[The following paper was written originally for the last Hellenic Tour of 1939. It was delivered to an audience interested but not in the main learned, who wanted to be informed or reminded about the associations of places they were about to visit. To-day, when peaceful travel is denied to us, it may serve perhaps to recall a few pleasant memories and to awaken hopes of happier days to come.]

In the Greek papyri from Egypt we meet a little band of schoolboys. They are a remnant of their kin. The tousled heads which bowed over the clay tablets laboriously incised with wedge-shaped tables in the Sumeria of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar are gone. No one even thought of carving them on a temple wall. Gone, too, are the lads of Egypt's temple schools. They had no free milk at school by the Nile, but each morning their mothers appeared with three rolls of bread and two jugs of beer to be consumed during lessons. ‘A boy who wanted more’, says the document which supplies the information, ‘is a gluttonous creature.’ Were there brown Oliver Twists among the budding scribes in the days when Tahutmes III was setting up ‘Cleopatra's’ needle ? The sturdy scribe who sits cross-legged in limestone in the Louvre looks as if he might have merry tales to tell of schooldays in his century. It was the twenty-seventh before Christ.

The best Latin poetry loses nearly all its quality in translation and even the beginnings of its appreciation need a little knowledge of Latin. This is not entirely a truism, or universally applicable. Some poetry, like Homer and the Psalter, can be truly though partially apprehended through translations; but the spirit of Latin poetry, deprived of its own embodiment, eludes us. The Italian Camena, however wooingly the great translators approach her, ‘flies, plunges deeper in the bowering wood’, in that sylvan felicity of sound answering to sound, which links Latin poetry to the senses rather than to the intellect, and refuses to yield up its secret in any language except its own.

Every young man in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. had to be a soldier or a sailor, whether he liked it or not, for the greater part of his life; we may recall that Socrates ‘trailed a pike’ when he was forty-five at the battle of Delium, and the records of those times certainly show that anyone to whom the life of soldiering appealed had ample opportunity to indulge his taste to the full. If he did not like it, there was little remedy, and no provision for conscientious objection in the city-state. There were some, however, who found an outlet for their surplus energies not in the army of their own city but in that of a foreign overseas power, or even of a neighbouring and rival state, sometimes from choice, often compelled by a variety of causes which we shall shortly mention. It was with the Carians of southern Asia Minor that mercenary service of this sort traditionally originated in the eighth and early part of the seventh centuries b.c.—with their neighbours from Ionia they had long been troubling the shores of the Nile Delta by their freebooting expeditions until Psammetichus I actually took them into his service in his successful attempt to gain the throne of Egypt, and then formally incorporated them in his army, stationing them at Daphnae on the eastern frontier of the Delta. From that time onward Egypt also knew other large bodies of Greek soldiers, still mainly from Asia Minor; in return for their help the Egyptian kings on various occasions sent gifts to the great shrine of Apollo at Branchidae. Later on we find that this habit of mercenary service spread to, and grew in, mainland Greece.

Two scandalous passages in Tacitus and Suetonius seem to hint at a project for a marriage between Nero and his mother Agrippina. There seems reason, as will be seen, to suppose that there was policy rather than a much lower motive behind the manœuvres recorded in these passages, if indeed they actually occurred. But whereas Tacitus, quoting Cluvius as his authority, represents the overtures as coming from Agrippina, Suetonius, giving the story according to Fabius Rusticus, makes Nero responsible.

The patriotism of Propertius' line is more evident than its truth, especially to the schoolboy. He can read the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid with enjoyment, and some consciousness of their greatness, and will patronize the fifth with his interest, though the footrace is unfair, the boxing grotesque, and the archery miraculous. But the later books have no appeal. The last Sixth Form with whom I read Aeneid x–xii for Higher Certificate were unmoved, and thought they knew why. It was but adulterated Homer. Incidents which are telling in the Iliad are reproduced and embellished with a care that shows that Virgil's direct inspiration had run dry.

A stone thrown into a still pool radiates ripple upon ripple in an ever widening circle. So the ripples caused by the irruption of Christian society into the early Roman empire radiated an ever widening influence, destined to assist in the overthrow of an old order, and to promote the building of a new order of European society. When the disciples received the command ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, … teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’, they were faced with a tremendous social and political problem. This was, in a word, to create a Christian society, irrespective of race, creed, or colour, within the existing framework of the imperial Roman world.

The thesis of this paper is that Brasidas, while being second to no Spartan in courage and endurance, excelled them all, if not other Greek generals as well, even during his short life, in grasp of military principles, in energy, enterprise, leadership, in military genius.

In the May number of Greece and Rome Mr. R. S. Stanier, in a stimulating and provocative article, contended that, if only one ancient language can be taught in our schools, that language should be Greek rather than Latin, because of the greater variety, interest, and value of Greek literature.

