Polybius' sources for his account of the First Punic War are not in question. It is agreed that Fabius Pictor and Philinus of Agrigentum, whom he criticizes didactically in i. 14–15, were his sole authorities. But, as Gelzer has most recently pointed out,1 difficulties soon appear when one begins to assign the various sections of the narrative to one or other of Polybius' predecessors. This task has frequently been attempted, and a good deal of common ground has been won. It is not my purpose in this paper to go over that ground again. What I propose to do is, first, to discuss the most recent article on Philinus of Agrigentum, which is in my opinion based on false principles and comes to novel, but wrong, conclusions; this done I shall try to relate what can be discovered with certainty about the character of Philinus' work to the general body of Hellenistic historical writing and historical theory. I hope that such a study may help to throw light on one part of Polybius' direct literary inheritance.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward the hypothesis that the author of ‘Herodes περ πολιτας is Kritias. The speech bears Herodes’ name: did Herodes' well-known interest in Kritias amount to the transcription of a whole speech? The speech concerns Thessalian affairs at approximately the time when Kritias was in Thessaly: is it exactly the time? and is the tone what we would expect Kritias' tone to be? We have much description of Kritias' prose style, and a few verbatim fragments: does the style of this speech correspond?

From Patristic writings ample evidence can be gathered about the important part which hymn-singing held in Early Christianity. Until recently, however, Early Christian hymnography was known only from documents transmitting the text but not the music. The discovery and publication of a Christian hymn in Greek with musical notation was, therefore, bound to change the whole aspect of studies concerned with the history of Early Christian music. This happened, as is well known, in 1922 when, under No. 1786 of the fifteenth volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri A. S. Hunt edited a fragment of a hymn, dating from the late third century, together with a transcript of the music by H. Stuart Jones. For the first time it became possible to realize what kind of music Greek-speaking Christians in Egypt sang in praise of the Lord.

Recent discussion of the problems associated with glacie has been copious. It has arisen (C.R. lii. 56) out of Housman's note, which runs as follows: ‘glacie nemini, quantum scio, praeterquam mini et Schradero et Hadriano Valesio admirationem mouit: ceteris exploratum est frigore pisces maculosos fieri, eos praesertim qui torrentem cloacam, locum frigidissimum, penetrare soleant.’ In his 1931 reprint he added (p. xlvi): ‘Ruperti took exception to glacie, but only to its case’. Housman's ironically stated objection to the sense is indeed a formidable difficulty; though the other—the fact of the two ablatives and the vagueness of the former—is itself serious enough to provide an additional indication of corruption.

The tribute of two maidens to the temple of Athena in Ilium was discontinued after the end of the ‘Phocian’ war (346 B.C.). We have for this the evidence of the Epitome of Apollodorus 6. 22 χéων δ τν παρελӨντων μετ τν Φωκiκν πλεπoν ἱκτiδας πασαντo πμoντεσ. In Tzetzes' commentary to Lycophron 1. 1141 the same piece of information is given on the authority of Timaeus (pp. 335–6 Scheer = fr. 66 FHG), but Wilamowitz, among others, showed that Tzetzes arbitrarily (though perhaps not foolishly) transferred the name of Timaeus from the scholium on 1. 1155.3 The information remains valuable without the adornment of an illustrious name. We know from a story of Aelian, which ‘Suidas’ partially preserved in many fragments (Aelianus, fr. 47, Hercher, ii, p. 205), that the Locrians were compelled by the Delphic oracle to resume the interrupted practice and submitted the regulation of it to a King Antigonus, δ βασiλεὺς Ἀντγoνoς øεӨν oἱ πρσταξεκλρῳ δiακρiӨναi This King Antigonus can hardly be identified with Antigonus Doson for two reasons which must, however, be admitted to be not absolutely cogent. First, the interval between interruption and resumption would be one of more than a century, whereas Aelian (though he cannot be pressed too much on any interpretation) presupposes a shorter interval. Secondly, the ‘Lokrische Madcheninschrift’ made famous by A. Wilhelm, which is an evident terminus ante quern for the intervention of King Antigonus, can hardly be later than 230–220 B.C. Wilhelm, indeed, had suggested a date c. 270–240 B.C. His date has been affected by recent changes in Delphic chronology; but the balance of probability (so far as I can see) still favours a date nearer to 250 than to 200 B.C. Thus, the more natural alternative remains between Antigonus Monophthalmus and Antigonus Gonatas. Either agrees well with the interruption after the third Sacred War.

In my translation of the Historia Animalium, now thirty-five years old, I pointed out a couple of passages where ἄνθρωπος stood in the text though νος seemed to be the appropriate word. It had not occurred to me for the moment, though it soon after wards did, that ανος was at hand to account for so curious a misreading. The same contraction has other misreadings to account for, as we may read in Cobet; but I do not know that this one has been drawn attention to.

Plato's examination of False Statement (Sophist 259 D–263 D) is, like many of his discussions in the later dialogues, a mixture of complete lucidity with extreme obscurity. Any English student who seeks to understand it will of course turn first to Professor Cornford's translation and commentary; and if he next reads what M. Diès has to say in the Introduction to his Budé edition of the Sophist he will, I think, have sufficient acquaintance with the views of modern Platonic scholars on the subject. For myself, at least, I have not gained any further understanding from other writers than these two.

The word τερθρεία, which L. and S.8 derived (following Moeris) from τερατεία and translated ‘the use of claptraps’, is perhaps best known from its occurrence in Isocrates (Helen, § 4), but the new edition has spread the net more widely, citing Philo, Philodemus, Proclus, Galen, Dion. Hal., and giving its meaning as ‘the use of extreme subtlety, hair-splitting, formal pedantry’. This agrees better with the gloss / κενοσπονδία attributed to Orus of Miletus in Et. Mag. 753. 4. Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Plutarch each use τερθρεύομαι once. In the Helen Isocrates, condemning the futile ingenuity of the Sophists in writing encomia on such unworthy objects as salt and humble-bees, holds that such tours de force are immoral, as (i) tending to deceive, (ii) representing a literary form of the vice περιεργία. Τερθρεία, then, should take its place, as a recognized term for the idle over-elaboration of a banausic theme, in the vocabulary of Greek literary criticism. It does not, however, appear in Rhys Roberts's ‘Glossary of Greek Rhetoric’ appended to his edition of D.H.'s On Literary Composition. No doubt this is because τερθρεία does not occur in this or any other of D.H.'s Scripta Rhetorica. But D.H. himself uses the word in Antiq. Rom. (ii. 19). Similarly J. F. Lockwood does not discuss the term in his lists in C.Q. xxxi and xxxii, where he collects words which are used metaphorically by D.H. in literary criticism. The metaphor in τερθρεία is certainly not obvious; but the literary sense must have involved some transference of meaning, for it is not to be expected that the word τερθρεία sprang, in full panoply of critical significance, from the brain of the Muse of Rhetoric; and it is part of the purpose of this paper to point the way to an explanation, or at least to set forth some known facts about the word and its possible congeners.