Among the works of Aelius Aristides is preserved one entitled the Rhodian ('Pοδιακ⋯ς, sc. λ⋯γος, no. 25) It concerns an earthquake which has recently struck the city of Rhodes, and since Keil's edition of 1898 it has usually been considered spurious.

The work reproduces a true speech, not something like an open letter: the clearest sign is when the author uses the deictic pronoun τοετ⋯, ‘this here’, of the place in which he is speaking (53). One question is best discussed at the outset, since later it will prove vital to the question of authenticity: does the speaker claim to have been in Rhodes at the moment of the earthquake? Keil assumed without argument that he does. He had clearly visited the city before the disaster as well as after it (4, 32), but despite the vividness of his descriptions he nowhere says that he was present, and this reticence surely implies that he was not; and if he had been it is odd that he should talk of ‘the actual climax of the thing that befell you’ (τ⋯ν ⋯κμ⋯ν αὐτ⋯ν το comflex περιστ⋯ντος πρ⋯γματος, 19), using the second person plural. I infer that the speaker had not been present, but gave the speech several months after the event (εἰςμ⋯νας, 28); in the last part of this paper I will argue that he is Aristides, stopping at Rhodes on his wayback from Egypt to Smyrna in or about 142.

The text of the fourth-century veterinary writer Pelagonius, recently edited for the first time this century and greatly improved by K.-D. Fischer, poses many problems for an editor. The Latinity of Pelagonius himself in the epistles which precede various chapters is awkward and difficult to understand. Much of the rest of the work is a compilation, not all of it Pelagonius' own work, based on a variety of sources from the magical to the scientific. The work survives largely in a single manuscript, codex Riccardianus 1179, a. 1485 (R). In this paper I pass over intractable questions of spelling and concentrate on more substantial problems of text and interpretation, some of which concern punctuation.

As A. B. Lloyd points out, the passage from Herodotus which includes this sentence is the most important non-Egyptian commentary on Ancient Egyptian shipbuilding. In the years following the discovery of the Dynasty IV ships buried beside Khufu's pyramid at Giza (c. 2500 B.C.), J. S. Morrison suggested a change in the translation of the word (⋯ν)επ⋯κτωσαν. Traditionally, and in Lloyd's commentary, the verb ⋯μπακτ⋯ω has been interpreted as meaning ‘to caulk’. Morrison, however, believes that (⋯ν)επ⋯κτωσαν ought to refer to reinforcement of a ship's fastenings with papyrus ropes. He bases this interpretation on the evidence of the Khufu boats, which are sewn through v-shaped mortises across the hull's width (Fig. 1), and on the argument that caulking is better done from the outside. Lloyd has challenged this translation, but we would like to support it with some further evidence, in particular evidence of Egyptian shipbuilding practice.

The decree of Themistocles, discovered by M. H. Jameson and first published by him in 1960 has given rise to an intense debate centring on the question of the decree's authenticity. This debate has focused to an important extent on supposed archaisms or anachronisms in the text. If a word appears to be used in an ‘archaic’ manner, i.e., in this instance, one peculiar to the early fifth century, it may be an indication of the inscription's authenticity. Conversely, a word employed in a manner proper to a later time may be an indication of the decree's actual period of origination. Thus an early and influential commentator, D. M. Lewis, argued for the decree's authenticity asserting: ‘I see no reason to suspect a forgery. There are too many traces of official and archaic language.’.

To convince the Spartans of his suggested reform of the kingship, Lysander tried to get the sanction of the oracle of Zeus Ammon at the oasis of Siwa in Libya, and even attempted to bribe the priests there. The priests reported him to the Spartans. Only after his death, upon the discovery of a speech he had ordered concerning the reform, was the full scale of his plans revealed.

LSJ s.v. πρεσβε⋯ω II.3.b recorded, on the strength of Thuc. 5.39.2, the meaning ‘go as ambassador’ for the middle voice, in addition to the well-attested ‘send ambassadors’. The passage, however, does not on inspection support the meaning (see K. J. Dover, HCT 4.376 on Thuc. 6.104.2); it was deleted from the Supplement to LSJ.

