One might easily say that the Tale of Troy was the most famous in the Western world. Already in the days of the earliest European literature it furnishes the background of half its drama and poetry. Homer alone would confer immortality on his epic theme, and all through ancient and medieval times Troy provided motives for every kind of art. And yet can one to-day say that the legend and the way in which literature has handled it are familiar to the general reader? Is even the Iliad, whether in the original Greek or in translation, known at first hand to more than a small minority? Perhaps, then, it is not superfluous to look back over the literary history of some 3,000 years and see by what channels this celebrated theme has come down to us.

As far as I can remember, although I read Virgil as a school-boy, scanned Virgil, translated Virgil, and learned Virgil by heart, yet no one ever tried to explain to me why I should study Virgil, except, of course, as a means to securing a School or Higher Certificate. Vaguely I was aware that Virgil was said to be a great poet, and I knew that Tennyson had written a celebrated poem about him. But nobody tried to make me feel that he was a great poet, nobody tried to open my eyes. Nor is this surprising, because no one tried to make me feel that Lycidas was a great poem either, although I learned most of it by heart. Certain things in Lycidas, I know, did move me, particularly the passage about St. Peter, the blind mouths, But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

The social and economic life of the ancient world was reared upon a substructure of slavery. The commercial greatness of Carthage, Tyre, and Babylon had depended on the same principle. Amid all the variety of notions and dominant ideas current in classical civilization there was one point of agreement. ‘It was universally assumed’, as Dr. A. N. Whitehead expresses it, ‘that a large slave population was required to perform services which were unworthy to engage the activities of a fully civilized man.’

TheBacchae is acknowledged to be the most difficult to interpret of all Euripides' plays, and the difficulty of understanding it is increased by the fact that it is in many ways unlike his other works. The human characters are not so clearly drawn, nor are they of such heroic calibre. The manifestation of Dionysus' power and the adoration of him at the end are, moreover, in contrast to Euripides' usual ‘sceptical’ tone.

The story of Mummius and the art treasures which he pillaged from Corinth, and sent back to Rome with the warning that the carriers would have to replace any that they lost with others of the same value, is a familiar joke from the history books at the expense of Roman sensibility. Perhaps less well known, and equally enlightening, is another story against the same unhappy official, which appears in Pliny (Nat. Hist. 35. 24). Mummius, according to this account, was conducting an auction of pictures from among his booty, and Attalus bid 600,000 denarii (say £21,000) for a picture of Dionysus and Ariadne by Aristides. Thereupon Mummius, ‘surprised at the price and suspecting that the picture had some good quality of which he himself was ignorant’, withdrew the work, and later dedicated it at Rome in the temple of Ceres. It is hardly unfair to Mummius if we imagine him, back in Rome, boasting to his friends how, thanks to his good judgement, he saved the masterpiece from the hands of Attalus. This famous painting comes up again, to the discredit of Rome, in the history of Polybius (39.13), who says that he saw Roman soldiers playing at draughts on it after the sack of Corinth.

To-day, not for the first time, the borderland between France and Germany, a land of hills, forests, and rivers, has been the unhappy scene of warfare. Though its pleasant prospects are worthy of activities less vile, man has used the natural gateways of this region for purposes of war, as well as of peaceful intercourse, discreditably often. It is through one of these gateways that the Mosel flows, linking the Gauls and the Germanics. This delightful river rises in the Vosges and, flowing north-eastward, adds breadth to the broad Rhine at Coblenz. On its way it passes by Metz, of French military fame, and later by Trier, or Trèves, a lovely old place which as Augusta Treverorum was in Roman times one of the most important towns of western Europe. Now the river's course is disfigured by fortified barriers, named after a legendary hero and a modern politician. But in Roman times it was a land of peace more continuously than at any other period.