‘Der Text der Tragodien des Seneca ist in zwei Rezensionen iiberliefert.Die bessere (E) ist vertreten durch die Haupths. Laur. 37, 13 (Etruscus) s. xi/xii.… Zu der schlechteren, stark verfalschten Rezension (A) gehoren die iibrigen Hss., von denen keine iiber die Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts zuriickgeht.’

The MS. 410 of the Bibliotheque publique of Valenciennes consists of 70 leaves of vellum, written in Caroline minuscules in the 11th century. The titles Ivvenalis liber primvs incipit and Explicit Ivvenalis. Incipit Persivs are in small rustic capitals. The MS. contains Juvenal and Persius in that order. The last leaf but one has been cut out, that containing Pers. vi. 8 dant–vi. 71 exits. Juvenal, Sat. xvi, follows at the end of Sat. xiv, fol. 56v: then Sat. xv follows on Sat. xvi, fol. 57v, after which comes Persius, fol. 60v, beginning with the Choliambi, which precede Sat. i. The MS. has usually 32, occasionally 34, lines on a page. There are interlinear glosses, but no scholia, and no titles to the Satires, with three exceptions: Pers. iv. ‘In hac satira reprehendit illos qui honores cupiebant’ Juv. v. ‘Ad trebium loquitur’ xi. ‘De uictus comparatione.’

The text of Fronto is in a very corrupt state, and the startling discrepancies which exist between different collations, as well as the unintelligibility of many of the readings deciphered, seem to justify a good deal of conjectural emendation. I append some attempts to complete or restore the sense in some passages of the Greek letters which seem hitherto to have been left in an unsatisfactory state. Not having had access to the MS, I have relied on the collations of Naber and others for a statement of what is to be found in the palimpsest.

The narrow limits of the apparatus criticus in the new Clarendon Press edition have excluded these suggestions, which may find a place here:

I xxix, 4 Quaedam (nomina) etiam facta sunt ex nominum deriuatione, ut a prudentia ‘prudens ’; quaedam etiam ex uocibus, ut a garrulitate ‘garrulus.’ Although garrulus is the traditional reading, the derivation elsewhere (X 114) of garrulus from graculus, ‘a jackdaw,’ suggests that we may read here ut a garrulitate ‘graulus.’ For the jackdaw's name in Late Latin developed from gragulus to graulus (Fr. grolle).

That the hiatus in 33 is inadmissible in an Augustan poet has long been recognised by the critical. Of the three other examples, Prop. II xv. 1 ‘o me felicem! o nox mihi Candida et o tu,’ ib. xxxii. 45 ‘haec eadem ante illam (add iam) inpune et Lesbia fecit,’ and Manil. I 795 ‘emeritus caelum et Clausi magna propago,’ only the first can claim any excuse, on the ground of the speaker's excitement and the pause after felicem, but, metre apart, even there ‘nox, o’ seems a better order. But the corruption has had perforce to be retained in our texts through lack of a reasonable correction. The line is perfectly sound Latin as it stands and, though not poetry, is sense.

. That fat animals are bad breeders was well known to the ancients; Aristotle insists upon it several times. is, as Dr. Hunt observes, an epithet of the willow in Homer, but the explanations he quotes from Hesychius do not look very satisfactory; the willow was thought to ‘lose its fruit’ because it was supposed never to produce seed at all. Hence means ‘barren willows,’ and so Cercidas means ‘barren fat,’ i.e., fat which prevents a man from breeding.

Though the problem of the Homeric augment eventually needs a rather intricate handling, it can at first be stated quite simply. Briefly, the facts are these:

A. True present-aorists, such as are seen in the similes and gnomes, take the augment idiomatically. In the whole of the similes there are only sixteen unaugmented aorists; three of the instances are difficult (4, Δ 279, O 682), but the rest could be emended by slight changes.

B.Iteratives do not take the augment; ν 7 is the only certain exception.

In the course of the preparation of the introductory article on ‘Drama’ for Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, my attention was directed, not only to the problem of the origin of this type of drama, but also to the basal meaning of the Greek term . It need scarcely be said that the rise of tragedy is almost universally connected with the cult of Dionysos (for the most recent exponents of this theory see Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 568 sqq., Cambridge, 1908; Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, p. 1436, Munich, 1906; Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, v. 229 sqq., Oxford, 1909). On the other hand, the theory has been advanced by Crusius (Preussische Jahrbiicher, lxxiv. [1893], 394), Hirt (Indogermanen, pp. 477 sq., 727, Strassburg, 1905–07), and especially Ridgeway (Address before the Hellenic Society, May, 1904 [cf. Athenaeum, No. 3995, p. 660, and Maas in Wochenblatt für klassische Philologie, 1904, pp. 779–783]; and particularly in his Origin of Tragedy, Cambridge, 1910), that tragedy arose not from the Dionysos-cult, but from the desire to honour and appease the dead. It is to this latter theory that I strongly incline, and I feel that tragedy can be connected with the cult of Dionysos only through this deity's aspect of a chthonic god who gave release from the lower world and who was later identified with Attis, Adonis, and Osiris (cf. Harrison, chap. viii.; Farnell, chap, v.; Gruppe, pp. 1407–1440).