There has been no major critical edition of Velleius with commentary since that of Kritz in 1840. Kritz, who took into account Sauppe's long essay on Velleius of three years earlier, was preceded by Ruhnken, whose commentary appeared in 1779. During the century which followed Kritz's work several valuable editions without commentary were produced, the last of which, by Stegmann de Pritzwald , almost coincided with the essay and bibliography devoted to Velleius in Schanz-Hosius . These two contributions of the (...) thirties remain standard to the present day. (shrink)

One of Sallust's main points in this preface is that individuals should strive to attain gloria , i.e. should be spoken highly of by others. With this in mind, the commentators seem agreed that silentio in the opening sentence must be taken in a passive sense: ‘silentio expresses not a state in which one says nothing, but a state in which nothing is said about one, i.e. “obscurity”’ . The sequence of ideas in the first chapter makes this interpretation seem (...) certain. (shrink)

‘Who wrote the scurrilous iambic poems of the first stanza?’, asks David West at the start of his commentary on the ode. ‘The culprit’, he declares, ‘must be Horace.’ This answer accords with that to be found in other commentaries: ‘my scurrilous verses’, ‘my scandalous lines’, ‘my scurrilous iambics’, ‘my abusive iambics’, ‘miei ingiuriosi giambi’, ‘my libellous iambics’, ‘my libellous iambic verses’, ‘miei giambi ingiuriosi’. What, then, are these iambic verses? Some earlier scholars suggested that Horace is referring to various (...) of his epodes, such as those addressed to Canidia ; but our knowledge of Canidia indicates that she would scarcely make plausible the accent on beauty in the first line of the ode. Most commentators, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, have believed that Horace is referring to some iambics which he had targeted at the ode's addressee but of which we now have no further knowledge: Kiessling and Heinze, for example, refer to ‘the satirical poems which Horace … has levelled at her’, while in the most recent commentary in 2012 Mayer says that Horace ‘assures an unnamed young woman that it rests with her to put an end to his vituperative attacks’. (shrink)

While Caesar as man of letters is most famous for his commentarii, it should not be forgotten that he also wrote two volumes on Analogy and was the author of various verses, one set of which, on the comic playwright Terence and his relationship to Menander, runs as follows : tu quoque, tu in summis, o dimidiate Menander,poneris, et merito, puri sermonis amator.lenibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret uis,comica ut aequato uirtus polleret honorecum Graecis neue hac despectus parte iaceres! 5unum (...) hoc maceror ac doleo tibi deesse, Terenti. (shrink)

Although modern scholars have expressed in various ways the view that the Gallus passage is unusual in its context,1 no editor or commentator during the past quarter of a century has questioned the ordering of the lines in which the Gallus passage occurs.2.

Towards the start of the elegy which prefaces his third book, Propertius rejects lengthy, martial epic in favour of slender poetry : it is on account of the latter that fame elevates him above the earth, his Muse triumphant ; accompanying him in the triumphal chariot are his Amores , and following the wheels is a crowd of writers . The latter, in the race for glory, rival the poet to no purpose . Many writers will praise Rome and sing (...) of future conquests , but Propertius’ pages, a special delivery from the Muses' mount, are the perfect peace-time reading. (shrink)

Fraenkel dismissed Epode 11 with the statement that it ‘is an elegant piece of writing, but there is little real life in it’. By this ambiguously expressed comment he did not mean that the poem fails to ‘come alive’, but that it is artificial: he saw the poem as little more than an assembly of themes and motifs which recur in other genres, especially epigram and elegy. This has also been the perspective of some other twentieth-century scholars: Georg Luck's self-styled (...) ‘interpretation’ of the poem consists largely of a numbered list of thirteen motifs which the epode has in common with elegy and which in Luck's opinion were derived by Horace from Gallus. Alessandro Barchiesi, on the other hand, capitalizes on the perceived elegiac motifs in order to see the poem as a dynamic fusion of elegy and iambus. As for commentators, although older representatives seem to have regarded Epode 11 as generally self-explanatory, the poem receives increasing attention from Cavarzere, Mankin and Watson, the last of whom originally discussed some of its problems in a paper published twenty years earlier. Yet various problems still remain, and in this paper I propose to re-examine lines 1–6 and 15–18 in the hope that a clearer view of the epode as a whole may emerge. (shrink)

Book 4 of the Annals, covering the years A.D. 23–8, traces the turning-point in the story of Tiberius' reign. Tacitus prepares us for disaster from the start. After a reference to fortuna in suitably Sallustian language and the deum ira in rem Romanam , we are told that the year A.D. 23 ‘initiated the deterioration in Tiberius’ principate .1 Modern historians are agreed that a decisive factor in this’ deterioration was the emperor's determination to leave Rome in A.D. 26, a (...) move which Tacitus gloomily portends in chapter 41 and eventually records, in due chronological sequence, at 57. 1. Suetonius is our other main source for this momentous event, and it is instructive to compare his treatment of it with that of Tacitus. (shrink)

Commentators on the Annals naturally observe that the famous first sentence of Tacitus' preface alludes to the preface of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae . But it seems that none of them has observed a further allusion to Sallust's preface in the last sentence of Tacitus', which is almost equally famous.

One of the most famous inscriptions to have survived from ancient Rome is the acta of the Ludi Saeculares of 17 b.c., and one of the most evocative of all epigraphic sentences occupies a line to itself : Carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus. This reference to the author of the Carmen Saeculare, says Fraenkel, ‘was the result of a carefully considered decision of the highest authorities’. The degree of careful consideration is initially evident from the prominent positioning of the poet's (...) name directly above those of Augustus and Agrippa in the following line. It will also be noticed that the sentence concludes with a clausula which is one of Cicero's favourites. A further refinement emerges, however, if the poet's name is spelled out in full, something precluded by the naming conventions of the inscription:Cārmēn cōmpŏsŭīt ´ Quīntŭs Hŏrātĭūs | Flaccus.The inscribed sentence incorporates an Asclepiad line, the ‘signature’ metre of Odes 1–3, which are framed by Horace's only two poems in stichic Asclepiads. In identifying the author of the Carmen Saeculare, the sentence also acknowledges the collection of poems which won him the commission. (shrink)

One of Sallust's main points in this preface is that individuals should strive to attaingloria, i.e. should be spoken highly of by others. With this in mind, the commentators seem agreed thatsilentioin the opening sentence must be taken in a passive sense: ‘silentioexpresses not a state in which one says nothing, but a state in which nothing is said about one, i.e. “obscurity”’. The sequence of ideas in the first chapter makes this interpretation seem certain.