Shortly after his accidental transformation into an ass, Lucius attempts to return to his human form by grabbing some roses decorating a statue of the patron goddess of the quadrupeds, Epona. But his servulus feels outraged at the sacrilegious act. Jumping to his feet in a temper and acting as a faithful defender of the sacred place, he addresses his former human owner as a new ‘Catiline’ (Apul. Met. 3.27):

caeditur et tilia ante iugo leuis altaque fagus
stiuaque, quae currus a tergo torqueat imos

In these two lines of his instructions for making a plough Virgil prescribes (173) the wood of the tilia (lime) as suitable for the iugum (yoke); he also (173–4) mentions the fagus (beech), seemingly in connection with the making of the stiua (stilt/handle). These recommendations are both problematic, and since the latter admits of no sure solution, treatment of it is relegated to a brief Appendix (below). The body of this paper has two aims: 1) to propose a new understanding of Virgil's prescription of the tilia for the iugum; and 2) to draw attention to Virgil's use of the Hesiod scholia in his plough instructions.

In Libanius' speech For the Temples (Or. 30), sometimes regarded as the crowning work of his career, he refers to an unnamed city in which a great pagan temple had recently been destroyed; the date of the speech is disputed, but must be in the 380 s or early 390 s, near the end of the speaker's life. After deploring the actions of a governor appointed by Theodosius, often identified with the praetorian prefect Maternus Cynegius, Libanius continues (30.44–5):

The vulgate text at Prop. 3.10.17–18 reads as follows:

et pete, qua polles, ut sit tibi forma perennis
inque meum semper stent tua regna caput.
17–18om. N  17 polles T, uulgo: pelles FLP

The speech of the Armenian embassy to Khusrow in the opening of Book 2 of Procopius' Wars has received little scholarly attention. Historians propose that this embassy, along with those sent by the Goths and Lazi, provided Khusrow with a pretext for violating the Eternal Peace in 540. As for the speeches themselves, they have been considered formulaic set pieces, requirements of the genre in which Procopius was writing. However, Anthony Kaldellis has argued that Procopius uses the Armenians as a mouthpiece for his own criticisms of Justinian, namely that the emperor is to blame for ending the Eternal Peace and that he behaved like an oriental despot. While these literary and historical readings are not incompatible, none fully explicates the mechanics and function of the Armenians' speech.

Intense scrutiny can raise chimaeras, and Virgil is the most scrutinized of Roman poets, but he may have engineered coincidences in line number (‘stichometric allusions’) between certain of his verses and their Greek models. A handful of potential examples have now accumulated. Scholars have detected Virgilian citations of Homer, Callimachus and Aratus in this manner, as well as intratextual allusions by both Virgil and Ovid, and references to Virgil's works by later Roman poets using the same technique. (For present purposes I disregard the separate, though related, phenomenon of corresponding numbers of lines in parallel passages: G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964) suggests several examples of such correspondences between Homer and Virgil, especially in speeches. Another purely formal mode of allusion faintly present in Roman poetry is homophonic translation (the technique which Louis Zukofsky's 1969 translations of Catullus pursue in extenso); thus Virgil's fagus, beech, corresponds with Theocritus' phagos, oak.) If genuine, the phenomenon lacks any consistent method or regular pattern (and the degree of plausibility varies); if genuine, it is very rare, even if accidents in textual transmission could have obscured some examples; if genuine, it probably originated in the Hellenistic period, although such a case has yet to be made. Virgil presently seems the earliest and most copious practitioner of stichometric allusion. A previously undetected example in the Aeneid is proposed below.

Macrobius devotes almost the whole morning of the third day in his Saturnalia to Virgil. Eustathius, in response to a question from Euangelus, examines what Virgil drew from the Greeks and from Homer in particular. In chapter 11 of Book 5, the expositor quotes and comments on some loci similes, judging in favour of the Roman poet. At the start of the chapter, he compares the bee simile in Aeneid 1.430–6 with a passage from Homer, Iliad 2.87–93:

Qualis apes aestate noua per florea rura
exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos
educunt fetos, aut cum liquentia mella
stipant et dulces distendunt nectare cellas,
aut onera accipiunt uenientum aut agmine facto
ignauum, fucos, pecus a praesepibus arcent.
feruet opus, redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.

The ghost of Darius provides a versified history of the Persian kingship, from the beginning down to the reign of his luckless son Xerxes, that starts out as follows in Martin West's Teubner text (1990):

Mῆδος γὰρ ἦν ὁ πρῶτος ἡγεμὼν στρατοῦ,   765
ἄλλος δ’ ἐκείνου παῖς τόδ’ ἔργον ἥνυσεν·
ϕρένες γὰρ αὐτοῦ θυμὸν ᾠακοστρόϕουν·
τρίτος δ’ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ Κῦρος, εὐδαίμων ἀνήρ,
ἄρξας ἔθηκε πᾶσιν εἰρήνην ϕίλοις,
Λυδῶν δὲ λαὸν καὶ Φρυγῶν ἐκτήσατο   770
Ἰωνίαν τε πᾶσαν ἤλασεν βίᾳ·
θεὸς γὰρ οὐκ ἤχθηρεν, ὡς εὔϕρων ἔϕυ.
Κύρου δὲ παῖς τέταρτος ηὔθυνε στρατόν·
πέμπτος δὲ Mάρδος ἦρξεν, αἰσχύνη πάτρᾳ
θρόνοισί τ’ ἀρχαίοισι·    775

Κίμων ἔγραψε τὴν θύραν τὴν δεξιάν,
τὴν δ’ ἐξιόντων δεξιὰν Διονύσιος.

