A. E. H ousman was born a hundred years ago this year. Somewhat in advance of his centenary, several studies of his life and work have recently appeared, provoking their spreading ripples of criticism and discussion, reminiscence and speculation. Little of what has been written, one feels, would have been much to Housman's own taste, for the general tendency has been to probe with more enterprise than delicacy into experiences and emotions that he himself had chosen, for the most part, to conceal.

It was in Istanbul, shortly after the anti-Greek riots of 1955, that some of us, who had met there to attend the Congress of Byzantine Studies, or some other conference, fell to talking about Rome, the Roman record, the Roman civilization. There, among the melon-carts and the Cadillacs, we thought of the darker side of Roman rule—the lack of intellectual curiosity, the indifference to technological advance, the blight of rhetoric, the cruelty, the vulgarity, and everything summed up by Haverfield as ‘the heavy inevitable atmosphere of the Roman material civilization’. And, having said all that, we began to reflect that this was perhaps a partial and an unworthy view of a people who, to mention nothing else, had preserved for our world the Greek heritage. There we were in Istanbul, Constantinople, the New Rome created by the Old Rome to be a world capital, the city which had preserved its Graeco-Roman traditions through the thousand years that separate antiquity from the modern world, and at the last had handed them back to the West and so made possible the new birth of art and science and literature.

With the decipherment of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos in Crete (dated to c. 1400 B.c.) and on the Greek mainland at Mykenai and Pylos (dated to c. 1275 B.c. and c. 1200 B.c. respectively) which have been shown to be written in Mycenaean Greek, the attention of scholars has been drawn to the problem of the language of the earlier Linear A tablets which have been found in Crete alone.

A survey of Greek baths can hardly begin without a mention of Agamemnon. The murder of the victorious King of Men in his bath is one of the facts that make history ring true. In her trance before the house of the Atreidai Kassandra sees the deed done. False Klytaimestra has scrubbed her husband clean (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα), and enveloping him in some sort of a net she stabs him to death. He falls down in the watery vessel (ἐνύδρῳ τεύχει). ‘That’, says the prophetess, ‘is the tale of the murderous cauldron’ Anyone who reads the passage carefully must begin to wonder: was Agamemnon really immersed in a bath? Or was he just standing with his feet in the sort of shallow basin that we see in vase-paintings? If we turn to Professor Fraenkel's great edition of the Agamemnon we find that he has his doubts: ‘Aeschylus is likely’, he writes, ‘to have left to his audience the choice between thinking either of the vessels for washing and bathing with which they were familiar themselves or of what they imagined the ἀσάμινθοι of the Homeric poems to be like.’ Our first step, then, must be back to the Homeric bath.

There is a question relating to the gods of Homer which is obvious enough, when one thinks of it, and yet has never, so far as I know, been clearly answered, or even envisaged. Professor Nilsson, for instance, in his works on Homer and on Mycenaean and Minoan religion, has nothing definite to say about it. The question I mean is this: where did Homer get his gods? Or it would be better to say, where did he get his pantheon? The question I have in mind is not the origin of the individual gods. That has been discussed repeatedly. Nor is it the origin of the Olympian monarchy, for that, it is generally agreed, is modelled on the monarchies of early Greece. It is rather how all those deities came to be present in Olympos, or at least how Homer and his audience knew that they were there.

In spite of the high reputation which Solon enjoyed in ancient times as a conciliator, the record shows the collapse of his plans for social stability in his own lifetime. This collapse was perhaps caused by events beyond his control or influence, and if it was social and economic change in Attica subsequent to his reforms that brought about a new revolutionary situation, and opened the way for the tyranny, the question is, What changes of such a nature took place in this period? In this connexion it would be well to review very briefly what evidence we have about Peisistratos' following in Attica.

Odysseus, with Herakles, was a favourite character in that mythological type of comedy which we know only in titles and fragments, though it was well liked in antiquity. The purpose of this article is to collect these stray pieces, to present Odysseus as he appears in this tradition, and to suggest reasons for his popularity on the comic stage.

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

There are two regions of Italy which might properly be called ‘Virgil's Country’. One is Mantua and its neighbourhood, where the poet spent his early days on his father's farm and witnessed the turmoils and miseries of the civil wars that ensued on the death of Julius Caesar; the other is the Naples area, where, after settling early in the thirties B.c. on an estate at Pausilypon, Virgil spent most of the rest of his life in comparative freedom from anxiety. The Eclogues describe the experiences of his younger days and his emotional and spiritual reactions to the great upheavals of the late forties B.c., while the Georgics were completed in ‘ignoble ease’ on the cliffs overlooking the Bay of Naples from the north. It was here, too, that the Aeneid was composed. The poet carried with him from the district of his birth vivid impressions which contributed much to his peculiar artistic outlook and which remained indelibly with him to the end of his life; but it was at Pausilypon that his art and thought reached the peak of maturity.

Latin begins, as we all know, with roses for sailors and Principal Parts; necessary items, not readily associated with τὸ καλόν. It is true that when people give us the reasons why the classics should still be studied in schools one always finds the argument that the varied richness of Greek Literature, and the few but incomparable masterpieces in Latin, should be made accessible to the educated European. The child should be given the key to this treasure-house, which he may turn if he chooses after a glimpse of the treasure within. If one points out that the key offered to the young treasure-seeker (who by that time has usually seen plenty of more alluring treasure elsewhere) appears rather rusty and unhandy, the answer is given—not unsympathetically—that no genuine treasure is to be won without an effort. This axiom is so manifestly true that it silences protest.