone are for the most part clearly legible, and even where there is damage to the surface of the stone restoration is practically certain.

Mr. Alan Ker in C.Q., N.S. vii (1957), 151–8, proposes to alter the text of Claudian in numerous places where the tradition appears to me to be blameless, in some cases substituting for readings which seem characteristic and admirable others which seem less so. Claudian is an elegant poet, whose mastery of language many regard as comparable with that of the Silver Age poets, and Mr. Ker's dismissal of him (p. 154) as ‘a simple writer, with a small and unambitious vocabulary’ does less than justice to his powers. I would suggest, in particular, the following points for consideration.

In an earlier article (C.Q., N.S. vii [1957], 68–81) a reconstruction was proposed of the stemma of the primary manuscripts of Livy. If such a stemma has been correctly drawn up, it must work, that is, it must enable an editor to arrive by routine methods at the reading of the archetype. The archetype itself need not have good readings—it may have bad ones, emended by later manuscripts—but, good or bad, it gives the tradition from which all correction must start. If these readings make grammatical, linguistic, and contextual sense and if there is no external tradition such as citations in grammarians or scholia, they may be taken to constitute what Livy wrote; if they do not make sense, then the editor must resort to correction on the basis of them.

The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras (the two being often confused), a number of anecdotes of varying degrees of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels in Der Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary (though not entirely comprehensive) as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat.

It is no doubt often salutary, even a necessary condition of progress, that we should shelve the great problems of a preceding generation without precisely solving them; but a controversy may be shelved too soon, and I fear this may have been the case with the great ‘Thucydidean question’ as it stood in the days of Wilamowitz and Schwartz. The analysts said some wild things, and their disagreements about early and late passages, or about the range of an editor's activities, have been found disheartening. For these or other reasons, since Schadewaldt's brief and stimulating book of 1929, scholars seem mostly to have stopped dissecting the text and taken to examining the qualities which Thucydides displays all through it.

As in literature poetry precedes prose, so in poetry a special and ‘heightened’ diction seems to precede everyday language. Mr.T.S.Eliot has put it thus: ‘Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech.’ How does this apply to Greek and Latin ? There are objections to considering words in isolation from this point of view, since neutral ones are apt to go now grey, now purple, according to their company; but if we do not do so, we deny ourselves the only considerable method of investigation (unsatisfactory though it is) that is still open to us. Again, we must recognize that most poems are composed largely of ordinary words, though these are often used in a way that is not ordinary.