Chapters 114 and 115 of Diodorus Siculus Book 17 give rise to impressive difficulties, considering their relative brevity. At the beginning of Chapter 113 Diodorus has announced the opening of the year 324/3 (Athenian archon, Roman consuls, 114th Olympic Games)—the last year of Alexander the Great's life. Alexander by then has already, at the end of the previous year (112.5), taken the fateful step of entering Babylon: wounded in his soul by Chaldaean prophecy, Diodorus says, but healed by Anaxarchus and the philosophical corps of the Macedonian army. The new year, 324/3, begins with Alexander dealing with diplomatic missions from three continents; and then, at the beginning of Chapter 114, Diodorus brings in the funeral of Hephaestion.

My purpose in this note is to examine the evidence for the witness's oath of disclaimer in the Athenian lawcourts. This is an issue on which modern discussions tend to be brief for want of ancient evidence. However, although our ignorance on matters of detail relating to the exomosia remains, and is likely to remain, profound, I believe that we can, by a careful reading of the limited evidence which is available, draw a number of more or less confident conclusions about the form and content of the oath and the degree of restriction it imposed on witness and litigant. The lexicographers have the following to say on pressures applied to recalcitrant witnesses:

Polydeukes 8.37: τóν δ' ο βονλóμενον μαρτρεῖν κλἠτενον το μαρτνρεῖν πρρστιθντεσ ἔδɛι δ αῖτóν ἠ μαρτνρεῖν ζομóσασθαι ὡσ οῖκ εíδεíη ἦ μἤ χιλíασ ποστíνειν. κλητεσθαι μν οῖν στí καλεíσθαι εíσ μαρτνρíαν, κκλητεεῖεσθαι δ τó δíκην óφεíλειν πí τπí τι τσ χιλíασ καταβαλεíν.

It was a characteristic of Macedonian custom that a name was used in a special and in a general sense. For example, ‘Foot-Companions’ was the name of a Bodyguard of Philip and also of the men of the Phalanx-Brigades from Lower Macedonia, and ‘Hypaspists’ was the name of Infantry-Guardsmen of Alexander and also of the men of three Hypaspist Phalanx-Brigades. Geographical names were repeated: there were at least two regions and two cities called ‘Emathia’, two or three regions called ‘Doberus’, four cites called Philippi or Philippopolis, and Alexandrias galore. To a modern mind this makes for confusion. That is certainly the case with the names ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedones’, which I shall treat separately in this article.

The incursions of Ptolemy Soter into Coelê-Syria and Phoenicia after the death of Perdiccas have received scant attention from scholars in recent years, and the little they have received has failed to draw some vital conclusions. The sources are compressed, but unanimous, that very soon after the settlement of Triparadeisus, Ptolemy subverted and overran the region, fortified and garrisoned the cities, and returned to Egypt. He seems to have held this satrapy until it became a major arena in the third Diadoch war, c. 315–311 B.C.

Apollonius Dyscolus’ use of ambiguity in grammatical problem-solving has in recent years had the benefit of two scholarly studies. David Blank, in the course of his analysis of the Syntax as a whole (1982), has described the broad functions which Apollonius assigns to ambiguity. Jean Lallot's 1988 paper, ‘Apollonius Dyscole et l'ambigüité linguistique: problemes et solutions’, is devoted exclusively to the treatment of linguistic ambiguity in Apollonius’ work. Yet it is to be feared that the flood of light thrown by these scholars on what had been an unregarded corner of ancient grammar has shown up rather more than Apollonius would have cared to admit, both about the nature, and about the prospects for success, of the enterprise on which he was engaged. At the same time, certain structural features of ancient grammar, at least of the ancient grammar which Apollonius himself constructed, have come into sharper focus: features clear enough with the benefit of hindsight, but glimpsed, it appears, all too dimly by Apollonius himslf. It is now worryingly clear not only that ambiguity was ambiguous for Apollonius, but also that the ambiguity of ambiguity represented a genuine threat to the coherence and value of his work. In this paper I set out to justify both these claims.

The most striking example of Roman intervention in the affairs of mainland Greece between the Achaean and Mithridatic Wars is provided by an inscription now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This stone bears the text of a letter to the city of Dyme in Achaea from a Roman proconsul named Q. Fabius Maximus, which describes his trial and sentencing of certain men of Dyme whom he had judged responsible for a recent disturbance in that city. One crux to be resolved is chronological: A date of c. 115 b.c. has long been generally accepted, but recently evidence from another, still unpublished inscription has been thought to point to the year 144. Further, the letter of Fabius Maximus has long been held to exemplify the close supervision that most scholars, regardless of their position on the vexed question of Greece's formal status after 146, assume was exercised over Greece by Roman commanders in Macedonia from the time of the Achaean War. The document has also often been cited to bolster the claim that Rome pursued in second-century Greece a conscious policy of suppressing democracy or the political aspirations of the lower class. This is not, of course, the place for reassessment of these old, complex controversies. My purpose here is rather to show that interpretation of the letter of Fabius Maximus has not always been sufficiently mindful of the many obscurities of the text and, consequently, of the events that lie behind it; too often the great lacunae in our knowledge have been filled with assumptions that beg the questions that are under debate.

