On the coast of southern Italy, just before the coastline changes its direction from south-west to south-east, there was in ancient times a place where the high mountain range stood back a little, and in front of these mountains a series of semicircular terraces formed a kind of giant's amphitheatre looking out to sea on to the Gulf of Tarentum. At this spot two rivers flowed close together into the sea; their alluvial deposit had built up a small fertile plain, and the route taken by the larger of them down from the mountains pointed to a short cut to the sea on the other side, the Etruscan Sea. Here, in the latter half of the eighth century b.c., a band of settlers from Achaea built a town between the two rivers, which they named, as colonists tend to do, after a river and a spring in their home-land: the larger river they called Krathis, ‘the Mixer’, and the smaller Sybaris, ‘the Gusher’. The newly-built town took its name from the Sybaris. Both these rivers are there to-day; the Krathis is still called the Crati, and the Sybaris, which now flows into the Krathis, is called Coscile.

I propose to review briefly the main grounds of attack on the Classics, and the defence and vindication that can be put forward; to suggest that it is Latin which is open to the attacks, and Greek which holds the key to the defence.…

One might easily say that the Tale of Troy was the most famous in the Western world. Already in the days of the earliest European literature it furnishes the background of half its drama and poetry. Homer alone would confer immortality on his epic theme, and all through ancient and medieval times Troy provided motives for every kind of art. And yet can one to-day say that the legend and the way in which literature has handled it are familiar to the general reader? Is even the Iliad, whether in the original Greek or in translation, known at first hand to more than a small minority? Perhaps, then, it is not superfluous to look back over the literary history of some 3,000 years and see by what channels this celebrated theme has come down to us.

As far as I can remember, although I read Virgil as a school-boy, scanned Virgil, translated Virgil, and learned Virgil by heart, yet no one ever tried to explain to me why I should study Virgil, except, of course, as a means to securing a School or Higher Certificate. Vaguely I was aware that Virgil was said to be a great poet, and I knew that Tennyson had written a celebrated poem about him. But nobody tried to make me feel that he was a great poet, nobody tried to open my eyes. Nor is this surprising, because no one tried to make me feel that Lycidas was a great poem either, although I learned most of it by heart. Certain things in Lycidas, I know, did move me, particularly the passage about St. Peter, the blind mouths, But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

No class of writers is more neglected than the men who wrote in Latin after the Renaissance. Medieval studies usually stop at that point, and thenceforth the attention of scholars is absorbed in the young literatures written in the vernacular languages of Europe. Classical scholars are chary of venturing even as far as St. Augustine or Ausonius, and the Middle Ages are to the majority a closed book. Yet these post-Renaissance authors, no less than the writers of the Middle Ages, are witnesses to the endurance of Latin culture. Fracastoro, no less than Dante or Augustine, is instructive as being under the influence of Virgil. Both Medievalists and Classicists can benefit from a study of such Late Latin poets as G. Buchanan, Joannes Secundus, and John Owen, to name only the more prominent. Even the historian can derive much interesting material from their work as signposts of opinion in an age of transition and symbols of the enduring value of the Latin tradition. For Owen in particular may be pleaded his enormous popularity in his lifetime, which suggests that his epigrams were more than academic exercises to charm the indolent at the court of James I. They were soon translated into French, German, and Spanish, and there were five English versions. His reputation was truly international and appealed beyond the circle of those who spoke Latin freely.

Towards the end of the winter 1939–40 I was asked by a nephew, who is the Mayor of a Midland town and had to request his Council to confer the freedom of the borough on some notable, whether there was not in Demosthenes an appropriate compliment for him to quote, expressing the high qualities of the candidate for the honour. I guessed that my nephew had a vague recollection from his school-days of the De Corona, and I found what I thought was in his mind in § 84—the spurious decree granting a crown to Demosthenes because he had always been friendly to the city, and had always said and done all the good in his power on its behalf. My nephew was pleased and used the quotation in his speech. I was then moved to explore the De Corona for myself, and very soon was startled by remarkable parallels to events in Europe in 1940; and the idea of this paper came to me. In the presence of experts, may I ask indulgence for my ignorance? My knowledge of Greek history, especially of this period, is but the sediment of what was never more than a very small cupful.

