Did Sir Arthur Evans find Linear B tablets on or underneath the floor of the Room of the Stirrup Jars? Do they belong to about 1400 b.c., as he maintained, or to 1200 b.c.? These may seem recondite questions, but when Professor L. R. Palmer raised them in the Observer last summer he stirred up a hornets' nest. After finding that his text had been cut, his title changed, and a reference to the Piltdown Man fraud gratuitously thrown in by the newspaper, he may have felt ruefully that he should have used a longer spoon; but his challenge to the authority of The Palace of Minos was real enough. Not unnaturally the archaeologists bristled at an intrusion by a philologist, however distinguished, into their territory, and deplored this questioning of their masterful hero, this use of the vulgar arts of publicity to advance a scholarly argument. Charges and rejoinders flew briskly to and fro; there were reproaches of sensationalism and vilification, of putting discredited technical arguments before lay readers to blind them with science. For a while an old-fashioned whiff of odium philologicum hung in the air, until the two parties agreed to await the full publication of the disputed facts, and hostilities were followed by an uneasy truce.

The B.B.C.'s recent series of programmes on the Greeks, introduced by an attractively illustrated booklet, was an enterprising essay in popular education. More might perhaps have been done to bring home to non-specialists the ‘strangeness of the Greeks’, their remoteness from us in racial make-up, language, and religion, and the peculiar character of life in a city-state. On some matters, such as the migrations and the development of the language, speakers tended to repeat the current doctrine without noting that it did not make sense; but the existence of unsolved problems was acknowledged, and the series as a whole summed up plainly the present state of knowledge, or opinion, about the Greeks, and properly drew attention to the revolutionary advances in Greek studies in the present century, and even in the last decade. It ended by offering a hope of still more discoveries, and by stressing the need of every generation for new interpretations of what is already known. No stagnation here; and, since the Greeks were pioneers in so many fields, little that was irrelevant to twentieth-century life.

To one student whose early training was concerned with the study of the tangible remains of the Greek past the proof that the Linear B script concealed the Greek language came as a great shock. Nothing to my mind was more certain than that a great gulf separated the later Greek world from the Mycenaean world. In my view those who would trace through a hypothetical Bauernstil a kinship between the Geometric ware of early Helladic times and the post-Mycenaean pottery were wishful thinkers of the softest kind. In my eyes they held their views against all evidence because they wanted to hold it. The Greeks who held this view, urged by patriotism and the wish to show the world that the glories of Mycenae were Greek, I could forgive; but for the foreigner, spurred only by the love of the theory that he had invented, I could feel nothing but contempt; so perverse did the view seem. And now this perverse view is buttressed by the new linguistic evidence, so convincing in its nature to the layman, the man in the street.

It must occur to anyone who reads Plutarch's account of Marius' flight and exile to wonder how much of this thrilling and romantic tale is historically true. There is indeed much to cause disquietude. Historiography of Plutarch's day had no distinct genre for the romantic novel, as Perrin so well points out, and consequently included much that history proper would exclude. Incidents in the flight and exile have in fact been described as ‘fairy-tale-like’ and ‘out.of the Arabian nights’. The debating points of the schools of rhetoric have had their influence too, involving Marius in several dilemmas which seem to have been invented for suasoriae (e.g. Marius and the slave-herdsmen, 36. 3; and the shipowners, 37. 2; and the old fisherman, 37.4; and Sextilius' envoy, 40. 3–4; the deliberations before the grove of Marica, 39. 4, are another example).

Few periods in all ancient history are more familiar than the months from May to September of 480 b.c., when the enormous army and navy of Xerxes, King of the Persians, crossed from Asia to Europe and bore down upon the heart of Greece. Few battles are more famous than Salamis, where Xerxes, after carrying all before him, crushing Leonidas at Thermopylai and forcing the Greek fleet to withdraw from Artemision, sacking and burning Athens, saw his navy defeated by a far smaller force and the tide of Persian might begin to ebb. How did the Greeks prepare to face the Persian threat, the greatest they had ever met, and what planning achieved this remarkable result?