In 1979, A. D. Woozley proposed an interpretation of Apology 29c–d which was intended to alleviate the well-known tension between the Apology and Crito on the citizen's obligation to obey the law. According to his interpretation, the court's hypothetical offer – to release Socrates on the condition that he will be put to death if he does not give up philosophy – is not an order, but a warning as to what would happen should he accept their acquittal and yet continue to philosophize. Obviously, if this is the spirit of the words he puts into the court's mouth, Socrates would not be guilty of disobedience should he refuse the offer, or even if he should accept it and then disregard the warning. To support this interpretation, Woozley suggested a novel construal of the words in which Socrates makes his refusal – πε⋯σομαι δ⋯ μ⋯γγον τῷ θεῷ ἢ ὑμῖν (29d3–4):

Agathon's mannered yet striking encomium on Eros in Plato's Symposium (197c ff.) has attracted critical attention in ample measure, yet at least one dark corner remains unilluminated. As the speaker approaches his climax in the words quoted above, he slips into nautical imagery: κυβερν⋯της ⋯πιβ⋯της … (a soldier on shipboard), but then disconcerts readers and commentators alike by immediately lapsing into the down-to-earth language of παραστ⋯της τε⋯ σωτ⋯ρ … words which seem to lack maritime connotations. The standard editions offer no help: Hug–Schöner (1909) devote several lines to the metaphors as they conceive them and suggest various groupings, but conclude somewhat despairingly: ‘dass es im ubrigen hier nicht auf Schärfe der Begriffe ankommt, leuchtet ein’. Dover, elsewhere a supportive editor, here only offers observations on ⋯πιβ⋯της and the ‘predominantly nautical sense’ of κυβερν⋯της (‘pilot’); he translates παραστ⋯της as ‘comrade-in-arms, – strictly the hoplite posted beside one’. Bury (1909, ad loc.) has some desultory statements which lead nowhere, while lecture-notes of pupils betray perplexity; some consider the four nouns here to be an ‘odd assortment’, and say that ‘many emendations have been suggested’. It has even been suggested that it was perhaps Plato's intention to show Agathon talking ‘near-nonsense’.

In an interesting passage in the Philebus (51c, cf. 56b–c, an enlarged and slightly modified list), Plato associates pure beauty with geometrical forms created by certain measuring tools used both by mathematicians and carpenters. The ‘beauty of figures’ is analysed as' something straight [εὐθ⋯ τι]… and round [περιφερ⋯ς] and the two- and three-dimensional figures (sc. σχ⋯7mu;ατα) generated from these by [τ⋯ρνοι] and ruler [καν⋯σ7iota;] and set-squares [γων⋯αι]' He continues: ‘For I maintain that these things are not beautiful in relation to something, as other things are, but they are always beautiful by nature, by themselves…’

In CQ 20 (1970), 277–87, 1 argued for dating Corinna to the third century B.C. In my Greek Metre (1982), p. 141, I continued to assume this date, observing that not everyone accepted it but that I knew of no attempt to answer my arguments. I must confess to having overlooked at least one such attempt, by A. Allen in CJ 68 (1972/3), 26–8; and now M. Davies has mounted another in SIFC 81 (1988), 186–94, largely repeating Allen's points but with some new touches. Allen upholds the traditional fifth-century date. Davies has yet to come to a decision, but meanwhile he is eager to discredit what he regards as an unsatisfactory case for a Hellenistic dating.

In an essay entitled ‘Cinna the Poet’ published in 1974, T. P. Wiseman forcefully countered the arguments of Monroe E. Deutsch and others against the identification of the ‘neoteric’ poet Cinna with the tribune Gaius Helvius Cinna, who after Caesar's funeral was torn to pieces by an enraged mob, mistaken by it for the praetor Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had applauded Caesar's murder. The identification of the poet with the tribune is supported by Plutarch, Brutus 20.4, where the murdered tribune is called a ποιητικ⋯ς ⋯ν⋯ρ. As Wiseman says, ‘there are six other ancient accounts of the murder, drawn from a source or sources unknown; five of them call the victim a tribune of the plebs, and none of them says he was a poet. Impressed by this, many scholars have thought that the victim was not in fact the poet Helvius Cinna, and M. E. Deutsch suggested in 1925 that either (i) the phrase in the Brutus describing him as a poet is a gloss, or (ii) “the tribune also dabbled in verse but was not the famous poet”.’ Wiseman's refutation of the various arguments of Deutsch and his followers against the identity of the poet and the tribune seems to me quite cogent, but the debate shows no sign of having been brought to a close: G. V. Sumner concludes his review of Wiseman's essay with an argument that the tribune was probably somewhat younger than the poet, and the suggestion that the tribune may have been ‘the adoptive, and hence homonymous, son of the poet’.

