On the northern frontiers, as on the eastern, Ammianus conceives of Rome's policy as fundamentally defensive. The essential requirement is to keep the barbarians out, or, if past negligence or failure has let them in, to drive them out, then keep them out for the future. But throughout his work there emerges a consistent constellation of themes.

In a discussion of the spread of Latin in ancient Palestine it has been argued that, apart from Westerners like Jerome who settled in the province and a number of translators from Greek into Latin and from Latin into Greek, three Latin authors whose works are extant may have been, with various degrees of probability, natives of the country. These are Commodian of Gaza, arguably the earliest extant Christian Latin poet; Eutropius, the author of a breviarium of Roman history, who apparently hailed from Caesarea; and the anonymous author of the Descriptio totius mundi et gentium, who certainly was a native of the Syro-Palestinian region, and conceivably of one of the Palestinian cities. Here I wish to discuss another case, which seems to me characteristic of the reluctance of scholars to admit that Latin, and Latin authors, were more prevalent in the East than is usually acknowledged. In fact, it may be not misleading to assert that the invariably adduced exceptions of Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian as Latin writers from the East are exceptions by virtue of the quality of their work rather than by its very existence.

The meaning of κερτομω and its congeners in Homer has been the subject of debate in this journal. Jones has argued that ‘to κερτομ⋯ω someone is to speak in such a way as to provoke (whether intentionally or not) a powerful emotional reaction’, whether of anger or fear, and thus means ‘“to utter stinging words at [someone]”, “pierce to the heart”, “cut to the quick”, rather than merely “provoke” This definition seems to work well enough for some cases, but certainly not for all, and especially not for the passage from which the whole controversy began: Iliad 24.649, where Achilles speaks to Priam ༐πικερτομέωυ. As Richardson says in his Iliad commentary, ‘there is no sign that Akhilleus’ speech has this direct effect [i.e. arouses fear] on Priam’. Jones's article was responding to an earlier one by J. T. Hooker, who attempted to ascertain the sense of Achilles’ ༐πικερτομέυ by surveying the usage of kertom- words throughout Homeric epic. He concluded that the basic meaning is ‘to taunt’ or, more abstractly, it ‘indicates the provocation of another person into behaving in a certain way, whether that is the behaviour desired by the speaker… or is not desired by the speaker’. The problem was that this definition did not seem to fit the very line from which his inquiry began, the words of Achilles to Priam. Hooker then hypothesized that the verse betrayed signs of an ‘imperfect adaptation’ of a different version of the poem in which Achilles taunted a defeated enemy or perhaps preserved his grudge against Agamemnon to its end. This explanation is unpersuasive.

‘It is hard to become a truly good man': so Plato's Protagoras purports to understand the first line (Prt. 339d), and modern interpreters of the poem have followed him without exception.

Euelpides and Peisthetaerus have just left Athens, looking for a better place to settle. Frightened by the arrival of Tereus' servant, they introduce themselves as birds. Peisthetaerus says that he is ‘Fearfowl, a Libyan bird’:

The literary contest of the two tragedians in Frogs is introduced by four stanzas redolent of Homeric combat, with their predominantly dactylic metre and a number of high-flown epic words. I am surprised that several editors prefer the reading ὑψὑλøωυ at 818, as íππóλοøος surely has a resonance of íπποκορυστ⋯ς of Iliad 2.1, etc. The readings and sense, however, of both halves of 819 have long been controversial. As Dover suggested in his 1993 edition (accepted more recently by Sommerstein) the MSS ‘linch-pins of splinters’ is less satisfactory than his proposed transposition to ‘splintering of linch-pins' (σὐáυδάλαμοí τε παραξουíωυ), which suggests a recollection of the dangers of chariot accidents or collisions, as in the funeral games of Il. 23. But the following expression ‘shavings of deeds’ is even more puzzling, and highly improbable, and Heiberg's emendation to σμιλο⋯, agreeing with φωτÓς (Euripides), is preferred by Stanford among others, though doubted by Dover.

