The Open University received its charter in July 1969, offered its first courses in January 1971, and produced its first graduates (with some ‘credit exemptions’) by the end of 1972. Those who originally planned it saw that many people who for various reasons missed their opportunity of university education at the usual stage of their lives could profit from it, provided that what was offered was home-based study in spare time. They saw too that radio and television offered an excellent opportunity for helping such study to be direct and personal. Students then are admitted with no entry qualification except the age of 21. We have built a few parameters into our selection procedure; we can control the proportion admitted to any one foundation course or from any one region of the country for example; but basically it is ‘First come, first served’. Typical students are the boy who has been to a poor school, has never been turned on, has left at the age of 15 and gone into industry, and in his twenties has suddenly become excited by what he is doing and at the same time has revealed a keen mind; the girl who with decent A levels has got married at 18, sees her family growing up, is aware that she has time for some study while they are at school, and will be able to take a full-time job in three or four years; the long-term prisoner needing a constructive occupation in prison and qualification for when he comes out; the working-class lad who has entered the police force and, by ability and application, has worked his way up from the beat; the retired industrial worker or bank manager who wants a positive purpose in his retirement; the teacher who has no degree, perhaps because the family could not afford more than a two-year course, and seeks more knowledge in his subject, as well as the increment applicable to a degree; the person well settled in one profession who would like to qualify for a second career before giving up the first; the taxi-driver who is interested in people and ideas, and wants to know what it is all about. We have them all, and many others.

The history of classical scholarship bears the traces of many a violent battle over the theory and practice of translation. It is not surprising therefore that today, when translations are in more common use than ever before, not only as aids to reading the original but even as sole texts for pupils in schools and universities lacking the classical languages, their function and quality should be subjects of considerable discussion and disagreement. The demand is greater than ever, and a Penguin version of Homer can become a best-seller; but it is also harder than ever to satisfy oneself that the translation one has recommended is not misleading students nurtured in a culture and attuned to an idiom so different from those of the Graeco-Roman world. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the provision of good translations is a matter no longer of theoretical discussion but of immediate practical importance, if our students are to have the remotest possibility of reaching understanding of what classical writers were trying to say.

Most modern studies of Roman agriculture have concentrated on the methods used for farming on a large-scale and on a commercial basis. This is not surprising since the classical writers on agriculture in Latin, Cato, Varro, and to a lesser extent Columella and Palladius, are mainly concerned with this aspect. And naturally so, since only the gentleman farmer could read them and profit by their advice. There is, as has been remarked by K. D. White, a serious lack of evidence about the life and work of the peasant farmer. This was, however, considered to be of great importance by the Romans themselves:

hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini,

hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit,

scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma.

One of the many stimulating ideas put forward by Gordon Williams in his book Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968) is the suggestion that Propertius planned and wrote his first three books as a single entity and published these simultaneously as a unified collection, the fourth book being a later addition. This is contrary to the usual view that all four books were written separately and published successively at intervals. It is obviously salutary that conventional views should be challenged, especially if they can be shown to rest on unproved assumptions, and two at least of the reviewers of Williams's book regarded his theory with some favour. E. J. Kenney writes of an ‘important discussion of the thesis that the first three books of Propertius were planned as a whole’, and D. Henry begins his discussion of the theory with the words ‘He argues plausibly that…’. The only dissentient voice that I have noted is that of E. Courtney, who in an article on the structure of Propertius' third book refers in passing and without further explanation to the hypothesis of unitary publication as one ‘which is surely to be rejected’.

TheMetamorphoses version has been culled for several anthologies. At line 206 editors comment that the Great Bear defines the north and Orion the south, leaving their readers to take Daedalus' instructions at their face value. Professor William S. Anderson, in his lovely new edition of Books vi–x, repeats the formula, observing by the way that Orion is visible in the northern hemisphere during two winter months only. Stop, please! I have a difficulty. A squadron commander who began a briefing for a daylight operation by telling his crews to leave their star charts behind, since they were going to fly all the way in formation, would be considered overdue for a long spell of leave before his oddities took a more dangerous turn. Why am I to suppose that Daedalus intends a night flight ? Aerial interception is not a risk. Cretan archery may be never so renowned, but any theory that Daedalus has decided to take off from the ‘monte minor collis’ (Ars Am.) under cover of darkness, as a precaution against ground fire, finds no support in the text of Ovid; nor does there seem to be any reason to suppose that the flight is to take place during those two months of winter when Orion is visible. Everything points to the contrary. From the moment both are airborne Daedalus is watching and criticizing his son's performance, and their progress is observed by fishermen, shepherds, and ploughmen, who are not usually night-workers with infra-red vision.