At Phaedo 59b Echecrates asks Phaedo who was present on the day when Socrates drank the hemlock in prison. Various Athenians are named (59b 6–10), then various foreigners (59c 1–2), but when Echecrates subsequently asks if two other foreigners, Aristippus and Cleombrotus, were present, Phaedo replies that they were said to be in Aegina (59c 4). After this fleeting reference to Cleombrotus, Plato does not mention him again in the Phaedo or any other dialogue; and yet in later antiquity a certain Cleombrotus of Ambracia rose to fame in connection with the Phaedo. Callimachus is our earliest source for the anecdote which immortalized the Ambracian (A.P. 7.471):

Εἴπας ‘Ἥλιε ϰαῖρε’ Κλεμβρτος ὡμβρακιώτης

ἅλατ' φ' ὑΨηλο τεϰεος εἰς Ἀδην,

ἴζιον οὐδν ἰδὼν θαντου κακν, λλ Πλτωνος

ἕν τ περ Ψυϰς γρμμ' ναλεζμενος.

Callimachus, ep. 1 Pfeiffer (= LIV Gow-Page = AP 7.89) relates an anecdote about Pittacus: when consulted by a stranger from Atarneus who was wondering whether to marry a woman of his own social class or one of a higher status, he suggests the question is answered by the cries of the children playing with tops, τν κατ ｃαντν ἔλα. The chequered history of the transmission and interpretation of the poem is beset by a number of unfavourable or patronizing judgements which, I hope to show, have their origin in a series of misunderstandings. The poem seems to lack the sharp point characteristic of epigrams, and indeed Gow-Page go so far as to pronounce that it ‘has no claim to be called an epigram at all’. We now have a number of valuable parallels for the unusual length of the piece, but grave doubts continue to be expressed about the Callimachean authorship of the poem. While Diogenes Laertius (henceforth referred to as ‘D.L.’), who quotes the poem in his life of Pittacus (1.79ff.), explicitly attributes it to καλλμαχοఁ ν τοῖఁ ’Epsilon;πιγρμμαఁιν, in P and PI there is no ascription at all: there our epigram has been mistakenly consigned to the ’ɛπιτμβια simply because AP 7.81 (= Antipater XXXIV Gow-Page), on the Seven Sages, is followed by some fifty epigrams on them and other philosophers, all (save three) derived from D.L. In the Palatine ms. there survive traces of the questions raised by this poem, though—surprisingly—both Pfeiffer and Gow-Page fail to report them.

One of the great mysteries of the history of southern Italy, if studied from a purely literary point of view, is the ethnic composition of the Greek cities in the era of the Oscan and Roman conquests. Ancient authors paint a most gloomy picture of those cities which were conquered by the Oscan peoples at the end of the 5th century B.C. or later, saying in some cases that the entire Greek population was slaughtered (Cumae, 421 B.C.), in others that the entire elite was slaughtered (as happened during the capture of Rhegium by Campanian mercenaries in 275 B.C.), and in yet others that the remainder of the Greek population was kept in a state of dire subjection (Paestum, 410 B.C.). While not wishing to minimize the horrors of war, these lurid tales must be an over-simplification of the actual situation. It is not readily plausible that entire Greek populations disappeared so abruptly.

The fabula praetexta is a category of Roman drama about which we are poorly informed. Ancient testimonia are scanty and widely scattered, while surviving fragments comprise fewer than fifty lines. Only five or six titles are firmly attested. Scholarly debate, however, has been extensive, and has especially focused on reconstructing the plots of the plays.1 The main approach has been to amplify extant fragments by fitting them into a plot taken from treatments of the same episode in later historical sources such as Livy, Dionysius, or Plutarch.2 This method was extended by Mommsen and others in their efforts to identify new titles and plots by isolating passages in the historians which seem written in a dramatic style, and could therefore be interpreted as derivations from historical plays.3 Such a line of approach is both risky and subjective. It is based on the desire to recover a lost genre, which modern scholars feel must or should have existed. It is tempting to imagine that the Romans would have encouraged a thriving national theatre on historical themes. Such a genre, it is argued, would have been influential in shaping the average Roman's view of past events and the treatment of famous episodes by later historians.4 The conclusions reached have virtually no basis in the ancient sources we actually have. The result is largely a fiction created by the scholarly imagination.

