Archibald Allen

In his account of primitive people in D.R.N. 5 Lucretius says that they led a wandering, nomadic sort of existence ; ignorant of agriculture and husbandry, they were content to eat nuts and berries and the like , while streams and springs called them to quench their thirst : denique nota vagis silvestria templa tenebant nympharum… The rest of the sentence is a lush description of the streams which welled up from those woodland shrines, washing over rocks and moss, and sometimes breaking out over the plain

‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’In his recent note on Hipponax in this journal, Joseph Cotter first offers ‘a revised version of LSJ's definition’ of ὄρχις. At LSJ, s.v. ὄρχις I, ‘… testicle Hippon. 92.3 W. …’, he would delete the Hipponactean citation and rewrite the second definition, under ΙΙ, to read: ‘from similarity of shape, 1 glans penis, Hippon. 92, 2. from the form of its root …’. Cotter derives his new definition from his reading of that Hipponactean line, καί μοι τὸν ὄρχιν τῆς φαλ[ …, which he supplements with the name of a marsh bird, φαλ[ηρίδος, also redefined. This supplementary ‘coot’ is said to mean ‘cock’, so that the narrator of the fragment's description of treatment for sexual impotence tells how a Lydian woman ‘thrashed with fig-branch the glans of my cock’. We are presented, then, with two previously unattested meanings of two nouns, ὄρχις and φαληρίς, and an accommodating correction of LSJ. What—I have asked Cotter—might Henry Liddell have thought of these innovations, familiar as he undoubtedly was with Humpty Dumpty's semantics!

This is our well received text of Propertius' celebrated address to the shades of Callimachus and Philitas at 3.1.1–2: Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae, in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus. Well received it may be, but scholarly worries and disagreements about the precise meaning of sacra, and indeed about the real purpose of the address, perhaps have diverted editors' eyes from a possible corruption. I would like to suggest that the pairing of ethnic adjective and personal name, Coi and Philitae, in line 1 may not be Propertian

At 3.9.37–8, Propertius says that he will not bewail the destruction of Thebes by the Epigonoi or the earlier assault on the city by the Seven: non flebo in cineres arcem sedisse paternos Cadmi, nee septem proelia clade pari. That nec…pari in 38 refers to the Seven, with Lipsius' septem for the manuscripts' semper, J. D. Morgan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in his discussion of the couplet in CQ 36 , 186–8. But Morgan's chief concern in that discussion was with paternos at the end of 37, and it is his treatment of that adjective which prompts this note

This is our well received text of Propertius' celebrated address to the shades of Callimachus and Philitas at 3.1.1–2: Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae, in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus. Well received it may be, but scholarly worries and disagreements about the precise meaning of sacra, and indeed about the real purpose of the address, perhaps have diverted editors' eyes from a possible corruption. I would like to suggest that the pairing of ethnic adjective and personal name, Coi and Philitae, in line 1 may not be Propertian.

At 3.9.37–8, Propertius says that he will not bewail the destruction of Thebes by the Epigonoi or the earlier assault on the city by the Seven: non flebo in cineres arcem sedisse paternos Cadmi, nee septem proelia clade pari. That nec…pari in 38 refers to the Seven, with Lipsius' septem for the manuscripts' semper, J. D. Morgan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in his discussion of the couplet in CQ 36, 186–8. But Morgan's chief concern in that discussion was with paternos at the end of 37, and it is his treatment of that adjective which prompts this note.

In his account of primitive people in D.R.N. 5 Lucretius says that they led a wandering, nomadic sort of existence ; ignorant of agriculture and husbandry, they were content to eat nuts and berries and the like, while streams and springs called them to quench their thirst : denique nota vagis silvestria templa tenebant nympharum… The rest of the sentence is a lush description of the streams which welled up from those woodland shrines, washing over rocks and moss, and sometimes breaking out over the plain.