Why does Catullus in his eleventh poem tell Furius and Aurelius to take an unpleasant message to his girl-friend? After all, in the eighth poem he imagines himself able to do the job alone: ‘uale puella’ . Has his courage just evaporated? Or is it that he wants to put his messengers, whom he perhaps does not like, in an awkward position ? Kroll is not sure why the poet chooses intermediaries. Some think they came in the first place from (...) the girl, who wanted reconciliation, and that this poem is Catullus' response. But the poet is usually able to make it plain, as in poems 7 and 85, that he is replying to a question ; here that standard device is missing, and should not be introduced. This note offers a new solution to the problem, and identifies the imagined situation in such a way that the eleventh poem can be seen to be in harmony with the poet's attitude to his idealised love-affair. (shrink)

Altum gurgitem Tigris premens: what is Tigris doing? Gronovius has no remark to the point. The context however points the way to interpretation. For in the list of four rivers, two others are given some word or phrase to characterize them: Hydaspes is gemmifer and Baetis is said to give his name to nearby lands. Thus altum gurgitem premens should refer to some characteristic act or condition of Tigris, not to a unique or casual occurrence. H. M. Kingery cannot be (...) right in saying that ‘the Tigris, noted for its swift current, is pictured here as checking its deep torrent, so as to water the plants that grow in or near its bed’. (shrink)

There is a suspicion in the minds of a number of Virgil's modern commentators that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave, and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis is his master too.1 It is the purpose of this note to show that the suspicion is baseless. None of the ancient commentators appears to know of such an interpretation. This should be significant in that they probably shared the poet's assumptions about literary decorum. We can (...) gather how Virgil viewed the function of slaves in poetry of an exalted genre by looking at the Aeneid and the Georgics. The essential considerations were set out by W. E. Heitland in Agricola , pp. 218-41. Virgil was less ready to introduce slaves into his epic than Homer had been. More startling is the complete silence of the poet in the Georgics on the use of slave labour in contemporary farming. Literary decorum induces this reticence; slaves are too mean to have a voice or place in epos. How do matters stand with pastoral? (shrink)

In C.Q. 42 551–2 E. J. Kenney impugned the appropriateness of femina in 28 on the grounds that it sabotages the poet's disclaimer to be treating not of women generally, but only of women not ruled out of bounds by the stola and uittae. Hesitantly he proposed to read in its place non or nee proba. It should be borne in mind that when a word has intruded itself from a nearby line and expelled the authentic reading, the ductus litterarum (...) is no guide to emendation. The door stands open to bold measures. I propose to read Thais. The name of the famous courtesan well serves as the type with which Ovid proposes to deal. But what advantage has she over, say, Lais or even Phryne, whose names would fit here as well as hers? The answer comes from Remedia Amoris 385–6 Thais in arte mea est: lasciuia libera nostra est; nil mihi cum uitta; Thais in arte mea est. (shrink)

In his final words to his son, Pallas, Evander interposes a prayer: ‘At uos, o superi, et diuum tu maxime rector Iuppiter, Arcadii, quaeso, miserescite regis…’ Of recent commentators, C. J. Fordyce alone is bothered by the reference to Evander's Arcadian origin; he reckons that it alludes to his exiled condition and so establishes a claim on Jupiter's mercy. That may be so, but it is worth suggesting that this is rather a piece of Virgil's Callimachean learning. For at the (...) opening of his first Hymn Callimachus had rejected the story that Zeus was born on Crete in favour of Arcadia . The Arcadian birth-place was known to Cicero . Yet Cicero is less likely to be in Virgil's mind than Callimachus, from whom he derived so much learned detail. Evander then is appealing to Jupiter as a fellow Arcadian, docte. (shrink)

Ajax is the subject of intonat, but little else is certain. Various punctuations are on offer, and even the authenticity of lines 545 and 546 is questioned; the difficulties are set out in Professor Tarrant's commentary . My concern is focused solely on 545 and the word nunc, printed in the text of the recent Oxford Classical Text and obelized by Professor Zwierlein. I suggest that the original word in this part of the line was saeuum, a standing epithet of (...) the sea. Written seuum, its initial syllable might have disappeared through haplography; that would have left uum to be transformed into something else. E came up with a word close to the ductus, nunc; the A-tradition added se either to mend the metre or perhaps to indicate the omitted syllable. If saeuum is a plausible emendation, we might at least keep 545 as a piece of direct speech introduced by intonat, exactly as at Phaed. 1065 magnum intonat. (shrink)