Did Sir Arthur Evans find Linear B tablets on or underneath the floor of the Room of the Stirrup Jars? Do they belong to about 1400 b.c., as he maintained, or to 1200 b.c.? These may seem recondite questions, but when Professor L. R. Palmer raised them in the Observer last summer he stirred up a hornets' nest. After finding that his text had been cut, his title changed, and a reference to the Piltdown Man fraud gratuitously thrown in by the newspaper, he may have felt ruefully that he should have used a longer spoon; but his challenge to the authority of The Palace of Minos was real enough. Not unnaturally the archaeologists bristled at an intrusion by a philologist, however distinguished, into their territory, and deplored this questioning of their masterful hero, this use of the vulgar arts of publicity to advance a scholarly argument. Charges and rejoinders flew briskly to and fro; there were reproaches of sensationalism and vilification, of putting discredited technical arguments before lay readers to blind them with science. For a while an old-fashioned whiff of odium philologicum hung in the air, until the two parties agreed to await the full publication of the disputed facts, and hostilities were followed by an uneasy truce.

To one student whose early training was concerned with the study of the tangible remains of the Greek past the proof that the Linear B script concealed the Greek language came as a great shock. Nothing to my mind was more certain than that a great gulf separated the later Greek world from the Mycenaean world. In my view those who would trace through a hypothetical Bauernstil a kinship between the Geometric ware of early Helladic times and the post-Mycenaean pottery were wishful thinkers of the softest kind. In my eyes they held their views against all evidence because they wanted to hold it. The Greeks who held this view, urged by patriotism and the wish to show the world that the glories of Mycenae were Greek, I could forgive; but for the foreigner, spurred only by the love of the theory that he had invented, I could feel nothing but contempt; so perverse did the view seem. And now this perverse view is buttressed by the new linguistic evidence, so convincing in its nature to the layman, the man in the street.

Few periods in all ancient history are more familiar than the months from May to September of 480 b.c., when the enormous army and navy of Xerxes, King of the Persians, crossed from Asia to Europe and bore down upon the heart of Greece. Few battles are more famous than Salamis, where Xerxes, after carrying all before him, crushing Leonidas at Thermopylai and forcing the Greek fleet to withdraw from Artemision, sacking and burning Athens, saw his navy defeated by a far smaller force and the tide of Persian might begin to ebb. How did the Greeks prepare to face the Persian threat, the greatest they had ever met, and what planning achieved this remarkable result?

The ancient mine-workings of southern Attica, although less photogenic than the Parthenon and other better-known buildings of antiquity, provide some of the most fascinating remains of Classical Greece. Their density upon the ground and state of preservation, except where they are being obliterated by modern mining or quarrying operations, are outstanding, and even a brief visit made without specialist knowledge cannot but send one away with a desire to know more about them.

Pindos, the mountain range between Thessaly and Epeiros, is not without renown. It appears first in Pindar (Pythian ix. 15), where in its ‘storied dells’ Kreousa gave birth to Hypseus by the love of the river-god Peneios. It, or more likely the town of the same name in Doris, was known to Pindar (Pythian i. 66) as the home of the Dorians, and it appears in Aeschylus and Sophokles—in the former (Supp. 257) as the north-western boundary of Pelasgos' realm, in the latter (Fr. 249) as the source of the Acheloos. Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Orpheus refer to it, and in Latin it is at least as old as Virgil. We find it in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, Silius, and Valerius Flaccus,3 and in the course of antiquity it acquired a reputation as a lofty, wooded mountain which persists in Claudian and through the Dark Ages. Once more it is the setting for an amour of Apollo; Paion's mother, Liagore, receives leech-craft as the price of her favours (Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 41); and the same Spenser praised the whiteness of its snow (Prothalamian, 40). Wordsworth, as he wondered at the torrent at the Devil's Bridge, asked:

‘Hath not Pindus fed thee, where the band Of Patriots scoop their freedom out, with hand Desperate as thine?’

and it was about the Pindos range that, in 1940, another band of patriots repelled the Italian invasion of their country and won the first Allied victory of World War II.

Paton remarks that the meaning of the riddle is obscure. May not the answer be the word κσρη, whose first meaning is ‘maiden’, but whose other meanings are also hinted at in this enigma? The successive phrases may then be explained as follows.

These notes are prompted by experience gained teaching Roman Republican history to a first-year Latin class over a period of a few years at Victoria University (then College), N.Z. The suggestions they contain arose largely from discussions with students and other teachers, university and otherwise, from all of whom I have learned a great deal. Basically, my problems were threefold. The course was very short, and tune limitations demanded the utmost selectiveness. The course was also voluntary, and so had to be interesting in itself and of immediate value and significance for students busied with Latin and generally with three other degree subiects, too.

