It has long been a commonly held belief among classicists that traditional Romans frowned upon male homosexuality and associated it with the influence of Greek culture. There have always been exceptions to this belief, but when Paul Veyne published the following remarks in his 1978 article ‘La famille et l'amour sous le hautempire romain’, his views were quite heterodox:

Il est faux que l'amour ‘grec’ soit, à Rome, d'origine grecque: comme plus d'une société méditerranéenne de nos jours encore, Rome n'a jamais opposé l'amour des femmes à celui des garçons: elle a opposé l'activité à la passivité; être actif, c'est être un mâle, quel que soit le sexe du partenaire passif.

Virgil, in his description of the establishment of a new city by Aeneas for those Trojans who wished to remain in Sicily, is thinking of the Roman practice of colonial foundation: ‘Meanwhile Aeneas marked out the city with the plough and allocated the houses (by lot)’. We may note the personal role of the founder, the ploughing of the ritual first furrow, the organized grants to the settlers and the equality of treatment implied in the use of lot (sortiri). Virgil was writing at the end of the first century B.C. at a time of great activity in land distribution, but the Romans had been founding colonies from the mid fourth century. Each colony involved the creation of an urban area and the settlement of people on the surrounding agricultural land, and so perpetuated the city state, which was central to ancient life and culture. Indeed a colony was a smaller image of Rome itself. In the early Republic, colonies, either of Latins or of Roman citizens, were established on the periphery of Roman territory, largely for military and strategic reasons. Between 200 and 173 B.C. more than 40,000 may have received plots of land, amounting to about 1,000 square miles of territory. Later, the motives for colonial foundations became more complex, being closely connected with increasing economic and political problems. There can have been few more important aspects in the development of colonies than the need to find land for discharged troops. These in the main were rank and file soldiers who would expect equal shares in land allocations.

Peter Marshall has done what all those concerned with manuscripts dream of doing: he has turned up a substantial lost portion of an ancient text. His discovery is related, with great modesty, in an article in Manuscripta 37 (1993), 3–20, where he prints for the first time Tiberius Claudius Donatus' commentary on Virgil, Aeneid 6.1–157, edited from a gathering written in the sixteenth century and now bound into Vaticanus Latinus 8222 ff. 2r–9v. We offer here some emendations to the text he prints; we are grateful to Prof. M. D. Reeve and Dr S. J. Heyworth for their suggestions, which we have incorporated in what follows. The bold figures represent the lines of Aeneid 6.

It may seem faintly absurd to claim or imply that a Vergilian cento has suffered unjustified neglect from scholars. These works—of which there are sixteen, covering a period of over three centuries within Late Antiquity—are usually treated at best with amused tolerance, and at worst (as in the new Anthologia Latino) with angry disdain. Though always ingenious, sometimes funny, and occasionally informative about the reception of Vergil, they are seldom admired. Even among Italian scholars, some of whom have paid much attention to centos, a recession has set in since the annus mirabilis of 1981, which saw two editions of the Medea of Hosidius Geta. Proba has, deservedly, attracted more attention than most; her aims and methods as a Christian poetess were carefully and illuminatingly studied twenty years ago by Reinhard Herzog, and her interest as a female Roman aristocrat has brought her further attention, especially in recent years. The main aim of the present article is to suggest a particular context and a serious purpose for her cento. A postscript will show that it went on to enjoy considerable popularity until the end of the century, and an introductory section will discuss its date, but very briefly, since Matthews has convincingly said most of what needs to be said about a recent attempt to redate it. Proba's preface, much of it not in cento form, calls for detailed treatment from various angles—textual, literary, historical—and will be explored in a separate article.

This sentence has long been regarded as problematic; Kirchhoff's emendation is palaeographically simple and has met with general approval, but if ίερά is taken to mean ‘temples’, as is usual, the phrase is not without its difficulties. ỉστασθαι is normally used of inscriptions, statues and trophies rather than buildings; LSJ cite only one instance of the latter usage, Thucydides 1.69.1, and there it might be argued that the Long Walls were not a building as such (although Thucydides does use οίκοδομεîν of them at 1.107.1). Furthermore, it does seem rather pointless to say that individual poor members of the demos are unable to build temples, for that was something that even the richest were unlikely to be able to afford.