The ancient mine-workings of southern Attica, although less photogenic than the Parthenon and other better-known buildings of antiquity, provide some of the most fascinating remains of Classical Greece. Their density upon the ground and state of preservation, except where they are being obliterated by modern mining or quarrying operations, are outstanding, and even a brief visit made without specialist knowledge cannot but send one away with a desire to know more about them.

Various difficulties beset the scholar investigating the origins of Greek drama. The ancient evidence is fragmentary, sometimes unreliable, and often difficult to interpret; Greek drama is the original drama, and from those to whom dramatic representation is a commonplace a real effort of imagination is required in dealing with its possible origins and early history; and scholars of a previous age, writing under the influence of early anthropological studies and their generation's innate notion of progress as ordered and inevitable, have sometimes bedevilled the whole investigation. Not all of these difficulties can be removed, nor are they without their compensating advantages. Anthropology can provide very interesting and suggestive parallels, and can help us to see significance where we might otherwise have missed it; and ritual no doubt has much to do with the beginnings of drama. But in attempting to explain the existence of the great drama of fifth-century Greece, we should do well to view with suspicion any theory which traces a direct and merely thickening line from primitive ritual to Aeschylus or Aristophanes, and regards the plays not as dramas but as interesting sources of evidence for primitive ‘survivals’. The more new facts about the origins (the plural is used with intent) of drama become known, the more complex these origins appear; and however much an artist is influenced (as he must be) by the conventions and inheritance of his own age, we should remember that that inheritance will include conscious intelligence and individual genius, as well as primitive ritual and superstition.

Pindos, the mountain range between Thessaly and Epeiros, is not without renown. It appears first in Pindar (Pythian ix. 15), where in its ‘storied dells’ Kreousa gave birth to Hypseus by the love of the river-god Peneios. It, or more likely the town of the same name in Doris, was known to Pindar (Pythian i. 66) as the home of the Dorians, and it appears in Aeschylus and Sophokles—in the former (Supp. 257) as the north-western boundary of Pelasgos' realm, in the latter (Fr. 249) as the source of the Acheloos. Kallimachos, Theokritos, and Orpheus refer to it, and in Latin it is at least as old as Virgil. We find it in Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Lucan, Silius, and Valerius Flaccus,3 and in the course of antiquity it acquired a reputation as a lofty, wooded mountain which persists in Claudian and through the Dark Ages. Once more it is the setting for an amour of Apollo; Paion's mother, Liagore, receives leech-craft as the price of her favours (Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 41); and the same Spenser praised the whiteness of its snow (Prothalamian, 40). Wordsworth, as he wondered at the torrent at the Devil's Bridge, asked:

‘Hath not Pindus fed thee, where the band Of Patriots scoop their freedom out, with hand Desperate as thine?’

and it was about the Pindos range that, in 1940, another band of patriots repelled the Italian invasion of their country and won the first Allied victory of World War II.

A Traveller from Athens who takes the inland route to Cape Sounion will pass from the plain of Athens, between Hymettos and Pentelikon, to enter the pleasant and fertile region of the Mesogia. Through the vineyards and olive groves, and through the attractive and populous villages of Paiania, Koropi, Markopoulo, and Keratea, the road bears on south-eastwards to encounter and cross a hill barrier close to the eastern coast of Attica. Descending by this road as it winds through the Plaka Pass to Thorikos and the sea the traveller is struck by the changing aspect of the country. Already in the Plaka Pass there is a hint of an abandoned industrial area such as is encountered in Derbyshire. The impression produced by these first indications of industry is strengthened after the descent to the level of the sea-coast. The charm of Attica's shore, so apparent elsewhere, is here destroyed by an ugly village with great dark mounds like those of a Yorkshire colliery or Scottish shale mine. There are also industrial buildings, for the most part derelict, looking not unlike enlarged Nonconformist chapels in the nineteenth-century tradition. Up the hill-side stretches a curious brick tunnel, with smoke stacks at intervals, intended to remove the noisome vapours generated in the processes here carried out. This is the village of Lavrion. Its other modern name of Ergasteri underlines its character. It is a profoundly depressing place, and one passes through it with relief to regain the road to Sounion.

Paton remarks that the meaning of the riddle is obscure. May not the answer be the word κσρη, whose first meaning is ‘maiden’, but whose other meanings are also hinted at in this enigma? The successive phrases may then be explained as follows.

