Ol. III. 43-5:

The ninth Pythian is one of Pindar's masterpieces. It contains the romantic story of the love of Apollo for the heroic nymph Cyrene, which is the foundation-legend of the great city, and he attaches to the end of the ode another graceful love-tale which was a family tradition of the athlete's ancestors. The style of the ode is suitable to the subject, and the rhythm is partly Dorian, partly Lydian. Therefore the grand style which is maintained throughout, the style in which Pindar always excels, is richly mellowed and tempered with a certain lusciousness, a rarer quality of his work, but appropriate here to the romantic theme. And Pindar combines here the energy which is his birthright with a certain dignified ease and clearness, and his besetting faults of harshness, bitterness, or overpungency and overstrain are absent altogether. ‘Out of the strong hath come forth sweetness.’

Hardly:τoσσάδε means ‘yet again,’ or ‘again and again.’ This idiomatic use of τοσο⋯τος (which is not recognized by the lexicons) may be illustrated from Plato, Apol. 19 c, µή πως έγώ ύπò Mελήτον τοσαύτας δίκας φύγοιµι, ‘lest I should be prosecuted by Meletus on yet another charge.’ Similar, in Latin, is the use of totiens: as Hor. Epp. i. 1. 6, ‘ne populum extrema totiens exoret harena.’

The passage about Paeon's treatment of the wound of Ares in Iliad V. 899–904 has been neglected or misunderstood by the majority of commentators, and no one, so far as I know, has pointed out its significance for pre-Homeric culture in that part of the Balkan area in which archaeological research has shown a connection with and influence on the culture of North Greece. I refer to that part known as Old Servia, extending from Naissus, the modern Nish, at present the temporary capital of Servia, and below Skopi, modern Uskub, into northern Macedonia.

In my paper on Xρή and Δεῖ in this journal for April, 1914 (VIII. 91-102), some errors call for correction, though they do not affect the argument at all.

Poetica xxii. 9. 1458b 5.

This use of ήβης has caused qualms both to others and to myself, but it means simply ‘life.’ Soph. frag. 713, ύβρις δέ τοι | ού πώποθ' ἥβης είς τ⋯ σώφρον ἳkετο | àλλ' έν νέοις àνθις τε καἱ πáλιν φθἱνει where τò νώθρον ἥβης must mean an advanced period of life. Thuc. v. 32, àπέκτειναν τούς ήβώντας, παῖδας δέ κα⋯ γυναικας ήνδραπόδισαν 116, ⋯πέκτειναν Mηλ⋯ων ὃνους ⋯βώντας ἔλαβου, παιδας δέ κα⋯ γυναῖκας ήνδραπόδισαν; in these two passages the context shews that ήβώντας includes grown men of all ages. Hence we may say with reason that ⋯κμ⋯ν ἥβης means merely ‘point of life.’ It does not, I think, mean to suggest that Oedipus hopes to hear that Laius was younger than the man he had killed; Oedipus is very careful to avoid leading questions throughout his investigations; it is his extreme scientific honesty that causes him to begin this very couplet by refusing to give Iocasta any hint of what he fears.Indeed he often seems to me to be an unconscious satire upon that scientific espirit which has led us to seek for the root from whence we sprung only to find an ancestor ‘with pointed ears, probably arboreal’; luckily we are none the worse. All he means therefore in this question is ‘how old was he?’ Both Campbell and Jebb mistranslate it.

I. 906-909.

μ⋯. ρ[…] τει. Professor Hunt thinks that this may be the remains of a verb ending in -ε⋯ or -λ⋯; read perhaps 'κρινλάτει. The uncompounded verb occurs in col. iv. 1. 8. It is well known that Sophocles is fond of forming new verbs compounded with ⋯κ. Professor Hunt tells me that this suggestion satisfies the conditions in the Papyrus. Compare κυνηλέσω, 11. 15, 44, and ⋯κκυνηλ⋯σαι, 1. 75.

The sense appears to be somewhat as follows: ‘An ill-fated army of “Siceli” shall come, bringing terror with it; but God shall give them evil and not good. Again and again stranger shall plunder stranger.’

(Works and Days, 172–181.)

In a note (C. Q. vii. p. 219) on the Geneva Papyrus, No. 94, I tried to show that of the four new lines (169 a-d) which that fragment adds to our text the last two formed an introduction to the Iron Age parallel to ll.127,143, 157. I may be mistaken, but I do not remember to have seen it remarked that in ll.179-181 (rejected by Lehrs) we have the conventional ending to the Iron Age.

