So Diggle's recent text and apparatus criticus; so too its predecessor in the Oxford series (Murray). Advocates of πντα δ' ξεῖλον ϕ ϕβον have, however, been in a considerable majority, and include Porson, Elmsley, Bothe, Weil, Wecklein, Nauck, Paley, Verrall, Meridier, and, more recently, Schiassi (1967) and Ebener (1972). But Page's objection (ad loc.) cannot be lightly dismissed: ‘With ϕ ϕβον here, σο must be understood; and the ellipse seems intolerable.’ To this I would add what appears to have been largely disregarded, namely that the contextual and thematic significance of δμον is an even stronger argument in its favour. Medea is ἄπολις (255, cf. 645–53 [ἄπολις 646], 386), having lost not only her home in Colchis (31–5, 166–7, 798–801) but also her new home in Corinth (139, 275–81, 359–60, 435–8). In a sense the fate cruelly forced upon the daughters of Pelias by Medea (487 πντα τ' ξεῖλον δμον) is now visited upon Medea herself, who finds herself deserted and alone (513). This isolation brings with it the realization that to those to whom she should be ϕίλη she is now χθρ (her family in Colchis, 506–8), while those whom she should be able to regard as ϕλoι are now χθρ (Jason, 467; even her children, 36, 112–14, 116–17; cf. the pointed, programmatic νν δ' χθρ πντα κα νοσεῖ τ ϕλτατα in 16). Her response? As Medea had done in Iolcus, so δμον τε πντα συγχασʼ Ἰονος | ἔξετιτι γαας κτλ. (794–5; cf. 114 πς δμος ἔρροι).

In response to Iolaus' cry for help, the chorus in Held, enter at a run (βοηδροµοντεс cf. 121), and the Parodos takes a form appropriate to that. Instead of choral song-and-dance, what follows, after an exceptionally brief non-strophic ‘entry’-passage, is an amoibaion first between the Chorus-leader and Iolaus, then between the Chorus-leader and the Herald, musical only as featuring some ‘half-chanted’ sequences in the Chorus-leader's utterances.

Philocleon, confined to his house by his son Bdelycleon, appeals to the chorus of heliasts, expressing his eagerness to join them as they journey to their courts:

Antigone and Ismene know that the situation of their father's grave must remain a secret to all except Theseus; but Antigone cannot help suggesting to her sister that they make their way back in the hope of setting eyes upon the burial place of Oedipus. How, Ismene asks her, can this be right in the sight of heaven? θμις δ πς τάδ'στί; μν | οὐχ ρις;

In his article ‘Did the Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?’, CQ 40 (1990), 370–7, Edward M. Harris rightly casts doubt on the value of Lysias 1.30–5, which has generally been accepted as evidence that the Athenians did indeed regard seduction as the worse of the two crimes. Euphiletos in this speech is defending himself on a charge of murder, and, as Harris says (p. 375), ‘Euphiletus’ presentation of the Athenian statutes regarding rape and seduction is dictated by the rhetorical constraints of his case. It is not a reflection of widely held social attitudes.'

The poet Philitas was so thin, they say, that he had to wear lead weights on his shoes to avoid being blown away by a gust of wind. We have two versions of the anecdote. First Aelian, Varia Historia 9.14:

Duris of Samos is significant enough, among lost Hellenistic historians, for a paragraph or two to be devoted to him in most works on the history or literature of the period. For the last two centuries such paragraphs have been saying among other things that Duris went to Athens and studied under Theophrastus. But Athenaeus 128a, the source cited for this statement, does not support it unless a doubtful conjecture is admitted to the text.

The short treatise On the Cosmos, which most scholars believe to be not by Aristotle, has confidently been attributed to Aristotle by G. Reale and A. P. Bos. I do not wish to enter into their arguments for this attribution, because I believe it can be proved to be untenable.

To Munro's conjecture, which has been accepted by Diels (1923), S. B. Smith (1942), Bailey (1947), Büchner (1956), Martin (1959), and M. F. Smith (1982), there is a serious, possibly a fatal, objection: the genitive plural of hiems is a grammarians' figment and never occurs in classical Latin (TLL s.v. 2773.84); while Lachmann's conjecture is palaeographically improbable. Read ad gelidas rigidasque pruinas; rigidas was omitted by haplography, a fecund source of corruption, and hiemis then supplied from the context to repair the metre. Cf. 2.431 denique iam calidos ignis gelidamque pruinam, 2.521 hinc flammis Mine rigidis infesta pruinis, and, for the collocation of the two adjectives, 2.858 nec frigus neque item calidum tepidumque uaporem.

This is clearly meant to ‘speak’, and offer thereby some clue to the interpretation. But what it ‘says’ is debatable. Most modern edd. settle for Ipsit(h)illa as the least badly attested form. The prominence of bidding in the poem best accords with the assumptions that the stem is indeed ipsa connoting ‘mistress of the establishment’ (cf. 3.8; OLD ipse 12, OLD ipsimus; ipsula, Pl. Cist. 450, issulo et delicio suo CIL 6.12156; ipsuma, Petron. Sat. 75. 11) and that the denotation is something facetious like ‘Miss Bossy-wossy’, ‘Imperia’, ‘Your nibsy-wibsy’.

