22. venenis, a translation of papμáкois, of magic potions.

23. triformi. Hom. Il. 6. 181 πρόσθε λέων, ἔπιθεν δὲ δράκων, μέσση dè xipaipa. Bellerophon, according to the post-Homeric legend, killed the monster with arrows from the back of the winged horse Pegasus. The ablative Chimaera' is governed, and кowoû, by 'illigatum' and 'expediet,' see on Od. 1. 3. 6.

ODE XXVIII.

If it be essential to good drama that the dramatic play should be at least so obvious that most intelligent readers should put the same interpretation upon it, this Ode cannot be pronounced very successful. Its scene, its nature, the division of the parts (if it is a dialogue), its purpose, are all points on which it would be hard to find two editors who agree.

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The question of the scene has been complicated by doubts which have been raised as to the locality of the Matinum litus.' The Scholiasts speak with an uncertain voice. 'Mons Apuliae, sive ut quidam volunt plana Calabriae' is Acron's note. Porph. calls it here 'promontorium Apuliae'; on Epod. 16. 28 Mons Calabriae.' Ritter, arguing from this Ode, and pressing the identity of the Matina apis of Od. 4. 2. 27 with the Calabrae apes' of 3. 16. 33 and the Tarentine bees of 2. 6. 14, places it near Tarentum, where it was natural that Archytas should have been buried. The balance of evidence, however, is greatly in favour of the more northern site. The Matina cacumina ' of Epod. 16. 28 would seem to have been part of the range of Mount Garganus, and the 'litus Matinum' the shore at their base. A village and port at this place is still called 'Mattinata.' Lucan, 9. 182, joins Vultur, Garganus, and 'calidi buxeta Matini,' as all belonging to Apulia. The Scholiasts' confusion arose more probably from the vagueness with which the term 'Calabria' was employed in many writers. We must choose then for the scene of the Ode between the 'litus Matinum,' as thus explained, and the shore near Tarentum. Which is most likely, that a speaker on the shore of Apulia should commend a passing sailor to the care of Neptune, the warder of sacred Tarentum,' or that one speaking at Tarentum shall apostrophize Archytas in his burial-place on the 'litus Matinum'? The question seems to be really settled by the second local reference in v. 26. The woods

about Venusia are near enough to stand for the inland woods' on the shore just north of the Aufidus, but they would not occur naturally if the scene were at Tarentum.

The Ode consists of at least two parts; some moralizing on the universality of Death, connected in some way with the fate of Archytas, and the petition of an unburied corpse for the handful of sand which would enable it to cross the Styx. What is the relation between the two? The oldest answer was that the unburied body was that of Archytas himself, who (we must suppose) had been drowned and cast ashore during a voyage on the Adriatic. The Scholiasts consider the Ode a monologue, the shade of Archytas addressing itself in the first twenty lines, and appealing to a passing sailor in the remainder. The commoner view makes it a dialogue begun by the sailor who finds the body of the philosopher, and moralizes upon it till he is interrupted by the shade of Archytas. Where the break takes place is a question still to be settled. Verses 7, 15, 17, and 21, have all been proposed. A chief motive for throwing the division as late at least as v. 15, is to prevent the appeal of v. 14 Iudice te non sordidus auctor Naturae verique' from being addressed by Archytas to the sailor. Newman, on the contrary, hears in the appeal so addressed a very keynote of the Ode. He thinks that 'the poem is written in the spirit of Lucian to ridicule the mixture of old mythology and new philosophy in Southern Italy, where the Pythagorean doctrines were widely diffused. The sailor is presumed, by the shade of Archytas, to be an adherent of Pythagoras.'

