Libertino Patre Natus: True or False?

Abstract I Offer this paper as a tribute to my friend of forty years, Robin Nisbet The topic is particularly appropriate, since it was to Robin Nisbet that I first suggested this hypothesis in 1957, a few weeks after Eduard Fraenkel’s great book appeured. On tha1 occasion, as on many others, Robin gave me helpful advice and suggestions, though I did not then pursue the idea. It was only many years later that I discovered that Niebuhr had anticipated me in a single sentence in a lecture on Horace.1 The idea was also put forward in a brief footnote by E. T. Salmon in his book Swnnium and the Samnitrs ( 1 967). I tried the idea very informally on an audience at a Liverpool Classin1! Seminar led by Francis Cairns in 1 981, and again on an audience a1 a lecture in the Institute of Classical Studies in London in J 986; and I mn most grateful to both audiences for helpful comments.