At Aristotle's Rhetorica III 9.2 (1409a), in a discussion of λ⋯ξις εἰρομ⋯νη and κατεστραμμ⋯νη, occurs the following misquotation of Herodotus' proem

In the penultimate scene of the Ecclesiazusae, the young man who has come to see his lover is accosted in succession by three old women, each insisting that the new legal code requires him to sleep with her first. In lines 999–1000, the first of these old women, faced with his refusal to cooperate sexually, swears by Aphrodite

There are a number of fragments attributed to Theophrastus, as well as titles in Diogenes Laertius' catalogue of his writings (5.42ff.), of which it is uncertain whether they should be placed among his logical or rhetorical works. In this note I want to give my reasons for excluding one of them from my forthcoming edition of his logical fragments. It is not my intention here to discuss all the questions it raises; I hope to come back to them in a later volume of my commentary.

In his exemplary edition of the papyrus fragments of Callimachus' Victoria Berenices, P. J. Parsons briefly considered the spelling of the name of Hercules' host, who played such a major role in Callimachus' αἴτιον on the founding of the Nemean games. At B iii 2 the papyrus has M⋯[λ]ορκοϲ. On this Professor Parsons noted ‘elsewhere M⋯λορχοϲ: the unusual spelling, which no doubt comes from the text, reappears in Apollodorus, Bibl. 2.5.1 (Mολ⋯ρκῳ, but later M⋯λορχοϲ), Nonnus, Dion. 17.52 and Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Mολορκ⋯α (above p. 2f)’.

These important lines have not yet received an adequate discussion. Aphrodite has been told that her beloved Adonis is dying on the mountainside; she rushes to him in grief, letting down her hair and calling for him.

Our information on Horace's friend Aristius Fuscus, whom he addresses in Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10, is neatly summed up by Nisbet and Hubbard: ‘he was a close friend of Horace's (serm. 1.9.61 ‘mihi cams’, epist. 1.10.3 ‘paene gemelli’). He wrote comedies (Porph. on epist. 1.10) and seems to have had a sense of humour: it was he who refused to rescue Horace from the ‘importunate man’ in the Sacra Via (serm. 1.9.60ff.). Horace says elsewhere that he was a town-lover, who disliked the countryside (epist. 1.10); here he amuses him with an account of the perils of his Sabine estate. Fuscus was a schoolmaster by profession (Porph. on serm. 1.9.60 ‘praestantissimus grammaticus illo tempore’); in epist. 1.10.45 Horace teases him for his stern discipline (‘nee me dimittes incastigatum…’: cf. CQ 9 [1959], 74f.). Fuscus is mentioned with Asinius Pollio and others as a critic who approved of Horace's poetry (serm. 1.10.83ff.). He may also have written on grammar; cf. gramm. 7.35.2 ‘Abnesti Fusti (Aristi Fusci Haupt, Aufusti Usener) grammatici liber est ad Asinium Pollionem’. The purpose of this note is to add a further piece to this picture, consonant with Fuscus' grammatical interests, namely to argue that Fuscus was also a Stoic, and that his philosophical loyalties are played on in the two poems addressed to him by Horace.

In 204 B.c. Pleminius, after perpetrating appalling atrocities at Locri, was sent back to Rome, and his fate is described at Livy 29.22.7–10

Femina in line 28 has nagged me subconsciously for years. I have now belatedly realized that it sabotages the poet's prudent disclaimer: it is not women in general who are in question, but only those not ruled out of bounds by stola and uittae. The repetition of the word in the following verse, where it means, as the opposition to uiri indicates, ‘the female sex’, only serves to underline its inappropriateness here. Cristante's defence of the anaphora, that it ‘ribadisce la necessità dell'insegnamento, introducendone la giustificazione’ (Ovidio, L'arte di amare, ed. E. Pianezzola [1991], p. 352), sets up an unwanted connection: lines 25–8 are strictly parenthetic to the main argument, as indeed is signalled by the truly functional anaphora of femina in line 29, whose effect is blurred in the text as transmitted. The form of the couplet, typical of Ovid, dictates that what is wanted is a variation on nil nisi lasciui, e.g. nec or, better, non proba. The source of the intrusive femina is not far to seek, though how precisely it ousted the original reading I do not pretend to guess.