Dillenburger, dividing at v. 17, thinks that the point of the Ode is the mutual exposure by a philosopher and a man of the world of the vanity of their respective pursuits,-the philosopher measuring the sand and dreaming of metempsychosis, the trader so intent on his pursuit of gain as to be unwilling to spare a minute to render the last service to his brother man,-both losing sight of death, and of their common humanity. The chief difficulty in the way of this interpretation is supposed to lie in the rendering of vv. 2, 3. Can parva munera pulveris te cohibent' mean 'the want of the gift of a little dust keeps you fast'? Or has Horace, when he makes Archytas ask for burial in v. 23, forgotten that he had already buried him in v. 2? Perhaps we may say that neither Horace nor Archytas vouches for the fact of a due sprinkling of dust. They are the sailor's words; and he is thinking at the time of the small compass to which the far-reaching mind of the philosopher is shrunk, not of the sufficiency or insufficiency of his burial. Archytas

replies that his case is worse even than the sailor had supposed, for he still lacks the sand that would give his shade rest.

Those interpreters who, for this or other reasons, hold that the unburied body is of some other than Archytas, explain the address of the early lines by placing the scene of the Ode in sight of Archytas' tomb. There is still a question whether it is a dialogue or a monologue. The interpretation which Orelli gives from an anonymous friend, and which he favours himself, makes the contrast between vv. 1-20, which contain reflections on the common doom of mortality suggested to a passing voyager by the sight of the philosopher's tomb, and the remainder of the Ode, in which the voice of an unburied corpse on the shore is supposed to interrupt his moralizing, and in its urgent appeal to suggest that, after all, death is not the hardest of fates.

Ritter imagines the Ode to have been suggested by the drowning of some doctus iuvenis' which was the talk of Tarentum on some occasion when Horace was staying there. He has been drowned on the Illyrian shore (v. 22), but his shade revisits Tarentum, apostrophizes Archytas, whose tomb is placed there, and appearing to a sailor, bids him stop on his voyage to throw dust on its unburied corpse, as he hopes for a prosperous return to more western waters (v. 26).

Others have supposed that the imaginary corpse is Horace's own. He had been nearly lost at sea once off Cape Palinurus (Od. 3. 4. 28). The scenery of this Ode will hardly suit that occasion; but the event may have filled his mind with thoughts and images of shipwreck.

In my notes I have inclined to Dillenburger's interpretation, not as a completely satisfactory one, but as less far-fetched than most, and involving fewer difficulties, and as giving the Ode a thoroughly Horatian tone. That Archytas had a tomb on the sea-coast, near Mount Garganus, is not a fact of history, nor in any way less an assumption of the interpreter than that he was drowned and cast ashore there.

We may notice that Horace seems to have been interested in the Pythagorean doctrines, and especially in that of Metempsychosis, and yet not disinclined to speak playfully of them, Epod. 15. 21, Epp. 2. 1. 52, S. 2. 6. 62. He ranks Pythagoras with Socrates and Plato as representing the great teachers of Greek philosophy, S. 2. 4. 3.

Archytas was a Greek of Tarentum, and lived in the fourth century B. C. Like the rest of the Pythagorean school of philosophers he was a great mathematician.

Metre Alcmanium.

Line 1. maris et terrae. Horace combines the title of yeaμérpns with the charge of counting the sand which exceeds number. He is thinking probably of the yaμμírns of Archimedes, the responsibility of which he throws on Archytas as a kindred genius. The question with Archimedes was not really the number of the sand, but the possibility of expressing numbers which defied the capacity of the clumsy Greek notation; though his treatise starts as an answer to those who had asserted that the number of the sand on the shores of Sicily was infinite, or at least incapable of arithmetical expression. To count the sand' was a proverb for wasted trouble, Pind. Ol. 13. 66, Virg. G. 2. 104, so that the speaker is intended (as the oxymoron' mensorem . . numero carentis' suggests) to put Archytas' labours in a somewhat ridiculous light.

2. mensorem, cp. Cic. de Sen. 14. 49, of the astronomer Gallus: 'in studio dimetiendi paene caeli atque terrae.'

cohibent, confine,' Kaтéxe. The contrast is, of course, between the infinity of space and number through which Archytas ranged in life, and the tiny handful of dust which has set bounds to him and his thoughts now.

3. litus. There is a variant latum' found in By 7, and in the first hand, altered subsequently to 'litus,' in A. Keller accepts it, and perhaps it is more consistent than 'litus' with the form of the notes of Acr. and Porph. The Scholiast on y read it, for his interpretation is ' amplum.'