It neither is nor need be doubted that tutamen opis, preserved like many another true lection in the margin of G and R, is what Catullus wrote. The tutū opus which OGR present in their texts is a simple error arising from the abbreviation of tamen as . But the verse still fails to satisfy and is universally esteemed corrupt. The description of Peleus as dear exceedingly to his yet unborn and unbegotten son is so absurd a form of address that all editors now adopt from the interpolated MSS the conjecture ‘clarissime nato.’ This description is neither absurd nor untrue, but it is yet untimely, and sorts ill with the bridegroom's other titles. The ‘decus eximium,’ the ‘magnae uirtutes,’ the ‘tutela Emathiae,’ all are already his: the glory reflected from his heroic son belongs to the future and is part of that prophecy to which in the next two verses he is bidden to give ear. clarissime nupta would be appropriate, and would resemble 25 ‘eximie taedis felicibus aucte’ and Ouid. met. XI 217 sq. ‘coniuge Peleus | clarus erat diua’; but ‘most illustrious in thy son’ breaks away from the rest of this prelude and forestalls what is to come in 338 and the following verses. There is therefore an undercurrent of feeling that even now all is not well: ‘de coniectura ilia dubitari potest, cum propriae Pelei ipsius uirtutes hie praedicentur’ says Baehrens, and Schwabe even proposes so wretched an alternative as ‘carissime fato.’

The four Books numbered XI. to XIV. in the extant collection of Sibylline Oracles present, under the transparent disguise of prophecy, a summary of the world's history, concluded, in the last fourteen lines of Book XIV., by a short prediction of an ideal future. The chronicle of events, as it now stands, runs continuously from the Flood and the Tower of Babel to some date not hitherto determined, but certainly not earlier than 266 A.D.

θήσμαιis not.is not‘I shall regard,’ as has often been supposed, for the reason that the two lines thus become tautological:‘I shall account my master's fortune prosperous; this beacon is a stroke of good luck.’ Verrall (quoting the Scholiast's oίkειώσoμαι, which does indeed strongly support his view) writes:'"My lord's good fortune I shall score to my game," i.e. regard it as my own.' The weakness of this seems to be that it gets too much out of the termination of one verb;1 something likeoίkειώσoμαι is needed to support the emphasis.

Circumstances have allowed me to inspect the Paris MSS. of Strabo and to collate them for a portion of Book IX. (namely, from c. 4. 18, μéγιοτον δη κ παλαιóτον to the end), in view of an edition of Strabo's Thessaly which Mr. A. J. B. Wace has in contemplation.

After I had put myself the task of investigating the correctness of the results obtained by Heibges concerning the clausulae of Chariton, I decided to determine the frequency in which the different rhythmical forms appear in the authors of non-rhythmical works. For that purpose I investigated the prose works of Thucydides and Plutarch as carefully and in as specified a form as was possible. This I did with the intention to compare the percentages with those of Heibges. In this comparison, however, I came to the conclusion that the figures for Thucydides and Plutarch differed considerably, and that in such a way that certain conclusions could be drawn concerning the manner in which Plutarch constructed his clausulae according to fixed rules.

Octogesa.—Those who have read the First Commentary of Caesar's Civil War will remember that the theatre of the campaign which he conducted against Afranius and Petreius extended from a point on the Segre twenty-two Roman miles above Ilerda (Lerida) to the mountains which close on the north the valley of the Ebro. The earlier operations took place in the neighbourhood of Ilerda and on either side of the upper reaches of the Segre; the later in the country between Ilerda and the mountains. Thanks to Stoffel, the topography of the earlier operations is determined fairly well: that of the later, especially the position of Octogesa, is still uncertain. Caesar's camp was about five furlongs west of Ilerda; the Pompeian camp was on a ridge half a mile south of his.

After considering this couplet at intervals for over thirty years, I feel continually more and more strongly that Elmsley's explanation is the right one, i.e. that the construction is o ύ µή πOTε Tà σà έKφήνω kakà τνa ετπω Tà έµà έ πη, and that the second µή is only an emphatic repetition of the first.

In a recent number of the CLASSICAL QUARTERLY (viii., p. 121), under the title ‘Neaera as a Common Name,’ Mr. Postgate writes: ‘There are two undoubted instances of this use of Neaera in Prudentius which are cited by Mr. Ullman.’ This is indeed a very welcome admission, for, unless I am greatly mistaken, Mr. Postgate was formerly of the opinion that such a usage or anything approaching it was unthinkable in Latin.1 But Mr. Postgate still feels uneasy about it, for he says: ‘I imagine however that to an unprejudiced sense of Latin usage these instances will themselves seem to be strange and in need of explanation…. Now is there anything in Neaera or its history which will account for this ? Let us examine the possibilities. And first those offered by etymology…. But it may be thought that it acquired its objectionable colour through the reputed conduct of some particular Neaera of legend or history.’ We are now on common ground, for of course there can be no type-names or common names without some reason.