The task of elucidating the nature and use of the gerund and gerundive is notoriously one of the most difficult which the teacher of Latin has to face. He can draw no analogy between these forms and those used for the same purposes in English or in the other modern languages studied by his pupils; and the twofold antithesis between these two parts of the verb and between the uses of each in the nominative and in the oblique cases constitutes a puzzle whose adequate clarification by the usual methods must inevitably demand more time than can easily be devoted to a single construction. My fairly long experience of teaching first-year university students and of assessing S.C. and H.S.C. candidates certainly indicates that the gerund and gerundive have often been left behind ungrasped. And yet to hammer away at these constructions until, if ever, they are understood would be an obnoxious example of that ‘grind of grammar’ so justly condemned by most enlightened teachers. The fact is that we have here a usage which must be learnt gradually, not indeed by Direct Method or by the unaided impressions received in the reading of texts. A vigorous initial effort is necessary to grasp in general the essential character of the two forms, the difference between them, and their quite different behaviour in different circumstances, but, instead of overburdening the pupil's memory, whether he be a junior or a comparatively advanced pupil, and overtaxing his brain-power with the attempt to digest the complicated and conflicting details once and for all, I suggest that the system of gradual assimilation, based on a mnemonic table, may be as helpful to others' pupils as it seems to have been to mine. I have found it especially useful in ‘refresher’ lessons for pupils with a confused knowledge, rather than ignorance, of the construction.

This passage has suggested that it might be interesting to collect, as far as possible, the passages dealing with the use of dogs in ancient warfare and make a comparison with modern practice. The references which I have discovered, and which seem mainly to refer to Greek warfare, are numerous, but no doubt there are others which I have failed to trace.

The social and economic life of the ancient world was reared upon a substructure of slavery. The commercial greatness of Carthage, Tyre, and Babylon had depended on the same principle. Amid all the variety of notions and dominant ideas current in classical civilization there was one point of agreement. ‘It was universally assumed’, as Dr. A. N. Whitehead expresses it, ‘that a large slave population was required to perform services which were unworthy to engage the activities of a fully civilized man.’

Josephus almost invariably calls Strabo the Cappadocian. But he belonged not to Great Cappadocia, the home of Basil and the two Gregories, but to Cappadocia Pontica, more usually called Pontus. ‘Amaseia, my fatherland, a very strong city’ was his birthplace. ‘My city is situate in a large, deep valley, through which flows the river Iris. Both by human design and by nature it is admirably laid out, affording the advantage of both a city and a fortress: for it is a high, precipitous rock which descends steeply to the river, and has on one side the wall on the river edge where is the settled city, and on the other the wall that runs up on either side to the twin peaks.’ It had a water-supply which could not be cut off, passages being cut through the rock to the springs, and two bridges, one to the suburbs and another from the suburbs to the outside country. Its territory was larger and better than that of any other Pontic town. Within its walls were the palace and tombs of the Pontic kings: he certainly means the Pontic Achaemenids, not the Polemones. He adds that it was given to kings, but is now provincial. The era is fixed by coinage to 2 B.C., when it was annexed to the province of Galatia. It was still a metropolis in Christian times with many subordinate bishoprics, and we last hear of it as wrecked by an earthquake in the reign of Justinian. It is generally agreed that Strabo did not return to his native place to spend the last years of his life: he probably had no relatives left there.

TheBacchae is acknowledged to be the most difficult to interpret of all Euripides' plays, and the difficulty of understanding it is increased by the fact that it is in many ways unlike his other works. The human characters are not so clearly drawn, nor are they of such heroic calibre. The manifestation of Dionysus' power and the adoration of him at the end are, moreover, in contrast to Euripides' usual ‘sceptical’ tone.

