The twenty-four lines of this poem have been preserved only by the cod. Sangallensis 878 (variously assigned to saec. IX or IX-XI or XI-XII), whence it was edited in 1863 by K. SchenklSitzungsb. d. phil.-hist. Cl. d. kais. Akad. d. Wissensch. (Vienna) XLIII p. 71. A single line, the last, exists also in the cod. Bernensis 108 saec. IX. Fifteen survive in a MS of the 17th century now divided into two parts, Barberinus (or Barberinianus) XXXI 39 and Vaticanus 9135, the former containing the hexameters 3, 5, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23 and a spurious hexameter in lieu of 1, the latter the pentameters 2, 4,14,16,18, 20, 22, 24. The eight consecutive lines 6-13 are therefore missing from both ; and in this imperfect and interpolated form the poem was edited by Mommsen with Haupt's assistance inC.I.L. I p. 411.

In the second book of his Epitoma rei militaris Vegetius sets himself the task of describing the organization of the antiqua legio of the Roman Army, the units into which it was divided, its officers, the arms of its soldiers, and its tactical employment on the field of battle. Interspersed in this account are frequent references to changes that had been subsequently effected and were in operation in the author's lifetime. But although these annotations destroy the synthesis of the book, and the transition from past to present is not always clearly indicated, the disentanglement of Vegetius' own additions from the material provided by his source or sources is not the chief difficulty that confronts the modern historian. For with few exceptions in chapters 4–14 Vegetius describes the antiqua legio in the imperfect, the legion of his own time in the present indicative, with the not infrequent addition of the word ‘nunc’ or ‘hodie.’ The great problem is to discover whether in his account of the antiqua legio the author is referring to any one period of Roman History, and, if so, whether its limits can be exactly defined. Many solutions have been attempted. Some scholars have thought that the period is earlier than Hadrian; the more generally accepted theory is that the antiqua legio can be identified with the legion as it was constituted in the reign of Diocletian. Recently two German historians have subjected the evidence to fresh consideration, and, while one of them agrees with the majority in selecting the age of Diocletian for his answer to the problem, the other believes that he can date the period to which Vegetius is referring to the late second century A.D.

In the course of his dispute with Conington on the comparative merits of Catullus and Horace, Munro taxed the Augustans with having made the lyric of the heart impossible in Latin by their virtual exclusion of diminutives from the language of poetry; and, whether that is the result or no, the general fact that diminutives are rare in the serious poetry of the Augustan age is well known. The details, however, are less easy to come by. Stolz (Hist. Gr. d. lat. Spr., p. 574) and Stolz-Schmalz (hat. Gr., p. 834) devote a few unilluminating lines to the Stilistik of diminutives: otherwise the grammars and the treatises on diminutives known to me concern themselves only with forms and meanings. Except for a note by Professor Housman which, at 4. 927, sets out Manilius's diminutives, I know of no collections for any Augustan poet, and it is perhaps worth while therefore to state the facts. I have not indeed read through Augustan poetry for the purpose, but for some time past I have been in the habit of noting such diminutives as I have come across in the course of reading, and these lists I have now checked and amplified from the indexes to the authors concerned. My lists are probably not complete, but I hope they are sufficiently near it to present a true picture of the position.

The text of Seneca's Letters, despite the attention it has received from scholars in the last fifty years, still leaves much to be desired in a large number of places. It is a field in which emendations can be proposed (and judged) with rather more security than is often the case in classical Latin prose, because Seneca was a very prolific writer, exceeded only by Cicero and Livy in the bulk of his extant work. The absence of a special lexicon for this eminent author constitutes a genuine difficulty of course, but it can be overcome in part at least by a constant reading and re-reading of his works, not excluding the dramas. The following suggestions are based on a more intense application to Seneca than Quintilian would be likely to have approved.

