This text, containing Cicero's oft-repeated canard, is deeply problematic. Both Reynolds and Moreschini resort to daggers here. Madvig's abeat for habeat has failed to convince, since Cicero appears to use abeo metaphorically without specifying the place of origin or destination of movement within a narrowly circumscribed semantic field which does not encompass our passage. C.F.W. Müller, on the other hand, offered aberret, which can appear without such specification in the sense ‘be deceived’ or the like. Editors evidently hesitate, however, because of the difficulty of explaining the corruption. Perhaps one might rather consider the merits of haereat. haereo can mean ‘be stuck in difficulties’, but the usage is uncommon enough that it could easily have been a stumbling block for an inattentive scribe. Moreover, in some scripts where r is written with somewhat elongated hasta and an arc curving down, it can be easily confused with b; and once haebeat appeared, the ‘correction’ to habeat was all but inevitable.

(1) qua re flecte te, quaeso, et maiores tuos respice atque ita guberna rem publicam ut natum esse te ciues tui gaudeant: sine quo nec beatus nec c[l]arus nec †unctus† quisquam esse omni<no> potest. (1.35)

nos numerus sumus et frugis consumere nati,
sponsi Penelopae nebulones Alcinoique
in cute curanda plus aequo operata iuuentus,
cui pulchrum fuit in medios dormire dies et        30
ad strepitum citharae cessatum ducere curam.
ut iugulent hominem, surgunt de nocte latrones:
ut te ipsum serues, non expergisceris?

Scylla's nurse Carme has just learned that Scylla is in love with Minos, who in turn was once in love with Carme's daughter Britomartis and chased her to death. Carme opens her speech with an address to Minos (286–9).

The fourth choral ode in Seneca's tragedy Troades ends thus (1050–5):

tum puer matri genetrixque nato
Troia qua iaceat regione monstrans
dicet et longe digito notabit:
‘Ilium est illic, ubi fumus alte
serpit in caelum nebulaeque turpes.’
Troes hoc signo patriam uidebunt.

At Petron. Sat. 48.4 Trimalchio makes a famous boast about owning three libraries:

‘Of course laniabor is not a name.’ Thus very recently Cristiano Castelletti in a discussion of this notorious acrostic, which he associates with Aratean ἄρρητον (Phaen. 2) and Virgilian MA VE PV (G. 1.429-33). If, however, laniabor is itself ‘not a name’, the aim of the present annotatiuncula is to argue that it is an etymological play on a ‘name’. Laniabor spans the description of Amycus’ cave, which is adorned with the dismembered limbs of his victims: Amycus himself will shortly suffer the same fate at Pollux’ hands. The name ‘Amycus’ was etymologized from ἀμύσσω (‘tear’; LSJ s.v. I), which exactly matches lanio (‘tear’; OLD s.v. 1a). Hence by a cutely etymological jeu onomastique ‘Tearer’ says ‘I'll be torn’.

In Virgil's third eclogue, the goatherd Menalcas responds to his challenger Damoetas by offering as his wager in their contest of song a pair of embossed cups, caelatum diuini opus Alcimedontis (Ecl. 3.37), decorated with a pattern of vine and ivy. In the middle of this design, he says, are two figures. One is the astronomer Conon, and the other—at this point Menalcas, afflicted with a sudden loss of memory, professes to have forgotten the name of the second figure, and breaks off into a question (Ecl. 3.40-2): quis fuit alter, | descripsit radio totum qui gentibus orbem, | tempora quae messor, quae curuus arator haberet? Various candidates for the identity of this second astronomer have been suggested, one of the most favoured being Eudoxus of Cnidus, whose Phaenomena had been versified by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. In 1930 it was proposed by Léon Herrmann that Menalcas in fact answers his own question in his reference to curuUS ARATor at Ecl. 3.42: the solution to Virgil's riddle is already written into the question, in the form of the anagram of Aratus concealed within these two words. Strictly speaking, Hermann notes only that ‘Arator au v. 42 évoque le nom d’Aratos’; he and later exponents of the theory tend to ignore the preceding ‘-us’—but there seems no reason to exclude it if an allusion to the Greek poet is to be seen in the two following syllables.

The beginning of the second entry of Apollonius Sophista's Lexicon Homericum reads as follows in the codex Coislinianus gr. 345, the only direct witness to this section (1, 14–15 Bekker):

In their edition of Philostratus’ Imagines Benndorf and Schenkel established an index locorum, ‘ex quibus tamquam fontibus Philostratus ea quae in Imaginibus leguntur hausisse videtur’. For the passage quoted above, they note three allusions to the Odyssey: (1) the famous snow-melting simile (19.204-9), which describes the weeping Penelope; (2) Penelope's loom, on which she unravelled at night what she had woven during the day (19.150; 2.105); and (3) the invisible bonds of Hephaestus as fine as spiders’ webs (8.280).