Lvcretivs II. 263 ‘nonne uides etiam patefactos tempore puncto.’ ‘Tempore puncto’ occurs only here in Lucretius and in no other author; but ‘puncto tempore’ is read in II. 456, 1006, IV. 214; ‘puncto in tempore et,’ VI. 230. ‘Temporis puncto’ is found at I. 1109, and ‘temporis in puncto’ at IV. 164, 193. ‘Puncto… diei’ occurs in IV. 201. ‘Punctum’ as a noun corresponds to ἂτομος, for a point has no dimensions; St. August. Ep. 205, 14, ‘atomo temporis, inquit, hoc est in puncto temporis quod diuidi non potest.’ ‘Inquit’ refers to St. Paul I. Ad Corinth. XV. 52, where the N.T. has ν τόμѡ and the present Vulgate ‘in momento.’ And in Ep. 190, 15, St. Austin says ‘summa celeritate atque atomo temporis’; and St. Jerome, Ep. 119, 2, ‘in atomo et in puncto temporis atque momento,’ 5 ‘atomus… punctum temporis est’; J. Cassian, Inst. II. 7, 2, ‘puncto breuissimo’; Lact. Inst. VII. 12 ‘uno temporis puncto.’ ‘Punctum temporis’ or ‘atomus temporis’ means an instant of time that cannot be divided.

As is well known, many editors, following Valckenaer, reject the bracketed line altogether; but the omission leaves the opening clause with a very unsatisfactory ending. Ἐμπρέποντας αίθέρι, heavily stressed by its position, seems to form little less than an anticlimax, unless we assume that the stars could hardly be expected to shine in the sky. On the other hand, when line 7 is added, έμπρέποντας αίθέρ στέρας brings out clearly the fact that only certain conspicuous stars or constellations are meant—those which serve as guides to the operations of agriculture and navigation, such as the Pleiades, Arcturus, and Orion, as we may see from Hesiod, Op. 609 onwards.

In 820 the corrections of Buecheler and Scaliger are accepted. In 822 the MSS. have quom penes me potestas; quom for quos from v. 823, lacuna supplied by Klotz, met <fuit nulla>, by Leo, mei <fuit saepe>. I conceive an intermediate stage: quom penes mei <positast> potestas, which would account for the lacuna by haplography, as well as for the change of mei to me (posita pot- is, of course, a proceleusmatic foot).

In my previous article I argued that certain of the later MSS. of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and especially those which I call Class I., are to a large extent descended from a lost copy of F, made before the rent was torn in Book VIII., and therefore before the writing of ϕ; and I inferred that it was likely that the evidence of these MSS. would prove a valuable addition to that of ϕ in places where F is now illegible. In the following pages I shall prove that this hope has been fulfilled.

These words occur in Appian's account of the riot which led to the death of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 B.C. The tribunician elections had been adjourned from the previous day, and Gracchus, who irregularly sought re-election, had with his supporters taken possession of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. The assembly broke up in disorder amid wild rumours that Gracchus had deposed all his colleagues or had declared himself tribune for the following year without election or had actually demanded the diadem. The Senate meanwhile had been in session in the temple of Fides, and upon receipt of the news from the Capitol Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio urged the consul, Publius Mucius Scaevola, to crush the tyrant. When he declared that he would not put any citizen to death without trial, Nasica, calling loudly upon those who desired the safety of their country to follow him, mounted the Capitol at the head of a considerable body of Senators and led the attack on Gracchus and his partisans.

In this much-vexed passage a form or variant of ναγνώρισς is described and exemplified. It is said to be συνθετ, which word all the translations I have seen render ‘compound’ or ‘composite,’ but their authors either omit or (me judice) clearly fail to explain in what sense this form is said to be ‘composite.’ I believe that this translation is wrong, and that the word here means something else, συνθετος λόγος is good Greek for ‘a made-up tale’ (cf. Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 686, where συνθετο λόγοι are also called μθοι ψευδεῖς). The point is not that what is said or told is necessarily a lie, but that it is untrue, baseless, not founded on fact. All this is supported by the use of the corresponding verb in e.g. Thuc. I. cc. XXI. and XCVII., where it is opposed to the truthful recording of facts (συγγρϕειν). Further, it justifies Dacier's reading in 1459a 21, where the relative clause refers to ἱστοραις not to τς συνθσεις. The characteristic of a poetic σνθεσις is that it is a connected narrative which has a causal nexus between its parts, and so is of μα πρξις, whereas an ἱστορα is a record of disconnected happenings to a single person or group of persons during a certain period. Such a σὐνθις may be merely made-up or fictional. It is specially so where it has no basis in fact (or prior accepted legend or ‘epic’), but is the sheer invention of the poet. Clearly such a fiction must be rendered acceptable or plausible, and this can only be done through someone being misled, and this misleading implies that that someone draws a wrong conclusion from evidence present or presented to him— i.e. it presupposes a παραλογισμός.

The Twelfth Ode of the Third Book of Horace consists of four stanzas in this metre, each stanza consisting of ten feet. How these feet should be distributed into verses is a matter of much dispute; but inasmuch as it does not concern me at the present time I shall avoid it by following certain editors of Horace and printing each stanza continuously.

