This article discusses the text of seven passages in the etymological books 5–7 of Varro's De lingua Latina, and proposes new conjectures for all of them. The discussions are of direct relevance to the interpretation of fragments and testimonies of lost Latin authors quoted by Varro: the scenic poets Naevius, Pacuvius, Caecilius Statius, Juventius and Atilius, and the grammarian Aurelius Opillus. The starting point for the discussions is the new Oxford edition of Varro's De lingua Latina by Wolfgang de Melo.

The paper re-edits and discusses a medieval text that contains a syncrisis of Plato and Plautus. I argue that, in addition to fragments from lost comedies of Plautus, the text also contains a previously unrecognized fragment of the playwright Pacuvius. The same fragment seems to have been known to Remigius of Auxerre (or his model) when he wrote his commentary on consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius.

The Law of Hermann and Lachmann stipulates that in the iambo-trochaic verses of Roman drama the two shorts of a resolved element must not be the final syllables of a trisyllabic or longer word. The exceptions are covered by the ‘rule for places with licence’, for which a redefined and extended version is given in this paper. Its purpose is to show that a dactylic word can be placed behind the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius. The paper discusses the (...) transmitted evidence for this licence and argues that the place after the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic senarius corresponds to the place after the median diaeresis in the trochaic septenarius, a well established licence-place which permits dactylic words. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the text of five passages in Lucretius’ de rerum natura (2.1082, 3.21, 5.1082, 6.743, 6.1082). Each of them has a Greek model on which Lucretius draws, and which scholars of Lucretius have not yet fully exploited in the interpretation of the poem or in the restitution of its text.

Macrobius quotes in his „Saturnalia“ (sat. 1, 24, 11) a letter from Vergil to Augustus, which is commonly accepted as authentic and regarded as a precious document of the friendship between the poet and the Emperor. In this article, however, I shall argue that the letter was not written by the poet Vergil. Instead, it is a prosopopoiia, which presupposes a passage in Suetonius’ „Life of Vergil“. Therefore, the text has to be re-classified in the history of Roman literature: It (...) belongs to the ancient traditions of pseudo-epistolography and of prosopopoietic fictions based on Vergil’s biography and poetry. (shrink)