I Wish to reply to some of the objections raised by Mr. A. Hudson-Williams in Class. Quart., vol. xlvi , p. 27, to my notes on Martial in vol. xliv. In two places, on pp. 17 and 22, he corrects an error of mine, and in one or two other of his remarks he may well be right; but in many cases he does nothing more than repeat the traditional interpretation of a passage without commending it any more effectively than (...) the editors do. I do not think there would be much profit in restating my view on all these passages, but there are some points I wish to make in reply. (shrink)

‘Prince, lovelier than the flashing star’, says the Poet Laureate to his Emperor; ‘Leda would rather have produced thee than Castor, Thetis than Achilles; Delos prefers thee to Apollo, Lydia to Bacchus.’ Then follows a passage describing the effect on nature of the Emperor's going out to hunt: ‘the beasts will gladly fall to your spear, the lion will be proud to die at your sacred hand. Venus scorns Adonis returned to life, Diana Hippolytus’.

This is the reading of the manuscripts with the punctuation given it in the Delphin, Loeb, and Teubner editions. But the future does not give the sense required. Adrastus is gazing with horror at the two young men who have arrived on his doorstep, realizing that they are the lion and the boar of Apollo's oracle . The whole force of the blow lies in the fact that they have actually arrived. The Delphin editor solves the problem by saying that (...) adfore means adesse, the Loeb by translating ‘that they had come’. Gruter suggested ac fore, and Garrod accepted this, putting a comma after ductos. But I do not see how this helps. I suggest that the reading of the manuscripts is correct, provided that we take adfore with quos … ediderat; i.e. put a comma after ductos and supply esse. The presence of three verbs, adfore, portendi, and ediderat, may seem a little clumsy, but each has its point; and the future is now natural, depending upon portendi: ‘he realized that the clear will of heaven had brought to his house the sons-in-law of whom Apollo had announced that their future arrival was destined by fate.’. (shrink)

The text of Martial is fairly good, though not as good as many editors seem to think. We have three separate sources from which our manuscripts are derived, which are called by Lindsay in the O.C.T. AA, BA and O.1 All three sources seem to have suffered from editing, AA less than the others. In A.D. 401 one Torquatus Gennadius seems to have emended the text . We do not know whether all three sources were affected by this recension: all (...) we know is that the BA family are the only manuscripts that mention it. But there are many signs of recension discernible in the readings of the other families too, e.g. pas-sages which have evidently had grammar or syntax thrust upon them—and in these I do not include the now obscure allusions and the dead jokes past recall. (shrink)

In this passage transposition is surely necessary, as Leo saw. The only verb which can be supplied for Sarmata in 1. 71 is celant; but whereas the Hyrcanian forests may hide Diana's prey, the nomad Sarmatian can scarcely be said to do so; Sarmata requires some verb like nouit. Leo put 1. 71 after 1. 68. But in is not easy to see how uacuis …campis fell to two lines later. The transposition would be more easily explicable if Seneca, after (...) 1. 66, wrote 69–70, then 67, 68, 71, i.e. (shrink)