Among the clothes Ariadne is wearing in this scene is a finely woven headdress which Catullus terms a ‘mitra’ (1.63). Commentators have defined this mitra variously as a ‘scarf’ (Ellis, Merrill), a ‘cap or bonnet’ (Fordyce) and a ‘kind of hairnet’ (Quinn).

In Greek literature, a ‘mitra’ is any piece of cloth worn by women in various ways to tie up their hair. While the word came to be used by Latin writers, it seems to have retained its specifically Greek associations. Varro refers to ‘mitra’ as a Greek word:

mitra et reliqua ferre in capite postea addita cum vocabulis Graecisd. (de Ling. Lat. 5.130)

When Wordsworth was eighteen he embarked on a series of translations from Virgil's Georgics. All that survives of them today is a series of rough drafts and jottings, among which is a short note in which he attempts to resolve the well-known crux at 4.228–30

Suppose we read it thus – ‘prius haustu parcus aquarum / Ora fove, etc.’ – and construe it thus:

First sparingly steep the mouth (‘ora’) of the hive in water (‘haustu … aquarum’).

Few details in Virgil's description of the underworld have elicited more comment than his treatment of the sinners Ixion and Pirithous

quid memorem Lapithas, Ixiona Pirithoumque?

quos super atra silex iam iam lapsura cadentique

imminet adsimilis; lucent genialibus altis

aurea fulcra toris; epulaeque ante ora paratae

regifico luxu; Furiarum maxima iuxta

accubat et manibus prohibet contingere mensas

exsurgitque facem attollens atque intonat ore

Scholars have long seen that Horace's treatment of Homer in this Epistle demands to be read in the tradition of moral allegory in which Ulysses becomes the type of the ‘man of virtue’ (‘rursus quid virtus et quid sapientia possit / utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulixen’, 17–18): on such a reading, Circe becomes an allegory of foolish passion ‘to which Ulysses’ companions give in through their stultitia, and because of which they lose their reason and become no better than animals. Antisthenes, from whose writings such an allegorising approach probably developed, was regarded as an early Cynic, and the idea became the special province of Cynic-Stoic philosophy; scholars have therefore felt justified in seeing this epistle as a criticism of Epicureanism, represented by the sponsi Penelopae, nebulones, Alcinoique … iuventus, from the point of view of a Cynic or a syncretistic Stoic.

In a recent issue of CQ, N. J. Lowe refers to the ‘slyly Catullan appeal to the language of pietas’ in [Tib.] 3.7 (4.11) 1–2 (‘Estne tibi, Cerinthe, tuae pia cura puellae / quod mea nunc vexat corpora fessa calor’?). In this he follows Matthew Santirocco, who comments on these lines: ‘significantly, the expression for love here is not just cura as before [sc. in 3.16 [4.10] 3], but pia cura. We recall the pietas Catullus proclaimed in his affair with Lesbia (cf. 76.2,5) and perhaps also pius Aeneas and all that pietas meant to the Augustan age, and then we realise that Sulpicia is now concerned not so much with the mere fact of Cerinthus’ affection as with its quality.

There is a persistent tradition of reading Propertius 1.10, according to which the Gallus addressed by the poem is the elegiac poet, and the poem itself is a description, not, or not only, of Gallus and his girl in bed but of Propertius reading Gallus’ love elegy.1 In CQ 39 (1989), 561–2, James O'Hara suggests that the phrase ‘in alternis vocibus’ in Prop. 1.10.10 is a hint at amoebean verse, and as such may refer to the amoebean elegiac experiments by Gallus which Fairweather argues are represented by the Qasr Ibrim papyrus. This may well be right. I suggest, however, that the primary metaphorical meaning of ‘in alternis vocibus’ is ‘in your elegiac verse’. Oblique hints at such a reading can be found in Ross (above n. 1), who describes 9f as ‘an extremely suggestive couplet’, and Hinds, in his discussion of alternus as a programmatic term in Ovid, Fasti 4.484.

