The Classical world continues to dwindle. The study of Greek has vanished altogether from very many schools and, in some places, even Latin hangs upon the uncertain future of administrative reorganization or the relaxation of faculty requirements. In the face of steady retreat, few can now afford the easy luxury of indifference and most admit to a rueful apprehension. What then is the future of the Classics? Unless the present drift is halted, the future must rest mainly with the Universities and it confronts them with a cruel dilemma. The glories of classical literature require the study of the classical languages, but this study, concentrated into three years, leaves scant time for literary glory or humane reflection. Yet literature can only survive if it is read and the study of a civilization can only be fruitful as long as it continues to provoke curious interest. Some will recoil from ‘popular’ or ‘general’ courses but no one should scoff at those who attempt them, for there perhaps lies our best hope that Classics will be more than the secret preserve of a devoted few. Such courses must inevitably walk a giddy tight-rope: if they include too much, they run the risk of drudgery, if they are content with too little, they may decline into that diarrhoea verborum so mercilessly pilloried by Wilamowitz. The state of equilibrium will be hard to attain, but it may be hoped that, with the continuing support of our contributors, Greece & Rome will be able to assist these new and crucial developments.

We publish in this number a paper by the late Professor William Beare, which was received shortly before his death last summer. Readers who had the good fortune to know him will surely feel that this paper captures something of the style and spirit of the man: a modest, sober, humane, and forthright scholar, ποθεινὸς τοῖς φίλοις.

The mysterious writing on Cretan seals first attracted Arthur Evans to Crete. His own words are well worth quoting. ‘In the course of a visit to Greece in the spring of 1893 I came across some three- and four-sided stones perforated along their axis, upon which had been engraved a series of remarkable symbols. The symbols occurred in groups on the facets of the stones, and it struck me at once that they belonged to a hieroglyphic system. They were, however, quite distinct from Egyptian in character, and though they seemed to show a nearer approach to Hittite forms, it was evident that they belonged to an independent series. My inquiries succeeded in tracing these to a Cretan source. … I therefore determined to follow up my investigations on Cretan soil.’

In his notes T. E. Page often points out Virgil's ‘accommodation of sound to sense’. Postgate declares ‘Spondees are employed to express Seriousness or Melancholy’. But spondees of course are employed otherwise as well; and in general we are often warned against finding in the text what the poet did not intend. The cautioners too should beware, of missing a relevant point.

Tacitus' Historiae begin in the middle of a series of civil wars: initium mihi operis Servius Galba iterum Titus Vinius consules erunt. This point of time leaves the revolts of Vindex and Galba behind and the revolts of Otho and Vitellius just about to begin. Such a plunge in medias res, more suitable for the novelist than the historian, was at one time sharply criticized. It would have been more logical, it was argued, to begin with the proclamation of Galba at the beginning of April A.d. 68, with the death of Nero on 9 June following, or with the death of Galba himself on 15 January A.d. 69. These points, or others even earlier or later, are better ‘natural breaks’ in the story, and consequently more satisfactory from the literary point of view than the arbitrary breaks of the calendar. On behalf of Tacitus it was maintained that in Roman historiography the annalistic method had the force of law (but what then of the starting-point of the Annales—ab excessu divi Augusti?), or that Tacitus took up the tale where some other historian, Cluvius Rufus perhaps or Fabius Rusticus, had left off (why then the long introduction extending to ch. II? Xenophon, for example, felt no such need for the Hellenica). Tacitus himself does not attempt to justify his choice of starting-point. In fact the use of the future tense (erunt) may be thought to imply that the matter is scarcely worth discussing at all. That was likely, I think, to have been Tacitus' hope and intention. If it was so, it has been realized in the most recent scholarship, which, having failed to make out a conclusive case for or against any other date, has fallen back on the belief that 1 January A.d. 69 was, faute de mieux, inevitable.

Σαῦλος ὁ καὶ Παῦ λος: or St. Paul and the Greek World. That is my subject, but before I come to it, I should like to say two words about myself—both by way of apology and to explain how I am dealing with it.

