The dissatisfaction which orderly-minded schoolboys generally feel when they first attempt to read the works of Propertius all too often persists among more mature readers who turn to the elegies in search of genuine literary experience. After tasting the immediate attraction of the other Augustans, whether the inexhaustible richness of Virgil and Horace, the brilliance of Ovid, or the gentle music of Tibullus, the reader continually turns away frustrated from Propertius. What, after all, is one to make of a poet whose words simply do not make sense by any accepted standard; who cries aloud for textual emendation, but never has enough of it until he has been utterly transformed by transpositions and by marks of long lacunae, as in Richmond's edition, or whittled away into something like a pedestrian Ovid; who describes a society which interests us intensely, yet hardly ever succeeds in transmitting to the reader any sort of direct experience of the life he lived and the sights he saw; who continually invites the reader by the overpowering emotion of the opening of a poem, often with some particle to indicate that we are arriving in the middle of a pre-existing train of thought, and then tails off into that artificial Alexandrianism which he plainly thought so admirable, but which we can appreciate only as an odd historical phenomenon? After considering these characteristics, one is more than ever convinced that Horace was speaking of Propertius, and speaking justly, when he criticized the pretensions of the self-styled ‘Roman Callimachus’.

The only external evidence we have of the date of publication of Suetonius' Caesares is the statement of Iohannes Lydus that it contained a dedication to Septicius Clarus as praetorian prefect—a statement, incidentally, which is related to the correct nomenclature of the office, and not in any way to the persons concerned. This dedication, lost along with the opening chapters of Iulius, must accordingly have been made some time during the years 119–22, before Septicius and Suetonius were dismissed from their respective posts, apparently for lack of respect to the empress. What is by no means certain is that the dedicatory epistle was attached originally to the whole series of Lives; nor that all the Lives were completed, far less published, while Suetonius was still employed as ab epistulis to Hadrian.

In a recent number of this Journal, Edward Champlin called in question the dating of the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus, traditionally placed in the early years of Nero's reign. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the Neronian date fits the references in the poems much better than does Champlin's date in the reign of Severus Alexander, and that there is no valid reason for doubting it.Some of the purely negative arguments may be dealt with briefly. When in 4.87 Calpurnius uses the phrase ‘facundo comitatus Apolline Caesar’, there is no need to take this as referring to the divine comes who becomes part of imperial propaganda in the third century (C., p. 96). Already in Nat. Deor. 2. 165–6 Cicero mentions Homer's attachment of various gods to great men as ‘discriminum et periculorum comites’; and in Rep. 2.44, ‘Fortuna comitata est’ Tarquin. For more specific activities, Propertius (4. 3. 16) makes Arethusa regret that she married ‘non comitante deo’; and this is brought into the realm of poetical composition in Prop. 3. 2. 13 and Ovid, Tr. 4. 1. 20, where the gods act as comites to the writers. This is precisely the context of Calpurnius' words, where Apollo's facundia is set beside the kingliness of Jupiter, as in Ecl. Eins. 1. 29–33, and provides poetic inspiration, just as Apollo does, ibid. 38, amplified in the following lines (39–42) with reference to Nero's poem on the Sack of Troy, and again in Apocol. 4, where there is a suggestion of Nero's identification with the god (‘ille mihi similis voltu similisque decore, nec cantu nec voce minor’). Nero was to exploit this idea much more as the reign proceeded, but Apollo's patronage of the poet-emperor was too firmly established at the beginning of the reign for any doubts to be raised.

Before the accession of Vespasian it is rare to find anyone outside the imperial family holding the consulate more than once. From A.D. 70 onwards the pattern is established whereby prominent lieutenants of the emperor are distinguished in this way. Mucianus, of course, is outstanding: consul first c. 64, he appears in the Fasti again in 70 and 72, as a fitting honour for the architect of Flavian supremacy. The great general Plautius Silvanus, consul as long before as 45, is consul again in 74, on his return from governing Tarraconensis, a province which Vespasian evidently wished to render secure beyond doubt. In the inscription of Silvanus' career (ILS 986), Vespasian states his reasons, apparently based simply on a recognition of merit long unrewarded, rather than for services to the Flavian cause. A more obvious supporter is Q. Petillius Cerealis, consul in 70, probably after his departure to the Rhine, and again in 74, after settling the Batavian revolt and governing Britain: he had taken an active part in hostilities against the Vitellians, and was also connected to Vespasian by a propinqua affinitas (Tac., Hist. 111, 59). Eprius Marcellus, a less clearly military figure, but active on behalf of the Flavians, in opposition to the intransigent Helvidius Priscus, likewise goes straight to an important province, Asia (CIL X, 3853; XIV, 2612; P-W VI, 263–4; PIR E, 84), and returns to a second consulate in 74.

Among a number of short Latin poems by Walter Savage Landor, of which an interesting appreciation was published recently by Bruce Mackinnon, of British Columbia, is one particularly attractive pastiche of Catullan hendecasyllables. In many respects this poem could claim to reproduce the manner of Catullus himself. My own uneasiness was aroused by the rhythm of the opening line:I was aware of no rule for the composition of this type of verse which was infringed here; but the run of the words appeared curiously prosaic. After some consideration, I identified the metrical feature in question as the opening of the verse with two disyllables: the former spondaic (no examples were to turn up, as it happened, with a trochaic or iambic word), the latter of necessity trochaic. It is a rhythm often employed by Landor in the fifty and more pages of hendecasyllables found in the 1847 edition of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (pp. 125–78), occurring for example in poems 3, 5, 9, 10, and three times in 12. A particularly striking example is found in 88.8, quaedam scripsit avunculus… which nobody would mistake for a production of Catullus.