Incongruity and anachronism characterize Ovid's treatment of the gods and mythological figures in the Metamorphoses; frequently the resulting discrepancy between the superhuman world of mythology and characteristic aspects of Roman society serves to pillory that society as well as to undermine the dignity of the traditional mythology. Linguistic parody is one of the tools Ovid uses to highlight these discrepancies. An example recently noted is that of the serenade delivered by Polyphemus the landlubber to his marine beloved, Galatea (Met. 13.789–869): by casting this in the form of Gebetsparodie, Ovid mocks the literary topoi of the paraclausithyron as well as reducing the heroic status of the mythological protagonists. I suggest that in Tiresias’ brief appearance in Metamorphoses 3 Ovid imitates the pedantic locutions of jurists’ language in order to demonstrate how trivial and undignified are the preoccupations of the bickering Olympians.

Pompey has been treacherously killed, his body decapitated and thrown into the surf. The faithful Cornelia cannot give her husband a proper funeral, but must be content to place on the pyre all that is left of his greatness. Commentators are not of much help in this place, most caught up in tralatician glossing and hence content to echo the scholiastic reference to Pompey's three triumphs. Thomas Farnaby thought of the funeral of Misenus in Aeneid 6; but one looks in vain to Grotius (1639), Oudendorp (1728), Burman (1740), Bentley (1760), Weber (1828–9), Francken (1896–7), Heitland-Haskins (1889), Housman (1926), Bourgery-Ponchont (1947), and Luck (1985) for the most important parallel, which is to Dido in Aeneid. I adduce the passages Heinze well described as examples of ‘das Idealbild eines heroischen Weibes’:

tu secreta pyram tecto interiore sub auras

erige, et arma uiri thalamo quae fixa reliquit

impius exuuiasque omnis lectumque iugalem,

quo perii, super imponas:

494–7) super exuuias ensemque relictum

effigiemque toro locat haud ignata futuri.

(507–8)hie, postquam Iliacas uestis notumque cubile

conspexit, paulum lacrimis et mente morata

incubuitque toro dixitque nouissima uerba:

‘dulces exuuiae…’

So a frenzied matron cries out to Phoebus as she rushes through an appalled Rome. In CQ 34 (1984), 454f. I pointed out that the words primos in ortus could not here bear their normal sense ‘to the far east’ (as taken by Duff, similarly Bourgery-Ponchont, and others), which in view of the next line would be geographically absurd, and, distraught as the lady was, even so highly improbable. I did, however, then think R. J. Getty right in taking the expression primos ortus as simply = ‘the east’, and adding ‘the epithet primos appears to be otiose’. But I now feel very doubtful about the epithet being viewed as otiose in order that the words may denote Egypt; quite different are the passages noted in OLD primus 6 ‘belonging to the rising sun, eastern’, as Stat. Silv. 1.4.73 ‘occidiias primasque domos’ in the cited Sen. Oed. 116 ‘miles… ausus Eois equitare campis / figere et mundo tua signa primo’ the literal meaning is no doubt ‘on the world's first edge’ (Miller, Loeb), but its development into ‘eastern’ is readily seen. Egypt, however, as viewed by Rome, is but the bare beginning of the east, and that is what primos must indicate above (note emphatic position): see OLD primus 10 b ‘the nearest part of, the entrance, threshold, or sim., of, noting e.g. Ov. Fast. 1.717 ‘horreat Aeneadas et primus et ultimus orbis’, Cic. Fam. 3.6.2. ‘te in prima prouincia uelle esse, ut quam primum decederes’. In a characteristic departure from their stock meaning Lucan's words primos in ortus must then mean ‘to the threshold of the east’, i.e. the delta of the Nile, as explained in the next line (684): contrast 7.360 primo gentes oriente = ‘the nations of the far east’ (Duff). For Egypt viewed as the beginning of the east, cf. Mela 1.9 ‘Asiae prima pars Aegyptus’, Plin. Nat. 5.47 ‘[Africae] adhaeret Asia, quam patere a Canopico ostio [Nili] ad Ponti ostium Timosthenes…tradidit’, Mart. Cap. 6.675 ‘Aegyptus… Asiae caput, 3 quae una ab ostio Canopi ad ostium Ponti habet… milia passuum’; cf. the close association of Egypt with the east in Virg. Aen. 8.687 ‘Aegyptum uiresque Orientis’. For the varied use of the word primus should be noted too Luc. 9.413f. ‘nee… plus litora Nili / quam Scythicus Tanais primis a Gadibus absunt’, ‘from Gades in the far west’ (Duff), ‘Gades the first place in the west’ (Haskins), i.e. the threshold of the Mediterranean.