When a new journal makes its bow to the public, it is expected to submit to a δoκiμασíα and to explain the reasons for its existence. Greece and Rome is a classical journal, or, as its claim might be stated more modestly, a journal for readers of the classics. It has many elder sisters, the Classical Quarterly, the Classical Review, the Journals of Hellenic and of Roman Studies, to which it would be an impertinence to appear as a rival. But Greece and Rome has no intention of rivalling these grave and reverend seniors; its function is rather to be a supplement. For all of these, though many of their articles have a wide appeal, are in fact the journals of the professors and the learned dons, whose business is in the deep waters of the minutiae of classical scholarship, and of the latest developments in its many branches. But there is another public, less learned perhaps but not less keen, the classical schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, who, though their occupations do not permit them to keep abreast with details, are yet eager to know the general trend of recent criticism and to hear of important new discoveries in archaeology or to learn the gist of a striking new theory. There are many too, as the list of the members of the Classical Association makes clear, whose avocations lie in quite different fields, but who maintain their study of the classics and their love of all connected with the ancient world. It is for such as these that Greece and Rome hopes to cater. It will be its endeavour to provide interesting and attractive articles on general topics connected with the study of the classics as well as to give an efficient record of work that is being done.

I have been moved to write this article by receiving a letter from a man of learning and sense, whose name, if I were at liberty to mention it, would be familiar to readers of this journal. Speaking of mythology, he said: ‘It is a desert of names to most of us, with heavy Germans grubbing for solar myths; but there is a core of imagination, if some one would point it out to us.’ I wish to make it clear that the desert of names is no essential part of the subject; that Germans, heavy or light, no longer grub for sun-myths unless they are strangely behind the times and out of tune with the rest of the world in their researches; and that the core of imagination is quite easy to find, and refreshing when found.

To reach Cherchell from Tipasa you must leave the sea and go inland round the flanks of Djebel Chénoua. Just beyond the first mile you come upon a strongly built Roman farm on the left of the road. The main gate is well preserved; it appears to have given en trance to the courtyard, round which were grouped living-rooms and farm-buildings, the whole forming a quadrilateral which would offer stout resistance to any band of raiding Berbers. The excellence of the masonry suggests that the farm dates back to the early days of Roman occupation of the littoral, but it may well have played its part in resisting Firmus and his Moors in the fourth century when they swept eastward down the Taza corridor to raid the fertile fields of Caesariensis.

The visitor to Algiers who is interested in Roman archaeology naturally and rightly thinks first of Timgad and Lambèse. If he takes train to Setif, spends a night at Djemila, motors across country to Batna, and, after visiting the famous camp and the even more famous town, returns through Constantine, he should have enriched his knowledge of the Roman Empire appreciably. But time and money may preclude such a tour as this. It is pleasant to realize that, even within a comparatively restricted circle, there is a great deal worth seeing.

Some excellent people there are who hate digging things up, hate things dug up, and hate people who dig them up. It takes many sorts to make a world and I would not pick a quarrel with any such; but it is not primarily to them that I would direct my remarks—unless indeed in any case the heart is not too hardened to admit of softening. To put the point more directly, coins are undeniably a part of archaeology and, tempted though I am to secure an easier approach to your attention, I cannot pretend that they are primarily a literary source.

