False generalisations have often been made about the use of hyperbaton in Latin prose. According to Hofmann-Szantyr, for instance, ‘die klass. Prosa geht im Gebrauch des Hyperbatons…kaum über die Praxis des Aldateins hinaus'. The same scholars also imply that even when Cicero and Caesar do separate a substantive from its attribute, the separating word is seldom a verb. Again, E. Fraenkel, while showing that long disjunctions are common in Cicero, has maintained that hyperbaton ‘vielmehr ist… in der Umgangssprache zuhause’.

E. Skard has recendy pointed out the frequency with which Cornelius Nepos uses hyperbaton of the kind which comprises a substantive separated from its attribute by a verb. Since Skard accepts the above assertions of Hofmann-Szantyr, he is led to suggest that Nepos must have been following a Greek master. The favoured candidate is Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Dionysius not only has hyperbaton more often than any earlier Greek prose author; his work περὶ ἐνδόξων ἀνδρῶν may have been a source for some of Nepos' biographies.

It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the history of one type of hyperbaton in Latin prose, that consisting of a verb standing between a substantive and its adjective (henceforth for convenience referred to as ‘verbal hyperbaton’). It will be demonstrated that, however easy disjunction might seem in a synthetic language, our device was artistic rather than natural to ordinary speech. The statements of Hofmann-Szantyr mentioned above will be shown to be inaccurate, and Skard's hypothesis to be unnecessary.

I continue on die lines set out in the last volume but one of these Proceedings. 1. C. II. 2. 19–20 numero beatorum / eximit Virtus (Prahaten). The noun beatus is well established in classical verse as well as prose, although naturally it never reached the substantival status of bonus or honestus. D. R. Shackleton Bailey's repointing of 1. 37. 9–10 contaminato cum grege turpium, / morbo uirorum, etc.,2 assumes a noun tur pis; thus Hor. S. 1. 6. 63–4 qui turpi secernis hones turn / non patre praeclaro, sed uita et pectore puro, A.P. 213 rusticus urbano confusus, tur pis honesto. These two passages suggest that it was the likeness of such terms as bonus or honestus that facilitated this usage. A search in the materials of the Latin Thesaurus (for which I am much obliged to Dr W. Ehlers) shows that this development is, as one might expect, much older than Horace. I am not thinking of Pl. Poen. 338 (where the notion is ‘plain, ugly’, promoted by the contrast with pulchra), but Cic. Att. x. 8. 2 turpissimorum honores, cf. Sen. Dial. VII. 8. ι nec minus turpes dedecus suum quam honestos egregia delectant, 24. 3 in turpes indignos que, Quint. I.O. III. 38 honestis contrasted with apud turpes.

Shackleton Bailey pays tribute to Bendey's taste when he said ‘in illa locutione, uirorum turpium morbo, non agnosco elegantiam Flacci’, while (rightly) refusing the same critic's conjecture opprobriorum for morbo uirorum. At first I found it hard to believe that turpium could be divorced from morbo uirorum, the words immediately following. But now I think that the pun morbo uirorum, ‘men only in vice’, is highly persuasive, and likely, even in a text without punctuation, to be effective in dissociating uirorum from turpium.

My concern is with the account in Ennius’ Annals of Romulus and Remus and the foundation of Rome, in particular with the verses which Cicero made his brother Quintus quote at Diu.I. 107 (= Ann. 77-96 V2)

If we remember anything about Cicero's political ideas, it is that he believed in the right and duty of the senate to exercise supremacy in Rome, but that he also advocated a concordia ordinmi, an alliance between and recognition of the common interests of senators and equites, to whom property and the status quo were sacred. Closely connected with this is the idea of a consensus omnium bonorum, a wider alliance to include most of the plebs, and Italy. In the service of this ideal of unity he believed that the conservative statesman should be concordiae causa sapienter popularis, though he should consult the true interests of the people even more than their wishes; and that all government should be mild and conciliatory. These are the views by which we distinguish him from his more obstinate optimate contemporaries, above all Cato, who are less flexible, more rigidly reactionary. Although, since Strasburger's famous study of Concordia Ordinum, students of Cicero ought to have been prepared to pursue some of these beliefs of his back into the Roman past, too many historians and biographers still give the impression that they were Cicero's own invention (and an unhappy and unrealistic one too, it is often implied). But this is rash. Cicero, pace some of his detractors, was an intelligent man; but he was not a man of deeply original mind, as would be generally admitted. His greatness lay not in originality, but in the life and form that he could give to the Roman tradition, enriching or illuminating it, sometimes even criticising it, from his knowledge of Greek history and thought.

We should be chary therefore of supposing that Cicero's political programme was wholly his own; and, where a programme on a practical level is concerned, we should probably look more closely for Roman than for Greek sources. The first place to search is of course in a man's immediate family background, its position, traditions and contacts. This is true of all ages and places; but it is especially true of Rome. In the recent and justified reaction against the idea of fixed family parties, allied to or warring with certain other families from generation to generation, we are in danger of forgetting that family tradition in a broad sense was often very important. Cicero explains in the de officiis how one should imitate not only the maiores in general, but one's own maiores in particular – thus successive Scaevolae have become legal experts, and Scipio Aemilianus emulated the military glory of the first Africanus.

In PCPS N.S. XV (1969), 69 ff. I defined the triadic structure of P. Oxy. 2735 fr. I and suggested that the contents of this and other fragments would seem more at home in Ibycus than in Stesichorus. It was already clear that not all the fragments of this papyrus come from the same poem, but I had not yet noticed that the number of poems represented is probably at least three, and that there are now further reasons for preferring Ibycus as author.

The following two fragments belong to poems different from each other and from fr. 1:

(a) P. Oxy. 2735 fr. II

(i) The tradic structure (top of column)

(a), (b), (c) with paragraphos mark stanza-ends according to the three schemes described immediately below.

Though the left-hand margin is nowhere preserved, I take it as self-evident that these are the beginnings of lines. It is likely, in Ibycus or Stesichorus, that eighteen lines will cover at least about two-thirds, perhaps the whole, of a triad; and in fact it seems obvious that strophe, antistrophe, and epode are represented here, although it is not quite certain where the stanzas end.

There are three choices:

(a) 1–6 = ant., 7–11 = ep., 12–17 = str., 18 ff. = ant.

(b) 1–5 = ant., 6–10 = ep., 11–16 = str., 17 ff. = ant.

(c) 1–5 = str., 6–16 = ant., 17 ff. = ep.

Though several leading Greek scholars expressed agreement with my theory (PCPS N.S. XIV (1968), 65–74) that our bifid manuscript tradition of Longus derives from two recensions by Longus himself, I had not expected it to go unchallenged, especially as the lecture in which I set it out necessarily could not explain in detail many passages of which the sense is not immediately apparent. Therefore I welcome Mr M. D. Reeve's detailed criticisms (PCPS N.S. XV (1969), 75–85). I am confident that, given space, I could refute all his objections; but I confine these remarks to a few by way of examples.

In the first passage that Mr Reeve discusses (p. 76), II.19.1, we may examine closely the author's earlier draft, as I think it, reflected in the manuscript A (Laurentianus, Conventi soppressi 627). It runs, with my punctuation:

Yet the affair had not altogether ended. But the men from Methymna, returning with difficulty to their own city, wounded, while the local inhabitants were luxuriating and being at ease, supplicated them to come to their help, and convened an assembly of the citizens, and, proffering suppliants' olive-branches, supplicated to be thought worthy of revenge.