One day towards the end of the eighth century the scribe of cod. Paris. Lat. 7530, a miscellany to which we owe the carmen de figuris , began to copy out for us, on the 28th leaf of the MS, the Thyestes of Varius. He transcribed the title and the prefatory note, which run thus: INCIPIT THVESTA VARII. Lucius Varius cognomento Rufus Thyesten tragoediam magna cura absolutam post Actiacam uictoriam Augusti ludis eius in scaena edidit, pro qua fabula sestertium deciens (...) accepit. Then he changed his mind: he proceeded with a list of the notae employed by Probus and Aristarchus, and the masterpiece of Roman tragedy has rejoined its author in the shades. (shrink)

‘uester, de uno, per indignationem’ says Achilles Statius at the first of these two places, and again ‘uester, de uno’ at the second. Muretus on the other hand explains ‘uestrae saeuitiae, ferocitatis illius, uobis omnibus, qui formosi estis, innatae.’ Most commentators have taken part with Muretus, and deny that uester in these two passages means tuus; nor is the usage recognised in the lexicons. But when it comes to explaining what, if not tuus, uester does mean, the interpreters are not (...) agreed: they contradict one another, and they even contradict themselves. (shrink)

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 S0009838800022916_inline1. 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.’. (shrink)

These minute annotations, put together for a paper read to the Cambridge Philological Society on February 15, are mostly taken from jottings which I made some thirty years ago in the margin of Leo's edition. There they would have stayed, but for the appearance in 1918 of the Illinois index uerborum compiled by Messrs Oidfather, Pease, and Canter, which is not merely what its title promises, but also aims at recording the conjectures of the present century, and has enabled me (...) to cancel three or four proposals which I found anticipated. Other people, from Dr U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff downward, so often print emendations of mine as their own, or indeed as anyone else's, that I am even more anxious than I otherwise should be to avoid printing as mine the emendations of other people. (shrink)

I have not read the Thebais more than three times, nor ever with intent care and interest; and although in putting these notes together I have consulted a large number of editions—Bernartius, Tiliobroga, Geuartius, Cruceus, Gronouius, Barthius, Veenhusen, Beraldus , ed. Bipontina, Lemaire , Queck, O. Mueller , Kohlmann, Wilkins, Garrod, Klotz, and the translations of Marolles, Nisard, and Mozley —it may well be that profitable matter has escaped me and that some of my comments have been made before.

This is the way to say in Latin ‘you see my face, though you cannot see the rest of me’. So her. X 53 ‘tua, quae possum, pro te uestigia tango’, 135 ‘non oculis sed, qua potes, aspice mente’, art. III 633 ‘corpora si nequeunt, quae possunt, nomina tangunt’, trist. IV 2 57 ‘haec ego summotus, qua possum,. mente uidebo’, 3 17 sq. ‘esse tui memorem… quodque potest, secum nomen habere tuum’, 10 112 ‘tristia, quo possum, carmine fata leuo’, ex (...) Pont. IV 4 45 ‘absentem, qua possum, mente uidebo’.1 But that is not what Ovid seeks to say: he means ‘you see my face in such fashion as you can’, not in the flesh but in counterfeit presentment; and Latin expresses this meaning otherwise. As Ovid here speaks of his own likeness on a ring, so in ex Pont. II 8 55 he speaks of the likenesses of Augustus Tiberius and Liuia on a medal; and he says ‘nos quoque uestra iuuat quod, qua licet, ora uidemus’. Arellius Fuscus in Sen. suas. 4 I puts the same thought in the same way, ‘cur non ab infantia rerum naturam deosque, qua licet, uisimus, cum pateant nobis sidera et interesse numinibus liceat ?’ In her. XIII 41 sq. ‘qua possum, squalore tuos imitata labores dicar’ many MSS have changed the adverb into quo agreeing with the substantive hard by; and similarly here the ‘quae potes’ of the text has come from ‘qua potes’. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 4 describes the influence of the zodiacal signs on the people born under them. (shrink)

What the nineteenth century knew of attamen or at tamen it did not learn from dictionaries. The two last revisions of Forcellini, Corradini's and De-Vit's, provided eight examples between them, of which three were false. Klotz added one, Georges two, Smith two: one of these five was false, and two more lie under much suspicion. Freund gave no instance whatsoever. In preparing his first volume, which appeared in 1834, he turned, like a good compiler, to the first volume of Hand's (...) Tursellinus, published in 1829. What he found there, on p. 450, was ‘de at tamen uide in tamen’; so he sat down quickly and wrote ‘attamen adv., s. tamen’. But Hand's Tursellinus, which never reached tamen, had proceeded no further than multum when Freund in 1840 produced the last volume of his dictionary; so he did not redeem his promise, and when you got there the cupboard was bare. This perfidy was faithfully imitated by the English and American dictionaries of Andrews, White and Riddle, Lewis and Short. To all intents and purposes one was left to depend on one's own reading and on the observations of Madvig at Cic. de fin. pp. 286 and 425 and opusc. I p. 491. (shrink)

Nec, si rationem siderum ignoret, poetas iniellegat said Quintilian of Γ ραμματική; and in the history of scholarship during the last two centuries there is much to confirm his sentence. The elements of astronomy were once part of a scholar's ordinary equipment, and astronomical allusions in the poets, if expounded at all and not left by the editor to the knowledge and intelligence of the reader, were usually expounded aright. The first three lines of Lucan's seventh book are briefly but (...) correctly explained by the scholiast, and Oudendorp so late as 1728 was content to quote his explanation: then Cortius and Burmann and Bentley came forward to misinterpret them, and they have been misinterpreted ever since, because editors of the classics no longer know which way the sun moves. (shrink)