The object of this note is to draw attention to a piece of evidence about the history of the Greek theatre which appears to have gone unnoticed, yet may be of some importance. Aelian in his Historia animalium 11.19 reports the fate of Pantacles the Lacedaemonian, who refused to allow some actors on their way to Cythera to pass through Sparta. Later, when performing official duties as ephor, he was torn to pieces by dogs.

Hamaker's conjecture κομâ (for τολμâ, sic) at Lysias 16.18 was adopted by Rauchenstein in his influential edition of 1869 and soon given powerful endorsement by Jebb and by Shuckburgh. Successive later editors and commentators have seen no reason to demur: Thalheim, Adams, Hude, Gernet and Bizos, Lamb, and finally Edwards and Usher all adopt κομâ, and, where they comment, unanimously cite Aristophanic parallels (especially Eq. 580) in support of a connection between longhaired affectation and ‘oligarchic’ affiliations; some also adduce the expression ảπ’ὂΨεως in justification. But this is an egregious instance of unwarranted tampering with a sound text. τóλμα is a quality conspicuously displayed by Mantitheus, on his own account of his character, words, and actions.

ῥαΨῳδ⋯σαι λ⋯γεται καí τó φλυαρ⋯σαι, τò áπλ⋯ς †λαβεíν (1. λαλεîν) κπ´ παγγεîλαι χωρíς †ἒργου τινός. This is how W. C. Greene (Scholia Platonica, Haverford, 1938) prints the last sentence of the Schol. ad Ion 530a ῥαψδν, which is repeated (with small changes) ad Rep. 373b and in Photius, Suda, Et. Magn., and Lex. Bekk. s.v.αφῳδοί.

So Ross, incorporating Bywater's transposition of ἂ συμβέβηκε τοîς αἰσθητοîς from 24 to 20. Thereby Aristotle distinguishes ‘the three types of objects of perception: (1) the ἲδια αἰσθητά, colour, sound, etc. (11. 18–19), (2) the objects to which these belong, but which are here described as being (in the order of our apprehension of them) contingent on the ἳδια αἰσθητά (11. 19–22), and (3) the κοιυà αἰσθητà, such as movement and size (11. 22–25)’—D. Ross, Aristotle De Anima (Oxford, 1961), 6; see also 289.

The year of Livia's birth is nowhere explicitly recorded in any ancient sources, and can be determined only by calculating back from the date given in the sources for the year of her death. Both Tacitus and Dio place that death securely in A.D. 29. Tacitus limits himself to the observation that by then she had lived into extreme old age, aetate extrema, but Dio adds the more precise and useful information that at the time of her death she had lived for eighty-six years: ef ἒξ καì ὀγδο⋯κουτα ἒτη ζ⋯σασα Less usefully, Pliny the Elder states that Livia herself attributed her eighty-two years to her consumption of Pucine wine, which she drank exclusively (although in a different section Pliny adds his own observations on the beneficial effect of her daily dose of elecampane). Whatever the merits of Pliny's health tips, his chronological information is of little service in determining when she was born.

I refer to the editions of the third book of Columella by S. Hedberg (Uppsala, 1968) and J. C. Dumont (Paris, 1993).

… nullus tamen uel iniquissimus locus non maiorem quaestum reddet quam acceperit inpensam: siquidem, ut cultoris neglegentia sex milia seminum intereant, reliqua tamen decem milia tribus milibus nummorum libenter et cum lucro redemptorum erunt… 3.3.12–13

