Plutarch's Timoleon has received little attention from scholars who in recent years have studied the sources of his Lives and sought to determine the methods which he followed in their composition. The reasons for this neglect are obvious: the Timoleon is a simple Life, contains few citations, and is universally and justifiably believed to be founded, together with the Timoleon of Cornelius Nepos, upon the tradition established by Timaeus. Scholars of the nineteenth century agreed in further concluding that both authors derived their material directly and almost exclusively from Timaeus. This conclusion does not appear to have been challenged in spite of the well-known contention of Eduard Meyer, which has won considerable approval, that neither biographer was accustomed to use primary historical authorities, each relying mainly upon biographies of the Hellenistic period which have not survived. The validity of Meyer's theory as a general principle of source-criticism will not be expressly discussed in this paper. My purpose is rather to examine the Timoleon only, especially in relation to the Timoleon of Nepos, and to suggest a method of composition here adopted by Plutarch, who, I believe, based his Life upon a secondary biography and supplemented this from a primary historical authority.

The present paper is based on one entitled ‘The papyri and the text of Thucydides’, which I read before the Fifth International Congress of Papyrology in Oxford on August 31st, 1937. Later in the same year appeared Vittorio Bartoletti's Pisa dissertation Per la storia del testo di Tucidide (Florence: Sansoni), of which I was privileged to see a draft in 1935. I have several times saved space here by referring to Bartoletti for a collection of the evidence.

The elegiac poem of eight lines discovered in the Ceramicus and published by by W. Peek is of considerable interest for the historian. Peek is surely right in maintaining that it was composed for the Athenians who fell under Tolmides at Coronea in 447 B.C., and his general exposition of the poem's meaning is convincing. The aim of this paper is to make some comments and supplements to his interpretation and then to consider some peculiarities in the thought and technique of the poem. We may first set out a text and a translation:

λμονες ℎοῖον γṑνα μχες ελσανες λπ[ο]

φσχς δαιμονṐς ṑλσα' μ πολμοι

σὐν κακι χσετλελεσσε βροοῖσι δ πσι λοιπν

φρζεσθαι λογṐν πιοσν ἔθκε λος.

Eunomia was early personified. Already in Hesiod she is one of the three Horai, the child of Themis and the sister of Dike and Eirene, and from her family we may learn something of her nature. Both mother and sisters are concerned with the individual as the member of a community rather than as persomn in himself. Themis is a complicated character, whose implications cannot here be discussed, but we may without offence call her the mother of the social order and of the organized life of the community; Dike and Eirene are certainly social virtues which cannot usefully be practised by the individual in isolation, but if widespread make possible the collective life of the city. Eunomia too is one of the guardians of the social order, keeping the city from violence and lawlessness.

In 1461 the refugee Byzantine scholar Michael Apostolius, who since the fall of Constantinople had resided chiefly in Crete, paid a visit to his native city. There he copied a MS of Thucydides and brought the copy back with him to Crete, whither two other MSS of that author had already been taken. These few facts underlie and explain the complex relationships of at least ten extant MSS of Thucydides, which were written during the following generation by Apostolius and other scholars in Crete for their private use or more often for sale to their Venetian masters. All are descendants of one of those three original arrivals, or, by contamination, of more than one of them.

The Republic represents the good life as some sort of harmony or composition between the different interests of which the threefold nature of the soul makes it capable. The rational factor, τ λολιστικν, not only chooses which impulses shall be satisfied and which rejected but is credited also with impulses of its own, such as the desire for knowledge, to the importance of which the Republic testifies by various strands of argument. But in Plato's attempt to prove the goodness of this mixed life he may be thought to have relied too much on arguments about its pleasantness. If he had really meant from the first to prove against Thrasymachus that the just life is more prolific in pleasure1 than the unjust, he would have had to undertake the task of proving a necessary connection between just activities and pleasant states of feeling which could scarcely exist unless feelings were under the control of the will. If this had been his intention, the whole weight of the argument would rest on the two comparatively short passages in Book IX (581–3, 583–6) in which he makes first a dubious appeal to experience and then, by an equally dubious piece of metaphysics, attempts to reinforce his ethical conclusion by denying the reality of such pleasures as might tend to throw doubt on it.