The Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus has probably been more admired, and has certainly received more attention from scholars, than any other Alexandrian poem; and for obvious reasons. ‘It is a page,’ said Matthew Arnold, ‘torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom! what animation! what gaiety! what naturalness!’ The picture of contemporary manners which it presents has a charm far beyond the compass of T.'s nearest rival in this genre, Herodas, and, if some reservations be made on the score of language, it is convincingly lifelike. Nevertheless, in spite of the attention it has received, it has not, I think, been viewed as clearly as it may be either in details or as a whole. Of the five sections of which this paper is composed, the first four are an attempt to bring the picture into rather sharper focus; the fifth is a briefer note upon a point of detail.

HERE and there from the literature which deals with Theocritus the student may gather a vague impression that his twenty-second Idyll, the Hymn to the Dioscuri, is not a very satisfactory poem, 2 but to judge from their meagre and desultory commentaries scholars have not found it very interesting, and nobody, so far as I know, has envisaged at all plainly the problem which it presents. The purpose of this paper is to state the problem, and in order to do so it will be necessary to consider separately the four component parts into which the Idyll falls.

The student of Theocritus who wishes to know what is the ῥόμβος plied by Simaetha at l. 30 of the second Idyll will find it identified in the scholia with the ἲυγξ of the refrain; and of all the modern commentators who express an opinion, Legrand is alone in questioning the identification. And yet to the attentive reader it should seem more than questionable. It will be well to begin with an examination of the passage.The incantation of Simaetha, who might say, with Tibullus (1. 5. 16), uota nouem Triuiae nocte silente dedi, consists of nine terms, each of four verses, framed and articulated by the intercalary verse, ῖυγξ ἔλκε τύ τῆνον ἐμόν ποτὶ δῶμα τόν ἄνδρα of which there are therefore ten occurrences. The type to which the terms of the incantation in the main conform is given in the first two quatrains—(1) Strew barley-groats on the fire and say, ‘I strew the bones of Delphis.’ (2) I burn bay-leaves: so may Delphis burn. It consists, that is, of a magic act, accompanied by a prayer or by a statement equivalent to a prayer.

In the course of his dispute with Conington on the comparative merits of Catullus and Horace, Munro taxed the Augustans with having made the lyric of the heart impossible in Latin by their virtual exclusion of diminutives from the language of poetry; and, whether that is the result or no, the general fact that diminutives are rare in the serious poetry of the Augustan age is well known. The details, however, are less easy to come by. Stolz (Hist. Gr. d. lat. Spr., p. 574) and Stolz-Schmalz (hat. Gr., p. 834) devote a few unilluminating lines to the Stilistik of diminutives: otherwise the grammars and the treatises on diminutives known to me concern themselves only with forms and meanings. Except for a note by Professor Housman which, at 4. 927, sets out Manilius's diminutives, I know of no collections for any Augustan poet, and it is perhaps worth while therefore to state the facts. I have not indeed read through Augustan poetry for the purpose, but for some time past I have been in the habit of noting such diminutives as I have come across in the course of reading, and these lists I have now checked and amplified from the indexes to the authors concerned. My lists are probably not complete, but I hope they are sufficiently near it to present a true picture of the position.

Since the appearance of C. Hoffer's dissertation De personarum usu in P. Terenti comoediis (Halis Saxonum, 1877) the view that masks were not worn at the original performances of the plays of Plautus and Terence has become universally accepted. This dissertation is usually cited by recent writers, who have for the most part been content to accept Hoffer's conclusions in their entirety, and the only independent investigators since the publication of the dissertation have also arrived at very similar conclusions.