At the peak of this heated confrontation between Nero and Seneca, in which the latter exhorts the emperor to seek the people's love and trust rather than their hatred, Nero retorts that it is meet for the people to fear their prince (457–8). This is unsurprising and represents Nero as merely the latest in a long line of tragic tyrants (in the wake of Atreus' oderint dum metuant in Accius [203–4 R.]). In the exchange that follows, however, is the slightly puzzling (458): ‘metuant necesse est’:: ‘quicquid exprimitur graue est’. It is not only that Nero simply reiterates a concept already asserted in the line before (’decet timeri Caesarem’) which had prompted Seneca's ‘at plus diligi’. More than that, Seneca's exprimitur (‘all which is extorted is disliked’) is a non sequitur after ‘metuant necesse est’. exprimere is to ‘squeeze out’, ‘to extort’, ‘to elicit’, but in Latin metus is hardly ever ‘extorted’, exprimere, on the other hand, is commonly said of sincere or pretended assent, applause, jubilation, or forced admission. The verb occurs again at 494 ‘humiles … uoces exprimit nostri metus’; 581 ‘exprimere ius est, ferre quod nequeunt preces?’; elsewhere in Sen. Oed. 529 ‘ulline poena uocis expressae fuit’; Clem. 1.1.7 ‘omnibus … nunc ciuibus tuis … haec confessio exprimitur esse felices’; Plin. Pan. 2.2 ‘uoces illas quas metus exprimebat’.

(The text is that of the most recent edition of Silius Italicus: Punica, by Josef Delz [Stuttgart, 1987].)

Terpsicles is neglected in all current Histories of Greek Literature and Dictionaries of Antiquity, except for a five-lines-long entry by E. Bux in Real-Encyclopädie V.A. 790. He is the author of a treatise Περί ἀΦροδισίων, which is only known from two references in Athenaeus—7.325d and 9.391e—and seems to have been a collection of sex-related marvels. In the first passage he provides a piece of information on the red mullet:

In fr. 69 Smith, the Epicurean Diogenes of Oinoanda, like Lucretius 4.353–63, explains why a square tower viewed from the distance appears to be round. The explanation is that εἲδωλα, filmy atomic images, emanating from the tower, are forced out of shape by the air through which they pass on their way to our eyes. Diogenes’ account is fragmentarily preserved on a stone which I discovered in 1970. The stone bears the right half of one fourteen-line column and the left half of a second one. I first published the text in 1971. When, twenty years later, I came to deal with it again, in preparing an edition of all the known fragments, I was able, thanks in no small measure to the discussions and suggestions of other scholars, whose names can be seen in my apparatus criticus, to print a text which represents a considerable advance on that of the editio princeps. However, with so much of what Diogenes wrote missing, there has remained scope for further progress, and in this note I correct an error—an error present not only in my text, but also on the stone itself.

This translation of καì αὐτɂυ ῥυπŵυτα ('and a dirty one at that’) gives the sense we need. But the words mean something different: ‘and it too was dirty (like Epaminondas)’. Cf. VH 12.1 πευομέυη δέ ༐καì τρεøομέυη ὑπɂ πατρì καì αὐτŵι πέυητι (‘she was poor and was looked after by her father who was poor too’). See LSJ αὐτóc 1.8, KG 1.653 (f).

The history of Ammianus Marcellinus states that Constantius II (337–61) renamed the Pontic diocese Pietas, in honour of his second wife, Aurelia Eusebia (353–60?). pietas refers to sacred dutiful conduct toward all, specifically gods, state, and family. Constantius’ purpose in renaming the diocese poses an interesting question because it holds an important key to understanding the role Eusebia played in supporting her husband's position as emperor. In other words, what kind of part could an empress play in the Late Empire? Constantius may indeed have been honouring his wife. Why, however, would he honour her so? Is pietas just a play on the empress's name, which means ‘piety’ in Greek, or is there a deeper meaning? A search of late Imperial evidence on this woman and etymology on this word is needed.

Bentley's emendation in Horace, Ep. 1.14.9 (avet for amal has been accepted by many scholars as correct and harmonizes with the tone of Horace's letter, in which he expresses his impatience to go back to the countryside and at the same time his inability to fulfil his desire (Ep. 1.14.6–9: Me quamvis Lamiaepietas et cura moratur, / fratrem maerentis, rapto de fratre dolentis / insolabiliter, tamen istuc mens animusque / fert et avet spatiis obstantia rumpere claustra).

The recension G of the Vita Aesopi has received a fair amount of attention after the editio princeps by Perry. In recent years, Papathomopoulos and Ferrari have emended scores of corrupt passages in their fine editions. I will offer only one note, dealing with a section that has been left unclear.