Cimon painted the door to the right,
and the right door as one goes out, Dionysius.
(Anth. Pal. 9.758)

Anagrams and syllabic wordplay of the kind championed by Frederick Ahl in his Metaformations have not always been favourably received by scholars of Latin poetry; I would hesitate to propose the following instance, were it not for the fact that its occurrence seems peculiarly apposite to the context in which it appears. That Roman poets were prepared to use such techniques to enhance the presentation of an argument by exemplifying its operation at a verbal level is demonstrated by the famous passage of Lucretius (DRN 1.907–14; also 1.891–2) in which the poet seeks to illustrate the tendency of semina … ardoris to create fire in wood by the literal presence of elements from the word for ‘fires’ (IGNes) in that denoting wood (lIGNum). A similar conception may underlie the association insinuated by the love elegists between amor and mors, suggesting that death is somehow ‘written into’ love: so Propertius declares laus in amore mori (2.1.47), while Tibullus appears to point to the lurking presence of death in the pursuit of love in the lines interea, dum fata sinunt, iungamus amores: | iam ueniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput (1.1.69–70) – so swift and unexpected is death's approach that it is already present in aMOReS in the preceding line. Ovid's awareness of the poetic potential of this kind of play (if that is the right word for it) is fully exhibited in his celebrated account of Echo and Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3, where the subject matter gives the poet ample scope to exploit the humorous and pathetic possibilities afforded by Echo's fragmented repetitions of the frustrated entreaties of her beloved.

Herodotus is a fascinating author, not only to scholars of history, but also to a wide spectrum of scientists, such as engineers, who are not usually considered to be relevant to humanistic studies. A strong indication of the persisting interest in Herodotus is the recent proliferation of books, for example those of C. Dewald and J. Marincola and A.M. Bowie, on various aspects of his work. At the same time, there is a remarkable interest in the evolution of knowledge in different scientific fields which promotes the understanding of a) the relationship between socio-economic phenomena and technological progress and b) the process of acquiring and documenting scientific knowledge. In the field of hydraulics and hydrology in particular, this interest is documented by journal papers (for example by L.W. Mays et al. and D. Koutsoyiannis et al.), books (for example by A.K. Biswas, Ö. Wikander), book chapters (for example by A.I. Wilson) and conference proceedings.

The dating of Manilius' Astronomica and of the Aratea attributed to Germanicus are both long-standing problems of Latin scholarship. The large number of significant correspondences between the two poems suggests a considerable degree of imitation and allusion one way or the other, but it is widely agreed that the internal evidence of the poems can shed no light on the direction of the influence. I would like to present a new observation, however, suggesting that the Aratea was already available to Manilius in some form by the time he came to compose his first book.

The first sentence of the Annals reads urbem Romam a principio reges habuere. Commentators observe the echo of Sallust, Catiline 6.1 urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani, and of Claudius, ILS 212 quondam reges hanc tenuere urbem. In a stimulating recent contribution David Levene also compares the first sentence of Justinus' Epitome of the Histories of Pompeius Trogus: principio rerum gentium nationumque imperium penes reges erat. A fourth potential model may now be taken into consideration: Ἀθηναῖοι τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐχρῶντο βασιλɛίαι.

In Python's comic satyr play Agen (perhaps actually written by Alexander of Macedon) Harpalus, Alexander's errant treasurer, is mocked for erecting costly buildings left and right to honour his dead lover, the notorious prostitute Pythionice:

ἔστιν δ’ ὅπου μὲν ὁ κάλαμος πέϕυχ’ ὅδε
†ϕέτωμ’ ἄορνον, οὑξ ἀριστερᾶς δ’ ὅδε
πόρνης ὁ κλεινὸς ναός, ὃν δὴ Παλλίδης
τεύξας κατέγνω διὰ τὸ πρᾶγμ’ αὑτοῦ ϕυγήν.
(TrGF 91 F 1. 1–4)

Six palimpsest folios – or, to be accurate, three bifolios – of the Verona manuscript, Biblioteca Capitolare XL (38), contain fragments of a Latin translation of Euclid's Elements: fols. 331v–r and 326v–r, 341r–v and 338r–v, 336r–v and 343r–v. The folios are dated to around a.d. 500, and the text is written in capital script in two columns. Unfortunately the folios have suffered severe damage from various chemical substances, which were used by nineteenth-century scholars in attempts to retrieve the underlying text. Nevertheless, an edition of the fragments finally appeared in 1964 by M. Geymonat.

Vitruvius has something interesting to say at De architectura 2.8.8:

In a recent contribution to this journal, D. Kovacs addresses the following passage from the fourth Eclogue (cited here from the OCT of Mynors):

o mihi tum longae maneat pars ultima uitae,
spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta!

As the first poem of the last book of Ovid's Amores, 3.1 parallels the programmatic recusatio of the first two books, which present the traditional opposition of elegy to epic. In Amores 3.1, the personified Elegy and Tragedy compete for Ovid's poetic attention, and scholars have accordingly scrutinized the generic tension between elegy and tragedy in this poem. My study, by contrast, focusses on the import of the metapoetic locus in which Ovid sets his contest between the two genres, by considering the linguistic and allusive play in the opening lines. Ovid exploits the metaphor of literary tradition as an ancient and sacred forest to transform an author's choice of poetic genre into a walk in the woods. Moreover, allusions to Virgil's Aeneid 6.179 and Ennius' Annales 175 (Sk.) in the first line guide Ovid's audience to expect the more traditional opposition of elegy and epic. The less conventional contest between the genres of elegy and tragedy soon overturns this expectation; nevertheless, elegy's customary opposite, epic, maintains a presence in the form of a woodland context for Ovid's innovative generic opposition.