In chapters 30–1 of the de Stoicorum repugnantiis, Plutarch sets out to show that the Stoics involve themselves in self-contradiction if they claim that their philosophy allows them an intelligible notion of providence. In the first place, he says, this is so because the traditional boons which men expect to receive from the gods (health, wealth etc.) do not benefit them at all if they do not have wisdom. Indeed, the fool uses all things badly, so that to give him anything at all without giving him virtue should be positively harmful to him. Yet the gods never give virtue to anyone so, on this score, they benefit no one either.

In his account of primitive people in D.R.N. 5 Lucretius says that they led a wandering, nomadic sort of existence (932, ‘vulgivago vitam tractabant more ferarum’); ignorant of agriculture and husbandry, they were content to eat nuts and berries and the like (933ff.), while streams and springs called them to quench their thirst (945ff.):

denique nota vagis silvestria templa tenebant

nympharum…

The rest of the sentence is a lush description of the streams which welled up from those woodland shrines, washing over rocks and moss, and sometimes breaking out over the plain (949–52).

So far am I from rejecting the use of what has been well stated by others, that I would wish that everyone said the same things about the same things and, as Socrates puts it, in the same words, and then there would be no undisputed quarrelling among men about the matters at hand.

Some scholars have seen in ‘fulminat’ an allusion to Callimachus' βροντ⋯ν οὐκ ⋯μ⋯ν, ⋯λλ⋯ Δι⋯c (fr. 1.20 Pfeiffer), and that is reasonable enough, since Virgil contrasts the warlike fulminations of Octavian with mocking disparagement of his own very different lifestyle (563–4 ‘illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti’). But it may have escaped attention that Virgil seems to be imitating some lines by another Hellenistic poet, Rhianus (mid to late third century B.C.); the parallel has thought-provoking implications.

This is our well received text of Propertius' celebrated address to the shades of Callimachus and Philitas at 3.1.1–2:

Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae,

in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus.

Well received it may be, but scholarly worries and disagreements about the precise meaning of sacra, and indeed about the real purpose of the address, perhaps have diverted editors' eyes from a possible corruption. I would like to suggest that the pairing of ethnic adjective and personal name, Coi and Philitae, in line 1 may not be Propertian.

In 1918 Conway and Walters published a restoration of Livy 9.40.3. The passage in question describes how the Samnite army of 310 was composed of two differently equipped corps.

At 876ff. Octavia's partisans lament the ruinous intervention of the Roman mob in support of the heroine's legitimate claims against Poppaea. A series of paradigmatic figures illustrates the sentence ‘o funestus multis populi dirusque fauor’: the two Gracchi, first, then Livius Drusus, the tribunus plebis of 91 B.C., stabbed to death in his house in the year of his tribunate. The gallery of historical characters suits the Roman atmosphere of the play, the fallen heroes of Republican times are presented as noble and disinterested figures, struck by disaster and evil fortune. This is the description of Livius' fate (887–90; text and colometry given as in Zwierlein's OCT):