Suetonius quotes a number of extracts from Augustus' letters, with the intention of showing that Augustus did not dislike Tiberius as much as some had held, and that he had a high opinion of Tiberius' military qualities. The first of these contains a somewhat vexed textual problem. It reads as follows (in Ihm's Teubner edition):

Vale, iucundissime Tiberi, et feliciter rem gere, ⋯μο⋯ κα⋯ ταῖς †μουιcαcαιcτ στρατηγ⋯ν. iucundissime et ita sim felix, vir fortissime et dux νομιμώτατε, vale.

In an earlier paper it was argued that in the famous chariot simile at the end of the first Georgic, Virgil imitates a passage from the Choephoroi of Aeschylus describing the onset of Orestes' madness. It was also suggested that Virgil may have been intentionally drawing a parallel between Octavian and the son of Agamemnon. Orestes avenged his father by murdering his mother Clytemnestra, but in so doing he deepened the guilt that afflicted Argos and thus gave new life to the curse that lay on the house of Tantalus. So too, perhaps, Virgil is warning Octavian that in seeking to avenge his ‘father’ Caesar by killing his murderers at Philippi he is precipitating civil war, and so continuing the cycle of blood-guilt which similarly afflicts the Roman people. If such a suggestion seems fantastic it can now be supported by analogy from an explicit parallelism of Octavian and Orestes in a passage of Claudian. The first part of the passage in question reads as follows:

Maurusius Atlas

Gildonis Furias, Alaricum barbara Peuce

nutrierat, qui saepe tuum sprevere profana

mente patrem. Thracum venienti e flnibus alter

Hebri clausit aquas; alter praecepta vocantis

respuit auxiliisque ad proxima bella negatis

abiurata palam Libyae possederat arva

The eunuch Eutropius began his ascendancy over Arcadius, Emperor of the East, in late 395, following the murder of the Praetorian Prefect Rufinus. Eutropius, despite his physical shortcomings, ‘sullied the Fasti’ by holding the consulate in 399. By the end of that same year, however, collusion between the barbarian general Gainas and Tribigild, leader of a rebellion of Ostrogoths in Asia Minor, resulted in Eutropius’ fall from power. He was exiled to Cyprus and executed shortly afterwards.

In the Res Gestae Alexandri of Julius Valerius, the manuscripts at 1.36 read Tyrum enim proteri mox pedibus haberi principis respondere. The use of habeo with infinitive as a virtual equivalent of the future tense is common in late Latin. Thielmann emended our text to read habere and is followed by the standard critical edition and by TLL. “Can haberi be defended? We ought to remember that auxiliary verbs are often ‘attracted’ into the passive when the dependent infinitive is passive, in the case of some verbs regularly, with others occasionally (consider coepi, incipio, possum, desino).b It is not impossible to believe that the text at hand reflects the same phenomenon.

John of Alexandria is an obscure figure. Little is known of his life: his floruit is placed in the first half of the seventh century A.D. He was a practising doctor; the exact significance of the epithet ‘sophista’ which is found on the superscription to his commentary on the sixth book of Hippocrates' Epidemics is uncertain: but it may indicate an interest beyond the purely medical. Apart from the commentaries on the Epidemics and De Sectis, the only other work ascribed to him with any certainty is a commentary on the Hippocratic text On the Nature of the Child, although four other works traditionally attributed to Philoponus and of a purely medical nature have been ascribed to him.

Several times in the past the question has been raised whether in Greece or in Rome there were any free-born citizens who would have been prepared to take over the management of a farm, a business thought to have usually been entrusted to slaves. In this connection the number of sources testifying to the manumission of Roman slave bailiffs has also attracted some attention. It must be said, however, that notwithstanding previous scholarly efforts to assemble the relevant testimonia, important evidence has been disregarded or simply overlooked; in addition, in one instance at any rate, a source was not yet available.