‘Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horribiliores sunt in pugna aspectu.’ Every schoolboy is familiar with the passage, and the general accuracy of the statement is everywhere accepted; although the hypercritical might question the omnes. For Caesar cannot be speaking from his own knowledge, since his acquaintance with the British was limited; and the use of woad being a peculiarly British institution—I know of no evidence of its use on the Continent—it would not be surprising if some at least of the tribes in the south of Britain, who had been established there for not more than two or three generations, were slow to adopt what must have seemed to them a very barbarous habit.

Aristotle's theory of poetry is based upon two main propositions: the first, that poetry is imitation (μίμησις), and the second, that it aims at universality. The first of these propositions has seemed so shocking to modern aestheticians that they have endeavoured to modify it by translating μίμησις as ‘representation’, or, like Mr. Carritt, suggesting that what Aristotle was trying to say was that poetry is expression, as in Croce's theory of art as the expression of feeling. Yet Aristotle himself makes it quite clear that he did mean imitation by μίμησις, for in explanation he speaks of ‘making likenesses’ (ἀπεικάʒοντες) of objects. He also describes how painters and poets make likenesses which are better or worse than, or exactly like the real people, and discusses the enjoyment which we derive from looking at likenesses (εἰκόνας) even of things which are most unpleasant in real life. This shows that Aristotle was not thinking of ‘expression’ in the modern aesthetic sense.

The story of Mummius and the art treasures which he pillaged from Corinth, and sent back to Rome with the warning that the carriers would have to replace any that they lost with others of the same value, is a familiar joke from the history books at the expense of Roman sensibility. Perhaps less well known, and equally enlightening, is another story against the same unhappy official, which appears in Pliny (Nat. Hist. 35. 24). Mummius, according to this account, was conducting an auction of pictures from among his booty, and Attalus bid 600,000 denarii (say £21,000) for a picture of Dionysus and Ariadne by Aristides. Thereupon Mummius, ‘surprised at the price and suspecting that the picture had some good quality of which he himself was ignorant’, withdrew the work, and later dedicated it at Rome in the temple of Ceres. It is hardly unfair to Mummius if we imagine him, back in Rome, boasting to his friends how, thanks to his good judgement, he saved the masterpiece from the hands of Attalus. This famous painting comes up again, to the discredit of Rome, in the history of Polybius (39.13), who says that he saw Roman soldiers playing at draughts on it after the sack of Corinth.

I don't quite know why I have decided to set down the story of my life on tablets. It is very doubtful whether anyone will be interested in it but myself. But that is, perhaps, the reason; it has seemed interesting to me, as I have lived it, and, now that it is near its end, I have the wish to unroll it again and judge whether it really has been what it has seemed. It has been a hard climb over steep, rough rocks; my hands are sore, but not as dirty as they might have been. But the time is short now. Since my master Pallas died, I have lost my chief motive for living. Whether I hold my post here in Rome or fly, in quest of safety, to my native Antioch, there will not be much to add to the tale. I do not grumble. I have known the upward, as well as the downward turn of Fortune's wheel.

To-day, not for the first time, the borderland between France and Germany, a land of hills, forests, and rivers, has been the unhappy scene of warfare. Though its pleasant prospects are worthy of activities less vile, man has used the natural gateways of this region for purposes of war, as well as of peaceful intercourse, discreditably often. It is through one of these gateways that the Mosel flows, linking the Gauls and the Germanics. This delightful river rises in the Vosges and, flowing north-eastward, adds breadth to the broad Rhine at Coblenz. On its way it passes by Metz, of French military fame, and later by Trier, or Trèves, a lovely old place which as Augusta Treverorum was in Roman times one of the most important towns of western Europe. Now the river's course is disfigured by fortified barriers, named after a legendary hero and a modern politician. But in Roman times it was a land of peace more continuously than at any other period.