Horace addresses Torquatus again in Carm. 4.7. There the poet distinguishes three cardinal qualities: Torquatus's genus, his facundia, and hispietas. Since Horace distinguishes them they were no doubt qualities on which Torquatus prided himself, but they are, in any case, the key by which Torquatus slips into Horace's lyric. I suggest that we can use the same key to open up the Epistle, and that by taking up these qualities we have ready access to the wit of the poem, carefully predicated upon its addressee.

This article has a double purpose: to argue for some specific points on Cicero's rhythm, and to show how the significance of rhythm for literary understanding is larger than has perhaps been perceived. The piece is based on a reading of the whole of Cicero; but it will make only occasional reference to the letters. The question of rhythm in the letters is particularly involved, and it will be best handled elsewhere.

In an earlier article in Classical Quarterly, S. J. Harrison explored the varying frequency of hexameter-endings of the type discordia taetra, where a noun that ends in short a is followed by its epithet with the same termination. It appears from this that while most pre-Augustan poets allow a fairly high frequency of such verse-endings (e.g. Lucretius 1:130, Catullus 1:204), some Augustan poets and their imitators show a distinct tendency to avoid them (e.g. Vergil, Georgics 1:547), while some almost exclude them altogether (e.g. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1:4999, Statius, Thebaid 1:1948). The hexameters of elegiac poetry might be subject to the same restriction; the following are figures for elegy from Catullus to Martial.

Here Ovid treats the demiurge's disposition of weightless aether over the other elements. This section of the cosmogony follows one that is devoted to the sphere of aer (52–66) where the creator settles the turbulent winds and other threatening meteorological phenomena. Recently Denis Feeney has suggested that Ovid's demiurge ‘does not act in a very epic manner’ by placing weightless aether on top of the winds. He argues: ‘The oddness of the control is caught in a moment of comparison with Vergil's universe: Vergil's Jupiter controls the winds by putting on top of them a mass of mountains(Aen. 1.61), while Ovid's mundi fabricator places above them the aether, explicitly “liquid and lacking weight, containing nothing of earthly sediment” (liquidum et gravitate carentem / aethera nee quicquam terrenae faecis habentem, 1.67–8)’. Feeney's observation has much to recommend it. To begin with, Ovid's excursus on the cardinal winds (57–66) evokes Vergil's set piece on the cave of Aeolus in Aeneid l. And the demiurge's subsequent placement of aether (‘haec super inposuit liquidum et gravitate carentem / aethera’) seems to echo the action of the Vergilian Jupiter(‘hoc metuens molemque et montis insuper altos / imposuit,’ Aen. 1.61–2). However, Feeney's conclusion that the demiurge's action is ‘redolent of anti-epic allegiances’ needs some adjustment.4 For his reading neglects an important verbal and structural allusion to the cosmogony of Lucretius (D.R.N. 5.495–501). Accordingly, the conclusion to be drawn from lines 67–8 may be, not that Ovid momentarily reveals his Callimachean colours in an epic context, but that he plays Lucretius off against Vergil and so establishes his own position in the epic tradition of cosmological poetry.

What follows is a list of corrections to my ‘Discordia taetra: the history of a hexameter-ending’, CQ 41 (1991), 138–49. Most of these are owed to the researches of Dr Nigel Holmes, author of the preceding article, and I am most grateful to him for his material, and to the editors of CQ for giving me this opportunity for correction; my humble apologies for human error in my pre-CD-ROM era. I am glad to say that none of the article's conclusions are substantially modified by these corrections.

Ovidians continue to be puzzled by the 404-line speech put into the mouth of Pythagoras in book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Questions of literary decorum and quality are insistently raised: how does the philosopher's popular science consort with the predominantly mythological matter of the preceding fourteen books? Do Pythagoras' revelations provide some kind of unifying ground, a ‘key’, for the endless variety of the poem? Can one take the Speech as a serious essay in philosophical didactic, or is it all a mighty spoof, as intentionally laughable, perhaps, as the imperial panegyric with which the narrative of book 15 concludes? Or should we beware of imposing modern tastes on Ovid's original audience, and respect the Hellenistic and Roman predilection for scientific poetry? This article seeks to establish further contexts for the evaluation of the Speech of Pythagoras through a study of Ovid's allusive practice within the Greco-Roman tradition of hexameter epos. The figure who provides a foundation for Ovid's construction of his own poetic genealogy turns out to be the Greek philosophical poet Empedocles. The resulting reflections on Ovid's manipulation of generic conventions may be timely in the light of the recent appearance of sophisticated and fresh approaches to the question of whether the Metamorphoses is, or is not, an epic.