There are arid patches in Livy, as in most historians, but for these there is ample compensation in passages of brilliant description and characterization.

The observations which follow will to some appear heretical and perhaps dangerous; but I believe that they are worth making, if only to draw attention to a tendency in the present teaching of Latin prose which seems more dangerous still. When the beginner, having covered the field of essential grammar and syntax, is first introduced to the writing of continuous prose, he is rightly reminded of the disjointed style which is often encountered in English. This, he is told, was foreign to the Roman, who preferred to express his ideas in the form of a ‘period’, that is to say, a complex, architectural sentence-structure in which several subordinate clauses are made to depend in various ways upon the main clause. This period, he learns, is central to Latin prose, and an example or two from Cicero and Livy will be given to illustrate its use; he is then advised to emulate these models. His first exercise may well be nine or ten lines of English, to be turned into a single Latin ‘period’. The result is rarely satisfactory. The unhappy learner, in his attempt to produce the required composite sentence, upsets the natural order of clauses, presses phrases into strained and alien constructions, and probably achieves confusion. Here, for instance, is one of the first exercises in Bradley's Aids to Latin Prose; the passage, it is stated, ‘should be fused into a single sentence by the aid of participles, relatives, and conjunctions’:

‘Both sides had exhausted their ammunition. The fight had raged at close quarters for three hours without any result. The carnage was horrible. The soldiers were suffocated with the heat and dust, and could scarcely keep their feet on the bloody and slippery soil; but no one could say that he had seen the back of a single foe, or heard a single voice asking for quarter. It seemed as though the gods of Mexico had inspired the nation with superhuman strength, and a courage proof against wounds or death.’

Thucydides in the first book of his history, before enumerating the different αἰτίαι which were the prelude to the outbreak of hostilities, says: ‘but the true reason (ἰληθεστάτη πρόφασις), though it was never mentioned, was Sparta's fear of Athens' growth to power.’ The statement is repeated in other parts of this book, and we must assume that when it was written it represented Thucydides' considered judgement. These passages belong to the latest stratum of his work, and date from the time when he had formed a unified conception of what had previously seemed to him isolated events, namely the Archidamian War, the Sicilian Expedition, and the Decelean War. As he looked back after 404 they seemed parts of a whole, a Peloponnesian War, and what gave them unity was a single purpose behind them, the Spartan determination to remove from Greece the dangerous power of Athens, which she regarded as a threat to her own security. Judgements as to causes when the results are complete may in human affairs be as dangerous as illuminating, since reason insists on arranging things according to a pattern; it is our duty therefore to inquire whether Thucydides' interpretation corresponds with the facts, whether the unity which he has given to these three events is real or imaginary.

Readers of Professor E. S. Forster's paper in Greece and Rome, x, 1941, pp. 114–17, may be interested in some of the passages which he does not quote or mention. He refers to Aelian, Varia Historia, xiv. 46, but not to Pollux, v. 47, who speaks of Paeonians as well as Magnesians: Μάγνητας μὲντοὺςἐπὶ Μαιάνλρῳ τρέΦειν φασὶ κύνας πολέμῳ ύπασπιστάς τοιοũτοι Δ̕ἦσαν καὶ Παίοσιν οἱ σύνθηροι κύνες. We hear of a Paeonian and a Perinthian dog in Herodotus, v. I μουνομαχίη τριφασίη έκπροκλήσιός σφι έγένετο καί γάρ άνΔρα ἀνΔρὶ καὶ ἵππον ἵππῳ συνέβαλον καὶ κύνα κυνί.

Milton was obviously well versed, by the standards of his time, in the Greek Tragedians, but more in Euripides than in the other two. ‘Sad Electra's poet’ in Sonnet 8 refers to Euripides, not Sophocles.

When Julian reached the Gallic armies at Rheims in the summer of a.d. 356 and laid his plans with the commanders for the coming campaign, it is not likely that he gave much attention to Ammianus Marcellinus, a young staff officer who was present at the discussions. Yet most of our information about the Apostate and about the years on either side of his brief and tragic career—from the aftermath of Magnentius' rebellion in 353 to the battle of Adrianople in 378—is derived from the work of that Antiochene Greek who had arrived at the army only a few months before the Caesar and who was later to become his admirer and friend.

You would do well to make a special thing of Homer. Read it in large lumps and get up Monro's ‘Homeric Grammar’ afterwards. I have been reading the Odyssey at the rate of four books a day since I came here. It is the only secret. It is so much easier to pick up the theories of modern scholars, so far as they are worth picking up, when you have a large first-hand acquaintance with the actual literature. That is the primary fact we have to deal with, and all the rest is ‘trimmings’. I never knew what scholarship meant till one lucky summer when I was inspired to read Plato from cover to cover.