Meges, ruler of the men of Dulichium and the Echinades, is a personage who has occasioned some trouble to the commentators on the Iliad. The difficulties are stated fully, perhaps over-fully, by Walter Leaf (Homer and History, London, 1915, pp. 161 f.):

IN Od. 10. 81–86 we read: ‘On the seventh day we came to the steep city of Lamos … where herdsman bringing in his charge hails herdsman taking his charge out, and he who takes them out returns the greeting. There might a sleepless man have earned a double wage, as cowman for the one part, as shepherd of white sheep for the other. For close ‹together› are the paths of night and day.’

A. ScT 803–21 are a notorious crux, which has received very varied treatment from editors without any clear solution of the problem emerging.

A widely favoured version follows that of Weil, and disposes the lines as follows: 803–4 –6–7 ( (Heimsöth) or (Dindorf))–8–9–io (Porson))–ll ( (Hartung))–21–I2 … 19– [20]. We may be able to concede the arbitrary transpositions of 805 and 821, since it is likely enough that the text is substantially disordered; more serious, however, are the inherent weaknesses in Weil's rearrangement:

In my article ‘Two Textual Problems in Euripides’ Antiope, Fr. 188' (C.Q. N.S. xvii [1967], 41 ff.), in which I compared the debate of Amphion the unpractical musician and his industrious brother Zethus to the fable of the cicada and the ant, I drew attention to a passage of Olympiodorus' commentary on the Gorgias (p. 161, Norvin) which had been overlooked in the testimonia to Euripides' play, and which begins

Phaedra's long speech is one of the most important elements in Euripides’ most intricate play; we may confidently assume that with his surpassing interest in women and in rhetoric the dramatist will have lavished more than usual pains upon it. Interpretation of it has suffered in the past from false preconceptions and lexicological imprecision; the nature of the speech is such that we can be led far astray by a small misjudgement of the connotation (whether for Phaedra or the audience) of such words as at the same time there are some profoundly significant variants in the manuscripts, and it will be argued that the text of 405–12 has suffered from ancient garbling and interpolation. In the following discussion I am everywhere indebted to W. S. Barrett's commentary, whose detailed approach at least draws attention to numerous difficulties that have been hitherto neglected, but the conclusions reached differ radically from his.

Every Greek scholar knows the celebrated lapsus linguae committed by the tragic actor Hegelochus at the Great Dionysia of 408 B.C., when he faltered in his enunciation of line 279 of Euripides' Orestes and gave the impression to the mirthful audience of having said I am surprised, however, that the commentators on this line (and on Ar. Ran. 303, the most notable of the references in the comic poets to Hegelochus' lapse) have only partially explained the reason for its having seemed exceptonally funny.

The story of Dion of Syracuse was told by ancient writers, and is still being told by modern historians, in the main as a story of ‘freedom versus tyranny’. The liberation of the greatest state in the Hellenic world from the rule of the most powerful tyrants' house in Greek experience fired the imagination and aroused the admiration of contemporary and later writers. There is, however, another side to the story of Dion.

Philocleon's dance in the exodus of the Wasps, and its allusions to, and caricatures of, contemporary composers or dancers, have often been discussed, and much is bound to remain inconclusive in view of the dubious nature of such scanty material as has survived in explanation of the scene in the scholiastic tradition. It is particularly unfortunate that it is not certain who is the Phrynichus referred to in 1490 ff.:

Sixty years have now passed since Lefebvre first published the Cairo papyrus of Menander (Fragments d'un manuscrit de Menandre, Cairo, 1907), and Körte's still authoritative third Teubner edition (Menandri quae supersunt, pars prior, Leipzig, 1938, reprinted in 1955 with addenda by Thierfelder) appeared almost exactly halfway between then and now. It laid the coping-stone on the labours of many scholars, of whom four rose head and shoulders above the crowd:

In the present paper I shall investigate how far the employment of the vocative in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica and in Callimachus' Hymns i–iv complies with the Homeric usage as elucidated by Scott. For Apollonius, the relevant attestations have been listed, but hardly analysed, by Gildersleeve and Miller in A.J.P. xxiv (1903), 197–9; the Callimachean material has never been examined, as far as I know.

