An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the front of each page. There are now over 100 volumes, representing the greater part of classical Greek and Latin literature. The aim of the series remains that of including the works of all the principal classical authors. Although this has been largely accomplished, new volumes are still being published (...) to fill the remaining gaps, and old editions are being revised in the light of recent research or replaced. (shrink)

In the Classical Quarterly, vol. ii. No. 2, reviewing Breiter's recent text of the Astronomica, together with Housman's edition of Book i, I made a number of suggestions of my own on some of the principal difficulties in the text and interpretation of Manilius. I did not, however, bring my notes down beyond Book i. In the present paper I propose to traverse some of the more thorny places of ii. and iii. I shall try to make what I have (...) to say to some extent a continued review of Breiter. (shrink)

Hardly:τoσσάδε means ‘yet again,’ or ‘again and again.’ This idiomatic use of τοσοxs22EFτος 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.’.

77, 3 uastat in quae includit.E has incidit for includit–another example, eagerly welcomed by Gercke, of free interpolation in this MS. Perhaps incutitur.

77, 3 uastat in quae includit.E has incidit for includit–another example, eagerly welcomed by Gercke, of free interpolation in this MS. Perhaps incutitur.

The spaced words are commonly rendered either ‘desiring to ward off from his head,’ or ‘expecting to strike his head.’ Of these two renderings the first gives to κεφαλxs22EFς βαλεxs1FD6ν a sense which is seemingly without example and which the two words can hardly bear, if they can also bear the meaning given to them by the second rendering. The meaning which this second rendering gives to them is their natural meaning : on the other hand μενοινxs22EFν does not mean, (...) and cannot mean, ‘expecting.’ It means ‘strongly desiring.’ ‘Expecting it to strike his head’ would be μένωνοxs1F31 κεφαλxs22EFς βαλεxs1FD6ν, and this, I suggest, is what Pindar wrote. (shrink)

My paper, written in 1911, was something of a ballon d'essai, and I acknowledge frankly one or two mistakes. Thus I did not know that Euripides wrote a Thyestes; and again one or two of my references were wrong: in excuse I may perhaps plead that I have not had access to a Latin book for nearly two years. Apart from this I will now make only two observations:1. I set aside the evidence of Cod. Paris. Lat. 7530 because I (...) was dealing with evidence of saec. i.-iv. Cod. Paris. Lat. 7530 shows that some persons at the end of saec. viii. ascribed the Thyestes to L. Varius Rufus. So did persons in saec. iv. In addition, Cod. Paris. Lat. 7530 gives a date for the Thyestes. To Mr. Housmanthis date is certain; if it is uncertain a large part of his argument comes to nothing. But who can think it certain ? It comes to us from the end of the eighth century. If it came to us from Jerome's Chronicle we could still not think it certain, though we should know whence Jerome derived it. We do not now whence Cod. Paris. Lat. 7530 derived it. The reference to Actium may have no better source than the wish to connect a great literary and a great political event: and the gossip about the playwright's profits seems to me in itself suspicious.2. The main contention of the early part of my paper was that the evidence of the relevant MSS. as between Vari and Varii, etc., amounts to nothing either way. I do not think Mr. Housman is prepared seriously to contest this proposition. (shrink)

In what has preceded I have travelled a good deal beyond Simonides. But I have done so in order to illustrate the fact that the remains of ancient lyric cannot be interpreted in isolation. I come back now to the extant fragments of Simonides.

Our best MSS. agree upon salapantium. But they also agree upon desertum for disertum. Seneca, who quotes the last two words of the line, has salaputium disertum ; and since he is right about disertum it is supposed that he is right about salaputium ; and salaputium stands in all our texts of Catullus. What it means nobody knows. It is mostly relegated to that numerous class of Latin words of which we conjecture that they are obscene and are content (...) that they should remain obscure. (shrink)

A good edition of the Catalepton has long been wanted: and Birt's recently Published ‘Erklärung,’ despite some obvious defects, may fairly be regarded as good book. It is at any rate fresh, interesting, and stimulating. The text is the whole, though not always, sensible. The commentary is full without being too full. But, more valuable still, both commentary and introduction constantly bring home to one the probability that nearly all the poems in this collection are genuinely Vergilian— ‘Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie (...) Vergils.’ No editor before Birt has brought before us so clearly the environment out of which these poems came. (shrink)

After Mr. Stuart and Mr. Hardie I ought to be shy of speaking upon the Tragedies of Seneca. But Mr. Stuart and Mr. Hardie have stirred the dust that lay upon notes which I have had by me for some four years: and their papers encourage the hope that there is among English scholars some revival of interest in Seneca. I am afraid that I myself read Seneca for pleasure, with admiration for the justness of his moral sentiments and with (...) affection for his style. Yet I can hardly be blind to the opportunities which his text offers to those who practice the art of critical divination. (shrink)

Bücheler assigns this epitaph to the Caesarian epoch: and it is clearly not of later date. The fifth line is corrupt. Bücheler suggests tentatively the insertion of the word dilecto after Cadmo. That will indeed give us a verse of six feet. But we shall not be much the happier. We shall still have to believe that a member of the gens Heluia married, circa 100&50 B.C, a husband of the name of Cadmus Scrateius. He must have been the public (...) executioner: for I know of no other Cadmus in Rome; and he bore no very good reputation, and very little deserved the epithet dilectus, for the commentators upon Horace 5. i. 6. 39 speak of him as ‘ notae crudelitatis.’ He must be supposed to have taken the name Scrateius to make himself more terrible. But where in all the Graeco-Roman world he found it, it is impossible to guess. (shrink)

People are beginning to think of Manilius as the spoilt child of Latin Scholarship. In England alone there have appeared editions of, or works upon, Manilius, in the seventeenth century by Sherburne and Creech, in the eighteenth by Bentley and Burton, in the nineteenth by Ellis and Postgate, and in the current century by Housman. The contribution of France also has been considerable in quality, if not in quantity—Scaliger, Huetius, Pingré: though to-day there is no eminent French student of Manilius. (...) Of the German editors we might say what Aristophanes says of the Athenian generals. (shrink)

These are not two adjectives. They are two men—or, rather, two shadows. If I said that they were two names I should be speaking inexactly. The name of Varus occurs five times in Vergil: and twice out of these five times the oldest Latin MSS. which we possess have confounded it with that of Varius. In the Vitae Vergilianae, recently edited with an adequate Apparatus Criticus, the names Varus and Varius are found, I think, twenty-eight times; and twenty-two times out (...) of these twenty-eight all, or most, of our MSS. have confused them—and that though in thirteen cases we are dealing with codices of saec. IX.–X. The same names occur four times in Quintilian, and in one case all, in another all the respectable, MSS. have got them wrong. They occur thrice in Martial—twice right, once wrong. I have selected these particular writers for a reason that will appear later. But the MSS. of Horace tell a like tale. (shrink)