InC.Q., January, 1928, pp. 16 sqq., I examined afresh the two discussions of poetry as imitation which are found in Plato's Republic. I pointed out that Plato used the term ‘imitation’ (μίμησɩς and cognates) in two senses, a good and a bad. The only kind of poetry which Plato excludes from his ideal state is that which is imitative in the bad sense of the term. He admits, and indeed welcomes, that kind of poetry which is imitative in the good sense (without discussing the question whether any such poetry is actually extant), and which he calls either imitative or non-imitative according as he is using the term ‘imitative’ in a good sense or a bad. The kind of poetry (briefly summed up in Rep. 607a as consisting of hymns to the gods and eulogies of good men) which is admitted into the ideal state is certainly imitative; and (which is the important point) it is in fact called imitative by Plato himself (e.g. in 397d τòν τοῦ ἐπɩεɩκοῦς μɩμŋτὴν ἄκρατον)—of course in the good sense of the word. Now the tenth book begins by stating that the result of the earlier discussion had been the decision to exclude ‘so much of poetry as is imitative.’ The implication is obviously that the remainder will not be excluded. (Plainly it is assumed that such a remainder either exists or will be successfully called into existence by the ideal state.) But what are we to call that remainder, unless it be non-imitative in the sense (the bad sense) in which the word is here used?

One of Sulla's first acts on assuming the dictatorship in 81 B.C. was to fill up the numbers of the Senate by the addition of some 300 new members. Tradition is divided on the question of the rank of these men before their promotion, and no unanimity has yet been reached in the matter. There are two distinct versions in the ancient authorities, both equally well attested. Appian and the Epitomator of Livy state that the new members were equites, while Sallust and Dionysius of Halicarnassus assert that they included men of the lowest rank (gregarii milites is Sallust's phrase). When we turn to modern historians we find opinion similarly divided. Writers such as Lange, Zumpt and Herzog accept the first version, whereas Niebuhr, Botsford, Willems and Gelzer incline to the view of Sallust. It is tempting to do as some writers have done and to combine the two versions, saying that some of the new Senators were equites and some common soldiers. But this is a very arbitrary cutting of the knot. Herzog seems to play with the idea that Sulla promoted ordinary soldiers via the equites when he says ‘wobei noch dazu mancher war, der seine Ritterstellung erst eben errungen hatte.’ This, however, is mere guesswork.

For about a hundred years there has been an intermittent but sometimes vigorous debate1 on the question whether Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus directly used the Second Aeneid as a source for their epic descriptions “of the capture and destruction of Troy. Heyne thought that they did not; but towards the end of the nineteenth century it appeared more likely that they did. Heinze opposed the general belief: but it was reaffirmed for Quintus by Paschal and Becker4 and for Tryphiodorus by Dr. E. Cesareo on internal evidence. Meanwhile Professor Samuel E. Bassett had concluded that Quintus was not after all dependent on Vergil: and still more recently Dr. J. W. Mackail, reviewing Cesareo's monograph, has maintained with emphasis that the Aeneid is certainly not the source of the late epic. Accordingly the controversy cannot even now be considered closed.

Tsc question of the date of Ctesibius has been much obscured of late years by those German scholars1 who assert that Ctesibius the pneumatic and hydraulic engineer mentioned by Vitruvius IX. 8. 2 is distinct and separate from Κτησίβιος Κτησίβιος μηΧανικός who is mentioned by Athenaeus Mechanicus (Βελοπιικά, p. 8, Thevenot), Philo of Byzantium (pp. 56, 67, 72, 77, Thevenot), and Hedylus ap. Athenaeum Naucratitam Deipn. XI., p. 497, d-e = Anthologia Graeca ed. Cougny, Paris (Didot), 1890, Vol. III., p. 298, n. 67.