The Persian wars is a vague term. I use it to cover the A period between the battle of Marathon (490 B.c.) and the peace of Callias (448 B.c.): I use it merely as a label, and do not wish to imply that the Persian wars were the cause of the change which takes place in Greek art during that period. This change can be seen in all the arts: in sculpture the landmarks are the west pediment of the temple of Aphaia at Aegina, the east pediment of the same temple, the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the east pediment of the same temple: in literature the change is perhaps more easily traced in the works of Pindar than elsewhere. In the early odes, e.g. Pythian X (498 B.c.), the connexion of the myth with the rest is purely external, for it is linked on by the one word ΥΠερβορέων, in the later odes the whole is often subordinated to the moral which Pindar wishes to point: in Pythian IV (462 B.c.) the moral is ‘Do not banish good men’, and the myth of Pelias and Jason gives a disastrous instance. The earlier ode is composed of beautiful parts loosely joined together, the later is an organic unity with a moral purpose running through the whole. This same change can be traced in Greek vases. Here we have a large number of works of art which can be dated with considerable accuracy and assigned to particular painters. The criteria for dating need not be considered here: the attribution to painters is largely the work of J. D. Beazley and rests ultimately on stylistic grounds. In some cases we have signatures and can call the painter by his name, e.g. Euphronios, Euthymides, but more often none of the vases are signed and the names are conventional, e.g. Berlin painter, Niobid painter. I shall consider in turn subjects, composition of the whole picture, and composition of the single figure,2 during two periods, the ‘ripe archaic’ and the ‘early classical’, which are bounded on the one side by the ‘early ripe archaic’, on the other by the ‘classical’: the late works of Euphronios and Euthymides (early ripe archaic) with the early works of the Berlin painter and his fellows (ripe archaic) are to be dated in the decade 500–490 B.c., the ripe works of the Berlin painter and his fellows from 490 to 480 B.c., the late works of these painters 480 to 470: then come the ‘early classical’ painters, the Penthesilea painter, the Niobid painter, &c., till 450; with the Achilles painter the other boundary is crossed into the ‘classical’ period.1

Mycenae, Knossos, Ur of the Chaldees—Schliemann, Arthur Evans, Woolley—these are names which leap to the mind at any mention of excavation, names glamorous with the romance of discovering by some magic of Prospero's new civilizations old beyond the historian's dreams. But excavating is not all romance, not all the discovery of the undreamed of. Much good work without any glamour has been done by adding one small fact here to another small fact there. And as for the magician's wand the true magic lies in the faith and imagination of those great diggers.

In Greek art we have a conspicuous example of a twofold character that belongs only to the greater types of creative expression. This character is both permanent and fluid. On the one hand, it can never go out of fashion, because it embodies principles of life that respond to the aspirations, if not the capacities, of intelligent humanity in every age. On the other hand, being far too vital to be merely static, it continually allows of fresh and powerful re-interpretation, so that natural lovers of art can always see and enjoy it at first hand through the aesthetic consciousness of their own time.

It was not till the sixth century B.C. that geography was recognized by the Greeks as a distinct branch of study. But Strabo was right in regarding Homer as the first Greek geographer, inasmuch as the Homeric poems provide the earliest literary evidence about the content of the Greek world. From Homer onwards the known world was continually enlarging its boundaries, and by the end of the Roman period very little, except the New World discovered by Columbus and his contemporaries, remained unknown. The progress of geographical knowledge may be divided into four stages—Homeric, Ionian, Hellenistic, Roman–in each of which the acquisition of data led on to an attempt at systematization, when the information provided by travellers was used as material for scientific theory. This process was unconscious in the Homeric stage, but deliberate in the others. Thus in the Ionian age the spread of colonization enabled Anaximander to make the first map and Hecataeus to write his Περίολος Γη~ς, the first systematic account of the world; these in their turn produced Herodotus, who brought to geography and ethnography the rudiments of a critical standpoint ( , vii. 152). In the Hellenistic and Roman ages the factors were not so much colonial as military and mercantile. Hellenistic knowledge of the world was enlarged by the campaigns of Alexander and by the enterprises of Alexandrian traders, which the scholars of Alexandria, notably Eratosthenes, the first truly critical geographer, turned to scientific use: similarly the progress of the Roman arms and the expansion of Roman trade brought grist to the mill of Strabo and Ptolemy, the most careful, respectively, of descriptive and scientific geographers. In the period which follows these, no longer ancient but medieval, the wheel comes full circle in a new Homeric stage of feudalism and fable, and starts its revolution once more; the next stage, the renascence Age of Discovery, is Ionia again on a larger scale.

