A cursory glance at the reports of the later students of harmonic theory is enough to give a clear if perhaps artificially systematic picture of the character and relations of the major conflicting schools of thought in the first century or so A.D. In the centre of the field are the supposed followers of Aristoxenus, lined up against the forces of the so-called Pythagoreans. Each side is linked with a more or less lunatic fringe; to the right of the Pythagoreans those mathematical extremists who find no place in harmonic studies for αἴσθησις at all, and to the left of the more empirical Aristoxeneans a collection of persons known as ὀργανικοί, whose work, whatever it was, is based wholly in perception and in familiarity with the properties of musical instruments, and who find no place for theory or for the pursuit of the αἰτίαι of harmonic truths.

Like everything else that Mr. T.C.W. Stinton writes, his recent article ‘“Si credere dignum est”: some expressions of disbelief in Euripides and others’ displays a range of learning and a subtlety of argument with which few of us could attempt to compete. If I now take issue with his interpretation of one particular passage, I am certainly not doing so in any spirit of rivalry or depreciation of his achievements. I am, however, emboldened to write this article by his frank admission, concerning his account of HF 1340-6, ‘I am not sure that I now believe it myself’ (p. 89, n. 56). Where Stinton is in doubt about his own interpretation, it may not be presumptuous for a lesser mortal to advocate another.

In any exchange, information streams back and forth in numerous channels. This truism is worth recalling when the exchange in question is between scholars, where the temptation, reenforced by tradition, is to focus on the obvious intellectual content and ignore the rest. But no matter how strictly the writers seem to discuss only ‘objective’ matters, there is always a nonintellectual component present, and if the social and psychological context is available or can be reconstructed, then the biographer or historian finds much besides the issues discussed. In this exchange of letters between the Cambridge scholar, Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), the latter makes some keen observations about the limited value of the comparative method so far as classical studies are concerned. But beneath the text of these letters exists a personal ‘subtext’, which permits us to read the letters in a fresh or unexpected light.

The St. Andrews University Library manuscript 36326, containing correspondence addressed to W. M. Lindsay, chiefly on the subjects of Latin palaeography and textual criticism, preserves two communications from Housman, previously unpublished. The first (no. 202, ii) was written in 1901 in the form of a postcard, the second is a letter of 1903 (202, i). I present them as an addendum to The letters of A. E. Housman, ed. H. Maas (London, 1971) and his ‘Additions and Corrections to The letters of A.E. Housman’, Housman Society Journal 2 (1975) 33-5.

Plays, we say, are about people, about people doing and saying things. What they say and do gives us access to the kind of people they are – their personalities, their individuality, their ‘character’. And we find people interesting. Simply, crudely put, this is the basis of what we call our interest in dramatic character. It is in her clear-sighted attention to this simple but central fact that Mrs. Easterling's essay on ‘Presentation of character in Aeschylus’ is at its most effective. But as we go on to ask further questions, about precisely what our interest in dramatic personality amounts to, about what it springs from and what are its necessary conditions in dramatic and theatrical form, further discriminations become necessary. I am not at all sure, for example, that it is true, as Mrs. Easterling suggests, that ‘the people and events of Aeschylean drama … convince us with the same kind of blinding authenticity as we find in Shakespeare and George Eliot'. We may have to distinguish between very different modes of authenticity. Again, Mrs. Easterling's appeal to ‘human intelligibility’ seems to me not without ambiguity. This paper is an attempt to forward discussion of dramatic personality in the context of Greek tragedy by examining some of the ambiguities inherent in the concept and to offer some possible discriminations. It is a contribution to an argument rather than a statement of a position.

The twentieth century has been so begrudging to Timon of Phlius that he could be forgiven for identifying himself with his misanthropic namesake. About a hundred and fifty of his ‘glänzenden Sillen’ (the phrase is Wilamowitz's) survive, but in Albin Lesky's Geschichte der griechischen Literatur Timon gets only a third of the space devoted to Anaximander from whom we possess one possible sentence. Serious work on Timon largely came to a stop with Hermann Diels who edited the fragments and testimonia in Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (Berlin, 1901), a book which is as difficult to come by as the older and much fuller study of Timon by C. Wachsmuth in Sillographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1885). In spite of his skilful parody of Homer and his Aristophanic versatility in language (some sixty neologisms, many of them comic formations, occur in the fragments), Timon has been ignored by those who give such generous attention to Hellenistic poetry. Many fragments raise at least one major textual difficulty. A new edition and literary study of the material is badly needed.

The text of Catullus is notoriously corrupt, and though much has been healed, something remains to be done. An article may still be useful if it encourages scepticism and speculation. I have found Baehrens the best commentator for this particular purpose; for information about the manuscripts I rely on Mynors. The text printed is that of V where I wish to discuss it, but it is sometimes silently altered where I do not. Textual variants are mentioned only where they are relevant to the argument.

Some reviewers of my little book, Vitruvius and later Roman building manuals (VLMB), express the wish that I had produced my own text of the Treatise De Diversis Fabricis Architectonicae, which can now be assigned to Marcus Cetius Faventinus, instead of just reprinting the text given by Valentin Rose in his Editio Major of Vitruvius (Leipzig 1867).

On the whole, I agree with them; and having learnt about the texts of Vitruvius and Faventinus, I feel I can briefly list the handful of alterations that I would now make in the latter. The list is so short, that perhaps it could be pasted on an endpaper of my booklet.

Since 1867, as I noted, the only direct addition to our knowledge of the little treatise has come from the manuscript S, discovered at Schlettstadt in Alsace in 1871 and now put in its proper place among Vitruvian manuscripts as a fairly late copy of the text that served also as the archetype for H and for the common source (also vanished) of E and G. S not only gives us the name of the author – the only known manuscript to do so – but also the only uncial text down to a point in the thirteenth chapter corresponding to p.298, line 19 of Rose. All the manuscripts of Faventinus known to Rose in 1867 were, by contrast, in minuscule.