Nearly sixty years ago, when Latin and Greek were losing their old predominance in the school curriculum, the Classical Association was founded to rally support for them and champion their claims. Since then there have been many attacks on them, and much slow erosion of their position. They have had a share in the post-war boom in sixth forms, but it is a diminishing share, for other subjects are expanding faster. This relative decline is likely to be accentuated by the current drive to promote science in education, and consequently there is good cause for anxiety about the future: this time it may be a question not of pre-eminence in the schools, but of survival itself. It is this anxiety, among teachers and dons, and especially in the institutes of education, where general trends are perhaps more clearly seen, that has prompted, the launching this year of a new society—the Joint Association of Classical Teachers.

Seneca has long been regarded as one of the supreme—one might say notorious—examples of the way in which the human personality can be divided and compartmentalized. To live in two entirely different worlds at the same time can never be easy: to combine the contrasts present in Seneca without outward sign of strain is almost miraculous. Seneca took a leading part in Nero's education and training, both before and after he became Emperor; he lived for eleven years during his reign and then committed suicide at his behest; he played a central role as chief counsellor in his administration. At the same time he wrote treatises on the perfectibility of the human race under the flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity, not as a vision of the future, but associating its realization with Nero himself; he discussed the moral duty of the philosopher in terms which were completely inconsistent with his own mode of life, and composed ten (or is it nine?) tragedies which have as one of their main themes the rule of moral chaos in human affairs, often under a tyrant. In these plays there is a vision much less pleasant, that of the coming disintegration of the world, expressed in terms like ‘In nos ultima aetas uenit?’

The trouble with epigraphy is that it does not admit of tidy classification. The linguist seizes upon inscriptions as samples of language; the historian, when the linguist has interpreted them, as factual evidence. But their discovery is due to the archaeologist; and in a prehistoric period, where the historian has no loctis stanai, the archaeologist is liable to claim epigraphy as part of his province. This is what seems to have happened in the case of a recent book, Prehistoric Crete, which contains in Chapter 3 a long account of the Minoan scripts and the controversy which surrounded the decipherment of Linear B. It is regrettable that Mr. Hutchinson's expert knowledge of Minoan archaeology is not matched by a similar grasp of Minoan and Mycenaean epigraphy, and I feel driven to write a criticism of this chapter, in the hope that it will be thoroughly revised and brought up to date in a second edition.

Much of the imagery of Aeschylus' plays is vivid and startling. It runs through his tragedies like a thread of bright colour, setting the mood and atmosphere of the drama. Yet often the playwright creates his effects by hints, by a subtle use of a pictorial word here or an unusual verb there. His words are like the quick close-ups of a film which stimulate the imagination to see more, and often it is by a series of visual ideas that he creates the effects he is aiming at.

Every literary language differs more or less from the spoken language. Most of the ancient Greek that is studied today is written in a literary language. Yet the student should not ignore pronunciation. In a society that did not practise silent reading sound mattered for prose as well as for verse. Accentuation deserves as much attention as any other feature, if the attempt is made to accustom the ear to the sound of a language. Blass, Postgate, and others have discovered a great deal about the accentuation of ancient Greek. More recently the evidence has been collected and the main conclusions stated by E. H. Sturtevant in The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin.

Modern philhellenes often show an impatience with the relations that existed between the city-states, suicidally quarrelsome, in Perikles' or Demosthenes' day. The inability of the polis to get along with its neighbour, and of all poleis together to shape some rational permanent peace, is all too clear. But to the excuses usually offered—to fierce local pride, to the love of independence, to the divisions imposed by geography—still another consideration should be added. The foreign statesman of fifth- or fourth-century Greece had to reckon with a peculiar fact.

Having been associated with a recent production of Euripides' Cyclops in the original Greek at Ibadan, I feel prompted to reply to Peter Arnott's charges against Euripides' adaptation of the well-known episode in Homer's Odyssey, ix. We know very little about the origin and nature of satyric drama, and it seems unfair to discuss the structure of the Cyclops on a priori grounds or to compare it with the form of Greek tragedy. We do not subject Old Comedy to this kind of treatment because we are aware in this case of the dissimilar elements which came together to produce the disjointed articulation that Old Comedy displays. It may well be that ‘the pattern of decline’ in the composition of the choruses and episodes noted by Arnott is not the result of hasty composition and overwork but is merely indicative of a looser structure allowed by the conventions of the satyr play. On the other hand, the intervention of the chorus in the Cyclops is always eminently dramatic— not too long-drawn-out or too brief—and gives a life and impetus to the play which modern audiences, unfamiliar with the choral tradition of Greek tragedy, miss in more regularly constructed plays. The ‘miserable couplet’ which serves as exodos is not unparalleled even in tragedy, although the iambics in place of the more usual anapaests are certainly unexpected. In general, the choral odes are admirably suited to the grotesque personalities of the satyrs; they include two haunting lyrics, lines 495–502 and 511–18 (unfortunately somewhat mutilated) which rank in rhythm and imagery with some of the best of Euripides, and at the moment of greatest tension, in the third and fourth stasima, are commendably brief and onomatopoeic.