In Italy, at the end of the tenth century, a pedant named Regulus (?) who had a copy of the De Verborum Significatu (or had made extracts from one), wishing to read Plautus (so often quoted by Festus), took the opportunity of an illness to appeal to certain prelates whose church-library contained a MS. of the comedian. Through their stupidity he received not Plautus, but Plato, i.e. Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus. Disappointed, but not deterred, he wrote the following letter (in a sort of rhyming prose, affected by the litterati of that time) on the fly-leaf and returned the MS. (now Bamberg. Class. 18), hoping that by much repetition he might hammer into their dull heads the difference between PL-AU-TUS and PL-A-TO and yet save them from chagrin and resentment (the material for the letter was supplied by Festus, although the opening illustration comes from Chalcidius):

Differentia est qua differunt singula: in Timeo Platonis legitur ANIMA-M post ANIMA-L non perire: in Plauto legitur CANCRUM imitaris, item aeneis COCULIS excocta est mihi omnis misericordia.

Professor Housman states (C.Q. IX, p. 33) that stella never is used to mean sidus, and for authors of the best age I believe he is right; at least I know of no examples except those which he convincingly explains away in the article quoted. There seem, however, to be instances of this usage perhaps as early as the age of the Antonines. Hyginus, fab. cxcv, says of Orion, ab Ioue in stellarum numenim est relatus, quam stellam Orionem uocant. Again, fab. ccxxiv, Crotos…in stellam Sagittarium. Hyginus, it is true, was a fool, and his book is crammed with mistakes, including astronomical blunders; thus, just after the last-quoted passage, and also in fab. cxxx, he names the star Arcturus when he means the constellation Arctophylax, or Bootes. But I cannot think him quite so grossly ignorant, since he was interested in star-myths, as not to know that Orion and Sagittarius are constellations. It may be, however, that the use of stella in these passages is due, not to Hyginus himself, but to the epitomators whose extracts from the original work are all that has come down to us. Of these gentry I can believe almost anything that implies false Latin or general ignorance.

Ancient Greek music was purely or predominantly melodic; and in such music subtleties of intonation count for much. If our sources of information about the intervals used in Greek music are not always easy to interpret, they are at any rate fairly voluminous. On the one hand we have Aristoxenus, by whom musical intervals were regarded spatially and combined and subdivided by the processes of addition and subtraction; for him the octave consisted of six tones, and the tone was exactly divisible into fractions such as the half and quarter, so that the fourth was equal to two tones and a half, the fifth to three tones and a half, and so on. On the other hand we have preserved for us in Ptolemy's Harmonics the computations of a number of mathematicians, who realized correctly that intervals could only be expressed as ratios (e.g. of string-lengths), that the octave was less than the sum of six whole tones and that this tone could not be divided into equal parts. These authorities are Archytas, the Pythagorean of the early fourth century, Eratosthenes (third century), Didymus (first century) and Ptolemy himself (second century A.D.). To these we must add the scale of Plato's Timaeus (35B) and, closely related to it, the computations of the pseudo-Philolaus (ap. Boethium, Mus. Ill, 8) and of Boethius himself (IV, 6). Aristoxenus is less easy to understand than the mathematicians because of the unscientific nature of his postulates. His importance, however, is very great, not only from his comparatively early date but because he claims to champion the direct musical consciousness against the scientific approach of some of his predecessors and contemporaries.

MY ‘Further Considerations on the Site of Vergil's Farm’ have drawn from Professor Rand two more long but lively articles in which he seeks again to defend Pietole and to controvert the evidence of the manuscripts of Probus. The effect of his articles on the mind of any reader who has not both time and inclination to test Professor Rand's statements by comparing them with the passages in his own and in my writings, to say nothing of others to which he refers, is almost certain to be twofold. First an impression that the whole question depends on highly technical points, of manuscript criticism and of the interpretation of puzzling scholia, on which no one but an expert can hope to form a judgement. And, secondly, the feeling that if so devoted a student of Vergil as Professor Rand, declaring himself quite content with the mediaeval tradition, can accept with a perfectly light heart interpretations of what Vergil wrote about his own farm which leave the reader in the end quite in the dark as to where it was and what it was like, then the non-specialist scholar may safely leave the matter in that obscurity, only thanking Professor Rand cordially for the charming gaiety with which he has handled and appears to have dismissed a troublesome enigma.