The question of cognomina tends to be over-simplified in the elementary textbooks, where one meets such statements as: ‘Most Romans had three names … of which the third defines the familia within the gens.’ Such brevity is doubtless pedagogically convenient, but it has its dangers, particularly in respect of one of the most important periods in Roman history and literature, the late Republican; for there exceptions to this rule are so numerous and important as to make it almost meaningless. To demand greater accuracy in this matter is not mere pedantry; already a tradition is being established powerful enough to influence those whose business it is to know better, even leading, as I shall show later, to the misinterpretation of texts.

In his description of Cicero's eloquence Quintilian says that he had the power of carrying a jury with him against its better judgement without the jury's realizing what was happening. This magical power of Cicero's is exercised not only on Roman jurors, but also on most modern readers and even on some editors. This process is particularly apparent in many interpretations of the Pro Caelio. For example, Professor R. G. Austin, in his great edition of that speech, says, ‘Whatever the secret history, it is clear that the actual indictment was formal, and that Clodia was the real driving force behind it; society reasons prompted the case, and the issue was the social disappearance of either Clodia or Caelius.’ Yet an impartial weighing of the evidence with a mind unclouded by Cicero's brilliant oratory will point to the conclusion that the part played by Clodia in the case, though an important part, was only a subsidiary one.

In his charming essay on ‘Jardins d'Humanité’ Pierre Grimal says that gardens are inseparable from the humanism of Europe; ‘the groves were God's first temples’, wrote the poet Bryant; and there is abundant testimony to these statements in classical antiquity. Sir Archibald Geikie, who, like Sir D'Arcy Thompson, belonged to those grand old Scottish scientists who added to their science a deep humanism, Geikie from whose books I learned geology forty years ago, wrote:

From the infancy of mankind, trees have been regarded with mingled feelings of admiration and awe. The combined majesty and grace wherewith they tower above the soil that supports them; their infinite variety of individual forms and colours, whether carrying their foliage all the year or at one season clothing themselves with tender leaf and blossom, at another flaming in the varied glories of autumn, and, thereafter, bare and leafless, stretching their giant arms and delicate branches to all the winds of heaven; their immemorial age; their calm endurance and seeming defiance of the vicissitudes of time, in pathetic contrast to the short and troubled span of human life; their varied music under the changeful moods of the weather, from the faint whisper awakened by the gentlest breath of summer to the loud roar or moaning wail aroused by the fury of a wintry tempest; the grateful shelter which under their canopy of leafy boughs they provide for man and beast; the endless services which they render to man's daily life in their yield of timber or leaves or fruit—these features give to trees a high place among the charms and bounties wherewith Nature teems.

SirFrankAdcock, in his book, Caesar as Man of Letters, observes (p. 72) that Caesar's description of his defeat at Dyrrhachium, in B.C. iii. 69, shows a change of style. ‘Here, as Caesar lives again through this crisis in his fortunes, the plain style is for a moment infused with the vividness of his recollection’; and we note especially the words omniaque erant tumultus timoris fugae plena, which recall plena erant omnia timoris et luctus, found in the description of Curio's disaster in B.C. ii. 41. But long before that, in E.G. v. 33, Caesar had written: ‘Praeterea accidit, quod fieri necesse erat, ut uulgo milites ab signis discederent, quae quisque eorum carissima haberet ab impedimentis petere atque arripere properaret, clamore et fletu omnia complerentur.’ This is in the vivid and moving account of the disaster which befel Sabinus and Cotta in 54 b.c.; and indeed Sir Frank Adcock does note that here ‘there is a more dramatic treatment of the situation’.

OneHundred years ago, in July 1858, Darwin and Wallace propounded the theory of evolution by natural selection, and thereby caused a revolution in human thought. It may be of interest to recall that in certain important particulars, though not in all, this doctrine had been anticipated by the Greeks and Romans. Fragments of a striking didactic poem On Nature by the fifth-century philosopher, statesman, and mystic Empedokles of Akragas suggest a conception of nature as an experimenter, who by following a process of trial and error creates some strange monsters and mixtures of species. The more fantastic speculations of Empedokles were rejected by Epicurus, who reduced the idea to a more scientific form, and one more in conformity with the atomic theory; and the Epicurean version was in turn followed by Lucretius in the fifth book of the De Rerum Natura. The passages quoted below provide parallels to the ideas of natural selection and the survival of the fittest; but, as is now recognized, what Lucretius and the ancient world generally did not anticipate was the idea that crowned all—that natural selection could lead to the creation of new species by the evolution of one out of another. The relevant texts are cited by Bailey in his commentary on these passages.

