Ovid's great poem has held its place in the European artistic and literary tradition primarily as a collection of superbly told individual stories, in which successive generations have found inspiration and pleasure. But the poet himself clearly thought of it as something more than a series of detached narratives. In fact he describes it(i. 4) as perpetuum carmen. The object of the present essay is to inquire into the nature of this perpetuitas and to suggest some of the implications that it has both for the poem as a whole and for the appreciation of its individual parts.

The phrase perpetuum carmen has interesting ideological connotations. The mutilated first fragment of Callimachus’ Aitia clearly formed a poetic manifesto. The author proclaims his antipathy to the fashion of writing ἔν ἄєισµα διηνєκές in which the deeds of kings and heroes were extolled ⋯ν πολλαις , he declares, , so he rejects , ⋯οιδήν in favour of the delicate cicada's which is heard at its best in and other poetic genres that are . Three separate but related targets are singled out for attack: long continuous poems, epic subjects, and the grand style.

Civilium ofnciorum rudimentis regern Archelaum Trallianos et Thessalos, varia quosque de causa, Augusto cognoscente defendit; pro Laodicenis Thyatirenis Chiis terrae motu afflictis opemque implorantibus senatum deprecatus est; Fannium Caepionem, qui cum Varrone Murena in Augustum conspiraverat, reum maiestatis apud iudices fecit et condemnavit. interque haec duplicem curam administravit, annonae quae artior inciderat, et repurgandorum tota Italia ergastulorum …

The trials of Archelaus, the Trallians, and the Thessalians are usually assigned to the period 27–23 B.C.: their position in Suetonius' account of Tiberius' early career seems to offer support to this view, though Stein connected the trial of Archelaus with Octavian's settlement of the East after Actium. Tiberius had been born only in November 42, and Gelzer more plausibly suggested that the trials occurred in Spain, where Tiberius was serving as tribunus militum during the Cantabrian war. The earthquake that Suetonius mentions in the following sentence took place in 27, and Tralles, which had been affected along with Laodicea, Thyatira, and Chios, sent an embassy to Augustus in Spain to ask for help.

‘et quid agam?’ ‘rogat! en saperdas aduehe Ponto, castoreum, stuppas, hebenum, tus, lubrica Coa. 135 tolle recens primus piper et sitiente camelo. uerte aliquid; iura.’

In 1. 136, Clausen's’ adoption of et from the best manuscripts would warm the heart of A. E. Housman, who takes exception to the e, ex, and ec of other editors (i.e. Jahn, Owen, and Nettleship): ‘Spell it as you will, the preposition is not natural: the camel carried the pepper on his back, not in any of his numerous stomachs; and it does not follow that we ought to say “tollere piper e camelo” because there exist such phrases as “desilire ex equo”.’ Instead, he takes both primus and sitiente camelo as adverbial adjuncts to the predicate which (diough not parallel in form) are parallel in force and therefore united by the conjunction et.

From a purely historical point of view Lucan's epic is important, because it represents an intermediate stage between the contemporary account by Caesar of his defeat of the Pompeians and the later versions in Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio. However, it does not merely show us the development of the historical tradition about the war, in particular that part of it which did not stem ultimately from Caesar himself. It is a milestone in the development of Roman ideas about the fall of the Republic. For, while we can only tentatively deduce the attitude which Augustan writers, especially Pollio and Livy, adopted towards this war, Lucan represents the views of those who had not only lived under the monarchy which was the final product of the conflict begun in 49 B.c., but had experienced its less agreeable consequences under the later Julio-Claudians.

What is the meaning of numerosa? From the fifteenth-century commentaries of Valla and Mancinelli to the most recent translation of Juvenal into English, by Peter Green, interpreters are in nearly unanimous agreement that numerosa describes a particular annoyance of the rhetor's unrewarding life, namely, the large size of his classes. A few commentaries, however, touch upon another interpretation, although without defending it. Pearson and Strong, after translating numerosa as ‘overgrown’, continue: numerosa might mean “in rhythmical cadence”, referring to the sing-song implied in cantabit. H. P. Wright too sees a possibility that the adjective might describe a musical or sing-song style of declaiming. A brief examination of Juvenal's purpose here and a consideration of some passages from other writers will show that ‘sing-song’ is certainly the primary meaning intended here and probably the only one.

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem (Strasbourg, 1776) and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition (Leipzig, 1813), but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969.

LIFE offers various amusements, and anyone these days who can choose among them will come late to the study of hiatus in Greek prose. Germany in the 1880s, so it seems, was less fortunate, and few greater excitements were known to young or old than the hunt for hiatus; but now that we no longer strait-waistcoat our classical authors and the austerity of those times is discredited, few collectors of hiatus are to be found, and there are people even in Germany who have never identified a single specimen.

Yet there is nothing to be said for underrating an author' stylistic pretensions, still less for encouraging others to do the same; and the textual critic, whose path is slippery enough at the best of times, can ill afford to dispense with footholds.

There has been no broad study of hiatus in Greek prose since 1841, when Benseler in a long and original book De hiatu in oratoribus et historicis Graecis went through the text of 27 authors and attempted to determine their practice.