It has commonly been assumed that the work of four books by Moeragenes on Apollonius of Tyana, to which Philostratus refers disparagingly when discussing the source material for his own work, represented a viewpoint hostile to the sage, and was for this reason discarded by Philostratus. Hand in hand with this assumption has gone the view that Moeragenes presented Apollonius as an undesirable μγος, a wizard and sorcerer, or even a charlatan pretending to be a μγος. These views have recently been challenged by E. L. Bowie, who rejects both, arguing not only that Moeragenes was favourable to Apollnius, but also that he presented him as an intellectual philosopher, a figure instantly recognisable from Philostratus' account. This leaves Bowie in some difficulty when he attempts to explain Philostratus' strong disapproval of Moeragenes' work. His only suggestion is that ‘the main reason for Philostratus’ hostile attitude is clearly the usual ground for ancient polemic: Moeragenes' was the standard work when he wrote'. In this paper I propose to argue, on the basis of a re-examination of the available evidence, that there was a considerable divergence between Philostratus' and Moeragenes' views of Apollonius, and that this offers a more substantial and satisfactory explanation of the later author's disapproval of his predecessor.

Claudian's poem In Rufinum is a historical epic with at least two unusual features: the first book contains many of the standard elements of a formal invective, and the two books were composed and recited some eighteen months apart, since Book One celebrates the death of Rufinus on 27 November 395 as a very recent event (i, pr. 15 ff.), while the preface to Book Two refers explicitly to Stilicho's expedition to Greece in 397. The interval in composition is matched by a gap in content: Book One treats Rufinus' career down to 393, with some forward references to 395, explicitly marked as such (especially lines 321/2: Hunnorum laturus opem, quos adfore bello norat), while the narrative of Book Two begins from the death of Theodosius on 17 January 395 (ii. 1 ff.) and ends with the lynching of Rufinus on 27 November 395. Claudian thus omits any account of Rufinus' activities during the campaign of Theodosius against Eugenius in 394 and the emperor's last months in Italy. Claudian's careful chronological ordering of his material is deliberate, but since it has been obscured in recent discussions of the In Rufinum, it needs to be reinstated.

In a recent discussion note1 C. D. C. Reeve investigates the reasons for Heraclitus assigning a primary position to fire, as contrasted with the other substances like earth and water which go to make up the physical universe. (I shall henceforth refer to these substances as ‘elements‘; the term is strictly incorrect for Heraclitus, in that the substances can change into one another, but it is a convenient form of shorthand.) Reeve considers and rejects other reasons for the primacy of fire that have been put forward, such as the symbolic associations of fire, the role of fire in governing the universe, or the claim that everything becomes fire at some time or other. Rather, Reeve argues, the primacy of fire in Heraclitus' physical theory can be explained purely in terms of that physical theory.

ὓβριс φυτε⋯ει τ⋯ραννον ὕβριс κτλ. Thus the MSS, Schol. (= Suda u 15) and Stobaeus 4.8. 11 (p. 298 H.). ὕβριν φυτε⋯ει τυραννον ὕβριс κτλ. Thus Blaydes, followed recently by R. P. Winnington-Ingram, JHS 91 (1971), 126 = Sophocles. An interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), p. 192 (‘What is positively gained by making this correction? Three things’); R. D. Dawe, Sophoclis Tragoediae (Teubner, 1975), i. 156 and Sophocles. Oedipus Rex (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 18, 61,182 f. (‘We may be sure of this for two reasons’); R. W. B. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles' Tragedies (Oxford, 1980), p. 164 (‘The resulting sense is admirable’); J. Diggle, CRn.s. 32(1982), 14(‘My heart warms… What is drastic about altering three letters?’).

K. J. Dover, in Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978), p. 125 n. 1, observes: ‘My interpretation ad loc. (sc. in his Commentary), that drosos is Cowper's secretion, appearing when the boy's penis has been erected by titillation, is far-fetched (I am bound to agree with some reviewers on this), but no other interpretation so far seems to me to pay enough attention to the semantics of drosos or to explain why Right regards the beauty of “drosos and down” as incompatible with anointing below the navel’.