Aristotle begins his criticism of the communism of property in Plato's Republic1 with the following (which I have divied into two sections for convenient reference):

(i) τπων μν οὖν ὂντων τν νεωπγοὑντων ἂλλς ἂν εἴη ςπóπος καì πᾀων, αὐτν δ’ αὑτοις διαπονοὑνων τ πεπì τς κτσεις πλεíονς ἃν παπχοι δνσκολíας. (ii) καì γπ ν ταις πολαεςι ν τοις ἒπγοις μἠ γινομνων ἴςων λλ’ νíσων ναγκααιον γκλματα γíνεσθαι ππòς πολαὑσντας μν ἢ λαμβνοντας πολλ, òλíγα δ πονσντας ταῖς λττω μν λαμβνσι, πλεíω δ πονοσιν.

In this note I wish to reopen discussion of the role of Cornelius Nepos in Catullus' dedicatory poem. The Callimachean features of Catullus' assessment of his own work have been well documented. However I believe that, since this is a poem where Catullus evaluates not only his own work, but also that of Nepos, a closer examination of the latter is called for.

‘It is not likely that anything absolutely new can be added to the interpretation of this familiar poem.’ So G. L. Hendrickson forty five years ago. It need scarcely be noted that in spite of these cautionary words much has been written on this ode in the intervening years. With hesitation I add here a few words on what seems to me an overlooked yet central aspect of this poem.

After an opening of the elegiac epistle which recalls the Euripidean-Ennian Medea-prologue, Ovid's heroine thus states her purpose (Her. 12.23–4):

est aliqua ingrato meritum exprobrare voluptas;

hac fruar, haec de te gaudia sola feram.

These lines come from the passage describing the mourning of the natural world following the death of Orpheus. A. D. Melville (Ovid, Metamorphoses [Oxford, 1986]) translates as follows:

[‘ … ] and naiads wore,

and Dryads too, their mourning robes of black

And hair dishevelled.’

Two recent studies by A. R. Giumlia-Mair and P. T. Craddock have been devoted to a form of bronze having a blackish tint.1, 2 The authors there describe examples ancient and modern, from as far apart as Mycenean Greece, Egypt, Rome, China and Japan. In Japan such bronze is prominently represented in decorative art and known as Shakudo.

In Ars Amatoria 3.267–72, part of a longer sequence which begins in 261, Ovid advises his female readers on how to conceal various physical shortcomings. Text and apparatus are quoted from Kenney's revised OCT:

quae nimium gracilis, pleno uelamina filo

sumat, et ex umeris laxus amictus eat;

pallida purpureis tangat sua corpora uirgis,

nigrior ad Pharii confuge piscis opem;

pes malus in niuea semper celetur aluta,

arida nee uinclis crura resolue suis;…

Pliny the Elder in Natural History, xiii, 74–82, described in detail specifications for the manufacturing of papyrus. However, there was a spurious omission pertaining to the height (the term length was also used by some authors) of the manufactured sheet in sentence 78. Johnson has listed the different theories explaining this as an oversight or that a standard height-to-width ratio existed, thus making the specification of the height redundant. The latter is not substantiated by the measurement of the dimensions of extant papyrus rolls. Johnson proposed a more rational theory, that it was most important to specify the width but this does not explain the absence of any specification of height, even as a measurement of secondary importance.

There are two women called Salpe who are said to have written books in antiquity: one is described by Athenaeus (7.322a) as the name or pseudonym of a writer of ‘Paignia’ the other is cited by Pliny the Elder who calls her at one point Salpe obstetrix. Salpe is a rare name in antiquity—I know of no other examples—and few ancient books were ascribed to women. That two of these rare female writers should be called by the same name is something of a coincidence. That the name they shared was the very rare Salpe is a priori distinctly unlikely. It is much more plausible that they were one and the same.