The Corinthian piece belongs to the early series of pegasi with incuse pattern reverse. Due to the flattening of the under-type, a confident identification with one of the obverses illustrated by Ravel is impossible.

It has been claimed that there are no examples of overstriking of the earliest wide-flan staters of Magna Graecia on pegasi. This contention is now invalidated as far as Kroton is concerned.

‘Socratic irony’ is a familiar enough phrase. In the words of the Concise Oxford Dictionary it means the ‘simulation of ignorance as [a] means of confuting [one’s] adversary’ in argument. It is named after the philosopher Socrates, who was notorious for his use of the device as a means of discomforting his opponents without exposing himself to the risk of being shown to be wrong. Examples of Socratic irony abound in the early dialogues of Plato: the locus classicus for this unpopular trait is a disgusted outburst of Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic. Socrates has just explained why neither he nor Polemarchus has given a satisfactory account of justice— ‘You see, we have not the ability as I believe’—when Thrasymachus realizes the familiar trick being played on him.

The First Oration Against Stephanus stands apart from the other speeches delivered by Apollodorus which, though certainly spurious, are included in the Demosthenic corpus. It does not share their amateurish qualities and is commonly regarded as a genuine work of Demosthenes. But admirers of the orator would be happier if it could be proved spurious. It may, for all we know, have been an acceptable practice in the fourth century for Athenian speech-writers to write for both sides, but (like Plutarch) we cannot help thinking the worse of him if he supported Apollodorus in an attack on Phormio, after previously writing a speech for Phormio. The Pro Phormione was delivered in support of a paragraphe to show that Apollodorus had no basis for an action against Phormio. It made such an impression on the jury that they would not even listen to any reply, and Apollodorus now tries to recover himself by bringing an action for false evidence against Stephanum, who had been one of Phormio’s witnesses. Like the other speeches delivered by Apollodorus In Stephanum i seems to have been recognized and accepted by Callimachus in his collection of Demosthenic speeches, and Plutarch takes it to be genuine. Aeschines charges Demosthenes with letting Apollodorus see the speech that he wrote for Phormio, before it was delivered. He regards this an an indication of his lack of integrity, but says nothing about writing for both sides. It has been argued that Demosthenes wrote the speech as a political favour for Apollodorus, who shared his views about the Theoric Fund, but this explanation, though widely accepted by modern scholars, is not supported by any ancient writer.

In an earlier study I advanced a new interpretation of the poet’s purpose in the Fourth Hymn. Since the study was appended to an analysis of the Sixth Hymn and may have escaped notice, it may profit now from a fresh presentation with some new definition of detail.

As this word is so important for the student of Roman religion, and for the student of religion in general, since it has in western Europe helped to fix a pattern of thought in which ‘superstition‘ is contrasted with ‘religion’, it is natural that there should have been many attempts to explain its semantic origin, i.e. how the historical senses have come from that of‘standing over’.

It was many years after the last premiere of a Terentian comedy that the first attempts to write the history of Latin poetry appeared. Scholars had available little documentary material regarding the poets of the late third and early second centuries except the texts of poems, dates of performance of so-called carmina in priestly archives and of so-called fabulae in magisterial archives, and inscriptions on tombstones. These poets were without exception slaves or non-Roman clients of the great aristocratic families and their persons were not well regarded in the community at large. Neither the attitude to poetry of Roman society nor the example of Greek historiography permitted the chroniclers of Roman public life to take account of them. The poets who wrote for the theatre of fifth-century Athens came for the most part from well-regarded citizen families and practised an honoured craft. Although those of them who wrote comedies had much to say about Athenian public life and although their prejudices tended to correspond with his own the great Thucydides had ignored them. Their first biographers found themselves as badly off for contemporary documentary material as Roman writers were to be and yet by the exercise of judgement and fancy in interpreting the extant texts succeeded in constructing extensive narratives. The Roman writers took over Greek methods here as in other areas.

The stanza presents a number of difficulties:

(1) the grammatical structure of memorem; (2) the identity of Tarquin and hence the meaning of superbos; (3) the propriety of a reference to Cato.

As often in Horace an examination of the structure of the ode will help in the solution of problems within a stanza.

The clear reference to Pindar’s Second Olympian in verses 1-3 is an indication that the ode will be in Horace’s ‘Pindaric style’, in which there is a characteristic development of his thought in groups of stanzas. In this case the ode is constructed in triads of stanzas, the nearest approach Horace could make to the structure of a Pindaric ode. The ode may be analysed as follows:

In his article ‘Notes and Conjectures on the Astronomica of Manilius’, Antichthon ii (1968), 63 ff., of which he has been kind enough to send me a copy, Mr D. B. Gain discusses the following passage:

687 artibus Housman, urbibus Ω 689 Pella Schrader, ilia Ω 690 utrisque Gain, ripis Ω

Virtually all modern editors and commentators regard this dialogue as non-Lucianic, despite its presence in the best manuscripts. The three most distinguished Lucianic scholars of this century, Helm, Bompaire, and Macleod are all of this persuasion. Their usual objections are based on the alleged inferiority of the Greek style and language employed in the piece, and on the grounds of its inferior satirical qualities and general lack of inspiration. By contrast, I hope to show in this paper that these objections can be rebutted, and that there is no good reason to reject the work. I believe that the dialogue does contain some of Lucian’s best characteristics, and that it fits into the general context of second-century discussions of Demosthenes very effectively.

This statement appears to overlook an informative epistle of Cyprian (Ep. 39), written before the termination of the persecution of Decius. Cyprian is still in his self-imposed exile (which ended shortly after Easter—March 23—A.D. 251) and he is writing about events that have taken place during this same Decian persecution. The letter is, therefore, a contemporary document, for the incidents described cannot have occurred—at the maximum—much more than twelve months previously.

It may be helpful to the non-specialist for me to make, by way of introduction, some general observations on the use of similes by the poets from whom my examples are taken.

Already with the similes of the Iliad and the Odyssey it is apparent that we have to do both with a repertoire of themes that have become traditional and at the same time with a considerable number of verbal pictures which have the appearance of being the free invention of a particular poet. This situation remains broadly true of the similes of later Greek epic, but with the major difference that at least with several of the surviving poems from the Hellenistic period onwards the traditional becomes relatively much less prominent than the freely original, both in subject-matter and in form. However, a point that must be stressed at the outset is the sustained effectiveness of the Homeric similes as models and sources of inspiration. That Homeric dependence for subject-matter should be more prominent in the similes than in the narrative of later epics is only to be expected, except perhaps in such works as Quintus’ Posthomerica, where there is a close affinity with the narrative of the Homeric epics, and to a large extent dependence in formal expression goes together with thematic dependence.