It is exxtraordinary what difficulties have been found from ancient times in the extract from Empedocles (fr. 100 Diels) containing his theory of respiration, and preserved by Aristotle, De Respiratione 7, p. 473 B1.

Professor V. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf has recently published a paper in which he argues, firstly, that the very remarkable topographical errors in Thucydides' account of the Pylos and Sphacteria campaign, shown so clearly in Grundy's and Burrows' articles in the Hellenic Journal, can only be accounted for on the supposition that he had none but Athenian sources of information, and secondly, that as later— after 421—; he had access to Peloponnesian sources, his account of this campaign was written before 421; we have, therefore, an early example of Attic prose comparable with the oligarchic Constitution of Athens. Now seeing that the incident of the campaign which interested the contemporary Greeks most was the surrender of the Spartans, and that Thucydides goes out of his way, more Herodoteo rather, to give an anecdote (with explanation) to illustrate this interest, it would be sufficiently remarkable if he had not been to the trouble of getting the Spartan version of the affair; the more especially as Spartan sources were easily available in the prisoners themselves, who seem to have received at Athens the common treatment of that time, compounded of cruelty and freedom, which is so foreign to our own method, and to whom Thucydides could have had ready access. It is therefore worth while seeing if there is any reason for supposing Wilamowitz' view to be true.

Some time ago in this journal (XIII. 19) I asked for light on this common phrase of Lucretius, quoting three of its occurrences, and being especially interested in the last (where the final syllable of tempore is elided):

6, 230 Et liquidum puncto facit aes in tempore et aurum.

The Thebaid is not easy reading, and copyists (and at times, I fear, editors) have not helped to make it easier. There are many pitfalls in the language of Statius, and words cannot be taken always at their face value. I have erred myself and suffered. It may be of interest to give a few instances.

The passage here discussed, VIII. 6. 33, occurs in one of the lacunas, and we are thus deprived of the help of the great mutilated MSS., and have to fall back upon A. (Ambrosianus I.) and G. (the scribe who in the eleventh century filled up the lacunas in the mutilated Bambergensis. In § 31 Quintilian, in the course of his treatment of tropes, has reached onomatopoeia, and in § 32 that subdivision of the last-named, or perhaps we should say the kindred subject, which he calls πεποιημένα This was as follows: uix ilia quae πεποιημένα uocant quae ex uocibus in usum receptis quocumque modo declinantur, nobis permittimus, qualia sunt ‘sullaturit’ et ‘proscripturit,’ atque ‘laureati postes’ pro illo ‘lauru coronati’ ex eadem fictione sunt. Sed hoc feliciter eualuit.

When Gamurrini first published the Peregrinatio ad loca sancta (Rome, 1887), the narrative by an abbess of a pilgrimage undertaken to the Holy Land in the last quarter of the fourth century, he identified the authoress with Silvia, the sister of Arcadius' minister Rufinus. Heraeus, however, in his edition (Sammlung vulgärlateinischer Texte, Heidelburg, 1908) lends the weight of his authority to the view that the work was written by a certain Aetheria, and in his preface gives solid reasons for his preference. He also states that a thirteenth-century catalogue of the Limoges Cathedral Library mentions the book under the title Itinevarium Egenae abbatissae, but he regards the form Egeria as a mere corruption.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate the slightness of the foundation on which a commonly received doctrine about Roman funerals rests, and to discuss a point in connexion with the ritual of funera acerba.

Ep. 2, § 3 ‘non Conualescit planta, quae saepe transfertur.’ ‘coalescit’ (‘manuscrit de Mons’) commendat P. Thomas. Conferatur tamen Ep. 121, § 15 ‘herba conualuit,’ Ep. 38, § 2 ‘conualescunt et exurgunt.’

Ep. 13, § 14 ‘pudet me i bi sic tecum loqui.’ ‘diu,’ cf. § 15 ‘nimium diu te cohortor.’

When M. Félix Sartiaux says1 of the domain of Troy that ‘sa principale industrie est l'!èlevage de chevaux,’ he touches a point that has not been sufficiently considered in its bearing on the religion of Troy and its connexions with the tribes of Thrace, the Danube, and North Greece. In his study of the Thracian proper names Tomaschek notes2 the large number compounded with ‘Aulo-,’ which he regards as equivalent to ἴππο and remarks on the fact that it is natural to have such names in Thrace, as the chief business of the ruling Thracians was the breeding of horses, their food was flesh of horses, and horse-blood and horse-milk their drink. The same tendency is seen in the Iliad in the names with ἴππος as first or second member. They are for the most part names of Trojans or Trojan allies, the greater number belonging to Trojans. Only four Greeks have these names, and in two of these cases there seems to be an oversight on the part of the poet. Hipponoos occurs in a puzzling list of Greeks slain by Hector in II. XI. 301–304, in which the names that occur elsewhere in the poem are names of Trojans. Hippasides also constitutes a puzzle when used in the thirteenth book as a patronymic for Hypsenor, who is a Trojan in the fifth book, and has himself a characteristically Trojan3 or Dardanian name in ηνωρ Hippasos is a Trojan, father of Charops and Sokos, and, according to Hyginus, a son of Priam.

The word νóoς (νoύς) must, if it is inherited from Indo-European, be a word of the λóγoς type, and come from Indo-Eur. nósos, nówos, or nóyos, since a consonant must have been lost, and it is known that only s, w, and y vanished between vowels in Greek. Neither nóyos nor nówos can be traced with a suitable meaning in any Indo-European language; nóyos, on the other hand, would be a very probable ancestor of Skr. nayas. The senses of nayas are, I submit, sufficiently close to those of νóoς to lend some support to the identification. They are: ‘leading, performance, behaviour, worldly wisdom, policy, fundamental principle, system, theory.’

In the last instalment of the catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum, vol. VIII part iv (1922), Mr Cumont publishes from cod. Paris. Gr. 2425 two fragments of hexameter verse, one of three lines and the other of seven or eight, which he attributes1, perhaps rightly, to Dorotheus of Sidon, on whose remains I have written in C.Q. 1908 pp. 47–61 and 1911 pp. 249 sq. The scribe, who makes a practice of suppressing names, assigns the shorter piece to no author, and the longer he introduces with the circumlocution Фησί τις τν σοФν.

In the 'nineties the Celtic philologist, Whitley Stokes, told us in Common-room, that he once awoke muttering an incomplete stanza:

Like an ogress making progress

Through the spare-ribs of a child.

Could anyone complete it for him ? A former Newdigate prizeman, after reflexion, produced this:

Stern endeavour will be ever

By some welcome find beguiled,

Like an ogress making progress

Through the spare-ribs of a child.

In this journal (XII. 171, A Seventh-Century English Edition oj Virgil) I showed that an English monastery-teacher's marginal interpretations of Virgil had furnished material to the English group of Latin Glossaries—Corpus, First Amplonian (or Erfurt I.), Second Amplonian (or Erfurt II.), etc.; also that this English edition (if we may dignify it with the name ‘edition’) had no connexion with that Spanish Virgil whose ‘glossae collectae’ make Professor Goetz' so-called Virgil Glossary (C.G.L. IV. 427–470) and furnished material to the Abolita Glossary (cf. Weir, C.Q. XII. 22; Lindsay and Thomson, Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries, pref. p. viii).