We come now to the signs of fair weather; and the first five lines are important:

nec minus ex imbri soles et aperta serena prospicere et certis poteris cognoscere signis. nam neque tum stellis acies obtunsa videtur, nec fratris radiis obnoxia surgere luna, tenuia nec lanae per caelum vellera ferri.

By definite signs no less will you be able To forecast sunny, clear, and rainless days After the rain, or know it has set fair. Then seen, the stars' keen brilliance is not dulled; Rises no sunlit moon; no woolly cloudlets Flock over heav'n.

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.

These few reflections were suggested by a recent coastwise voyage with the Odyssey as only book-companion, and the sea is the main theme.

The sea, of course, figures largely in the Odyssey, and how true it all is! Clearly Homer was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of sealife, and we may be sure that his Greek audiences down the years found in him a satisfying interpreter of their own experience as members of a seafaring race.

Homer's stock adjectives and verbs are the quintessence of observation, but observation coloured with artistic imagination. His sea-pictures, with all their vividness, are not photographic, or scientific—if that means abstracting and explaining. Let me illustrate.

A net, to anyone who has made or used one, is a perpetual source of wonder. He knows its knots and its changing shapes, but how is he to describe it—universally? Not, certainly, in the terms of Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition: ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ In the last resort he hails with delight Homer's childlike, invincible, πoλνωπóχ (xxii. 386), for, after all, ‘many holes’ sums up to the eye of imagination the idea of net. True, these ‘holes’ are regularly bounded, but why insist on that when the reader knows it perfectly well and only likes to be re-minded of the general impression? Even Johnson had a glimmering notion that ‘holes’ had something to do with it, for he defines ‘reticulated’ as ‘formed with interstitial vacuities’.

Latin inscriptions are among the most revealing and valuable remains from ancient Rome and its Empire. They have been found in the hundreds of thousands—and are still being found—in all parts of the Empire, ranging in date from early times to the fall of the Western Empire and beyond. The earliest are few and of unknown date—perhaps of the regal period, perhaps of the early Republic—and the latest are of yesterday, such as the ones put up to mark the new excavations and discoveries under St. Peter's in Rome. The stories they have to tell are infinite in variety, and the information they give as varied in value. From the city of Rome alone we have the names of more than 50,000 persons recorded in inscriptions, not counting the many more whose cognomina only are given.