4. munera, specially used of the last offices. It does not occur to the sailor that the sand on Archytas' body, if there be sand, has been heaped by the wind, not by human hand, and that the tribute of a few grains duly thrown is the one boon he still needs.

5. temptasse, as if there were some audacity in lifting even the mind to the heavenly bodies; 'animo' of course in sense qualifies it as well as ' percurrisse.'

6. percurrisse, from Lucr. 1. 73 'Omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.'

morituro, the case ruled by 'tibi' (Madv. § 393 c), the time fixed by 'temptasse' and 'percurrisse.' 'What profits it you now to have scaled the homes of the sky, and in spirit to have ranged from star to star through the round heaven, you that had still to die'! Cp. 2. 3. 4, where'moriture' occupies the same emphatic position.

7 foll. The instances are of those who seemed at one time to have escaped the universal law: Tantalus, when he feasted with the gods; Tithonus, when he was beloved by Aurora, and snatched by her into the sky (Eur. Tro. 855 ὃν ἀστέρων τέθριππος ἔλαβε χρύσεος ὄχος ἀναρTáoas); Minos, when Jove himself counselled him in the art of lawgiving (cp. Hom. Od. 19. 179 Aids peɣáλov bapioτýs); Pythagoras,

when he proved that he had outlived one death. The form of argument is that of Hom. Il. 18. 117, so often imitated, ovdề yàp ovdè Bíŋ 'Hpaκλῆος φύγε κῆρα | ὅσπερ φίλτατος ἔσκε Διῒ Κρονίωνι ἄνακτι | . . ὡς καὶ ἐγών, κ.τ.λ. Horace uses the myths of Tantalus and Tithonus (longa Tithonum minuit senectus,' Od. 2. 16. 30) for other purposes elsewhere; here we are not to think of the punishment of the one or the old age of the other, only of the fact that, though privileged above humanity, they died at last like others.

10. And the son of Panthus is in Tartarus now since he descended a second time to the lower world, for all that before (for he took down his shield and proved his knowledge of the days of Troy) he had yielded to black death no spoils beyond mere sinews and skin.' Pythagoras was said to have supported his doctrine of μereμpúxwois by asserting that his own soul had animated the body of Euphorbus (Пávēov viòv küμμeλíny, whom Menelaus slew, Hom. Il. 17. 69), a fact which he proved by recognizing Euphorbus' shield hung with others in a temple at Argos.

Tartara, not of the place of punishment, but of the lower world generally, as in Virg. G. 1. 36, where the Elysian plains seem to be included in it. No distinction is intended between Tartara' and 'Orco.' 'Orco demittere' is a Virgilian phrase representing Homer's 'Aïdi poïánFor the dat. see on Od. 1. 24. 18.

τειν.

14. iudice te. As addressed to Archytas this is simple, and the case of Pythagoras is a natural climax. Those who put the words into Archytas' mouth are driven either to alter, with Jani, 'te' to 'me,' or to suppose that Archytas presumes in all the world the same reverence for his master that he feels himself.

auctor, 'master,' 'teacher,' Cic. ad Att. 7. 3' auctor Latinitatis '; Virg. Aen. 11. 339 consiliis habitus non futilis auctor.'

15. sed, advers. to the last clause. He may have been a great philosopher, but he was a man, and death knows no exceptions.

16. via leti, the same image, Od. 2. 17. 11 supremum carpere iter.' 17 foll. On Dillenburger's theory, Archytas' answer begins here. The sailor has insisted on the universality of death by the argument that those do not escape whom you would most expect to escape, 'You, the philosophers, do not escape.' Archytas is supposed to bring the same lesson home to the sailor by another argument. 'The forms and occasions of death are many; your own trade has its dangers; the young die as well as the old; the only fixed thing is that all die. I died like the rest, cast ashore, as you might be, by a tempest. Be not in such a hurry after your gain as to refuse me the last rites. You will not be unpunished if you do.'

17. spectacula. The metaphor is from gladiatorial shows; wars