In the encyclopaedia portion of the Liber Glossarum the compiler introduced numerous historical and geographical excerpts of varying length. The writers from whose works the geographical extracts are primarily taken are Isidore, Orosius, and Eutropius; but though the compiler has in many cases appended the labels ESIDORI, PAVLI HOROSI, or simply OROSI, and EVTROPI to the entries, this is by no means always the case. A few of the excerpts are of great length; thus, the longest of all, Hispania (HI 233), which is labelled PAVLI HOROSI, SVLINI, OROSI, fills a whole column of the Paris MS. (P.). Other long geographical entries are IT 12 (Italia), GA 52–4 (Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Gallia), and RO 105–8 (Roma). The length of HI 233, coupled with the fact that the next entry (HI 234) fills half a column of P., and contains Isidore's remarks on Spain (Etym. 14, 4, 28–30), has been used as an argument by those scholars who maintain that the Liber Glossarum is the work of a Spanish compiler. To this the obvious retort would seem to be that the presence of three passages about Gaul might with equal justice be used to support the view that the compilation was made in France. Other evidence of a ‘Spanish hand’ in certain geographical items will be given below, but it is of such a character that it adds nothing to the evidence for the vexed question of provenance.

Amongst material collected for Part II. of the Pre-Italic Dialects is a plaster cast of a bronze fibula of the ‘simple bow’ or ‘arched’ type found in the neighbourhood of Chur. The cast was sent by Dr. R. von Planta to Professor Conway, who passed it on to me. Study of the inscription, however, which is not, so far as I am aware, hitherto published, shows that it is not, as was thought, Raetic, but Gallo-Latin, as its provenance (which, in any case, precludes its publication in the book for which it was sent to me) would suggest.

Mr. Powell's ingenious observations on The Simile of the Clepsydra in Empedocles raise afresh the problem of the precise form and construction of the instrument with whose aid Empedokles is said to have reached his memorable conclusion that air is a corporeal substance. That ‘klepsydra’ was the name of the instrument in question is shown by a comparison of Aristotle, Phys. 213a, 22 sqq. with Empedokles, fr. 100; but though so far the fragment is plain, in its detailed interpretation there arises a difficulty which is the subject of the present note. Empedokles is explaining his theory of respiration, and the theory is illustrated by the action of this apparatus. To make clear the general drift of the passage, it may be well to quote again so much of it as is relevant. ‘Thus do all things draw breath in and breathe it out again. All have bloodless tubes of flesh extended over the surface of their bodies; and at the mouths of these the outermost surface of the skin is perforated all over with pores closely packed together, so as to keep in the blood while a free passage is cut for the air to pass through. Then, when the thin blood recedes from these, the bubbling air rushes in with an impetuous surge; and when the blood rushes back it’ (i.e. the air) ‘is breathed out again.

Mr. Last's very interesting note (Class. Quart. XVII., pp. 35–36) is so ingenious and the Egyptian evidence falls so pat that it deserves to be right, but I very much doubt if it is. In fact the Aithiopians do not stand alone, and the context of their longevity deserves consideration. If that context is recalled, it may appear that ‘to say that the legend was attached by the Greeks to the Aithiopians through their remoteness from the Mediterranean world is no explanation’ is itself a hard saying.

§ 1. The dates for Peisistratus’ reigns and exiles in the Athenaion Politeia, as given in the papyrus, which is the sole authority for the text, are as follows:

The story of Epaminondas' trial has come down to us in two divergent traditions, which differ as to the occasion, the ground, and the result of the action. One group of authors, of whom Plutarch may be taken as the chief representative, gives the following data:

(1) The trial took place after Epaminondas' first campaign in Peloponnesus— i.e. in spring 369 b.c.

(2) The charge preferred against Epaminondas was that he had outstayed his term of office as boeotarch.

(3) The trial resulted in his acquittal.

Eduard Norden, in the second half of his Agnostos Theos, has maintained with great learning and ingenuity the thesis that predications in the style ‘Thou art (Isis),’ ‘I am (the supreme god),’ are due to Oriental influence; purely Greek religious language does not go beyond ‘Thou dost (illuminate the earth),’ ‘We are indebted to thee for (the fruits of the earth).’ This view appears to be substantially correct. To Oriental influence we may, I think, trace also the custom of stringing together a series of brief predications in or of the second person, for the most part not connected by conjunctions, and producing the effect of a rapid fire of assertions. The earlier Greek examples are not, as a rule, asyndetic. In the Hellenistic age and later we see the other style, as in Catullus 34. 13: ‘tu Lucina dolentibus Iuno dicta puerperis, tu potens Triuia et notho es dicta lumine luna, tu cursu dea menstruo … exples’ 61. 51: ‘te suis tremulus parens inuocat, tibi uirgines zonula soluunt sinus, te timens cupida nouus captat aure maritus’; in Lucretius' proem; in Ovid, Met. IV. 17: ‘tibi enim inconsumpta iuuenta est, tu puer aeternus, tu formosissimus alto conspiceris caelo, tibi cum sine cornibus adstas, uirgineum caput est’; in the invocation of Apollo (identified with Osiris and Mithras) at the end of the first book of Statius' Thebaid; in Capaneus' prayer to his strong right arm (ib. IX. 548-): (‘ades o mihi, dextera, tantum; tu praesens bellis et ineuitabile numen, te uoco, te solum superum contemptor adoro’); in the Orphic hymns, II. 10-, though they consist mostly of accumulations of epithets; in Menander Rhetor περ πιδειкν (IX., p. 330, ed. Walz, an address to Apollo): περ [al. Θο⋯ραι], περ σ Θνδες, παρ σο⋯ кα σελνη τν ετῖνα λαμβνει; in Valerius Maximus VI.