When Carthage had been destroyed and Greece made captive, what power was left to challenge the might of Rome? This question comes to mind just now, for this year, if arithmetic is any guide, is a centenary of the two Roman acts of destruction in 146 B.c. at Carthage and at Corinth. The date is of some significance: these actions, in effect, inaugurated a pax Romana that was to last, despite all upheavals, for half a millennium. What the world gained when Rome conquered Greece, and was conquered in turn by her captive, the world knows. What was lost by the overthrow of Carthage is more a matter of speculation; but the calcined infant skeletons of Salammbô and the dearth of art and literature worthy of a great nation do not encourage much regret for what might have been.

GilbertMurray was born in Australia on 2 January 1866. He came to England as a schoolboy, and his career since then has made him the best-known and best-loved scholar of our time. His contribution to Greek scholarship, and so to the teaching of Greek in our schools, has been immense. His famous translations and his broadcasts have been propaganda in the best sense, brought to bear on the wider public which knows nothing of Greek in the original. Nor has he confined himself to his Greek studies: he has given generous support to many humane and liberal causes, but above all to the cause of peace.

There they stand on the shelves, weary veterans with the marks of long service upon them: the school and college editions of Greek classics, rank upon rank, mostly in the sombre uniform of their period. For period pieces many of them are, as a glance at the date of original publication, with the long tale of subsequent reprints, will show. Their print has lost some of its early sharpness; the commentaries refer to grammars and the like that have long since passed into oblivion; and the occasional prefatory note, touching briefly on the principles of bowdlerization, brings back an echo of another age.

The student of anniversaries who is not particular to a year or two will recall that some two thousand years ago this year Corinth was refounded by Julius Caesar, following its destruction a little more than a hundred years before by Mummius. ‘Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum’, said Horace, translating what seems to have been a Greek proverb. Whether or not this means that a merchant and his money were soon parted amid the less respectable joys of Corinth, it seems to turn on the wealth and luxury of what was once the second city of Greece: a city, despite the fact that she suffers in our ideas from having played second fiddle politically and culturally to Athens and Sparta, of exceptional importance in the history of Greece. Thus is justified an effort to outline her history on this anniversary occasion.

A Few words first to explain the origin of this paper, and to excuse its rather forbidding title. Those responsible are your Hon. Treasurer and Hon. Secretary. They had come across some remarks on Virgil in my History of Ancient Geography, and they suggested that a fuller treatment on these lines might be of interest to this Society. I accepted the task willingly, not quite knowing then how it would work out, but hoping that it might at least throw some sidelights on Virgil. Will you bear with me if I pursue the matter where it leads, though well aware that this is not the only or the best way of studying a very great poet?

Few cities, perhaps, have enjoyed two periods of prosperous existence, each lasting some seven hundred years but separated by the gulf of a century when the city lay in utter ruin and desolation. Yet such was the history of Carthage: Punic Carthage which had dominated the western Mediterranean for centuries was wiped off the map by Rome in 146 B.c., only to be revived a century later as a Roman creation and to become one of the most flourishing cities of the Empire, surviving until its destruction by the Arabs at the end of the seventh century A.d. A centenary of the end of Punic Carthage, as of independent Corinth, falls this year and thus calls for a brief remembrance. This the Romans would doubtless have welcomed, not only as recalling their elimination of a secular, though weakened, enemy, but also because they liked celebrating anniversaries. It has indeed recently been suggested (by M. Grant, Roman Anniversary Issues, pp. 4, 120) that Julius Caesar deliberately planned the colonization of Carthage in 46 B.c., just one hundred years after its destruction, while Septimius Severus, himself an African, records on his coinage his favour to the city (INDVLGENTIA AVGG. IN CARTH.) in the quarter-millennary of the foundation plan. Whether or not such precise dating can be established, it is certain that the Romans enjoyed celebrating anniversaries and that the anniversary of the fall of Carthage marks an event of far-reaching significance: if Carthage had in fact succeeded in conquering Rome, the history of Western Europe would certainly have taken a very different turn.

‘You read in books’, Suliman said to me; ‘our book is the sand’. In the course of many long and fascinating journeys with the Arabs in the Eastern desert of Egypt, not a day—hardly an hour—passed in which I did not witness their powers of observation or listen to their comments on the footprints of man or bird or animal beneath us in the sand. From childhood to the grave the ground at their feet is an ever-open book, the reading of which is second nature with them, a constant occupation of vital importance to their desert lives. What would they think of the recognition scene in the Choephori? The few paragraphs that follow, extracts from the journal I made of a threemonth walk with three or four men of the Ma'asa tribe in the summer of 1949, are a record of my conversations with two of them on this subject.

The information available to us of events in Greece during the fifteen years which followed the battle of Plataea is limited enough. Any analysis of the relations between Athens and Sparta during this period must of necessity be a hazardous business. To explain the breakdown in the relations of the two states there is one cause so clear to us that it tends to fill the horizon, making us less sensitive to the circumstances which preceded and accompanied the rupture. The aggrandizement of Athens by her mastery of the Delian league was a factor which profoundly influenced the balance of power on the Greek mainland; but it did not, at first, bedevil Athenian–Spartan relations. There are signs of co-operation, if not of cordiality, in these relations for fifteen years; from then on there are the clearest signs of planned hostility. There is no doubt that relations deteriorated sharply at the time of the Thasian revolt, the Spartan earthquake, and the Helot revolt, and that hostility came into the open with the dismissal of the Athenian contingent at Ithome by the Spartan authorities. This action was the beginning of many misfortunes to both states: it drew aside abruptly the veil, which diplomacy had industriously maintained, from dark suspicions and sinister designs. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the probable reasons why the break came just when it did.

