There is a suspicion in the minds of a number of Virgil's modern commentators that Corydon, the lover-shepherd of the second Eclogue, is himself a slave, and that the dominus of his beloved Alexis is his master too.1 It is the purpose of this note to show that the suspicion is baseless. None of the ancient commentators appears to know of such an interpretation. This should be significant in that they probably shared the poet's assumptions about literary decorum. We can (...) gather how Virgil viewed the function of slaves in poetry of an exalted genre by looking at the Aeneid and the Georgics. The essential considerations were set out by W. E. Heitland in Agricola , pp. 218-41. Virgil was less ready to introduce slaves into his epic than Homer had been. More startling is the complete silence of the poet in the Georgics on the use of slave labour in contemporary farming. Literary decorum induces this reticence; slaves are too mean to have a voice or place in epos. How do matters stand with pastoral? (shrink)

In C.Q. 42 551–2 E. J. Kenney impugned the appropriateness of femina in 28 on the grounds that it sabotages the poet's disclaimer to be treating not of women generally, but only of women not ruled out of bounds by the stola and uittae. Hesitantly he proposed to read in its place non or nee proba. It should be borne in mind that when a word has intruded itself from a nearby line and expelled the authentic reading, the ductus litterarum (...) is no guide to emendation. The door stands open to bold measures. I propose to read Thais. The name of the famous courtesan well serves as the type with which Ovid proposes to deal. But what advantage has she over, say, Lais or even Phryne, whose names would fit here as well as hers? The answer comes from Remedia Amoris 385–6 Thais in arte mea est: lasciuia libera nostra est; nil mihi cum uitta; Thais in arte mea est. (shrink)