It is gratifying to read, in a recent issue of this periodical, Mr. A. A. Barrett's informed exposition of the syntax of this passage, even though he balks at the need to extract a grammatical subject for the verb deducit in 157 from the relative pronoun qua in the previous line. However his persuasive presentation of what he relies on as evidence in support of his suggested interpretation from the mosaics from Zliten in Tripolitania, which portray scenes in an amphitheatre, (...) may seduce the unwary into an over-ready acquiescence in his proposal to read raeda in 157 for taeda of the manuscript tradition. Juvenal's words were correctly understood by T. Maguire as long ago as 1881, and the solution was restated with clarity in a note by W. V. Clausen recently. (shrink)

Agathon's mannered yet striking encomium on Eros in Plato's Symposium has attracted critical attention in ample measure, yet at least one dark corner remains unilluminated. As the speaker approaches his climax in the words quoted above, he slips into nautical imagery: κυβερντης πιβτης … , but then disconcerts readers and commentators alike by immediately lapsing into the down-to-earth language of παρασττης τε σωτρ … words which seem to lack maritime connotations. The standard editions offer no help: Hug–Schöner devote several lines (...) to the metaphors as they conceive them and suggest various groupings, but conclude somewhat despairingly: ‘dass es im ubrigen hier nicht auf Schärfe der Begriffe ankommt, leuchtet ein’. Dover, elsewhere a supportive editor, here only offers observations on πιβτης and the ‘predominantly nautical sense’ of κυβερντης ; he translates παρασττης as ‘comrade-in-arms, – strictly the hoplite posted beside one’. Bury has some desultory statements which lead nowhere, while lecture-notes of pupils betray perplexity; some consider the four nouns here to be an ‘odd assortment’, and say that ‘many emendations have been suggested’. It has even been suggested that it was perhaps Plato's intention to show Agathon talking ‘near-nonsense’. (shrink)