Not far north of the city of Cadmus a low bluff juts out into the flat plains of gravel and mud, alternately dry-cracked with summer drought or spongy with irrigation. The waters of Lake Copais no longer sluggishly daub its slopes, but are drained and channelled and fed—for fifty drachmas an hour—through the tiny pumping station at its base to the fields of maize and cotton. Peasant wives and daughters, barefooted, tend the subsidiary flow, raking rivulets down the planted aisles, drawing little earth dams open or shut with their odd Greek spades, skirts tucked up from clay-sloshed calves, and heads swathed in scarves against the merciless sun.

In this paper I propose to deal with some difficulties in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, of which some have been noticed before, others I think have not. I am going to propose an unorthodox explanation, not through any love of unorthodoxy, but in the spirit of Oedipus himself, who when faced with a puzzle could not resist following a fact to its logical conclusion. The Sphinx's riddle was not, after all, a very hard one; and Oedipus doubtless grew tired of being praised for ingenuity. My thesis too disclaims that dubious quality. Ingenuity is what many of us have been using all our lives to explain difficulties in this play which may after all be insoluble.

Perhaps no Roman, except Julius Caesar, attracted the interest of ancient writers who specialized in religious affairs as much as Numa. His reign was considered to have been a period of unbroken peace, when the civilizing influences of religious laws tempered the savagery of the Romulean era. The Romans ascribed to Numa the organization of much of their state ritual, although they did admit that some of it was derived from the Etruscans and the Greeks. Numa's successor, Tullus Hostilius, failed to observe his instructions relating to the worship of Jupiter Elicius, a god usually associated by the ancients with lightning, to whom Numa had dedicated an altar on the Aventine. The result was that Tullus met his death when a thunderbolt struck his house. In contrast, Ancus Marcius, traditionally Numa's grandson, regarded Numa as his model and caused the instructions for state ritual contained in Numa's Commentarii to be transcribed on to tablets and displayed in the Forum. This king had a successful reign. Such is the spirit of those whose accounts of the Roman kings are still extant, all writers who lived during the late Republic and early Empire. It is clear from the way in which they make Numa the author of complete institutions which could not have received their final form until later times, that every change and every new practice in religious performance needed at least to conform in appearance to the doctrines of Numa. Fondness for apposite etymology led some to associate his very name with the Greek νόμος, a law.

I Am offering to readers a version of the Attis, which I read at the Leeds meeting of the Classical Association in 1962. It is composed in the same metre as the Latin, according to the rules (and practice) of quantity in English. The metre is galliambic; the line consists of four ionic metra, the last syncopated or catalectic. The ionic metron, as two shorts and two longs, is familiar in Horace's Neobule

miserarum est neque amori dare ludum neque dulci—

but the first and the last syllables of the metron may be either long or short; this admits the anacreontic dimeter, a favourite variant in Greek lyrics—

super alta / uectus Attis …

Catullus' galliambic consists of two such anacreontics—

itaque ut domum Cybelles // tetigeṙe lassulae [pause]. (35.)

‘War with its strenuous exertions is the direct opposite of love with its languid sentimentality: nevertheless, that truism challenged ingenuity to invent reasons why they should not rather be considered as similar.’ This statement may serve as a basis for a survey of the use of the military metaphor in love poetry, in particular in Ovid's Amores, which illustrate the image in its most highly developed and perfected form.

The sixth book is the focal point of the Aeneid; it completes and concludes what has gone before, and it provides a new impetus for the second half of the poem. It is not an isolated piece of theology; it has its work to do within the design of the poem. It is of vital importance in the development of the main themes of the Aeneid, and it is on three of these that I want to concentrate as we accompany Aeneas on his journey from the cave at Avernus to the Gates of Ivory. We shall be concerned firstly with how a memorable picture—or perhaps two memorable pictures—of the world after death is built up from the rich and tangled heritage of poetry, folk-lore, philosophy, and religion. In the words of T. R. Glover—to whose warm and sensitive appreciation of the poet Virgilian studies are deeply indebted—‘we find here as elsewhere that Virgil tries to sum up all that is of value in the traditions, the philosophies, and the fancies of the past’. It is in the later part of Book vi that Virgil comes nearest to a solution of the problem of human suffering with which the whole poem is so preoccupied, as he gropes towards a conception of the life after death in which sin is purified away and virtue rewarded. Secondly, the golden hopes for the future of Rome and the Roman world are in this book expressed with a patriotic pride more complete than anywhere else; the vision of the temporal destiny of the world follows upon the vision of the spiritual after-life. Thirdly, and this is the aspect which I shall stress most because it is not generally stressed enough, this book (like the rest of the Aeneid) is above all about Aeneas himself, his character and resolution, his experiences, past, present, and future. We must always remember that the aim of the book is not primarily philosophical or theological—and in this it differs from the myths of Plato to which it owes so much; the aim is to present a poetic vision which has special reference to Aeneas and Rome within the design and framework of the total epic poem.