First of all, however, it will be useful to fill a gap in our knowledge and supplement Scott's data by surveying the use of the vocative in the Homeric Hymns i–v. My survey has led me to the following results:

It is well known that when resolution occurs in the stichic iambics and trochaics of tragedy word-end is not found between the two shorts so produced: w or, more accurately, that the first short of resolution must not be the last syllable of a polysyllabic word. Moreover, the syllables in resolution most often form part of the same word as the following short or anceps, e.g.: Ion 1143:

It is more than half a century since P. Boudreaux equipped the Cynegetka of the Syrian author now sometimes called Pseudo-Oppian with a proper text and apparatus criticus. The Halieutica of Oppian is still without either. Onemight think the latter poem hardly worth the aureus for every line with which Marcus Aurelius is reported in the Life of the author to have rewarded it, or hesitate to say, with St Jerome, that O. Alieutica miro splendore conscripsit, but it is better constructed and far better written than the Cynegetica; it was more admired by later poets, and some might account it the more interesting poem. It would appear from R. Keydell's survey of Oppianic literature down to 1929 that R. Vári published between 1908 and 1926 in Hungarian journals and an Italian Festschrift some papers on the manuscripts of Hal.;

In all texts of the fragments of Parmenides printed in the last fifty years he begins his poem by speaking of ‘the way which’ (or, according to some, ‘the goddess who’) ‘carries through all towns the man who knows’ (). The more percipient critics have realized that is difficult or impossible to defend, for it makes no good sense and is incompatible with 1. 27, according to which the way is . In fact , which is alleged to be the reading of the best manuscript of Sextus' books Adversus Dogmaticos, has no manuscript authority at all.

The purpose of this article is to present arguments which indicate that PA 2. 16. 659b13–19 may not be authentic.

The value and date of Vaticanus graecus 1339 (Bekker's P), which contains many of the works of Aristotle, have been much disputed. Here I want only to argue that at the beginning of the De Partibus Animalium, the first work it contains, it is closely related to Parisinus graecus 1853 (Bekker's E), the great tenth-century manuscript which is one of our major authorities for many of Aristotle's writings.

The following discussion' of the manuscript tradition of Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's Physics i-iv originated in an examination of the tradition of the fragments of Parmenides. It is therefore illustrated not only from Simplicius but particularly from the texts of Parmenides quoted by him. This will not be misleading, since, though many of these texts are quoted by Simplicius more than once, there is little or no sign in any manuscript of interpolation from one passage to another and it is not likely that any scribe could have interpolated the text from an independent manuscript of Parmenides.

It may not occur to a modern reader of the Poetics to think that Aristotle is drawing contrasts between poetry and oratory. But there is one aspect of tragedy which must have forced him to think of a contrast with oratory, especially forensic oratory, even though he seems to make no special effort to draw it to the reader's attention. This is the matter of characterization. He does not believe that it is the purpose of tragedy to illustrate character; he says that action, not ethical quality, is the of tragedy, that action and plot are what matter most and that action is not subordinate to character-representation.

Heliodorus has been edited twice in the last thirty years, by Colonna (Rome, 1938) and by Rattenbury and Lumb (Budé; vol. i, 1935; vol. ii, 1938; vol. iii, 1943).

Colonna's text is erratic, but in another respect his work on Heliodorus has been productive: he has put it beyond doubt that Book 9 of Aethiopica was written after the third siege of Nisibis, which took place in A.D. 350 (Athetueum, 1950, 79–87). There is no point in repeating Colonna's arguments here; they merit mention because no one has taken any notice of them.

Each of the Orphic Hymns is headed in the manuscripts by the name of the deity to which it is addressed, and in most cases a specification of the kind of incense to be used: thus 2 Only the first hymn lacks a heading. It is preceded in the manuscripts by a poem in which Orpheus addresses Musaeus and teaches him a prayer to a multitude of gods

The present better understanding of the Logistai Inscription (I.G. i2. 324), both mathematical and calendrical, justifies the presentation of a new continuous text and some comment upon it. The inscription is well cut with a stoichedon pattern of 75 or 74 letters per line. The change from 75 to 74 letters occurs somewhere between line 69 and line 75; in the upper half of the stone (approximately) there were normally six letters to the right of the preserved post-Classical edge, and in the lower half there were never more than five.