The epithet σστομος has generally been accepted as deriving from δι and στ⋯μα (σστομος) and meaning ‘double-mouthed’, ‘with two entrances’, ‘with two exits’ or ‘with two branchings’. In these senses it certainly suits caves, harbours, rivers, and roads.

There is still some confusion over the literary evidence for the methods by which children and others learnt to write in the ancient world. There are four main sources: the analogy between the methods of the grammatistes and the function of the laws in Plato, Protagoras 326c–d, three passages in Quintilian (1. 1. 27; 5. 14. 31; 10. 2. 2), a passage from one of Seneca's letters (Ep. 94. 51) and a short analogy in Maximus of Tyre (p. 20 Hobein, lines 13-16).

It is recognized that Romans of the late Republic did not normally address or refer to one another by praenomen alone (for the conventions, see J. N. Adams, ‘Conventions of naming in Cicero’, CQ n.s. 28 [1978], 145 ff.; J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens, ch. 11; Fordyce on Catullus 68 init.). Most instances in which the praenomen is used alone are easily explicable (see Adams, p. 161); either the persons concerned are members of the same family, with names otherwise identical (‘Marce fili’, ‘Quinte frater’; ‘Luci’ in de Fin. 5. 71, cf. 15, etc.), or the praenomen itself is particularly distinctive and aristocratic (Appius Claudius or Servius Sulpicius).

puri in 1026 can hardly be right. Bed-wetting is normally confined to children, and tum quibus…in 1030 presupposes the mention of an earlier stage of life in the previous sentence. And what does puri mean? Munro and Bailey translated it as ‘cleanly people’ (or ‘persons’), though Munro himself pointed out that the Latin for this was mundi rather than puri, and in any case there is no reason to suppose that in ancient Rome cleanly people were addicted to bed-wetting. Giussani, followed by Merrill and by Leonard and Smith, tried to give the required sense by supposing that puri meant ‘innocents’ and hence ‘children’, an expedient which is very far from convincing. Emendation seems called for. M. F. Smith in the 1982 edition of the Loeb Lucretius adopts Avancius' multi,2 but this does not provide the reference we need to the age of those concerned.

…vel quod res omnes timide gelideque ministrat,

dilator, † spe longus, iners (p)avidusque futuri,

diffcilis, querulus…

I agree with Brink, and other editors referred to by him ad loe, that spe longus in Horace's description of the typical old man's character cannot be made to give sense. For earlier attempts at emendation, see Brink's note (p. 239 of his commentary). Most of those who have tried to emend the passage concentrate on longus, and are reluctant to relinquish spe: this is largely due to the parallel with Aristotle's account of the character of old men in Rhetoric 2. 13. 1389b 13ff., in which (1390a4) they are said to be, among other things it seems to me that this parallel should not be pressed too far. There is much in Aristotle that is not in Horace, and nothing to suggest close and detailed dependence. The parallel can only be relevant if spe longus can be turned into a reasonable Latin equivalent for Otherwise there is no good reason to suppose that spe is any less likely to be corrupt than longus.

The argumentum of contr. 2. 4 reads as follows (quoted from my own provisional text, which I hope will be published in some years):

Abdicavit quidam filium. Abdicatus se contulit ad meretricem. Ex ilia sustulit filium. Aeger ad patrem misit; cum venisset, commendavit ei filium suum et decessit. Adoptavit puerum <pater>. Ab altero [pater] filio accusatur dementiae.

J. K. Evans' well-documented article, ‘Wheat production and its social consequences in the Roman world’, correctly makes the point that ‘the evidence with regard to wheat yields is at once meagre and plainly contradictory’. The difficulty in assessing yields arises, of course, from the character of the available source material; namely, literary sources. The information comes from the hands of men such as Cicero and Varro who were concerned with matters other than specific data on the cultivation and production of grains, and who probably never sowed or reaped a modius of wheat. What was lacking until recently was a bona-fide document from the hands of a farmer or a community intimately concerned with the growing of wheat. We now have one such document, P. Colt 82 of the seventh century A.D., that fills a gap in the evidence for yields for both wheat and barley.