It is well known that the emperor Julian plays a central role in the life and writings of the Antiochene sophist Libanius. As a commentator on the life and reign of the emperor Constantine, he is seldom taken into account, and if he is, he usually gets short shrift as being verbose and unreliable. This neglect is, I believe, hardly justified. Even if it were true that Libanius could not teach us anything about the historical Constantine, his testimony still deserves attention as an example of the attitude of eastern pagans to Constantine. Moreover, although much of what Libanius has to say about Constantine was written down half a century after the events, Libanius himself, born in 314, was a contemporary of the latter part of Constantine's reign. Unlike Julian, born in 331/2,2 and Eunapius, born in 347/8,3 he was able to form a judgement on Constantine based on first-hand knowledge.

My subject is two fragments of rhetorical commentary that appear both in an anonymous manuscript collection of quotations ‘From Longinus’ and (without attribution) in Photius' Bibliotheca. My purpose is to clarify some observations that have been made on them by modern scholars and thus offer a correction or two. The collection of separate quotations labelled κ τν Λογγνου in Laurentianus 24, Plut. 58, was given its title by a later hand different from that of the writer of the original. The grounds for that mistaken heading were that the name ‘Longinus’ appears in the second of the fragments. Aristotle and Theophrastus, however, are cited in other quotations, and most are anonymous, with as yet no particular resemblance found to wording in other rhetorical literature. Each begins with the word ὅτι. All are general remarks on subjects such as rhetorical tropes, style, and different types of speeches. They are, in effect, scholia without a text.

A number of recent papers have discussed the episode at Odyssey 10.156–72 in which Odysseus, on the third morning after landing on Circe's island, sees, kills, and transports a huge stag whose meat revives his men, who are exhausted in both body and spirit. Since the incident does not advance the main action, it invites interpretation, particularly since it is so richly elaborated. Naturally, it has received several: that the stag should be understood as a transformed human, and thus prefigures the rest of the episode; that the incident marks the liminality of Odysseus, who is about to lose some of his manhood in remaining for a year on the island; that the stag derives from the magical animal which, in folktale, often leads the hero into the Otherworld or the Underworld; and that it serves, both within its immediate context and within the narrative as told to the Phaeacians, as a figure for heroic action, removed from the battlefield and rendered ‘urbane’ by its emphasis on the cleverness with which Odysseus transports the dead animal rather than on the actual killing. I would like to point to a completely different aspect of the episode and to suggest that although some of these studies may be true pointers to its origin, its function within the narrative is straightforward and does not in itself demand such elaborate interpretation: the incident with the stag belongs to a series of incidents that test the ability of Odysseus and his crew to obtain meat, and so develop central themes of feasting, social order, and leadership.

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators (who may have been inhibited by the very brutality of the actions described). In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. (This observation goes back as far as Eustathius' commentary ad loc. (1934.43f.):πότομος αὕτη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ἧς εἰκς κα θανεῖν τν Μελάνθιον, εἰ κα ποιητς κα αὐτ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful.

There is a standard tradition in the ancient sources, which makes its first appearance at Thucydides 1.138.5, that, when Themistocles had fled into exile and been given the equivalent of political asylum by the Persian King Artaxerxes, he was ‘given’ the three Asiatic Greek cities of Magnesia, Myus and Lampsacus. There has been a fair amount of scholarly controversy over how the King could ‘give’ Themistocles Lampsacus, a city of great strategic importance on the Hellespont, which, by the mid-460s, was almost certainly within the ambit of the Delian League, i.e. no longer his to give. My concern in this paper is not with that political problem, but rather with a different, though related, issue – whether valid conclusions can be drawn from the Thucydides passage and the subsequent tradition for the social and economic history of these three cities in the classical period. I suggest that they cannot.

An. 19 has a metrical form which is quite peculiar and anomalous if compared either with hemiambics or with anaclastic ionic dimeters (anacreontics), i.e. the metres of all the other Anacreontea.

M. Bonnefond-Coudry has performed a great service by compiling a list of senators who are known to have spoken in the senate (‘intervenants’) in the first century b.c. Yet her list for the year 50 invites a thoroughgoing revision. Beside the rubric ‘supplicatio à Cicéron’ she gives the following list: Cato, Hirrus, Balbus, Lentulus (Spinther?), Domitius (Ahenobarbus or Calvinus), Scipio, Favonius. She also notes that Pompey spoke at a session late in the year (App. b.c. 2.28–9, instead of her reference, 2.29–30), and maintains that Scipio spoke on 1 December (Plut. Caes. 30.4–6).

