Olympus as an idea pervades Greek literature: Olympus as a mountain of earth and stone seems to have been little considered. Unlike Delphi, it was neither a Mecca to which pilgrims travelled nor a Jerusalem for which they would wage a Holy War. Apparently it did not occur to Greeks to climb mountains unless they wanted to get to the other side. Pausanias in his comprehensive wanderings mentions Olympus only to say that lions from Thrace used to roam there, and that an athlete once unarmed slew a lion, a great and mighty beast, on the mountain. The successor of Pausanias, Herr Baedeker, omits Olympus entirely: Le Guide Bleu to Greece informs us that ‘l'exploration méthodique de l'Olympe ne remonte pas au delà de la fin du XVIIIe siècle et début du XIXe’, and recommends Marcel Kurz, Le Mont Olympe, as the best book on the subject.

In classics we appear to have reached the position where ‘the best translator is he who knows that all translation is impossible’. With regard to classical culture and classical education, there is an uneasy feeling that somehow the ‘legacy of Greece and the legacy of Rome’ cut less ice than they used to do. Their influence becomes more and more isolated and more and more of a strain to justify, as against modern commercial tendencies in the schools. And as the whole position of the classics does rest finally upon translation, in its broadest sense, into our own modes of thought, it seems that the fatalism into which most of the sincerest classicists are forced to-day is aptly expressed in the paradox quoted above.

Forty miles north-east of Shiraz, in the Mervdasht plain near the confluence of the Bandamir and Pulvar rivers, stand the palaces of Persepolis on a spur of the little mountain Kuh-i-Rahmet. Across the valley to the west at Husein Kuh are the tombs of the kings. Farther up the Pulvar, at Istakhr, are the barren ruins of the town of Persepolis; and at a spot twenty miles to the north-east (but forty by the windings of the Pulvar) Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, built his residential capital, Pasargadae.

In his article on ‘Latin for To-day’ Mr. Coates has used several sentences about the Direct Method which show that he does not understand its principles or practice. This is a matter of public concern, for such statements can mislead the reader and so hinder the good teaching of Latin. They cannot therefore be allowed to go unrefuted.

(a) Origin and Development. The public games at Rome had their origin in religion. Thus the earliest games of which we have any account, those distinguished for the rape of the Sabine women, were in honour of the god Consus, and another very ancient festival, the Equirria, was in honour of Mars. That something of their religious character was felt even in the last days of the Republic is shown by a passage of Cicero: ‘An, si ludius consistit aut tibicen repente conticuit … aut si aedilis verbo aut simpulo aberravit, ludi sunt non rite facti?’ For Roman religion was marked by a love of formality and ritual: if, therefore, the slightest hitch occurred in the ceremonial procedure, the games were regarded as having failed to satisfy the gods, and it was necessary to start them afresh. So we meet in Livy such notices as ludi in unum diem or in biduum instaurati: sometimes the second performance was no more successful than the first, in which case we find ludi ter, quater, or even septies instaurati. Claudius, suspecting that these hitches were occasionally manufactured in order that the games might be prolonged, decreed that at the second performance chariotand horse-races should be finished in one day.

The period of the Flavian emperors (A.D. 69–96) was distinguished by a notable revival of epic poetry. No fewer than three poets, whose work is extant, flourished contemporaneously—Statius, Valerius, and Silius. It was indeed an age of literary figures, including Martial, Pliny the Younger, Quin-tilian, and Tacitus. Statius and Valerius are interesting as epic poets in that they broke away from the tradition of national and patriotic poetry prescribed for their art from the time of Ennius. Silius, on the other hand, remained true to the convention of Latin epic, and, in an age when the stimulus of national pride was losing its effect on poetry, produced a long poem that lacked originality and inspiration.

There is some special quality inherent in primitive art which arouses our curiosity about the personality, the aims, and the methods of its creators. The outline of the reindeer roughly incised on a rock, the crude figure of a man carved out in stone, which betoken the difficult achievement of a race low in the scale of civilization, often excite in us keener interest and speculation than the more facile perfection of the masterpieces of a later age.

To take a piece of simple narrative prose and render everything in it in another language, not only the words but the implications in them and in their order, is a difficult thing. To do the same thing for a piece of verse, when metre and perhaps rhyme have to be taken into account, is still more difficult; and if the verse has attained to that subtle dignity and magic which enables us to call it real poetry, the difficulties are again increased.

A cycling holiday is necessarily one of limited baggage, but this was not the only reason why I took Catullus in my pocket to Rotorua. I enjoy reading a well-known book in new surroundings. I once read the Greek Gospel of Saint John on the Christchurch-Dunedin Express and filled its simple pages, like a medieval manuscript, with pictures of white beach and headland, smooth plains of wheat and snow-capped hills, from that incomparable stretch of railway that runs down the coast of New Zealand's South Island. So did the beauty of the North Island lakeland illuminate a well-thumbed Catullus. How wrong to read our poets always in the study! We have lost them when they remind us only of grammar and philology, German tomes and prosody. We discover them anew when we can fill their lines with new associations and colour them with a colour sometimes all our own. With my eyes full of scenes from a day's wandering, guideless and off the beaten track, where Maori legends cluster thick about lakes, hot pools, and dark green woods, I read Catullus.

Martial leant back in his chair and looked out through the open window at the fair country that lay before him. It was a noble land, this Spain that he had left so lightly all those years ago. Had he ever realized half how beautiful it was? But no good thinking of that now. Rome had drawn him as a magnet draws the iron; and, if Valeria herself had been unable to hold him, what could you expect of any landscape, however lovely? Perhaps he knew better now; but he would never have believed it, without the experience. But without doubt it was good to be home again. After all the rubs and rebuffs of life at Rome, spiced though they had been by some rare successes, there was a warm comfort in finding oneself an honoured person, with an assured position, which had not to be maintained by constant self-assertion. There had been the civic welcome on the day of his arrival and now followed the more personal and intimate renewals of acquaintance. Was he not waiting at this very moment to see Valeria for the first time since that old parting? Martial flattered himself that he was no sentimentalist, but his heart beat faster than it need have done at the thought of seeing her again.

In the opening satire of his second book Horace makes a spirited reply to his contemporary critics. It is such an excellent example of his sprightly wit that I cannot do better than make use of a summary of this satire as the introduction to my paper. His published writings up to this date (29 b.c.) were the Epodes and the first book of the Satires, his earliest efforts, many of them composed in the grimmer period of his life when the poet had reason for depression, disillusionment, and anxiety, and before he had attained that philosophic calm which gives to the works of his maturity a mellow quality, dear to many subsequent generations of cultivated readers in all countries.

One of the privileges which the Athenians prized very highly was parrhesia—the right of free speech. From the foundation of the democracy until the dangers of uncensored speech in the Pelopon-nesian War made some restraint advisable this privilege remained unimpaired, and it is an important part of their political, if not of their social, system. The recognition of this right of free speech should mean that no grievance need remain unspoken, and that politicians could be well informed about the state of public opinion.