I Now turn to an examination of the grounds for arguing supernaturalism in the Phaeacian story, but for their proper appreciation it is necessary to consider an element in the narrative which unfortunately has had little attention of recent years. There is in it more than mere unseasoned description. The poet is evidently taking off these settlers in Scheria, the centre about which his humour plays being the figure of their king, Alkinoos. This is no new thing, but all, as Blass once slily remarked of a scene in the Iliad, do not perceive it. It was clear to Mure. On pp. 404 sqq. of Vol. I. of his Hist, of Gk. Lit. he describes the fun at length, deplores the misapprehension by ‘profound commentators,’ and thinks the episode ‘the most brilliant specimen of the poet's combined talent for the delineation of character and for satirical humour.’ See also Samuel Butler's The Humour of Homer. No one was better qualified than Butler for such an appreciation; the pity is that he spoiled it all by his great Homeric joke about Nausikaa's authorship. Some points are noticed by Perrin and Hayman, and Trenkel sees that the community is Gegenstand des Spottes. But generally the humour is lost on the commentators, who, intent only on the jigsawing of the Phaeacian story, mark the uerborum minutiae and are blind to the rerum pondera.

Professor Scott in his paper on ‘Eurynome and Eurycleia’ (in the April number of the Classical Quarterly) was inclined to believe, although he did not press the point, that Eurynome and Actoris were one and the same servant, the name Actoris being a patronymic. This explanation was offered also by Hayman, who compares Actorion (A 750), but it has been ignored by Wilamowitz (Hom. Unters. 84 sq.) and by van Leeuwen-Mendes da Costa, who reject ψ 226 sqq. It is an ingenious attempt to solve a small Homeric problem, and would be convincing but for two reasons, of which the first has to do with the poet's manner and the second with the circumstances of the recognition scene in ψ

Since the days of Merula it has been regularly assumed by editors and critics of Ennius that, despite the express statement of Cicero to the contrary, the Annales did contain some narrative of the events of the first Punic War. Familiar as the passage in the Brutus is, it must be quoted once again: “Tamen illius quem uatibus et Faunis annumerat Ennius Bellum Punicum quasi Myronis opus delectat. Sit Ennius sane, ut est certe, perfectior: qui, si ilium, ut simulat, contemneret, non omnia bella persequens, primm illud Punicum, acerrimum bellum, reliquisset”.

Two main views of the country called in the Odyssey the Land of the Phaeacians or Scheria are current among Homeric scholars. Some think it is, or is in, the island known to the ancients as Corcyra, and that the people who are described as living in it were ordinary flesh and blood mortals. The other view, the belief of the majority, though of great variety, is that Scheria is in fairyland or some other supramundane sphere, and a creation of the poet's fancy. In Class. Rev. XXIV. 204 Mr. Evelyn-White says, after quoting Monro, that it ‘cannot be disputed’ that the Phaeacian and other adventures of Odysseus are Märchen, so the matter is as good as closed. But as many of the Homeric choses jugées of last century have been proved of recent years to be unsubstantial, it has seemed worth while to examine the fairyland theory afresh. I begin with a survey of the literature of the question, and shall then inquire in a second paper what Homeric foundation there is for the supernatural theory. Elsewhere I shall endeavour to show that Homer describes a real people, and that Scheria can be fitted into the Mediterranean world, as we now know it, of the latest Minoan or Mycenaean period, and is in fact a Minoan settlement in Corcyra.

In attempting to determine the text of Sophocles in the places presently to be discussed, it is notmy purpose to put forward a series of novelties which, though more or less plausible, are essentially incapableof proof. I seek rather to plead for the reception of certain ascertained but neglected variants, and to establish their claims by a survey of the relevant evidence. After a somewhat prolonged study of the data, I am convinced that the chief hope of progress— apart from the discovery of fresh material—lies in a more methodical use of the ancient scholia and lexicographers. Although their value has long been acknowledged, they have been employed unintelligently or at haphazard, largely because the character of their information and its sources have been imperfectly understood. One of the chief aids which they afford is in passages where the genuine reading has been displaced by an explanatory gloss. This is a possibility which critics have always recognized, but, while ready enough to suggest that the word selected for expulsion is a gloss on some other, they frequently fail to demonstrate that it is used as a gloss at all. Leaving such guess–work aside, we shall still find various grades of probability. It should be a minimum requirement that the word removed from the text is, either itself or as one of a class, a well-attested gloss of the proposed substitute. Thus in El. 800, where LA with most other MSS. have καταξίως but four of the recentiores κατ' άξιαν, I think that Bothe and Monk were right in preferring κατάξι' ἂν.

For this Fable both Ademar and the Weissenburg MS. (Wissemburgensis) fail us. We have, however, the representatives of R, which Thiele groups under his Recensio Gallicana, and one (the Codex Vindobonensis lat. 303) which he places in his Recensio Vetus; of the other two one does not contain it, and the third, the Erfordtensis at Berlin, has a wholly independent version, which Thiele most strangely regards as imported from ‘Phaedrus in prose,’ although neither in diction nor in remnants of metre has it anything to suggest such an origin. His ‘restoration’ (Einleitung, p. ccxxi) may accordingly be neglected.

Thucydides, II. 28, records an eclipse of the sun in the summer of the first year of the Peloponnesian war. It can be no other than the annular eclipse of the 3rd of August, 431 B.C. He describes the phenomenon so accurately and with so many details that we can hardly doubt that he observed it himself — Tοῦ δ' αủτοῦ θέρονς γονμηνιᾳ κατά σελήγηγ, ὤσπερ και μόγογ δοκει ειναι γιγνεσθαι δνγατόγ, ό λιος έξέλιπε μετά μεσημβριαγ και πάλιγ άγ επληρὡθη, γενόμενος μηνοειδής και άστέρὡν τινὡν έκΦανέντων.

In the course of reading some of these writers I have made the following notes. Some of the suggestions have very probably been anticipated, and in such cases I can only plead the legal maxim, superflua non nocent. The references are to volume and page of Spengel's edition (Lipsiae, 1853–6), and Anon. 1. 427 has been cited as Cornutus.

‘Come, live with me,’ says Polyphemus (1. 42), ‘and leave the grey sea to beat upon the shore; my cave has all the heart could desire, laurels and cypresses, ivy and a sweet-fruited vine; a stream too fed by the snows of Etna.’

αἰ δέ τοι αὐτ⋯ς ⋯ϒὼν λασιώτερος ημεν, ⋯ντ⋯ δρυ⋯ς ξύλα μοι ὑπ⋯ σποδ⋯ ⋯κάματον π⋯ρ καιόμενος δ ὑπ⋯ τε⋯ς και τ⋯ν ψυχ⋯ν ⋯νεχοιμαν κα⋯ τ⋯ν ἕν ⋯ϕθαλμόν τ⋯ μοι γλυκερώτερον οὐδέν

In Mr. F.H. Colson's article on ‘The Analogist and Anomalist Controversy (C.Q., January, 1919, pp. 24–36) the following corrections should be made:

P. 27, note 5. Read ‘Ib, VIII. 42.’

P. 28, line 12 from foot. For συλλαβ ⋯ν read συμϕώνον.

P. 28, note 4. For παραγουσα read παρατ⋯λευτος.

This instalment of suggestions is put forward with all the diffidence one is bound to feel after an examination of the great body of the manuscripts. No great writer's text has hung upon a more slender thread of evidence. Larger matters than verbal emendation are touched upon in the discussion of poem LXVIII. My theory of how our texts became dislocated (and more than half of the extant manuscripts present an order quite different from that of GOR), and some new light I hope to throw upon the form and meaning of the Peleus and Thetis, must be withheld until a later occasion.

It is generally assumed that every adjective ending in -ης is an s-stem like εủγενἠς (gen. εủγενοὖσ from εὖγενἐ(σ)-ος; cf. γἐνος gen. γἐνε(σ)-ος, Lat. genus gener-is, Skr. janas janas-as) or δνσμευἠς (: μἠνος; cf. Skr. dur-manās gen. dur-manas-as). Solmsen, for instance, does not hesitate (Beiträige zur griechischen Wortforschung 16) to regard ὀμ-ηγερἠς (πολμ-ηγερἠς, θνμ ηγερἠσ) as evidence for the s-stem geres which he wishes to find in ἀγοστóς (ἀγο(ρ)σ-τóς), and Bechtel (Lexilogus 274) infers a stem παγεσ - from ὐπερπαγἠς. The result of this well-nigh universal belief has been that hardly anybody has thought it worth while to examine these words carefully.

The controversy between the Anomalists and Analogists has not, I think, attracted as much of the attention of scholars as it deserves. It was perhaps not a very practical matter, though, as I shall point out presently, it probably had indirectly some important practical results. The interest of the controversy lies rather in the spirit in which it was conducted. Anyone who reads for instance Varro, De Ling. Lat. VIII. 31–32, where the anomalist argues that as in life variety of furniture and the like is necessary for aesthetic enjoyment, so in language anomaly is desirable; or IX. 24, etc., where the analogist argues from the unchanging order that prevails in the heavenly bodies, in the tides, in the continuity of species, will feel that he is moving in a world of thought very different in one way from our own, though in another rather like it. By the analogist language is conceived as a world in itself, much as we conceive of the visible world. Its phenomena are being laid bare and constantly reveal fresh signs of law and order. The investigator sometimes finds facts which prima facie suggest anomaly, but he is as confident that behind them must lie some unifying principle as the scientific man of to-day is with regard to the phenomena of the visible world, as impatient of the suggestion of disorder as he is of any miraculous interference with the order of nature. Even the anomalist, sceptic as he is, approaches the question not in a spirit of mere denial, but of aesthetic consideration. We get a glimpse of a lost point of view. The world of words had a glamour and a wonder for them which it cannot have for us.

In the Introduction to his Old English Glosses, published in 1900, the late Professor Napier asserted that Aldhelm glosses are to be found in the Corpus Glossary. He did not attempt any elaborate argument, but contented himself with giving a list of sixty-four instances in which the lemmata of the Corpus Glossary (none of the words, it is important to remark, being in the normal dictionary form, but all in inflexional forms differing from this) coincide entirely (i.e., including the inflexions) with words occurring in the text of the De Virginitate. Of these lemmata, twenty-three occur also in the Epinal and Erfurt Glossaries, and must therefore have existed in the common archetype of the three collections. Napier's conclusion was that the compiler of the archetype had before him one Aldhelm glossary, and that the author of the Corpus Glossary, who rearranged the material of the archetype and made extensive additions, had among his sources another and an independent glossary.

A. The Vestine Inscription with brat.

T. Vetio | duno | didet | Herclo | Iovio | brat. | data.

1. This inscription, most easily consulted in Diehl's Alt-lat. Inschriften, No. 70, has been explained, beyond any reasonable doubt, by von Planta (Osk.-Umbr. Gram. 1. 304) as follows: ‘ The entire inscription is accordingly to be rendered thus: T. Vettius donum dat Herculi Iouio; merito data, sc. est or sunt, according as the votive offering was feminine singular or neuter plural.’ The very abbreviation of brat. favours a formulaic word such as merito. Von Planta accounts also for all other dialectic occurrences of the stem brato-, vindicating a sense of meritum (quasi gratia) for all of them.