Martial on a number of occasions declares himself the literary inheritor of Catullus, and repeatedly evinces that indebtedness by unmistakable echoes and adaptations of his Republican predecessor. But the Catullan legacy in Martial has not fared well at the hands of scholars. Many of the passages pertinent to the topic are industriously assembled in the secondary literature. But that literature is (it must be said) seriously deficient. Ferguson's 1963 article ‘Catullus and Martial’ is lightweight and vitiated by value judgements as to the respective worth of the two poets. Despite a disclaimer of bias, Ferguson is plainly of a mind with Muretus, who said that Martial was to Catullus as a buffoon is to a gentleman, and with Andrea Navagero, who each year burned a copy of Martial in an assertion of Catullus' superiority. A similar criticism can be levelled at Offermann's ‘Uno tibi sim minor Catullo’, which, descriptive rather than analytical, devotes a great deal of space to castigating Martial for sacrificing Catullus' intense emotionalism and to devaluing the Flavian poet in consequence; Offermann was unwilling to recognise that impassioned sincerity more Catulliano was not part of Martial's epigrammatic brief. J.K. Newman's recent treatment of Catullus and Martial, while helpful in some respects, makes much of the ‘carnivalesque’ or Saturnalian spirit which allegedly infuses the work of both poets, a claim which is valid for Martial, for the most part,8 but questionable for Catullus.

As the tumultuous Triumviral decades of the Republic ended and the Augustan era began, the shadow of Rome's majesty continued to envelop the shores of Judaea some 2000km to the east. King Herod had survived the struggle for dominance between Octavian (Augustus after 27 B.C.) and his rivals, Mark Antony and his ally and wife Cleopatra VII, in part by not being at Actium in 31 B.C. where the final battle in Rome's long series of civil wars was fought. Although his fealty had been to Antony, he had managed to be east of his kingdom's borders conducting a military operation against Malichus I of Nabataea, who had been accused of disloyalty by Cleopatra and Herod (Joseph. AJ 15.110).

In a much discussed passage Pindar uses the expression when speaking of early performances of the dithyramb. The passage was famous in antiquity and before the discovery of a papyrus fragment early in the Twentieth Century, we owed our knowledge of it chiefly to citations in Athenaeus. In discussing it, Athenaeus explains the words in the context of asigmatic odes, i.e. odes in which for the sake of euphony the letter sigma was avoided or omitted altogether. This explanation remains the most commonly accepted one, though scholars continue to puzzle over it, as it is hard to see why Pindar would use the word which means ‘false’ or ‘counterfeit’ in such a context. A more natural interpretation, and one which would, I believe, have been readily accepted had it not been for the comments of Athenaeus, is that in early dithyrambic performances the ‘s’ sound was in some way impure or unauthentic when compared with current practice. In what follows, I will re-open the discussion, arguing that Athenaeus misunderstood the passage or based his explanation on a tradition which obscured its true meaning. It will be necessary in the first place to examine evidence for the pronunciation of Greek sibilants and it is here that some light may be cast upon the discussion from a rather unexpected source—the adaptation of the Greek alphabet for writing down the Middle Iranian language of Bactria.

In 1998 at the age of 94, Giuliano Bonfante published a book that he had written in 1940. He was an Italian, educated in Italy, but he withdrew to Paris for his advanced studies and to Spain for his first academic posts where he founded Emerita. He went on to Geneva and in 1939 sailed to America and a chair at Princeton. This was where he wrote a book ultimately published in English concerning the origin of the romance languages. Fifteen years later he left Princeton where he had helped to found Word, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, to take up appointments successively at Genoa, Turin and finally in 1970 Rome, where in 1994 he published La Lingua parlata in Orazio (Venosa), a revised edition of a book first published in Spanish in 1936 (Los elementos populares en la lengua de Oracio). He admitted to his daughter Larissa, by then a scholar in her own right, that he would love to see his 1940 book also published. She undertook the editing of it and published it with some changes.

Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345-411 A.D.) is one of the most important Latin translators of Greek texts in Late Antiquity. In the summer of 397 A.D. he returned to the west, after some 25 years spent in Alexandria and Jerusalem. He brought with him a considerable library of Greek manuscripts. The first task he undertook—very shortly after his arrival—was to translate Basil of Caesarea's Asketikon, which became known in its Latin dress as the Regula Basili. This paper is dedicated to examining the translation techniques used by Rufinus in the Regula Basili.