One day in 79 b.c., when he was studying at Athens, Cicero and a group of friends took a walk along the same road as Lucian's Philosophia, but in the opposite direction. They had listened, as usual, to a lecture by Antiochos, who was then head of the Academy, delivered in the gymnasium called Ptolemaion, which was in the middle of the city; and they resolved to take an ambulatio postmeridiana (Latin for Περίπατος δειλινός) in the Academy, which at that time of day would be quiet (and comparatively cool). Forgathering at Piso's, they traversed the six stadia from the Dipylon, and reached the justly famous walks (non sine causa nobilitata spatia) of the Academy. There Piso remarks, ‘Whether by a sound instinct or by an illusion (natura an errore) when we set eyes on the very places frequented by great men, we are more deeply moved than when we merely hear of their deeds or read their writings. Plato used to hold discussions here; I can almost see him walking in those little gardens near by (illi propinqui hortuli). Here taught Speusippos and Xenokrates and Polemon, who used to sit on the very seat which we can see over there. The power of suggestion which places possess is indeed great (tanta uis admonitionis inest in locis).’ Quintus Cicero is more attracted to the Kolonos near by, with its Sophoklean associations.

These notes are prompted by experience gained teaching Roman Republican history to a first-year Latin class over a period of a few years at Victoria University (then College), N.Z. The suggestions they contain arose largely from discussions with students and other teachers, university and otherwise, from all of whom I have learned a great deal. Basically, my problems were threefold. The course was very short, and tune limitations demanded the utmost selectiveness. The course was also voluntary, and so had to be interesting in itself and of immediate value and significance for students busied with Latin and generally with three other degree subiects, too.

The dissatisfaction which orderly-minded schoolboys generally feel when they first attempt to read the works of Propertius all too often persists among more mature readers who turn to the elegies in search of genuine literary experience. After tasting the immediate attraction of the other Augustans, whether the inexhaustible richness of Virgil and Horace, the brilliance of Ovid, or the gentle music of Tibullus, the reader continually turns away frustrated from Propertius. What, after all, is one to make of a poet whose words simply do not make sense by any accepted standard; who cries aloud for textual emendation, but never has enough of it until he has been utterly transformed by transpositions and by marks of long lacunae, as in Richmond's edition, or whittled away into something like a pedestrian Ovid; who describes a society which interests us intensely, yet hardly ever succeeds in transmitting to the reader any sort of direct experience of the life he lived and the sights he saw; who continually invites the reader by the overpowering emotion of the opening of a poem, often with some particle to indicate that we are arriving in the middle of a pre-existing train of thought, and then tails off into that artificial Alexandrianism which he plainly thought so admirable, but which we can appreciate only as an odd historical phenomenon? After considering these characteristics, one is more than ever convinced that Horace was speaking of Propertius, and speaking justly, when he criticized the pretensions of the self-styled ‘Roman Callimachus’.

TheCyclops is a neglected play. Although commending itself by its brevity to teachers as an easy introduction to Euripides, it has received little critical attention and is only rarely performed. Nevertheless the feeling persists that even this slight work, being by Euripides, must be treated with respect. A recent school edition comments, ‘The preservation of ancient literature does seem in some measure to have illustrated the principle of the survival of the fittest; and the Cyclops may have been one of the few satyric dramas which really deserve to be handed down to us.’ Similarly J. Duchemin, in his critical edition published a few years earlier, cautiously suggests that the characterization of Polyphemos embodies familiar themes in later fifth-century thought: ‘Son Cyclope est, semble-t-il, auprès des autres, une figure évoluée, et par certains côtés vraiment moderne: le materialisme intellectuel affiché dans l'⋯γών avec Ulysse, et où l'on a voulu retrouver les traces de la sophistique (v. 316 sqq.), marque de toute evidence une étape nouvelle dans le développement du personnage.’ The purpose of this article is to re-examine the status of the play, and inquire whether such tributes are really justified. I hope to gather together certain considerations, some already familiar, others perhaps less well known, which suggest that the value of the Cyclops, both as drama and as an illustration of Euripides' thought, is negligible, and that the illustrious name of its author has led us to look for merit where none exists.