Who was the author of the Fourth Edict in the great persecution of Diocletian's reign we do not know. Its precise terms are not recorded; of the date of its issue we are not informed. It is true that Mr. Kidd has recently written: ‘On April 30, 304, Maximian put out the Fourth Edict in the name of himself and bis co-Augustus,’ but he discreetly forbears to give the reader any hint of the source on which he bases that statement. It may be doubted whether he has any better authority in mind than the ambiguous Passio S. Sabini, which, as even Mr. Mason admitted many years ago, ‘is not in the highest class of the historical relics of its age.’ If, indeed, this supposition does not do Mr. Kidd an injustice, it would have been well to have given some reasoned defence of the document. Dufourcq regards the Passio S. Sabini as a product of the Ostrogothic period, and contends that its picturesque exordium does not depend upon any earlier source. Until his detailed criticism of the Passion is answered, we can hardly use it for the reconstruction of the history of the fourth century.

Editors who profess to interpret these lines, while reaching agreement on some few points of detail, concur chiefly in a somewhat irritable half-confession of puzzlement and not unnatural tendency to avenge their smart on the poet's broader back. Hence the suggestions of historical misrepresentation and dramatic confusion, the hypothesis of a late recension, and other well-worn devices of commentatorial window-dressing. A task more likely to be of value to the study of the Georgics is to explore this short, compact poem for that unifying principle among the multiplicity of details, in accordance with which the triumphator and the temple-builder, the Greek festival and the Italian venue, the lightness of allegory and the ponderous literalism of the Via Sacra, Virgil and Octavian each perform their different functions and move in harmony with the whole poetic plan.

The Thebaid, with all its faults, deserves more attention than it generally receives in these days; it is something more than a desirable quarry for ‘unseens.’ Its exegesis is in a very backward state, quite unworthy of modern scholarship. It is almost a hundred years since the last explanatory edition was published, and the commentators on Statius have, as a rule, been more remarkable for their learning than for their discernment. Before the appearance of the Oxford edition and the latest Teubner recension the materials for the establishment of the text were very defective; and in spite of the valuable labours of Messrs. Garrod and Klotz (to say nothing of other contemporary scholars), the Thebaid still offers considerable scope for the textual critic. The MSS. present many puzzles; it must also be confessed that in not a few places the work of scholars in the last century (amongst them the youthful Lachmann) has done more harm than good. The following notes on Book II., whatever their value, may perhaps help to call attention to the need for more labourers in a promising field.