In 4.621–6, Ovid describes Perseus' flight over the known world

In this poem, ascribed to Automedon, Nicetes' way of orating is compared first to a light breeze that strikes upon the rigging of a sailing vessel and then, when the breeze has increased to a wind, to the vessel itself as it runs over open water under full sail.

Two new manuscripts have come to my attention since I made a study of the MS. tradition of Seneca's Natural Questions. The first is Munich, Bayerische Staats-bibliothek, Clm 18961, part ii (foll. 25–46v), which I shall call Y, a late-ninth-century manuscript from Brittany or the lower Loire. It contains a short collection of theological and philosophical excerpts from a variety of authors, a collection emanating from the circle of Alcuin, probably from the generation after Alcuin himself. Included in the collection are three extracts from the preface of Book 1 of Seneca's Natural Questions. Since the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Seneca work hitherto known are from the twelfth century, it is of considerable interest to see how the text of the Natural Questions in these excerpts relates to the later MS. tradition.

When Seneca comes to describe the appearance of the monstrous bull which appears out of the sea to kill Hippolytus in answer to his father's curse, he uses (among other things) a metaphor of birth: the sea's wave is said to be ‘heavy with burdened womb’ (1019f.: onerato sinu / gravis unda portat). If line 1016 is genuine – it was athetized by Leo – the sea is said to be ‘pregnant with a monster’ (tumidumque monstro). The metaphor has not passed unnoticed in modern commentaries but it has not been fully appreciated. I want to examine further linguistic aspects of the metaphor, and to consider its significance in its literary context. Seneca is a writer who likes – as he himself acknowledges – to re-work tradition: all the more significant, then, when he introduces a conspicuous metaphor into his text which does not appear to have literary antecedents.

This line involves a variety of important points.

Commentators on the Annals naturally observe that the famous first sentence of Tacitus' preface (‘Urbem Romam a principio reges habuere’) alludes to the preface of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae (6.1 ‘Urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani’). But it seems that none of them has observed a further allusion to Sallust's preface in the last sentence of Tacitus', which is almost equally famous (1.1.3)

The recent publication of a new edition of Dionysius Periegetes, the first since 1861, and the first ever to provide adequate information about the MS. tradition, has no doubt stimulated many of us to re-read this author, a rotten geographer but a competent versifier and recycler of Alexandrian flosculi. The new recension is a distinct improvement on Müller's, and the collection of citations and parallels is a valuable complement to the critical apparatus. Here are half a dozen suggestions for further amelioration of the text.

These notes continue the sequence begun in ‘Some Emendations in the Text of Maximus of Tyre, Dialexeis 1–21 (Hobein)’, published in CQ 41 (1991), 566–71. References to the text are by number, page and line in Hobein's Teubner edition; R is the principal MS., Parisinus graecus 1962, U is Vaticanus graecus 1390, I is Laurentianus Conventi Soppressi 4; U and I, being descendants of R (as are all other surviving MSS. of Maximus), offer conjectures not alternative readings. My thanks go again to Donald Russell and David Sedley for salutary comments on earlier and rasher drafts.

The extant MSS. of the Pervigilium Veneris, which all derive from a single archetype, are unanimous in their reading at line 74. Yet, as is widely agreed, this reading cannot be correct. The poet is describing the descendants of Venus

In L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: a Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), it is stated by J. G. F. Powell (p. 122) and by M. D. Reeve (p. 327 n. 4) that MS. Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Lat. 4° 404 (s. ix), containing Cicero, De amicitia, and Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, is missing. Not so: it is currently held with numerous other Berlin MSS., including humanistic and musical autographs, at the Jagellonian Library in Cracow, where I saw it on 5 May 1992. Other classical MSS. from Berlin now held in Cracow are Lat. 4° 1 (Eutropius, Breviarium, and Victor Vitensis, Historia persecutions Africanae prouinciae, s. xi), 257 (Vergil, Bucolics 3.107–4.47, s. ix), 590 (Boethius, opuscula, s. xii), 939 (Boethius, Cons. Phil. with Remigius' commentary, s. x/xi; till 1935 Schloβ Maihingen, Fürstlich Öttingen-Wallensteinsche Bibliothek, I 2, lat. 4° 3), and 8° 102 (Statius, Achilleis, 1.375–513, 2.120–257, s. xiv).