Many teachers must have found that it is far easier to awake interest in Greek history than in the history of Rome. Greek history affords much greater variety; it is full of the doings of men who stand out as clear-cut individualities, while those who fashioned the Republic of Rome are all surprisingly similar each to the other: they remind one of the portraits of the early Scottish kings of Holyrood. But perhaps an even greater difficulty lies in the fact that our text-books of Roman history are, naturally enough, planned chronologically, and thus the writers are forced to relate the whole contemporaneous development in many spheres of the nation's life. Constitutional, economic, military, and social history must all advance together as parts of a single narrative. The student's interest is distracted, and he is prevented from following up a single line of thought. Divide et impera is a good Roman maxim, and I feel that we should do well to follow Roman practice in our teaching of Roman history. Mr. Maurice Baring within the covers of a single book has recently four times recounted the history of Mary Queen of Scots: the four Maries attendant on the queen tell, each in her own way, of the same series of events. It would be an interesting experiment to narrate the history of Rome in one and the same book in several different ways, regarding that history in each case from a single standpoint. Thus would be secured that unity of view which it is impossible for the ordinary text-book to maintain. What, we may ask ourselves, would be our varied angles from which successively to approach the history of the Roman Republic? Here there is wide scope for the expression of a teacher's personality; my own chapters would be written round some such headings as:1. The Roman and the land.2. The Roman army.

If, in two thousand years time, any research student is sufficiently interested in the life of twentieth-century Britain, he may read The Times History of the War, as we read Thucydides; he may dig up London and try to reconstruct Westminster Abbey, as the Athenians are now rebuilding the Parthenon. But if our student wants to know how the ordinary Englishman lived, and what were his amusements, he will have to read the modern novel, if indeed any have survived so long. Now the Greek had no novel. The fifth-century Athenian found living far too exciting to waste any of a short life either in reading or in writing novels, even if he had spent sufficient time indoors to cultivate a taste for either; while the Spartan would have suppressed any such attempt, and its author, with ruthless energy. Consequently we cannot turn to any such source to find out what games the Greek boy or man played. No doubt there are allusions scattered throughout Greek literature, especially in the Comedies of Aristophanes, but to give his allusions their true significance is as difficult a task as our student two thousand years hence will find it to reconstruct any phase of modern society from the pages of Punch.

No other personality of the ancient Greek world proved so interesting to his own and to later generations as that of Socrates. Plato and Xenophon, both closely associated with him in his later years, made their first-hand portraits soon after his death. Xenophon's is a plain outline devised to bring out Socrates' moral character and his social and political views; it gives us many sayings but little of picturesque detail. Plato's representation is infinitely more rich and varied, drawn with fuller insight into a many-sided character, and enhanced by his own marvellous dramatic gift. From the point of view of precise truth Plato has no doubt given us too much. The problem of ‘the historical Socrates’ is ever with us; and while discussion centres chiefly on the philosophical doctrines which he expresses in the dialogues, and the question whether they (taken severally or as a whole) were actually conceived by him or by Plato, the same misgiving necessarily arises about the purely personal behaviour and sayings which Plato attaches to his hero. If we attempt to correct Xenophon and Plato, so to speak, by each other, and to arrive between them at a simpler composite picture, we may well be reminded that each observer of a great man has his own angle of vision, and sees as true for him what he is best able to see. Each kind of portrait has its own truth and its own value. It is probable that we shall all continue to find mainly what we seek, and that no one will now succeed in getting behind Xenophon and Plato.

In discussing popular verse we may note, first, that speaking generally it is originally rhythmical rather than metrical, usually only becoming metrical under literary influence—as was probably the case in Greek and Latin; secondly, that it tends to be strongly accentual, being very often (and perhaps by origin) connected with dancing or rhythmical movement (spinning, grinding, &c.); and thirdly, that therefore the number of accents is more important than the number of syllables. These considerations are of almost universal application, many languages, indeed, never developing any precise metrical rules at all—as Old English and Hebrew.

