The first volume of the collected works of Karl Marx, which is being issued by the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, opens with a dissertation entitled ‘Über die Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie’, which he presented for his doctorate at the University of Jena in 1841. It is interesting to find one who was afterwards to win fame in very different fields starting his career with an enthusiastic tract on Greekphilosophy, which he evidently intended to make his work for years (...) to come; for not only does he tell us in his introduction that this thesis is a prelude to a comprehensive study of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Scepticism, ‘the philosophical basis of Roman life and character’, but appended to the dissertation are some seventy pages of preliminary notes for the larger work, which range over such varied subjects as ‘The Immanent Dialectic of the Epicurean Philosophy’, ‘The Idea of the “Wise Man” in Greek Philosophy,’, and ‘Parallels between the Epicureans, and the Pietists and Supernaturalists.’. (shrink)

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)

The difficulty lies in the two words at the end of the first and last lines of the extract, cortus being manifestly corrupt, and pontus inappropriate. In 276 it is fairly clear that ‘the wind’ should be the subject of the sentence, and Markland's uentus is now printed by most editors: in 271, in spite of a variety of conjectures, editors are mostly agreed that ‘the sea’ should be the object, and Marullus' pontum is usually accepted. The sense is thus (...) rectified, but there remains a serious palaeographical difficulty, neither of the corruptions pontum > cortus, uentus > pontus being very probable in itself or paralleled in the Lucretian MSS. It has been suggested, both by Professor Reid and by Professor Merrill , that the last words of the two lines have been interchanged. If this theory can be accepted, it at once gives us pontum in 271: the nominative pontus is only an attempt to adjust it to its new context in 276. We should then be left with cortus at the end of 276, and I suggest that the obvious correction is then corus. (shrink)