One of the most primitive and genuine elements of Roman religion was the feeling that some mysterious power haunted the dark wood. Germany was pre-eminently the land of dark woods in which the practical-minded Roman faltered and lost his way. There were the woods along the banks of the Rhine, in which we sometimes walked in our student days at the University of Bonn. There was the wooded Taunus range, where we visited the reconstructed Saalburg, a fort belonging to the limes or line of entrenchments constructed to protect the Roman territory in south-west Germany. There was Abnoba, the Black Forest; there was the Hercynian Forest; a vague term applied to the vast range of wooded hills stretching a thousand miles from the Rhine along the Danube and around Bohemia to the Carpathians; there was the Saltus Teutoburgiensis, where in A.d. 9 Quintilius Varus and his three legions had been wiped out by the Cherusci under their leader Arminius in a battle which had turned the tide of history; there was the unknown island wood where our grim ancestors, the Anglii and the Saxones, performed the gloomy rites of the goddess Nerthus from which none of the slave ministrants was allowed to come away alive. Beyond lay even wilder regions and more savage peoples: the Aestii or Esthonians, who wore boars' heads and lived on the Baltic shore, from which they gathered amber and were astonished to receive a price for it from the traders; the nomadic Sarmatae of central and southern Russia, who lived in wagons and ate horse-flesh; the ferocious Fenni, or Finns, who had no home at all, but slept on the ground and lived on herbs and any animals they could shoot with their bone-tipped arrows, hunting with the bow being the life of both the man and the woman, while the babies were left with no protection against weather and wild creatures except a sort of hovel made out of interlaced branches; and further still the Hellusii and the Oxiones, who had the faces of men and the bodies of animals; to the north the dead seas of the midnight sun, the frozen Arctic Ocean, where every morning could be heard the noise of the sun rising from the waters, and the horses drawing his chariot could be seen.

Of Martial's three poems on Erotion (v. 34, v. 37, x. 61) this has found least favour with the critics. Their coldness towards it is more than compensated by the warmth of the tributes which they pay to v. 34. ‘We must go to the best work of the Greek Anthology to surpass [it]’; ‘c'est là une des plus tendres et des plus délicates epigrammes de Martial’; ‘there can be few things in leterature more touching’. In contrast v. 37 has appeared a frigid jest or at best an unhappy marriage of pathos and satire. ‘Where there is no depth of feeling a piece of sarcasm will do well enough’; ‘the remaining lines of the poem [i.e. 18–24] are tasteless and unworthy of the portion quoted, and raise a doubt as to the poet's sincerity in the particular case’. These critics might have appealed to high authority in support of their views, for Lessing noticed what seemed to him a lack of unity in the poem and felt in the ending an unwelcome surprise and disturbance of mood.

This title is redolent of crambe repetita, and nobody is more aware JL of this fact than the present writer. Herodotos enjoyed an almost universally bad press from ancient critics for his alleged mendacity and gullibility, and his lack of the scientific spirit of historiography when compared with Thucydides. Modern critics, though more reasonable, have often tended to agree with this damning verdict, or at least to assume the superiority of Thucydides as unquestionable. A few years ago, however, the case for Herodotos was cogently stated by Arnaldo Momigliano in an inspiring article in History. I should like merely to set down and discuss again some examples of what Herodotos himself really says about his sources and methods, in the hope of assisting Momigliano's work of rehabilitation.