TheAb Vrbe Condita of Livy has been on many counts justly criticized as defective. The inaccuracy of his battle accounts, the vagueness of his geography, the occasional confusion caused by his failure to reconcile divergent accounts in his sources, the distortion of history through the excessive partiality shown to one or other of his ‘heroes’, and in general the highly rhetorical nature not only of his speeches but also of his dramatic narrations, which inevitably causes distortion—all these are formidable and justifiable criticisms. Some of these faults are, of course, attributable to the conventions of rhetorical history initiated by Isocrates, which dominated Roman historiography. Others have their cause in the fact that Livy was a book-scholar pure and simple; he seems not to have understood fully the tactics employed on the battlefield or the manifold devices used in sieges, nor to have visited many of the sites he describes. Now it is essential to expose these limitations, but in a sense it is unfair to condemn Livy for them, since they arise from human defects which would have required a heroic determination to repair.

When an observer on land watches a receding ship, the hull is the first part to sink below the horizon, and the masthead is last (conversely, when a ship is approaching, the masthead is first to rise over the horizon). The fact was familiar to Roman poets. Ovid insists on it at length in the Metamorphoses (xi. 466–71), in the story of Alcyone and Ceÿx. Valerius Flaccus puts it very neatly in the Argonautica (i. 494–7), where the women gaze at the departing sails till the sea overtops the mast, donec iam celsior arbore pontus immensusque ratem spectantibus abstulit aer.

In this famous picture of the migrating birds, what precisely had Virgil in mind? In his note on the passage Conington writes: ‘the birds are apparently supposed to have accomplished their voyage over the sea, and to be just alighting in a mass in the warmer clime that is to receive them.’ Conington was evidently dissatisfied with this explanation, and so was Long, whom he quotes as remarking that ‘the flocking together of the birds before departure would be a fitter and more natural comparison’. There is further awkwardness involved if we take both terram and terris as referring to the same place.

One of the features of classical scholarship during the last ten years has been a renewal of interest in Latin literature. In England, at least, this was at a low ebb between the two great wars. The literature of Rome was regarded as derivative and second-rate. Virgil was the unwilling prisoner of the Augustan propaganda machine, Horace the favourite poet of those with no feeling for poetry, Ovid (apart from the Ars Amatoria) no more than a verse-writer of fatal facility, Plautus a knock-about comedian, and Terence a bore. Apart from Catullus, Lucretius, Petronius, and Tacitus, Latin could play no cards that Greek could not instantly trump. I do not think this an unfair picture of the impression of Latin literature I was given as an undergraduate. Why this was so is less easy to say. Partly, perhaps, because Oxford and Cambridge produced a succession of great expositors of Greek literature at a time when many of their Latin colleagues seemed immersed in the more arid forms of textual scholarship. Partly, again, because the iconoclasm of the age found in Latin a profitable and easy target.

Prudentius ranks as the third lyric poet after Horace and Catullus; he is also the greatest of the early Christian poets. In a short poem, which is the prelude to his chief collection, he gives a sketch of his career, but, unlike Ovid, affords only vague indications. At school he was put under a stern master:

aetas prima crepantibus flevit sub ferulis.

Then, after a stormy youth, he took to the law. Later he entered on a public career and held two high provincial governorships. Afterwards the Emperor (probably Theodosius) brought him to court as his own minister. Finally, when past the age of fifty, with hair already turning white (nix capitis), Prudentius resolved to devote the rest of his life to the praise of the True God.

How many classical masters and mistresses inwardly wonder about the relevance of what they are teaching in their junior and middle-school Latin lessons? Is what is taught relevant to the claims we make for the place of classical studies in the curriculum?

One of the most permanent of the values of Latin is that it helps to make real to the pupil the continuing heritage of Rome in that part of the civilized world which has drawn its culture largely or in part from Europe. And yet we must admit that the pupils who reach Ordinary level and go no farther hardly taste this. Even though at the moment those who are following advanced studies in Latin are increasing in number, nevertheless the number of those who do not go beyond Ordinary level is likely to remain far greater.