Delia is being carefully watched and the door is locked to keep her in and her lover out . It is hardly reasonable to suppose that she has in these circumstances been left in possession of the key; it is presumably in the custody of the ianitor. According to Ovid, what girls in this situation did was to have a duplicate key fabricated for use when occasion offered. The Delphin Ed. note ‘Par. pro fixo habet fcdso’ may, of course, record (...) what is merely a correction. Falso may, on the other hand, have arisen from a gloss on a reading ficto in a manuscript prior to those extant, which could easily have degenerated to fixo. This reading would sufficiently improve the sense of the passage to merit consideration, for lines 17 ff., while couched in general terms, clearly refer to the situation in which Tibullus and Delia are placed and describe the kind of behaviour by which they are to merit Venus' aid. (shrink)

Odysseus' man, disguised as the captain of a merchant ship, is explaining to Neoptolemus how he chanced unexpectedly to meet Neoptolemus' sailors. Jebb's note, ‘the same land ; not, strictly, the same “spot” ’, and his rendering, ‘off the same coast’, somewhat contradict one another.

Panegyric IV , 24, 2: diducta acie inreuocabilem impetum hostis effundis, dein quos ludificandos receperas reductis agminibus includis. Acidalius' correction ludificando is accepted in both the Teubner editions. The addition of the s would, of course, be an easy error, and quite characteristic of the MSS, of these authors. But there is no need for the correction, in view of the frequency; in the Panegyrici Latini, of the Gerundive as a Future Participle Passive, an unquestionable example of which occurs, in (...) fact, in the last sentence of the chapter in question. ‘Quos ludificandos receperas’ means ‘whom you had admitted with the intention that they should be tricked,’ is equivalent in sense to ‘quos ludificaturus receperas.’ The Gerundive used as Future Participle Passive gives an appropriate picture of the purpose with which the manoeuvre described by receperas was carried out. (shrink)

Following the example of the late Professor R. S. Conway, who in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society, vol. v, part i , discussed ‘The Use of the Singular Nos in Cicero's Letters’, I examined Catullus’ employment of the idiom in an article published in Mnemosyne, series iii, vol. vii, fasc. 2 , pp. 148–56. While the usage of Catullus exemplified various of Conway's indisputable types of the singular nos, such as the Plural of Authorship and the Plural of (...) Proprietorship, my observations did not confirm his main thesis of a ‘projective’ use, which L. C. Purser reviewing his rnonograph called ‘a Pluralis Dignitatis or Fiduciae, not to say Adrogantiae’, in direct contrast to the orthodox pluralis modestiae. I found that, where the use of nos related to a state of mind of the writer or speaker, not merely to circumstances of his environment, the usage in Catullus was either a pluralis modestiae or one of several derivative types. My examination of Virgil seems wholly to confirm the conclusions reached concerning Catullus, whose types of singular nos I classified as follows: the Plural of Proprietorship ; the Traveller's Plural ; the Local Plural ; the Plural of Authorship ; the Social and Domestic Plural ; the pluralis modestiae , pp. 87–9); the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; the Plural of Pathos or Self-pity. Of these , , , and are a product of circumstances of environment and relate to a group of which the speaker or writer is a member; , , , and express an attitude or state of mind. Virgil's examples of the usage fall into six of these categories, and being absent. For the purposes of the present study I shall, in order to indicate more clearly the connexion between and , and the subjective character of , number the six Virgilian categories as follows: the Plural of Proprietorship; the Social and Domestic Plural; the Plural of Authorship; the pluralis modestiae; the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; the Plural of Pathos, Self-pity, or Complaint. (shrink)