After the Jewish War Josephus was taken to Rome by Titus and then enjoyed the favour of Vespasian (Vit. 422–3). The first task set him was to write a history of it in Aramaic for the ‘upper barbarians’, by which he means Parthians, Babylonians, Jews beyond Euphrates and Adiabenians (B.J. I 3, 6). For his work he doubtless had access to the ‘commentarii’ of the emperor. This task may not have taken him long, but the translation into Greek (B.J. I 3) which we possess took longer, and was finished before the emperor's death, but after the dedication of the Forum Pacis (B.J. VII 158). In its leisurely composition he tells us later (c. Ap. I 50) that he had ‘certain assistants’ in the Greek language. As the work is quite uniform and smooth in style, we can only assume that J. turned his Aramaic into Greek himself to start with, and then placed the MS in the hands of assistants who systematically revised it, rewriting where necessary. No other hypothesis is possible; for no assistant could have been found sufficiently familiar with both Aramaic and literary Greek—at least it is highly improbable—and we have no reason to disbelieve J. when he says he translated his original treatise.

Peter Elmsley once said ‘difficillimum opus esse accuratam librorum collationem’. He was pointing out some mistakes in Porson's collation of the editio princeps of the four plays of Euripides, which Porson had said that he himself had collated ‘summa cum religione, ne dicam superstitione’. These were both men who knew Greek and who could collate manuscripts. So we ⋯ν;θρωπ⋯σκοι who would follow in their footsteps in this most difficult task cannot expect to do more than increase in some small measure the accuracy and completeness of existing collations. It is to be hoped that others in their turn may in due course improve on our work also, so that finally, with sufficient workers in the field, a close approximation to truth may be achieved.

Since geography was one of the accepted branches of Ionian Ίστορíη, it is not surprising that geographical description and discussion should play so large a part in the work of Herodotus. Nor is it surprising that, since he covered so much ground, he should occasionally borrow information from his predecessors. Apart from particular passages where comparison with the fragments of Hecataeus shows that he borrowed from this author's Periegesis, there are numerous others which, although strictly relevant fragments are lacking, by their style and manner betray the influence of Hecataeus. The so-called ΛιβυκῸσ λΌγος for example, in Book IV is full of the conventional formulae familiar to anyone who has studied the fragments; consequently Jacoby is prepared to say that it provides even more valuable material for the method and style of Hecataeus than the treatment of Egypt in Book II, where more specific evidence of borrowing is available. There are countless other passages and isolated sentences where the style suggests, if not actual dependence on the text of Hecataeus, at least adherence to the Hecataean tradition of geographical description.

The first study of Plutarch's prose-rhythm was made by Dr. A. W. de Groot, whose results were published in certain preliminary articles and in his Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm, a work which is one of the landmarks in the history of its subject. In it he insisted that to discover which forms of clausula were favoured or avoided by any author it was not sufficient to make a count and discover which were frequent, which infrequent; for a form may be frequent not because an author feels it suitable for the end of a sentence, but because he likes it at any point in his sentence, or even because we should find it frequent if we picked out words by chance from the dictionary. To discover which rhythms are specially sought or avoided at the end of a sentence we must compare the ends with the sentence as a whole. This Dr. de Groot did for a number of texts, included in which were selections from Plutarch's Lives.

The construction assumed for the first sentence in this passage is that adopted by Verrall and Headlam, apart from some differences in detail. It seems unlikely that ἰδών can refer to what precedes, as some have thought; for it can hardly be supposed that the poet, who is using speed and economy (a point often neglected by critics), would pause to tell us that the great Seer merely ‘sees’ two distinctively coloured birds which ‘have appeared near by in a conspicuous station’ compare Homer's method (B321). Also it would involve us in the doubtful construction Ατρεϊδας έδάη λαγοδαίτας for ‘he knew the Ἀ. to be the λ.’ (or vice versa); the nearest parallel to this would appear to be Xen. Anab. 1. 7. 4 οἴους γνώσεσθε τοùς ἄνθρὡπονς, where the adjective makes some difference.

The following remarks on the aviary simile have been prompted by Professor Hackforth's article in C.Q. January 1938, pp. 27 ff., in which he in turn comments on certain points in Professor Cornford's treatment in his Plato's Theory of Knowledge.

Commenting on 199c–d C. (137) suggests that P.'s criticism in that passage might be met by the inclusion in the aviary of ‘complex objects such as the “sum of 7 and 5”.… It is this object (sc. the complex object “the sum of 7 and 5”) that I identify with 11 when I make my false judgement.… False judgement can be explained as the wrong putting together of two pieces of knowledge’—i.e. 11 and ‘the sum of 7 and 5’. C. (138) further suggests that P. has overlooked this possibility because he persists in speaking as if we judged not ‘that the sum of 7 and 5 is 11’ but that ‘12 (the number we are seeking) is 11 (the number we lay hold of)’. H. replies that this criticism of C.'s is not valid because P. understands the knowledge of 11 and 12 to include a knowledge of the various sums that make up these numbers. There could, therefore, be no ‘question of “putting together” such a piece of knowledge as 7 + 5 = 12 with a different piece of knowledge, viz. the knowledge of 12. They are not different pieces; they are the same piece.’

The new edition of Chariton's novel Chaireas and Callirhoe by Mr. Warren E. Blake (Oxford, 1938) has a twofold merit: it is founded on a new and accurate collation of the only extant manuscript, a Florentinus, and it gives a full collection of the conjectures in and since the editio princeps by D'Orville (Amsterdam, 1750). The new text has already provoked some suggestions by Prof. H. J. Rose in C.Q. xxxiii, 1939, 30, but I should like to propose alterations in some more passages