Galen's intellectual autobiography, On my own opinions, has challenged, and frustrated, potential editors for over a century. It is preserved in Greek excerpts, in a Latin translation made from the Arabic and with a spurious conclusion, and, for its last three chapters, in a passage of continuous Greek that circulated under the misleading title of On the substance of the natural faculties. Around 1340, the Italian translator Niccolo da Reggio made an extremely faithful Latin version from a Greek manuscript of the last two chapters. Although by itself no one source offers a complete text of the treatise, together they apparently cover it in its entirety. The Latino-arabic version, called variously De sententiis, De sententiis medicorum, and De credulitate Galeni, is the most extensive, but, as a comparison with the surviving Greek shows, it frequently departs considerably from the wording, and even general meaning, of the Greek. Indeed, without the availability of many parallel passages elsewhere in the Galenic corpus, much of this Latin translation would remain unintelligible.

Two recent studies by A. R. Giumlia-Mair and P. T. Craddock have been devoted to a form of bronze having a blackish tint.1, 2 The authors there describe examples ancient and modern, from as far apart as Mycenean Greece, Egypt, Rome, China and Japan. In Japan such bronze is prominently represented in decorative art and known as Shakudo.

The praetorship of L. Rupilius is of great importance only to the biography of L. Rupilius. His consular candidacy has a wider significance, since his repulsa represents a reverse for his most prominent supporter, Scipio Aemilianus.

As the praetorship is not explicitly mentioned in the sources, its terminus non post quem is fixed by the consular candidacy. Scholarly treatment of the question is hard to come by. The terminus post quem for the candidacy of Lucius is his brother's candidacy (in 133); the terminus ante quem, Scipio's death (in 129): Cicero (Lael. 73) tells us that Scipio brought about the election of P. Rupilius, but failed to make his brother Lucius consul. Broughton classified L. Rupilius as ‘Pr. by 133 ’, and in this seems to have followed Münzer, who indeed considered L. Rupilius ‘Praetor gegen 620 = 134’, but added that he was a candidate ‘urn das Consulat für 623 =131 oder noch eher für 624 = 130’. Of course, if L. Rupilius was a candidate in 131 for a consulship of 130, then he was praetor by 133. A candidacy in 1294 can be safely ruled out: Scipio died in the first half of the year, in spring or early summer. But we cannot rule out candidacy in 130 for 129: Scipio might have preferred L. Rupilius to either consul of that year. The latest possible date for the praetorship of L. Rupilius is therefore 132.

In Ars Amatoria 3.267–72, part of a longer sequence which begins in 261, Ovid advises his female readers on how to conceal various physical shortcomings. Text and apparatus are quoted from Kenney's revised OCT:

quae nimium gracilis, pleno uelamina filo

sumat, et ex umeris laxus amictus eat;

pallida purpureis tangat sua corpora uirgis,

nigrior ad Pharii confuge piscis opem;

pes malus in niuea semper celetur aluta,

arida nee uinclis crura resolue suis;…

Pliny the Elder in Natural History, xiii, 74–82, described in detail specifications for the manufacturing of papyrus. However, there was a spurious omission pertaining to the height (the term length was also used by some authors) of the manufactured sheet in sentence 78. Johnson has listed the different theories explaining this as an oversight or that a standard height-to-width ratio existed, thus making the specification of the height redundant. The latter is not substantiated by the measurement of the dimensions of extant papyrus rolls. Johnson proposed a more rational theory, that it was most important to specify the width but this does not explain the absence of any specification of height, even as a measurement of secondary importance.

To my Oxford Classical Text of Cicero's De Officiis, published in 1994, I add two footnotes.

The first is an important citation of Cicero in Augustine, which I missed thanks to my own incompetence. Maurice Testard, in his Saint Augustin et Ciceron remarks in Augustine's Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum not only the passage I note at Off. 1.7, but also 4.43 ( =P.L. 45.1361). Migne's text (repunctuated) reads as follows:

Sequitur ergo ut uerecundiam deponas, ac manente amicitia cum

magistro Cynicis foedereris: quos tamen aliquorum, ut Cicero in

Officiis refert, etiam Stoicorum argumenta comitantur. Arguunt

quippe communem honestatem, ‘quod ea quae re turpia non sint, uerbo

5 flagitiosa ducamus; ilia autem quae re turpia sint, nominibus

appellemus suis. Latrocinium perpetrare, fraudem facere, adulterium

committere, re turpe est, sed dicitur non obscene: liberis operam

dare honestum est re, nomine obscenum. Pluraque in earn sententiam

ab eisdem’ inquit ‘contra uerecundiam disputantur. Nos autem

10 naturam sequamur, et omne quod abhorret ab oculorum auriumque approbatione fugiamus.’.

In A.D. 357 while at Antioch the sophist Libanius wrote a letter to his friend Anatolius in which he congratulated him on his appointment as praefectus praetorio Illyrid. He expressed his pleasure at the conduct of Anatolius in his new appointment, and related a story which he had heard at Antioch from Musonianus, the praefectus praetorio Orientis. On his appointment, Anatolius had promised Constantius II that he would not ignore the misconduct of any official, whether civilian or military, whatever his rank. This promise had been put into effect almost immediately when one of the military commanders who showed cowardice against the barbarians was arrested.

There are two women called Salpe who are said to have written books in antiquity: one is described by Athenaeus (7.322a) as the name or pseudonym of a writer of ‘Paignia’ the other is cited by Pliny the Elder who calls her at one point Salpe obstetrix. Salpe is a rare name in antiquity—I know of no other examples—and few ancient books were ascribed to women. That two of these rare female writers should be called by the same name is something of a coincidence. That the name they shared was the very rare Salpe is a priori distinctly unlikely. It is much more plausible that they were one and the same.