The ideal city of Plato could only come true if three great and unlikely changes were made in the state. Neither Plato's contemporaries nor later generations have been able to breast the second of these ‘waves,’ which brings in a new order of marriage for guardians. The scheme is condemned as not only not good or possible—the Platonic tests—but as inconsistent with itself and with the account given in the Timaeus. The parts under censure are the so-called table of prohibited affinities and the sanction of infanticide. It would be strange to find discrepancies in a proposal so important for Plato's state that details cannot well be left to some Damon, and I hope to show that difficulties arise only when critics do not place themselves exactly at Plato's point of view. He conceived a certain problem with sharp outlines, and his answer is precisely adapted to that. The first wave left the guardians as a family of men and women living in common. How was it possible to preserve this communal life and provide for the future of the guardian class? If the rulers failed to choose aright here, an oracle foretold the decay of the city (415b-c). Therefore Plato's rigid preoccupation in the second wave is to secure for the archons entire control over the birth of guardian children. Otherwise the community will sink into mere promiscuity and the stock will degenerate. In short, Plato tries to ensure that, apart from the necessary getting of children for the state, the guardians shall be friends and not lovers. Our special problems arise from the two questions—πως παδοποιήσονtαι, καì γεκομÉνους πως θρÉψουσι; (449c). Let us begin with the first of these.

Thus reads the ‘optimus Laurentianus,’ and starting hence we shall refuse claudent, the facile but incoherent correction of some MSS., and still more the claudunt which the majority offer. Nor for all that shall we make the ineptitude of these readings a ground for condemning the pentameter, which, save for its lack of grammatical construction, is perfectly faultless in expression. Turning our attention to the hexameter, we observe that Parca, a synonym for fata (Ex Pont. III. 7. 20 ‘Parcaque ad extremum qua mea coepit eat’ by id. II. 7. 17 sq. ‘iam mihi fata liquet coeptos seruantia cursus | per sibi consuetas semper itura uias’) with trahebat will set everything right. The offending fata is due to a gloss or an unfortunate reminiscence.

Dr. Leaf's article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies has recalled our attention to the venerable problem of the Rhesus. I hasten to give my adhesion to his main contention (in which he was partly anticipated by W. Christ) that the play is a pièce d'occasion justifying or sanctifying the foundation of the city of Amphipolis. But, as he remarks, seeing that the oracle ordering the removal of the bones of Theseus from Skyros to Athens preceded the actual removal by some years, so this play may be intended to prepare for the actual removal of the bones of Rhesus from Troy by Hagnon, and may be prior to it by several years. For this official theft—doubtless arranged beforehand—we have only the authority of Polyainos' Strategemata, but it is a story which seems likely in itself, and goes far to explain the previously obscure lament of the Muse at the end of the play. My object is to examine the play afresh and see whether anything prevents our believing that it was written and exhibited somewhere near 440 B.C., in which case of course it is almost certainly the work of Euripides and not far from his Cyclops in date.

A very slight reading of Clement of Alexandria is enough to prove how deeply he is indebted to Plato both in respect of language and of thought. Quotations from Plato are to be found throughout Clement's works, and in many cases acknowledgment is made of their origin. In addition there are frequent allusions, which for the most part the student of Plato can easily recognize. Clement invariably shows a profound respect for the Greek philosopher, whom he looks upon as a seeker after truth and as an authority, we may almost say, second only to the Scriptures. A careful comparison of the Protrepticus with the Phaedrus, results of which are given below, will furnish a striking illustration of the close dependence of Clement upon Plato. The Protrepticus is a short work, occupying in space not more than one–twelfth of Clement's extant writings, while the Phaedrus is even smaller in proportion to the whole of Plato. It is remarkable that so much inter-connexion should be found in so small a field, especially when we remember that the references to the Phaedrus represent by no means the whole of Clement's drawing upon Plato in the Protrepticus. There are allusions also to the Theaetetus, Republic, Charmides, Laws and Epistles, and possibly to the Politicus, Cratylus, Philebus, Symposium and Apology.

These are not two adjectives. They are two men—or, rather, two shadows. If I said that they were two names I should be speaking inexactly. The name of Varus occurs five times in Vergil: and twice (Ecl. VI. 12, IX. 35) out of these five times the oldest Latin MSS. which we possess have confounded it with that of Varius. In the Vitae Vergilianae, recently edited with an adequate Apparatus Criticus, the names Varus and Varius are found, I think, twenty-eight times; and twenty-two times out of these twenty-eight all, or most, of our MSS. have confused them—and that though in thirteen cases we are dealing with codices of saec. IX.–X. The same names occur four times in Quintilian, and in one case all, in another all the respectable, MSS. have got them wrong. They occur thrice in Martial—twice right, once wrong. I have selected these particular writers for a reason that will appear later. But the MSS. of Horace tell a like tale.

In his elegiacs Ovid did not permit the elision of the final syllable of an iambic word ‘in an arsis (as Palmer on Her. l.c. expresses it), i.e. first syllable of dactyl or spondee.’ See L. Müller, De re metrica, ed. 2, p. 341. These two are the only lines in which this rule is transgressed, for in Trist. II. 296, which used to appear as

stat Venus Vltori iuncta, uir ante fores

was brilliantly restored conjecturally by Bentley, and has since been found to be the actual reading of our best manuscript, the Marcianus. The soundness of the text in the two lines obelized above is still open to question.

The statement of Donatus (or Suetonius) that Vergil wrote the Culex at the age of sixteen (cum esset annorum XVI.) seems to be regarded by most scholars as too good to be true. It is a very long time since it was first suggested that XXVI. should be read for XVI., and the proposal has not yet fallen from favour. The apparent justification of this view is found in a passage of Statius' Genethliacon Lucani (Siluae II. 7), where Calliope is represented as foretelling the literary achievements of Lucan. It is the purpose of the present paper to examine this supposed evidence.

Sirs,—In response to your request I have been excerpting for your Summaries the last—itself a summary—instalment of Glotta, VI. I find there so much belittling censure of my own studies that I am prompted to ask the privilege of a few words with your readers on the criteria of belief in etymology.

In his edition of this author Buecheler translates the words of Mim. III. 72 πρός σΣ Τñς κοΤΤίδος ψυχñς by ‘per capitale tuum ingenium,’ but affords no explanation as to how he arrived at this sense. May I suggest another interpretation to which Modern Greek seems to me to lead? The equivalent of κοΤΤίς is now πουλί or πουλάκπουλί μου or πουλάκι or simply πουλάκ‘my little birdie,’ i.e. ‘my darling,’ is the most frequent endearing term of the Greeks. See Vlachos's Λεξικòν ‘Eλληογλλικòν ν πουλί 'πουλί μουmon chéri, mon amour, ma poulette.’ Therefore, πρóς σε Τñς κοΤΤíδος ψυχñς I fancy, means, ‘I implore thee by thy darling soul.’ The expression seems to have come down to us intact in sense, and only altered in so far as new words have been substituted for the obsolete ones. Of such a phenomenon I have given several curious examplesin my Notes tn the Gospels