Field events are notoriously the Cinderellas of the athletic world, and this was as true in antiquity as in our own day. The Greeks practised three, long jump, discus, and javelin, and in their festivals did not accord them the status of separate events but grouped them, together with a foot race and wrestling, which were also solo events in their own right, in the pentathlon. This was first included in the Olympic programme in 708 b.c.; other festivals imitated Olympia, and, with the astonishing conservatism of the Greek athletic world, the pentathlon remained unchanged until the disappearance of the festivals a thousand years later.

Every schoolboy knows that Ennius was the first Roman poet to use the hexameter. This series of articles is an attempt to put his action into its literary and social context.

There can have been few more intellectually exciting periods than that which in Rome followed the successful conclusion of the Second Punic War. By their victory over Carthage the tough, brutal, superstitious, conservative peasants who formed the Roman people and most of its rulers had forced their way into the arena of Mediterranean politics. In unmistakable terms they had made it plain to the Hellenistic monarchies of the East that their country was no longer the negligible training-ground on which a Pyrrhos might try his skill, their troops no longer the ignorant levies so easily put in their place by a Xanthippos. Like Peter the Great, when he burst into the England of William and Mary; like Tom Paine, had he lived to see the baroque splendours and know the world-weary diplomats of the Congress of Vienna; perhaps indeed, if we allow ourselves a little hindsight, like the self-confident Oedipus before the Sphinx, the Romans, ambitious, lusty, cunning, and doomed, now encountered for the first time the full impact of a mature civilization.

One should perhaps apologize for reopening the question of Hannibal's route over the Alps after the publication of Sir Gavin de Beer's recent book. It is, however, a perennially fascinating problem, and some of de Beer's points are not entirely satisfactory, though I accept his main conclusion. The cruces of the argument, as I see them, are: (1) the crossing of the Rhone; (2) the position of the Island; (3) the river Isaras/Skaras; (4) the two passes, the first where Hannibal was attacked by the Allobroges from the front, and the second the main Alpine pass into Italy; (5) the attack in the gorge by local tribesmen on his approach to the main pass; (6) did Hannibal cross the Durance?

Early Roman education had been based on the mos maiorum rather than on reason, the guiding light of Greek education. It had been education not so much for intellectual achievement as for a clearly envisaged type of character, summed up in the word gravitas. A Roman, learning a way of life rather than a body of formal knowledge, was ‘usu … et domesticis praeceptis multo magis eruditus quam litteris’. This training was conducted largely by the father and was entirely un-supervised by the state, hi contrast with education in Hellenistic cities, whence, by 100 b.c., many new ideas had come. Such training, however, though suitable for a rural community, was bound to change when Rome became a city and when foreign campaigns during the expansion of her empire took fathers away from home for months on end. Moreover the influence which had been exerted from an early date by the near-by cities of Magna Graecia began to increase after the capture of Tarentum in 272 b.c., and the result of Rome's successive conquests of Sicily, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia during the third and second centuries was so great an increase of Greek culture in Roman life that Horace was finally able to say ‘Graecia capta ferum captorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio’.

In a recent number of Greece and Rome Dr. T. A. Dorey has criticized those scholars who call the concluding scenes of the Adelphoe ‘a masterpiece of dramatic construction’. Arguing that at the end of the play the treatment of Micio is unsatisfactory or at least unsatisfying, the change in attitude of Aeschinus and Demea insufficiently motivated, and the transition from comedy to satire unnatural and excessively abrupt, Dorey seeks to explain these alleged flaws by reference to two passages of Donatus' commentary on the play: the note on v. 938, ‘apud Menandrum senex de nuptiis non gravatur: ergo Terentius ερετικ⋯ς’, and part of the praefatio (iii. 5), where Donatus observes that Demea is the means whereby ‘multa in comoedia nova’ are introduced into the final scenes of the play. Dorey's interpretation of these passages leads him to suggest that ‘the last scenes of the play were not in the original comedy of Menander, but were invented by Terence himself.’