The dissatisfaction which orderly-minded schoolboys generally feel when they first attempt to read the works of Propertius all too often persists among more mature readers who turn to the elegies in search of genuine literary experience. After tasting the immediate attraction of the other Augustans, whether the inexhaustible richness of Virgil and Horace, the brilliance of Ovid, or the gentle music of Tibullus, the reader continually turns away frustrated from Propertius. What, after all, is one to make of a poet whose words simply do not make sense by any accepted standard; who cries aloud for textual emendation, but never has enough of it until he has been utterly transformed by transpositions and by marks of long lacunae, as in Richmond's edition, or whittled away into something like a pedestrian Ovid; who describes a society which interests us intensely, yet hardly ever succeeds in transmitting to the reader any sort of direct experience of the life he lived and the sights he saw; who continually invites the reader by the overpowering emotion of the opening of a poem, often with some particle to indicate that we are arriving in the middle of a pre-existing train of thought, and then tails off into that artificial Alexandrianism which he plainly thought so admirable, but which we can appreciate only as an odd historical phenomenon? After considering these characteristics, one is more than ever convinced that Horace was speaking of Propertius, and speaking justly, when he criticized the pretensions of the self-styled ‘Roman Callimachus’.

In this paper I want to challenge a view of the Aeneid which I believe to be widespread, and indeed to have had the support of distinguished scholars. I could summarize it like this: The Aeneid has, of course, many great passages; indeed, over whole books, it reaches the heights of epic poetry—Bk. ii, The Fall of Troy; Bk. iv, Aeneas and Dido; Bk. vi, The Underworld; Bk. viii, Aeneas at the Site of Rome; Bk. xii, Aeneas and Turnus. But, on the whole, it is inferior in interest to the Iliad or the Odyssey; and the chief cause of this is the unsatisfactory nature of its hero. Aeneas, in short, ‘will not do’. Now it is no part of my purpose to try to set Virgil against Homer: that is a rash undertaking, and one against which we have a salutary warning. ‘It is easier’, we are told, ‘to take a cub from its she-bear than to take a single line from Homer.’ If that is so, what of the dangers of trying to take two whole poems? Instead, I wish to join issue on the character of Aeneas, while agreeing so far with his critics, that he is indeed vital to the whole poem—if you cannot understand and sympathize with Aeneas, you cannot understand the Aeneid. Virgil himself makes that clear in the first twenty lines, in which he strikes all the notes which are to be sustained throughout the poem.

To one nurtured on the pure and sustaining milk of Cicero and the Augustans, with an occasional dash of Tacitus and Juvenal for medicinal purposes, the writings of Apuleius come with something of the force of a knock-me-down. The very words are unfamiliar. Barrio is onomatopoeic enough to be guessed, but what does vispellio mean to anyone outside the legal profession? What of cambio? His is a strange language, highly artificial, with its borrowings from the Greek—myoparo, schedium, and naulum, which Juvenal took before him, for instance; with its echoes of Plautus—tuburdnor, scitulus, atticisso, capero, ientaculum, agaso, lurco, pollinctor, cincinnus, and examussim are all Plautine; with its diminutives, always a sign of artifice, as it was the sign of the Graecis-santes of Cicero's day—mellitula, tenella, centunculus, sdtulus spring to the mind; with comparatively unfamiliar literary words—tesca and blatero are both Horatian, but are very rare; and with his own occasional extensions of usage, as when he describes his horse as vector meus, or speaks of a kiss being given pressule, or seemingly coins subterlabere for ‘to slight’. But with this mannered artificiality goes the easy conversational idiom of the professional popular writer, evinced by his repeated use of commodum in the Metamorphoses to carry on the flow of ideas. Fuscis avibus or sinistro pede for ‘without luck’ are as artificial as the rest, but minimo minus for ‘almost’, or dicam an with the indicative for immo vero are surely conversational.

It is an axiom of modern linguistics that the form of any given word is much more constant than its meaning. It is true that linguistic communication would break down altogether unless it were accepted that some firm correlation existed between form and meaning. When the teacher uses the word chair all the listening pupils have some idea of what she means, so that the sound of the word is a meaningful linguistic signal to them all, yet the possible variation of the shades of meaning it can evoke is enormous, e.g. not only (to take a random, selection) can it refer to an article of household furniture of various types, shapes, sizes, and materials, but to the presiding over a meeting, a professorial appointment, a physical action, &c. When contrasted with the more or less constant form of the word chair, the variation and complexity of its meaning is staggering, for whereas the form of the word chair is subject to change only within a strictly limited phonetic, morphemic, and syntactical range, the range of variation in its meaning is as extensive as the variation in the situations in respect of which it is used.