This poem, first printed by Scaliger in his Ausonianae lectiones, lib. II c. 29, from a MS in the possession of Cuiacius, will also be found in Burman's anthologia Latina, vol. II p. 321, in Meyer's, no. 1032, and in Baehrens' poetae Latini minores, vol. V p. 350. In date, combining as it does the prosody of plānetae with the syntax of sex (for sexiens) denos, it can hardly be earlier than Prudentius and may easily be much later. It is (...) edited by Riese from eight MSS better than the Cuiacian, three of the 9th century, three of the 10th, one of the 11th, and one of the 12th: the best of these, and the only one of which he professes to give a full collation, is C, Aug. 167 at Karlsruhe. (shrink)

So far his weapons of defence are taken from a common armoury; but in the next verses he develops the argumentum ad hominem which was foreshadowed in ‘eques’ and ‘intra fortunam qui cupis esse tuam.’ Such promptings, says he, come strangely from Maecenas, whose own discreetness and self-repression will be famous in history, and whom he is resolved, so far as in him lies, to imitate.

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and a version was published by the astronomer Regiomontanus in 1473. Editions were later produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–30 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 1 covers the creation and arrangement of the heavens and their division into spheres. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 2 describes the signs of the zodiac, their characteristics and their subdivisions. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 3 describes the working out of horoscopes. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 4 describes the influence of the zodiacal signs on the people born under them. (shrink)

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 5 describes the non-zodiacal signs and their influence. (shrink)

Correction . Online publication date: 2‐Feb‐2006. We inadvertently printed three erroneous internal cross references in S. H. Rigby's review of Miguel Cabrera's Postsocial History: An Introduction in theFebruary 2006 issue of : On p. 114, "p. 458" should read "p. 112." On p. 120, the two references to "p. 460" should both read "p. 114." Professor's Rigby's review was rescheduled from an earlier issue and unfortunately we did not notice that these references needed to be updated.

The poetical remains of Dorotheus, on which I made some comments in the Classical Quarterly vol. ii pp. 47–61, have received from the cod. Vat. Graec. 1056 an increase of ten verses, published by Mr J. Heeg in catal. cod. astrol. Graec. vol. v part iii p. 125 and also in Hermes vol. xlv pp. 316–8.

The twenty-four lines of this poem have been preserved only by the cod. Sangallensis 878 , whence it was edited in 1863 by K. SchenklSitzungsb. d. phil.-hist. Cl. d. kais. Akad. d. Wissensch. 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 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. (shrink)

The 86 verses of Dorotheus printed at the end of Koechly's Manetho, 33 of which had already been published by Salmasius in his exercitationes Plinianae or his diatribae de annis climactericis, were edited by Iriarte from a scrap of manuscript at Madrid, into which they had been copied, as we now know, from the first book of the astrological treatise of Hephaestion of Thebes, who took Dorotheus for his chief authority. To these 86 verses nearly 300 more, by far the (...) most of which are preserved in the second and third books, still unpublished, of Hephaestion's work, have now been added, in the catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum vol. vi pp. 67 and 91–113, by Mr W. Kroll, the best editor they could have found ; a scholar who combines critical talent, knowledge of Greek, and knowledge of astrology, more happily than any of his associates, and who has emended much of the very corrupt text with conspicuous ability and success. A good many additional corrections, chiefly grammatical and metrical, have been made by Mr Ludwich in the Rheinisches Museum for 1904, pp. 42–54. (shrink)

A Cautious man, as I said at the outset, will not edit Lucilius; for it is an editor's business to pronounce an opinion on all the difficulties in his author, and when the author is in fragments the opinion will oftener be wrong than right. But a critic of Lucilius who is not also his editor, and can pick and choose among the pieces, is in a somewhat happier case; and I will now go on to attempt the correction or (...) elucidation of certain passages where I seem to myself to have arrived at probable conclusions. (shrink)

463 ante 462 VGP et ante corr. ut uidetur U, item adnotator super Lucanum ed. Endtii p. 276 et Statii scholiastes ad Theb. VI 760, qui 462 et 464 coniunctos legerunt. 462 ante 463 MZ et ex corr. U. 463 quam MZPGV, qua ex corr. U. 462 manum VGP, lemma schol. Bern., Statii schol., manus Z et ex corr. U de M non liquet. tempus quo noscere possent VGP et ut uidetur M, adn. sup. Luc, Z , Statii schol. , (...) tempus = q.t.i.r.n.p. lemma schol. Bern., uultusque agnoscere quaerunt ex corr. U, Z2 G2, uultus etiam V2. (shrink)

‘The date of the poem has been canvassed with merciless prolixity for the last four-and-twenty years, but the pertinent facts are few.’ So I wrote in 1903 on p. lxix of my edition of the first book of Manilius; and in two octavo pages and a half I collected all those facts, said all that I could find to say on both sides of the questions in dispute, and drew the conclusion that books I and II were written under Augustus (...) and book IV under Tiberius. Ten years have passed, and the prolixity has continued, but the prolix have added no pertinent fact to those which I collected: some of them have even subtracted one, by suppressing the numismatic evidence, which I duly recorded, that Tiberius had Libra for his star. (shrink)