In his magisterial new commentary on the Amores J. C. McKeown alleges an ‘inconsistency’ or ‘flaw in the dramatic continuity’ between Amores 1.1 and 1.2: ‘whereas Ovid is fully aware in 1.1 that he is under Cupid's domination, he shows no such awareness in the opening lines of 1.2.’ Previously A. Cameron had used this ‘inconsistency’, together with the evident programmatic character of 1.2, as an indication that the second poem must in fact have been the first poem of one of the original five books of Amores; then when Ovid decided to reduce the number of books from five to three, he wanted to keep Esse quid hoc dicam and had no choice but to put it as near as possible the front of the first book, immediately after that book's own introductory poem. This reconstruction McKeown rightly rejects on the ground that 1.2's emphasis on Ovid's newness to love makes it out of place in any book other than the first.

In Ovid, Heroides 10.79ff. Ariadne starts to consider various dangers which to her mind threaten her life as that of any deserted woman (80). She lists some of these dangers in the following catalogue (83–8):

Poetic incompetence is often blamed for infelicities or incongruities which appear in the poems collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, and in many cases such censure is justified. However, in the passage which is the subject of this note, Ciris 297–300, it is possible to reinterpret the incongruity which critics have remarked: when the pertinent evidence from antiquity is adduced, the lines are revealed as a display of scientific and etymological doctrina.

Since Rose collected Petronius' ‘adaptions of Lucan’ found in the Bellum Civile, there has been renewed contention as to whether these adaptations are real or imagined, with George, Sullivan, and now Slater leading the debate.

There can be few Greek prose authors who outdo Plutarch in fondness for elaborate similes, and a determination to sustain at length vocabulary appropriate to both objects of comparison within the simile, once it is embarked upon. In the essay Quomodo adulescens (Mor. 32e) he uses a favourite image, in which a young man aspiring to be educated in quality literature is recommended to follow the example of the bee, which extracts material for its honey from the most pungent plants: μν οὖν μλιττα ϕυσικς ν τοῖς δριμνττοις ἄνθεσι κα ταῖς τραχντταις κνθαις ξανενρσκει τ λειτατον μλι κα χρησιμώτατον, οἱ δ παῖδες, ἂν ρθς ντρϕωνται τοῖς ποιμασιν, κα π τν ϕαλονς κα τπους ὑποψας χντων ἕλκειν τι χρσιμον μωσγπως μαθησναι κα ὠϕλιμον. In another such essay (De recta, Mor. 41e–42b) he elaborates this theme at greater length as follows:

Sic effata et osculis hiantibus filium diu ac pressule saviata proximas oras reflui litoris petit, plantisque roseis vibrantium fluctuum summo rore calcato ecce iam profundi mans sudo resedit vertice, et ipsum quod incipit velle, set statim, quasi pridem praeceperit, non moratur marinum obsequium: adsunt Nerei filiae chorum canentes et Portunus caerulis barbis hispidus et gravis piscoso sinu Salacia et auriga parvulus delphini Palaemon… (Met. 4.31.4ff.)

Damis is a character in, and his memoirs the putative source of, Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Many scholars have doubted the existence of these memoirs, some the very existence of the man. Against the latter party Graham Anderson has advanced an ingenious argument, which attempts to prove that the Damis whose existence has been doubted is identical with a bearer of the same name to whom existence has hardly ever been ascribed. His evidence comprises: (1) Lucian's dialogue Zeus the Tragedian, in which a certain Damis appears as the Epicurean tormentor of the popular divinities; (2) a tale now extant in mediaeval Persian, in which a philosopher named Dini performs a similar function; (3) the testimony of Origen that Moiragenes numbered among the men seduced by Apollonius ‘the illustrious Euphrates and a certain Epicurean’ (Contra Celsum 6.41). Between these reports he detects the following parallels:

All surviving manuscripts of the Dialexeis of Maximus of Tyre descend from the oldest, Parisinus Graecus 1962 (given the siglum R in Hobein's Teubner text of 1910). Where they diverge, they do so as a result either of error or of attempts at correction. The history of the conjectural emendation of the Dialexeis thus begins with the second oldest manuscript, Vaticanus Graecus 1390 (Hobein's U), which dates from the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Since that time, the most significant contributions have come from two scholars, one of the fifteenth century and one of the eighteenth: Zanobi Acciaiuoli, librarian at the monastery of San Marco in Florence, many of whose corrections found their way anonymously into the editio princeps of 1557 via the manuscript used by Stephanus; and Jeremiah Markland, whose ideas are recorded as an appendix to the second, posthumous edition of John Davies's Maximus, published in 1740. J. J. Reiske's edition of 1774–5 and Friedrich Duebner's of 1840 (rev. 1877) also contain valuable material. But the field is by no means yet picked clean: witness most recently the useful articles of Professors Koniaris and Renehan. I offer the following gleanings of my own.

Claudian's carm. min. 50 which is addressed ‘In Jacobum Magistrum Equitum’ has recently been the subject of a detailed study by J. Vanderspoel. In it he reviews what little we know about the career of Jacobus using as his second source in this matter the letter of Vigilius, bishop of Tridentum, to John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, the heading of which reports that the relics of the martyrs Sisinnius, Alexander and Martyrius reached Constantinople ‘per Jacobum virum illustrem’. Whilst I am willing to accept the argument that the relics must have been delivered by about A.D. 400, if not earlier, and that Jacobus received the office of magister equitum subsequent to this, I have some misgivings about the treatment afforded the earlier career of Jacobus, and it is to this matter which I wish to draw attention here.