Thirty years ago, H. Flashar discussed the introduction to an anonymous commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates. The text contains an interesting picture of Hippocrates as a culture hero, who saved suffering humanity by the introduction of systematic medicine. The first section of this introduction offers some complicated problems. It ends with an extremely long and difficult sentence, which, has not yet been explained quite satisfactorily, and it contains a curious use of the verb σαρκόω, combined with τν ϕύσιν, which has led Flashar to suspect Christian influence. These two points are the subject of the first part of this paper.

Heraclitus B 126 D.-K. (=42 Marcovich) occurs in a scholion on Tzetzes' commentary on the Iliad. According to the first edition by G. Hermann (Draconis, Stratonicensis liber de metris poeticis, loannis Tzetzae Exegesis in Homeri Iliadem, Leipzig, 1812) on which all editors of Heraclitus have based their text, it reads as follows: τ ψυχρ θρεται, θερμν ψχεται, 〈γρν〉 αὐανεται, καρϕαλον νοτζετ〈αι〉 (p. 126, 17–19).

The phrase ὑγρòν ὓδωρ in Anacreontic 33.22 requires more explanation than has until now been offered: the parallel passages cited by M. L. West in his edition (Carmina Anacreontea, Leipzig, 1984), namely Ovid, Ars Am. 3.224, ‘nuda Venus madidas exprimit imbre comas’ and Her. 18.104, ‘madidam…imbre comam’, present the same image, but with quite a different vocabulary, whilst Patricia A. Rosenmeyer (The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition, Cambridge, 1992, p. 80) regards it only as an example of tautology characteristic of the Anacreontic corpus. But it is by no means unique, and, both for this reason and in the context of the nature of the whole poem, it is capable of further elucidation.

In the fourth chapter of the Hippocratic treatise De mortis II 1 an unnamed illness is discussed which arises allegedly from an overabundance of blood in the vessels around the brain. The author of the chapter, however, disputes this aetiology:

Anyone who studies antiquity is surely accustomed to the tenuousness and often wild variances of the dating of many of our texts. But even if this is taken for granted, the dating of Demetrius' On Style seems more problematic than most: the text has been assigned a date anywhere from the late fourth century B.c. to the late first century C.e. Attempts to narrow this wide range have been made using internal linguistic data, but these have not proved definitive, although a late date is now tentativel accepted by most. But a possibly more convincing argument for a late date may be found in a reference to architecture in paragraph 13 of On Style.

The transmitted text of line 13, ‘inter geminas…frontes’, has long presented an anomaly in the description of the decorated papyrus roll. If, in the context of book production, frons means the flat, round cross section located at either end of the rolled up book (TLL 6.1.1362, 84) and if cornu means an ornamental projection attached to the ends of the umbilicus and extending beyond the plane of the frons, then the transmitted text is a physical impossibility. For it is the frontes that lie between the cornua and not the other way round. In the words of Heyne's paraphrase: ‘geminae frontes inter duo cornua, non duo cornua inter geminas frontes.’ Emendation is required not only because an author is unlikely to be inaccurate or imprecise about the physical details of his book but also because the transmitted text can be salvaged only by recourse to tortuous theories about the meaning of cornu and frons, about their locations with respect to one another, and about the interpretation of inter with geminas.

Some of the more difficult archetypal corruptions to detect are those that occurred, not when a scribe was mindlessly copying what was before him, but when he was paying some attention to the sense of his text and departed from his exemplar by wrongly anticipating how the sequence of thought would develop. The resulting text may give sense, even though it does not reflect what the author wrote. It is suggested here that such a process led to corruption at Seneca, Thyestes 33 and Lucan, B.C. 2.279. In the former what was originally the subject of a verb has been transformed into the object; in the latter, the reverse has occurred.

In his recent book, the well-known Cypriote scholar K. Hadjioannou comes back to a disputed verse of Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13.432. For a long time the usual text (for instance in the edition of R. Keydell, 1959) has mentioned two obscure Cypriote heroes, Litros and Lapethos: Κνπριδας δ φλαγγας κσμεε Λτρος γνωρ | εὐχατης τε Λπηθος. Obviously the second is the legendary eponym of the town of Lapethus (north coast of Cyprus). But what are we to say of the first one, Litros? Hitherto the name is unknown, either for a figure or for a city. Nevertheless we know something which is not very different, in the ancient name of Λδρα, Λδρα, previous designation of the modern city of Nicosia, which was for a few centuries the capital of a small kingdom in central Cyprus. Thus, independently, Pierre Chuvin in his study of the geography of Nonnus and the present writer in a detailed discussion of the name of Ledra, etc., both put forward the hypothesis that ‘Λτρος’ is nothing but a light distortion of Λδρος, which could simply be the eponymous hero of the city (nowhere else mentioned, as is the case with Lapethos). As P. Chuvin observes: ‘Les deux formes sont pratiquement homophones: Lapéthos et Lèdros auraient été fabriqués de la même façon’. We thus think that the easy correction here is not misplaced. But now K. Hadjioannou objects that the poet did not allude to the town of Ledra and that the singular κσμεε cannot support two subjects. On the first point I would answer that the poet is not obliged to afford symmetrical allusions, on the second that the verb is here correctly in agreement with the nearest subject (and preceding it). And what does our Cypriote colleague propose? Another kind of correction by which the first hero completely disappears in favour of a new epithet of Lapethos, the text being; κσμεε λνγρς, γνωρ/εὐχατης τε Λπηθος. The idea is indeed ingenious, but does not convince: the rather negative adjective λνγρς