Students of later Platonism know well the significant role Porphyry played in the development of what we now call Neoplatonism. His own biography of Plotinus makes clear that we probably owe the very existence of the majority of Plotinus' written works to Porphyry's nagging. Having cajoled the master into penning a large number of works during his latter years, Porphyry then edited and published them, giving them the title Enneads which they have since borne. We must, of course, take Porphyry's claims regarding the importance of his own influence with a grain of salt. Still, with the sole exception of Plato himself, no figure in the Platonic tradition had ever enjoyed Plotinus' good fortune in the transmission of his complete works, and none would again, for which we clearly have Porphyry to thank.

A dominant theme in the ninth of the Heroides, Deianira's letter to Hercules, is Deianira's indignation that Hercules has been defeated by a woman: first by Iole (especially in the first part of the letter: for example, lines 2, 5f., 1 If., 25f.); then by Omphale (especially in the section 103–18). The theme is exploited so insistently that Vessey, who regards the epistle as spurious, sees in this insistence a sign of the forger's clumsiness. consider the exploitation of the motive of‘victor victus’ in Heroides 9, on the contrary, as a strong sign of Ovidian authorship. From the very beginning of the letter, the reader is reminded that if a woman, Iole, has metaphorically destroyed Hercules, another woman is on the point of destroying Hercules in a much more real and literal way, and this woman is none other than Deianira herself. When Deianira writes the letter, she has just sent to Hercules the garment soaked in Nessus' poison that will provoke Hercules' horrible death (see 143–68): thus Deianira, rather than Iole or Omphale, is the woman who vanquishes the unvanquished hero. But this is not only a matter of dramatic irony based on the general lines of the story. Heroides 9 is an elegiac rewriting of Sophocles' Trachiniae (it is no coincidence that the letter opens with an allusion to Propertius 3.11), and at the same time is inserted in the time and the ‘body’ of the tragedy. Ironic prefiguration in Heroides is normally realized through intertextual anticipation: thefuture events that are prefigured are present in the texts of the model epic or tragedy. Deianira blames Hercules for bis defeat:

quern numquam Iuno seriesque immensa laborum

fregerit, huic Iolen imposuisse iugum (Her. 9.5f.)

quem non mille ferae, quern non Stheneleius hostis,

non potuit Iuno vincere, vincit amor. (Her. 9.25f.)

This note argues that two passages are worthier of the dramatist if the audience has seen the furies than if it has not. Orestes sees the furies (Choe. 1048–50, 1053–4, 1057–8); the chorus (1051–2, 1055–6,1059–60) does not see them. Does the audience see them? K. O. Müller, on philosophical and antiquarian grounds, thought so. Nearly all scholars today believe not. I agree with Miiller from what Orestes now says to the chorus: ὑμεῖς μν οὐφ ρτε τσδ', γὼ δ' ρ (1061). If the chorus does not see the furies and the audience does not see them either, the ὑμεῖς μν οὐχ ρτε τά7sigma;δ' lacks moment; the chorus cannot find those words of any use and the audience (from what it has heard in the ten lines preceding) cannot find them of interest. There is value in the words only if the audience, seeing what Orestes sees, is being reassured that the chorus does not. Line 1058, κξ μμτων στζουσιν αἷμα δυσφιλς, may be regarded as saying something the audience did not know from its own senses, and the same is true for ὑμεῖ μν οὐχ ρτε τσδ' in 1061 if it says once more that the furies, though real to Orestes, and to the audience as well, are not real to everyone. The opposite reasoning—that if the audience has seen the furies the γὼ δ' ρ (at the close of the line) is unneeded after Orestes has already said three times that he sees them—is not countervailing. For those words are in the less emphatic position, are fewer, and are of less doubtful usefulness, since they lead to λαὑνομαι δ κοὐκτ' ἄν μεναιμ' γώ.

The text is taken from Georg Luck's edition (Heidelberg, 1967). I have also consulted P. Burman (Amsterdam, 1727), S. G. Owen's editio maior (Oxford, 1889), A. L. Wheeler's Loeb edition (London and New York, 1924) in the 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold (London and Cambridge, MA., 1988), and Georg Luck's commentary (Heidelberg, 1977). I have also had a preview of J. B. Hall's forthcoming Teubner edition and I have used his apparatus, in which the traditional sigla for the principal manuscripts are retained.