So Shackleton Bailey in his recent Teubner edition (Stuttgart, 1991). Housman's remarks (Classical Papers, 148–9) are germane

Acontius rhetorically addresses the young man to whom Cydippe's parents have betrothed her, whom he imagines as showing excessive familiarity while visiting the girl's sickbed. In line 146, ‘spes’ may be considered the vulgate reading; the noun can be used concretely, of the object of one's hopes (OLD 4), a person in whom hopes are centred (OLD 5), or sometimes as an endearment (OLD 5c). For application to a girl with suitors, cf. Ovid, Met. 4.795 ‘multorumque fuit spes invidiosa procorum’. Or one could take ‘spes’ in Her. 20.146 generally, = id quod spero. But, in any case, ‘spes’ is somewhat disappointing. After the strong imagery of 145 (cutting crops), we expect something no less definite in the pentameter, and, in particular, a word which will cohere with, and reinforce, the notion of providing access (‘quis tibi fecit iter?’). In this respect ‘spes’ fails to contribute anything. Nor does the manuscript evidence point unambiguously to ‘spes’. Some manuscripts have the unmetrical ‘spem’, while Heinsius found in a Medicean manuscript the reading ‘sepem’, which was taken up by Burman, and by a number of other editors. To this, however, A. Palmer made an objection which seems not merely pedantic: ‘I should rather have expected per sepem; for a man has a right to go up to, as far as, another man's boundary.’

Trimalchio is such an established figure of fun in the Satyricon that commentators have been content to note the myths that he jumbles together in his description of his tableware here, without going much further. Clearly his scyphoi portray Medea and her dead children, not Cassandra, and we assume that he can recognize gladiatorial fights when he sees them. Heretofore lacking is any discussion of what scene was actually represented on the capis he acquired from his patron and whether the reader of the Satyricon is meant to be able to decode the scene which Trimalchio so flagrantly misinterprets.

The ninth and last poem in Book 4 of the Silvae is an amusing hendecasyllabic piece in which Statius, addressing Plotius Grypus, reproves him for having sent him for the Saturnalia a tatty, second-hand copy of a boring book in return for the fine, expensive, new volume which was Statius' present to him. The poem includes a long list (lines 23–45) of humble and/or poor-quality items, any of which, it is suggested, would have been more acceptable than Grypus' gift. Included in the list are eggs

The solution to the problem posed by the presentation of the giant turbot to Domitian is put forward by Montanus, a gourmet well qualified to adjudicate in such matters: one bite was sufficient for him to distinguish between oysters from Circeii, the Lucrine, or Richborough (Juv. 4.140–2). The text reads

Commentators on this passage have drawn attention to the unusual genitive in the phrase ferox scelerum, ‘fierce in his crimes’: ‘this adj. seems here alone to take an objective genitive’, says Furneaux, while Martin and Woodman state that ‘the dependent genitive of an external attribute, evidently on the analogy of its use with personal characteristics (e.g. Ovid, Met. 8.613 mentis), seems unparalleled and is perhaps intended to suggest that Sejanus' criminality was innate’. Most commentators add a reference to Sallust's description of Jugurtha as sceleribus suis ferox (Jug. 14.21), but that passage is no help as a parallel for the construction, since it gives the ablative usual after ferox in Tacitus and other writers to describe the reason for ferocity (cf. Agr. 27.1 fama ferox, Hist .1.51.1 ferox praeda, Ann. 1.3.4 robore corporis stolide ferocem, TLL 6.567.76ff.).

In the letter which initiated his correspondence with Paulinus of Nola Jerome deplores the propensity of the inexpert to pontificate on scripture. Three kinds of incompetence are denounced. The second takes the following form: ‘alii discunt – pro pudor!–a feminis, quod viros doceant’ (Epist. 53.7.1). As in the other two denunciations, Jerome has chosen to express himself in general terms; scholars have nonetheless assumed that here a specific individual is meant. Nautin argued that with these words Jerome was attacking Rufinus, who is here represented as being intellectually dependent on his patroness Melania. More recently Testard has maintained that Jerome's criticism is in fact directed against Ambrose. However Nautin's view that Rufinus is the target has now been re-affirmed by Rebenich. The purpose of the present note is to draw attention to a piece of evidence which has hitherto been overlooked; it would seem to indicate that the object of Jerome's attack cannot be Rufinus.