The view that the younger Pliny was sent to the province of Pontus et Bithynia (Bithynia for short) as a ‘financial expert’ who would deal with the accounts of the cities has been thoroughly and properly discredited. Pliny in his province did all the things that his predecessors and successors did or might have done. His funerary inscription at Comum shows him to have been legatus pro praetore consulari potestate, an imperial legate, but with consular power; the regular governors had been proconsuls, men appointed by the senate for one year only after drawing lots for the post with their fellows of equal seniority. But in spite of their title they had been only ex-praetors, while Pliny had held the consulship; hence his cansularis potestas, which secured him the same number of fasces as they had enjoyed, one more than he could have held as a plain legatus Augusti pro praetore. Pliny was a governor of superior standing, chosen by Trajan on the strength of a decree of the senate, to take full charge of the province and to correct all the abuses that were rampant there (‘quoniam multa in ea emendanda apparuerint’, 32.2); and he died in office near the end of his second year of tenure.

Just as(pace Blaydes and Dawe) ὒβριζ φυτει τ⋯ραννον, Sophokles' Oidipous continues to beget misunderstanding. One can guarantee that any conversation about the play will soon produce any one of at least four large-scale misconceptions regarding it. One of these is discussed here, not so much for the purpose of dispelling it, as in the hope that such discussion will lead to some general conclusions about the dramatic technique of the Greek tragedians.

Among the general questions that arise in analysing a culture's outlook on its fauna are the following: Where do animals belong in the world-view of that culture, in their cosmogony or historical mythology, and how do these aetiological beliefs reflect upon the economic position of animals? What is the range of emotional attitudes towards man's enigmatic and uncanny half-brothers, especially domesticated species? Are animals used in entertainment? Questions such as these may be further refined by determining which species are domesticated, which hunted; which are eaten by man, which taboo; which animals does man sacrifice or worship? Are animals kept as pets, and if so, what kinds of names does a culture give them–human names or abstract names embodying a spiritual quality or force in nature? To what extent are these non-verbal creatures a substitute for affection or sadistic punishment, or a target for aggressive or hostile feelings? In other words, what qualities does man project onto animals? Or put slightly differently, which powers does he attribute to the animal? Is an animal thought capable of curing illness, for example? And finally, what are some of the recurrent symbols that emerge for a given animal in legend or myth?

It is a commonplace in the criticism of Attic drama to dwell on its severe, starkly unsympathetic treatment of monarchia, the rule of a single man. The often violent dislike of tyrannical government illustrated in the extant plays has been largely responsible for the widespread assumption among scholars that the attitude of fifth-century Athenians to monarchic rule was one of unrelieved hostility. Certainly it can hardly be doubted that the subsequent portrayal of the tyrant in Attic prose literature as a monster of depravity owes much to the art of Aeschylus and his successors, or, again, that this marked antipathy to sole rule reflects to a considerable extent the feelings of the dramatists' contemporaries.

In current texts of Propertius the first elegy of Book 4 is printed as one continuous poem of 150 lines. But at the same time most editors show a break after line 70 and supply a subheading, such as the name HOROS (Butler and Barber, Schuster, Barber in the Oxford text, Luck, Fedeli, Pasoli) or IA (Butler) or IB (Camps), to distinguish the second half of the poem.

It may seem strange to link the Roman Empire with a Himalayan kingdom which hardly gets a mention in most standard works on Roman history, but in fact during the second and early third centuries A. D. these two powers enjoyed a cordial and mutually profitable relationship which was of considerable economic importance to both. From the end of the first century A. D. to the middle of the third century the Kushans controlled what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, parts of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, and much of the Ganges plain. Their history has proved difficult to reconstruct, since they left no historical writing, and even the chronology of their kings is still disputed, but enough is now known for us to begin to piece together, though still somewhat tentatively, the strange and exotic relationship between this distant state and the Roman world, and perhaps in the process to contribute from Roman history to the problems of Kushan dating.