[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SrEcTATOE.1
SIR,—In this week's Spectator in an editorial note you quote the well-worn tag, 'Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat.'" Ought it not to be Quem Jupiter vult perdere dementat Arius " ? When I was at school (a very long time ago) I was taught that the line is a cradCwy iambic. I have forgotten where it comes from, and it would be interesting to find this out, as it is often quoted, but always, I think, quoted wrong.-
[According to King's Classical and Foreign Quotations, 3rd Edition, p. 298, the phrase, which is of dubious Latinity, first occurs as our correspondent quotes it in James Dupont's lionteri Gnontologia, Cambridge, 1660, as a rendering of two lines from an unknown Greek tragedian (possibly Euripides) given in the Scholium on Sophocles' Antigone, 620.1
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The same thought, though expressed differently, is to be found in the writing of P. Syrus and Velleius Paterculus.— ED. Spectator.]
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