In poem 64 Catullus, as Fordyce points out in his edition (p. 275), often has lines enclosed by a noun and its adjective, e.g.:

5 auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem

Very often, but not always, a syntactical unit is enclosed as well as the line. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the prevalence of punctuation at the end of the line in this poem. Nevertheless, an examination of the lines will show that when a noun and adjective1 enclose both line and syntactical unit the fact that they enclose a syntactical unit can be regarded as a determinant of the word order.

The first point that Tacitus makes is the confusion that surrounded these elections. Tiberius' policy was in no way as well denned here as it apparently was in the case of the praetorship elections:

De comitiis consularibus, quae turn primum illo principe ac deinceps fuere, vix quicquam firmare ausim: adeo diversa non modo apud auctores, sed in ipsius orationibus reperiuntur.

The decree establishing an Athenian colony at Brea in the north Aegaean area was firmly placed by the editors of The Athenian Tribute Lists in 446 B.C.; they identified the troops mentioned in lines 26 ff. with the men then serving in Euboia. In 1952, however, Woodhead proposed redating the decree c. 439/8 B.C. and explained lines 26 ff. by reference to the Samian revolt. A decade later I put forward a more radical theory, which seems to have won no adherents. I cannot really complain of this, since my arguments were inevitably far from cogent. For some Thucydides' silence alone will have been decisive. I would like to think that the issue has at least been clarified by now. The A.T.L. dating appears rather less plausible. Demokleides' generalship in 439/8 B.C. would fit excellently with his role as founder of Brea. This strongly supports Woodhead. It is doubtful whether Demokleides was general as early as 446 B.C, though conceivable that he returned to the board as late as 426/5 B.C. Woodhead may well be right in locating Brea on the inner Thermaic Gulf and, if so, this too tells against the A.T.L. dating. All our evidence suggests that real Athenian involvement in this area began in the 430's.

Ever since the work of Otto Miiller it has been generally agreed that the most important manuscript of the Thebaid is Puteaneus (P), a ninth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Parisinus 8051). It is not only the earliest extant manuscript but it has a large number of readings not found elsewhere, many of which are obviously preferable to what is offered by the other tradition, normally referred to as ω. Both traditions are early, however, since Lactantius depends on inferior ω material while Priscian seems to have followed the P tradition.

In the last number of CQ,(N.S. xvi [1966], 28 [iii]), I mistakenly attributed to Professor Zuntz (An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays of Euripides [Cambridge, 1965]) the view that P's exemplar was, before correction, the ‘parent’ of L.

The possibility that the parent (‘Λ’ in Zuntz) of L became, after corrections derived from its own parent (‘β’), the parent of P is in fact considered by Zuntz (p. 124) only as an alternative to the hypothesis, propounded by him on p. 122 and set out in his stemma on p. 192, that the parent (‘π’) of P was a copy of Λ and thus a brother of L. Regrettably, An Inquiry appeared too late for me to do it justice, with my article already in proof. In addition, I now draw attention to the following passages in An Inquiry as containing arguments which affect what I have written: pp. 13 ff. (my p. 28, n. 1), 119 f. (on Ba. 144–7), and 118 (on Ba. 151).