The recent revival of interest in the Athenian Plague suggested to us that it would be worth while re-examining the evidence. The very fact that it has troubled so many scholars in the last hundred years lends it a certain distinction, but their conclusions are so contradictory and unsatisfactory that many have agreed with Poppo ‘eam rem diiudicare non grammaticorum atque interpretum est, sed medicorum’. Yet it is clear that the inquiry can hardly be effective without co-operation between classical and medical men.

This very great play was first produced in 415 B.c. and must have been a favourite from the beginning, for it was chosen, with eight others from the same author, to be broadcast as one of the world's masterpieces. In spite of such a good start, however, it has been largely misunderstood in modern times, and the interpretation I am about to give must, unfortunately, be regarded as something new. Yet, of course, if it is the correct explanation, it is not new at all but exactly as old as the play itself. The author was Euripides—the youngest of the three great tragedians who were producing plays at the same time in one town—not as big as Newcastle-under-Lyme. Think of it—three Shakespeares at once. The construction of the play is brilliant, and that means, among other things, that it will contain its own explanation; we shall look for it and probably find it in the prologue. The scene displayed on the stage is one of desolation—much like a bombed site on the morning after a heavy raid. In the background we see smoking ruins and some rather poor tents or sheds evidently knocked up on the spur of the moment to accommodate a few desolate and homeless survivors.

It is essential for us to question our own views and those of our predecessors on the status of women in ancient Athens. With few exceptions these views display a kernel of prejudice and a pulp of misunderstanding, skinned over with the bloom of evasiveness. It is, indeed, odd to observe how inquirers into the social framework of Greek society have been misled, and how few classical scholars have attempted to give the lie to the extravagances spread abroad concerning the alleged attitude of Athenians to their womenfolk. Temptation to write up a violent contrast between the daily lives of Spartan and Athenian women was great, and in the last century other half-conscious feelings helped a false presentation. Again and again it has been said or implied that Athenian married women lived in an almost oriental seclusion, and that they were looked on with indifference approaching sometimes to contempt. Quite recently it was alleged in a broadcast that the Athenian social system relegated women to the condition of squaws, the matron being little more than a domestic servant. ‘As wives and mothers’, said the speaker, ‘Athenian women were despised.’ Literary passages have in the past been torn from their context as evidence for this, and the inferior legal status of women has been stressed. There are, however, important exceptions among scholars, of especial value being an essay by Professor A. W. Gomme, and a long section in The Greeks by Professor H. D. F. Kitto, whose remarks on truncated quotations from Aristophanes and Xenophon are very illuminating. Anyone interested in the question is advised to read again pages 219–36 in that little volume, as most of what follows simply strengthens what Kitto has written. In a variety of religious festivals women took conspicuous parts, and with the festivals we may put the theatre, because Athenian women formed a part of the audience, as is admitted in the last edition of Haigh's great work.

Man was born metrical, yet everywhere we find him writing free verse. Why this arrogant and lazy assumption that Parnassus can be climbed without feet? Or that the ascent is valueless?

In the eighteenth century versification was a grace and an elegance; in the nineteenth a virtue, perhaps a duty. What is it in the twentieth? A parergon? A morbidity? Versus laudatur et alget? Immo laude caret! Do we regard as an oddity the sixth-former who is prepared to put into practice his belief that language exists to make precise statements in elegant form? We do not; but we are flanked on the right by those who, having denied the utility of Latin in the fourth form, in the sixth know no written English but Latinese; on the left we are flanked by those who have no palate for the waters that inspired A. D. Godley, C. S. Calverley, and Vincent Bourne, preferring, if athirst for the Muse after years in the Waste Land, what Hippocrene is available at the Cocktail Party.

It is a well-known fact that the Trojan legend provided Augustus, as it had provided Julius Caesar before him, with a means of claiming divine ancestry. Likewise the Roman people were made the descendants of a nation renowned for its former greatness and celebrated by Homer. While much attention is paid to these facts, certain implications of the legend, for which apologies were sometimes felt (especially by Virgil) to be necessary, tend to pass unnoticed. One of these is that if the gens Iulia was descended from Aeneas, it possessed in him an ancestor whose birth was admittedly divine, but whose feats of valour were decidedly overshadowed in the Iliad by those of Hector. The other implication which I wish to discuss here is that if the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, it was from a defeated nation that the conquerors of the Mediterranean world had arisen. Was the Trojan heritage, in fact, despite its obvious value as propaganda, something of which the Romans and the emperor himself could justifiably be proud?

For some time the Council of the Classical Association has been considering ways of overcoming the shortage of editions of Greek authors suitable for use in schools and by university students (i.e. with commentaries and, in the case of authors read up to the Ordinary level of the G.C.E., with vocabularies).

Metapoetics—the name given by Aristotle's editors to his works on Publishing (either because they came after, or because they went beyond, and transcended, his Poetics)—deals with literary activity not qua itself but qua its product (ἔργον), the Book (ὥσπερ γὰρ τῆς οἰκοδομικῆς τέχνης ἐστὶν ἔργον ὁ οἶκος, ὁμοίως τῆς ποιητικῆς τὸ βιβλίον), and considers how this product is brought to the notice of the reader–or, rather, readers (μία γὰρ χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ).