I suppose we have all at some time been puzzled by Horace's substitution of boulders for the iron mass that the Phocaeans threw into the sea when they took their oath, and have wondered what poetical purpose the boulders could serve that iron could not. Would not iron in fact better cohere as an image with all the civil war that fills the poem's opening lines and with the agreeable absence of plough-shares and pruning-hooks from the Blessed Isles? Most of all, would it not cohere better with the poem's closing lines?

I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).

This paper essays a reconstruction of Livy's attitude to and treatment of the major ‘popularis’ figures of the late republic, from Ti. Gracchus to Cinna and Carbo. The opening section examines four situations involving ‘popularis’ prototypes: the careers of Sp. Cassius, Sp. Maelius, and Manlius Capitolinus and the fall of Ap. Claudius the decemvir. It first considers Livy's use of what by his time had become standard themes in writing about ‘populares’, then attempts to establish the possible antiquity of these modes of expression. In passing it should perhaps be stressed that the attention directed in this section to terminology is not intended to imply that Livy's attitudes (or those of any other author) can be determined simply from the mere occurrence in his work of certain slogans or catchwords. That is one reason why there is little profit in asking how a ‘popularis’ historian might have handled the same or similar events.

The myth of Hercules and Cacus is related by several Augustan writers: Vergil, Aeneid 8.185–275, Livy 1.7.3, Ovid, Fasti 1.543–86 and 5.643–52, Propertius 4.9.1–20, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.39. These accounts fall naturally into two classes, in which Cacus is represented respectively as a clever rascal and as a superhuman ogre. The former version is found in Livy and Dionysius, and the latter occurs first in Vergil, and then in Ovid and Propertius. Numerous shared details go to show that Livy and Dionysius drew on a common source, and verbal similarities that have been demonstrated between Vergil and Livy evidently establish Vergil's dependence on this same source. It would therefore appear that the ogre-Cacus is Vergil's invention. Certainly there is no evidence for a pre-Vergilian Cacus characterized as an ogre.

In his very valuable study of generic patterns in ancient poetry Francis Cairns assigns Propertius 2.28, [Tib.] 3.10 (4.4), and (tentatively) Ovid Am. 2.13 to the genre Soteria, that is works of congratulation and thanksgiving on the recovery from illness (or rescue from danger) of a friend, and he sees the resemblances between the poems as due to the elegists’ attempts to produce ‘dramatized’ examples of the genre, with the situation developing from the girl's illness at the beginning of the poem to her recovery at the end (Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), pp.153–7). Cairns's arguments and interpretation of the poems should, I feel, be scrutinized carefully, especially since his classification of the poems has been accepted recently without demur by at least one scholar (Jennifer Moore-Blunt ‘Catullus XXXI and Ancient Generic Composition’, Eranos 72 (1974), 118 and n.50).

Although scholars have expended increasing efforts over the last twenty years or so in either detecting or establishing large structural and thematic units within Ovid's perpetuum carmen, little attention, as far as I am aware, has been directed towards the evident care taken by Ovid in his arrangement of material within individual episodes, and the resultant over-all structure of those episodes. The aim of the present paper is to focus attention upon a single episode to which Ovid seems to have paid particular attention in these respects. I refer to the long story of Phaethon, which occupies the last part of book 1, and most of the first half of book 2, of the Metamorphoses, and intend to explore two different lines of approach in examining the structure of this episode.

In his philosophical works Seneca often refers to the views of his predecessors, and sometimes is the sole or the earliest authority for what he says about them, which makes it important for the student of earlier thought to know whether what he says is likely to be true. This I believe can be roughly assessed–and this paper is an attempt to do it–by considering how reliable he is in places where he can be checked: that is, in places where he refers to earlier writings which survive. I shall be principally concerned with his Naturales Quaestiones (hereafter N.Q.) and with early meteorology: with considering how accurately Seneca reports Aristotle's Meteorologica (hereafter Mete.), and trying to estimate therefrom the reliability of his statements about pre-Socratic meteorology; but I believe that my conclusions should also be applicable to what Seneca says on later thinkers and other subjects.

The word dona is an embarrassment here. If Agricola was appointed to ‘check the gifts of the temples’, that is, gifts which temples had received, it seems an odd restriction in a phrase which one would expect to refer to temple possessions in general. What the context, especially in the word sacrilegium, makes clear, as commentators have duly noted, is that the temples suffered losses through the plunder of their works of art by Nero and also by others, although the result (effecit commends itself) tended to obliterate the guilt of others. This was after the fire at Rome in A.D. 64. See H. Furneaux rev. J. G. C. Anderson (1922), pp.55 f.; R. Till (1961), p.62; I. Forni (1962), p.108; R. M. Ogilvie and Ian Richmond (1967), p.152.

These lines, presented as they appear in the O.C.T., are among the most difficult and hotly disputed that Juvenal wrote. The poet defends his decision not to attack contemporary politicians directly: ‘expose a Tigellinus’, he says, ‘and you know what the consequences will be’. It has long been recognized that the consequences related are probably inspired by those suffered by the Christians in A.D. 64 during the reign of Nero, and so vividly described by Tacitus.

The primary aim of this article is to reveal a number of previously unrecorded appearances of classical Latin poetry in the poems of Ausonius, with a brief assessment of their value in understanding his text, and an incorporation of them into the general picture of his acquaintance with his predecessors; a final section will outline some ways in which his adoptions and adaptations are used. Latin poets now fragmented or lost are not included in this study; for the survival of a Lucilius or an Ennius has generally enjoyed more attention and study than the after-life of better-known authors. It is moreover doubtful if such early writers had a context to offer the borrower in Late Antiquity; while poets of the second and third centuries A.D. (often denoted by the vacuous term ‘neoteric’), who did, are poorly known today.

Among the Christian Latin poets Paulinus, Bishop of Nola in the early fifth century and for Gronovius the ‘swan’ of that city, occupies a prominent place and his work throws important light on contemporary tendencies in language and literature as well as on religious customs. In editing both his epistles and poems (C.S.E.L. xxix-xxx, 1894) W. von Hartel performed a valuable service. Yet, great as was the improvement upon the Migne edition (Patrologia Latina lxi, 1847), numerous questions of text and interpretation have remained to be dealt with and these have received comparatively small attention. The passages discussed below are a sample of those that call for elucidation or amendment. The text quoted at the head of each note is that of Hartel. At or near the beginning of the first note on a new poem, where a point of reading is considered, the manuscripts available are specified.

Jebb is right. The two lines are a comment by the Chorus; and they are a comment on the apparent shamelessness of the remarks which Electra has just been making about her mother. The dissentients have been deceived by two pseudo-problems, hitherto unexploded:

Or future of Professor Skutsch (CQ N.S. (1973), 60, 378), calling the contraction ‘impossible’ (but see Ardizzoni's note), insists on the latter; F. Vian in his Bude Apollonius (p.82) leaves the question open. A.R.1.685 ~ 693 (Polyxo speaking; note the context of 683–8):

Isidorus Pelusiotes, Epistulae 2.42 preserves an opinion of Plutarch on genuine Atticism:

In his article (CP 71 (1976), 97–105) R. Reneham rightly classes Sail. Cat.20.9 as a conscious imitation of Cic.Cat.1.1, but adopts the unsatisfactory explanation of parody. Such parody is, as he notes, without parallel in Sallust and ineptly distracts attention from the vigorous development of Catiline's rhetoric. Elsewhere mimesis is regularly a compliment to the author imitated, often closely functional by reinforcing a point from the parallel of a similar context (e.g. Sail. Cat.4.1 ~ Pl. Ep.324 b). Similarly I suggest that here Sallust recalls Cicero's words to illustrate that perversion of vocabulary which is the keynote of Catiline's speech: just as he misuses, for example, the terms virtus fidesque at the beginning of his speech, in stark contrast to Sallust's own definition, so he perverts the famous words of the attack which revealed his true villainy in similar savage indignatio.

nihil autem uetabat et componi materias in hoc idoneas, ut controuersiae permixtis salibus fingerentur, uel res proponi singulas ad iuuenum talem exercitationem. quin illae ipsae (dicta sunt ac uocantur), quas certis diebus festae licentiae dicere solebamus, si paulum adhibita ratione fingerentur, aut aliquid in his serium quoque esset admixtum, plurimum poterant utilitatis adferre; quae nunc iuuenum uel sibi ludentium exercitatio est.

Ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nuliis spectaculorum inlecebris, nullis conviviorum inritationibus corruptae. litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant, paucissima in tarn numerosa gente adulteria, quorum poena praesens et mantis permissa: adcisis crinibus nudatam coram propinquis expellit domo maritus ac per omnem vicum verbere agit. publicatae enim pudicitiae nulla venia: non forma, non aetate, non opibus maritum invenerit. nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nee corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur.