Reading the Rhesus again the other day, I was struck by something strange in the rhythm of its trimeters. Whatever this was, it seemed to have nothing to do with metrical punctuation ; nor with the use of trisyllabic feet, though on that I shall have something to say. By listening hard I found a clue. The Rhesus is very spondaic at the beginning and the middle of the line.

The lover of Aeschylus and Verrall, remembering the appendix to Verrall's Seven against Thebes, pricks up his ears at etetumos and listens for a verbal equivocation.

In a recent article JRS, 68 f. Nicholas Horsfall sought to demonstrate that Corythus, which Virgil makes the original home of Dardanus, should be identified with Tarquinii, some 50 miles north-west of Rome, on the coast of Etruria, rather than with Cortona, roughly twice as far away, to the north, and inland. In doing so he expressed surprise that the Virgilian evidence should have been completely ignored by previous writers on the subject : and, using the Aeneid as the main (...) source on which his own argument was based, he supported his conclusion with a careful examination of several other aspects of the problem. (shrink)

Poets should mean at least as much as they say. When Lucan wrote sola futuri Crassus erat belli medius mora. qualiter undas qui secat et geminum gracilis mare separat Isthmos,1 he ought to have been aware of the inept juxtaposition of slender and Thick. Did Sophocles mean all that he has implied ? I think so, because onoma, if it has not this implication, is strange, and a feeble excuse for it has to be sought two hundred and fifty lines (...) away. (shrink)

Charles Erskine Stuart's studies of the MSS. of Seneca's tragedies are known to readers of the Class. Quart, from his two articles . Before he died he expressed a wish that his collations and notes should pass to me.