Over the course of his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961–76), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976–2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent Classical linguists, historians and archaeologists.

In November 2014 a special conference took place in Magdelene College, Cambridge to celebrate Anthony's eightieth birthday. Out of this meeting two edited Festschrift volumes have been prepared. The first provides articles written for Anthony by his former students. That will appear under the editorship of Lisa Nevett and James Whitley as a monograph of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge: An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976–2014).

In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement this second volume offers special papers contributed by friends and colleagues reflecting his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and archaeology, Classical art history, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and regional field survey.

The intellectual circle of a great senior academic is reflected in this collection of essays that bring fresh insights into the history, art and archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman Worlds.

An horrible story: one that causes sickening knots of dread to tighten in the pit of any loving parent's stomach. The events unfold simply, inexorably, as if the chill hand of the Erlkönig guided the tragedy. A family is on holiday in Gloucestershire when the youngest child, a bright, resolute, and charming little boy, falls ill. A local doctor is summoned, makes an accurate diagnosis and urges the family to return to London as quickly as possible. On the ride to the train station and on the train hurtling through the darkening countryside, the gasping child, held by his powerless father, struggles to breathe, turning blue and black from lack of oxygen, a sure sign of bulbar poliomyelitis. On arrival in London, an ambulance rushes the little boy to a nursing home; as the doctors debate about what to do – an iron lung, perhaps? – the child proves their irrelevance by dying. The boy, named Michael, left behind a father immured in a grief that time did not assuage; a mother whose feelings were doubtless keen but went virtually unnoticed; and an older sister whose secondary place in her father's affections would be felt again and ever again in the decades to come.

The music of Herbert Howells is inseparable from counterpoint: indeed, he considered himself to belong to the Tudor period ‘not only musically but in every way’. That was an intensely polyphonic era, and he himself normally thought in counterpoint (a trait he shared with Vaughan Williams). Thus the underlying feeling of ‘H. H. His Fancy’ (written in 1927) is of a meditative and dreamy fugue, the word ‘Fancy’ standing both for the Tudor idea of ‘imitative fantasia’ and for ‘the kind of music most admired by H. H.’ As it happens, ‘Foss's Dump’ (no. 6 in the same collection) is also a fugue, but it is perhaps surprising that the piece written for H. K. Andrews (no. 6 in Book 1 of Howells' Clavichord – HH 237) – that expert on all things pertaining to Palestrina and Byrd – eschews imitative counterpoint in favour of a melodic line with clear roots in Tudor keyboard dances, though with flowing contrapuntal accompaniment. Indeed, Howells's interest in Tudor music appears to have veered more towards the dance and air than towards the imitative fantasia or motet: ‘Master Tallis's Testament’ (from the Six Pieces for Organ of 1939–45 – HH 226) provides a modal tune with modally inflected supporting harmony, but does not use imitative counterpoint (even though Tallis was an expert at writing it); and when Bartök had tea with him in London, Howells demonstrated Tudor keyboard music by playing Farnaby's ‘His Rest’ and ‘Tower Hill’, and two pieces by Byrd (a pavane and ‘The Carman's Whistle’) – but not any of the Tudor imitative fantasias.