In one of the winding dells of the Arcadian uplands a little white-walled city slept sunnily on a knoll beside the riverbed, where the thread of the summer stream curled slowly among the rushes. The sun stood blazing in the south, and the people of the city lay resting peacefully in patches of shade under the temple roofs or under the colonnades by the fountain. The market-place was silent; a few shopkeepers dozed under their booths, where their merchandise was sheltered from the heat of the summer noon. The narrow streets, winding among the blank white walls of the houses, were deserted. On a small hill above the market-place stood the temple of Zeus, with its gables fronting east and west. In the shade of the eastern gable two boys were standing and straining their eyes into the glare of the sun to watch the white track which climbed the hills before them. Both of them at once saw a little cloud of dust rise on the crest of the hill, and the form of a man running. ‘The runner!’ they shouted, and their shout woke the cool shadows along the northern colonnade of the temple. One after another, men came out and joined them, and the elder boy darted down the temple steps, across the market-place, and down one of the narrow streets crying all the while ‘The runner! The runner!’ The town woke from its sleep; shopkeepers, porters, nobles, men, women, and children gathered on the temple steps before the runner had reached the bottom of the valley; and as he climbed the short ascent, and ran through the open city gate, an eager crowd awaited his arrival. He reached the open space in front of the temple. His face and hair were covered with dust and sweat, as were his sinewy legs and arms. He stood gasping for a moment to get breath for his announcement to the silent eager crowd. Then in a hoarse but exultant voice he cried, ‘Stymphalians, Hagesias won the mule-car race yesterday morning!’

In the first number of Greece and Rome Mr. Symonds reminded us that the bearing of art and archaeology on literature can be studied by visits to sites and museums, and suggested that ‘even a holiday expedition to the Roman Wall is not beyond the bounds of ambition’. Indeed, once Newcastle or Carlisle is reached the motor-car has made a trip to the Wall a simple matter. A cursory visit starting from Newcastle takes but a few hours. A twenty-mile drive over the West Turnpike, Wade's Road as it is popularly called, along the line of the Wall with the earthworks visible for most of the way and a fragment of the Wall itself to be seen not far from the city boundary, brings us to Chesters. Here is the camp, or more properly fort, of Cilurnum, the fort baths, the bridge abutment, and the museum. After Chesters we travel a further ten miles. A substantial length of the Wall is soon seen on the right, while the earthworks line both sides of the road for most of the way, and at Limestone Bank are cut through solid rock. Then with less than half a mile's walk across the fields we come to Housesteads. Here we can see the fort of Borcovicium (or Borcovicus), and then walk a few hundred yards to the west to see a milecastle and get the well-known view of the Wall at Cuddy's Crag. If the start is from Carlisle the mileage is more, Housesteads being about half-way to Newcastle but Chesters ten miles farther east. If we come from the south by road we may leave the North Road at Durham and travelling by Lanchester, Consett, and Corbridge (Corstopitum), join the West Turnpike at Portgate where the Roman Road of the first of the Antonine Itineraries passed through the Wall on its way to the Cheviots and Scotland: or we may turn off earlier and make for Teesdale and Alston, to join the West Turnpike three miles north of Haltwhistle.

On a hill-side rising above the sheltered waters of Suda Bay, on the north coast of western Crete, lie the scattered remains of the ancient city of Aptera or, as it was locally called, Aptara. Near the summit of this hill stood until recently a wall, constructed at a late period of limestone blocks, several of which were inscribed, taken from some earlier building. This wall has now disappeared, and its component stones have been scattered or broken. The left-hand portion of one of them has, however, lately come to light in a neighbouring field, bearing the following text engraved in letters characteristic of the Hellenistic period.

Lucan, fine poet though he be, is yet one of the most faulty and incalculable of the whole recalcitrant tribe. At the very outset we are surprised by a monstrously fulsome dedication to Nero of a work apparently devoted to a vilification of the man on whose amazing career Nero's empire is founded. Satire being quite out of the question, we must suppose that, despite his republican sympathies, Lucan, recalled as Suetonius says from Athens and received with marked favours, felt some acknowledgement required. At the worst we may regard it as a prudent step to forestall any treacherous slave-copyist, or delator who might have heard a partial recitation; and after Seneca's disgrace in 62, in which year the separate publication of books i–iii indicated by Vacca may have occurred, caution would be still more needful. To the same precaution it may be due that, in the poem proper, anti-Caesarian bias is not immediately apparent. The initial attitude seems impartial: general causes are mentioned; we get the plain statement:

Quis iustius induit arma, Scire nefas; magno se iudice quisque tuetur: Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni;

and even some hesitation by Caesar himself, who, at the Rubicon, confronted by the Genius of Rome, exhibits terrors equal to any recorded of pious Aeneas; though after this he is consistently resolute, and is soon credited with a savage desire for bloodshed2 quite inconsistent with his reported actions and with history.