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.

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.

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.

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.

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).