This report is not concerned with the teaching of classical specialists in public schools and grammar schools with an established classical tradition, but rather with the classical teaching in the type of school which has come into being since the Education Act of 1902; nor is our primary object to discuss the full Classical course of Greek and Latin studies in a school in which pupils normally stay till the age of 18 or so. It limits itself in the main to the problems of the suitability of Latin as a subject to be included in the curriculum of boys who may (not necessarily must) leave at 16. The larger question of full classical studies has been discussed elsewhere, as, e.g., in the Prime Minister's Report; R. W. Livingstone, A Defence of Classical Education; F. W. Kelsey, The Position of Greek and Latin in American Schools. The more limited question, the desirability of including Latin as a subject in a four or five years' course from the age of 11+ or 12+, is a matter which has engaged the attention of the Classical Association for some years; not only has the Association helped very materially towards the statement of the aims and methods of such a course (as, e.g., in such publications as J. W. Mackail, The Case for Latin; Recommendations of the Classical Association on the teaching of Latin and Greek), but it has been in constant touch with teachers engaged in the work of the schools and may claim first-hand acquaintance with the problem and real knowledge of the results already achieved in the schools towards a satisfactory solution.

If I had asked ten years ago the question I am asking to-day, I should have answered it with a good deal of confidence. I should have told you that we have irrefragable evidence of a group of very ancient cults, those of the di indigetes or native Roman gods, in whom we might safely recognize the reflection of purely Roman thought, untouched by the influence of Etruria, of Greece, or even of the other Italian states. I should then have proceeded to describe briefly the general characteristics of these gods and deduce therefrom the mental development and social status of their worshippers. I should probably have added that one of the most ancient of Roman institutions, the templum, showed clear traces of being derived from the customs of the terramara people, and therefore that that interesting branch of the Bronze culture had a good deal to do with the founding of the Eternal City. Then I might have gone on to tell you of other elements known or supposed to exist in the earliest cults, as revealed by modern investigation.

A small volume has come down to us from the Imperial Roman period entitled De Re Coquinaria. It is attributed to Apicius, the notorious gourmand of the first century a.d., who paid the equivalent of £50 for a particularly large red mullet. This fish had been presented to Tiberius, but he thought it too luxurious for himself, and sent it to the market in Rome, saying, ‘It is too much of a dainty for me. If I am not out in my reckoning, either Apicius or Octavius will have it.’

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.

‘That great instrument of thought, the Verb,’ is a phrase which must have arrested the attention of many young teachers of Latin, and helped to prevent their methods from becoming mechanical and to keep the spirit of their instruction generous and humane. To teach Latin means an increasing appreciation of the power which it derives from its inflected verb, and of the extent to which this moulded the style of the great Latin writers: they had an innate appreciation of their native advantage, used it to its fullest capacity, and developed it in the using.

There has recently been unearthed from the Governors' minute book of a public school in the north of England a list of books which formed the school library in the year 1707. It provides some interesting sidelights on the educational ideas of the time.