Throughout the ages the undersides of earthenware vases have been the home for all manner of cryptic abbreviations and signs. The importance nowadays placed on such marks varies considerably according to the date and origin of the material, though generally it is greater when the signs refer in some manner to the potter, decorator, or producing factory, especially when considerations of the mark may affect the value of the piece.

When the quaestor C. lulius Caesar began his aunt's funerary laudatio with these words in 69 B.c., he was not claiming any unique glory appropriate only to ‘imperial Caesar’, but indulging a form of family pride shared by many aristocrats in the late Republic.

This article is an attempt to throw light on Virgil's narrative of the death of Turnus by comparing it to Homer's narrative of the death of Hector. It will begin with a summary of these two episodes.

The following is the second of a series which began in G & R xx (1973), 38 ff. and 155 ff.

A generation brought up with bicycles and cars takes for granted the necessity of lubrication. Yet consultation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reveals that the earliest book devoted to a theoretical examination of the subject appeared in 1883; before that date, lubrication was based solely on rule of thumb and traditional experience. It is natural to enquire how far the Greeks and Romans advanced in acquiring this empirical knowledge.

The mysterious crise de profession which saw the painter Euphronios switch to potting in the heyday of his career is a worthwhile topic for discussion and one on which scholars have manifestly avoided committing themselves. That the pioneer red-figure artist should up and change professions quite unannounced and apparently without reason is a curious fact indeed and one which perhaps the optician alone can explain.

Thus Horatio on the ghost of Hamlet's father. Good dramatic poetry; but here it must serve a baser turn, as an illustration of my theme. My question is this: when the spirit is being extravagant and erring, just what is it being ? The editors are quite willing to tell us. For example, Dowden, in the Arden Shakespeare, has the following notes: extravagant] wandering out of bounds, vagrant; ‘erring’, straying; and the Variorum Shakespeare takes a similar view. So Hamlet's father's ghost is simply wandering about away from the nether world to which it must return at daybreak.

Saul bellow's book Mr. Sammler's Planet documents contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster of homo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.

It is well known that many poets, from Callimachus (Anth. Pal. ix. 507) down to those mentioned by Rosamund Harding on pp. 38—9 of her book An Anatomy of Inspiration (Cambridge, 1942), have preferred to compose their works by night. It is perhaps less well known that some poems are or claim to be the result of involuntary insomnia. One example is Catullus 1. Catullus had spent a day composing poetry in the company of his friend, the brilliant young ‘new’ poet Licinius Calvus (lines 1–16):

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi

multum lusimus in meis tabellis,

ut convenerat esse delicatos:

scribens versiculos uterque nostrum

ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,

reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum.

The question of what actually happened on the Ides of March, 44 B.c. is merely incidental to most ancient historians, concerned as they are with Caesar's intentions and the assassins' motives. On the Ides more varied and abundant information survives, I believe, than on any other day in Roman or Greek history. But this evidence is full of obscurities and inconsistencies, largely unexplored; nor has it been examined specifically for the light it sheds on the public life of the late Republic. The outline of the day's events is easily discovered; in this paper I shall examine some of the details, with the aim of showing, above all, why the conspirators settled on the Ides of March and the Curia Pompei as the time and place for their deed.

‘Attica has a plentiful supply of stone,’ says Xenophon (Poroi i. 4),‘from which are made the fairest temples and altars, and the most beautiful statues for the gods.’ Athens was indeed blessed in its building stones, as in its fine clay. The immensely complicated geophysical processes which created the exquisite landscape of Attica produced a variety of useful and often beautiful materials, nicely distributed about the land. The stones are mostly limestones of different sorts. Marble itself is a limestone miraculously metamorphosed by titanic heat and pressure into its characteristic crystalline structure, thus forming in the body of the earth what M. Aurelius (ix. 36) aptly calls poroi, calluses or nodules. This has happened in many places, but in most the result consists of comparatively small lumps or thin veins; much rarer are the massive beds from which can be extracted the great blocks needed for the major architectural members of temples and other large buildings. In this too Attica is exceptionally favoured. More than one huge layer runs through the fabric of both Pentelikon and Hymettos; and other extensive beds lie near the southern tip of Attica.