That the De Rerum Natura has a message is not clear from a cursory survey of its subject-matter. Book I (we read in the Penguin table of contents), Matter and Space; Book II, Movements and Shapes of Atoms; Book III, Life and Mind; Book IV, Sensation and Sex; Book V, Cosmology and Sociology; Book VI, Meteorology and Geology. Is this nothing more than a science textbook—and a potted one at that? One may be forgiven for thinking so. Even Bailey accepted that emphasis when he wrote that Lucretius' aim was ‘to set forth the physical theories of Epicurus’ and that other aspects of Epicureanism such as the moral theory ‘crop up from time to time in the poem, but only incidentally and in a partial treatment, which is subordinated to the main purpose and structure’. As a description this is misleading to the point of distortion. The work is indeed structured upon an exposition of physical theory, but its main purpose is to win converts to Epicureanism—and the ‘incidental’ non-technical passages do not ‘crop up’ by some chance intrusion but form a series of deliberate reminders of the overriding evangelical aim. We may guess at the tactical considerations which led Lucretius to adopt this form. His call to the Epicurean way of life would consist of two elements—impassioned appeals (appropriate to the central moral theory) and systematic exposition (needed for the supporting technical arguments): since the former had the greater potential impact but much less bulk, he chose to deploy them as a series of interjections in the latter. Thus what are in structural terms ‘digressions’ lie closest of all to the heart of the work.

Patient and unobtrusive service, faithfully rendered year by year, often by reason of its very familiarity receives less than its merited meed of recognition, but we are happy here to pay all honour to one of the editors of Greece & Rome, who, after twenty-five years' loyal service to this journal, must now on medical advice relinquish his post. A glance at the list of books reviewed, for example, in one year in vol. xvii, numbering 102 in all, is eloquent testimony to the impressive role so long sustained by the man to whom we gratefully dedicate this issue, Mr. E. R. A. Sewter. His many brief reviews, while making their point, have ever given illumination to senior scholars, schoolmasters, and others, who sought to know more of some classical publication than its title might well convey. A measure of Mr. Sewter's quality is to be seen in the gap he leaves behind him. Scarce twelve men nowadays could sustain the weight this rugged Ajax so lightly wielded. Mr. Sewter, as he withdraws into retirement, takes with him the gratitude, not only of the Press and Editorial Board, but also of the vast number of his readers who have benefited from his services. Once more we are given occasion to reflect upon that grand Shakespearian phrase—‘The constant service of the antique world’.

‘Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.’ Voltaire's epigramfits Greek literature like a glove. In school and university syllabuses, just as in our own private reading, we concentrate on the best authors; and a large number of the merely good authors stay on the library shelves, neglected and unread except by a steadily decreasing number of experts in forgotten fields. How many of us are on terms of easy familiarity with the bittersweet epigrams of Asclepiades, or that remarkably modern opening of Heliodorus' novel, or (for that matter) with the mimianiboi of Herodas?

Herodas was the major Hellenistic author of mimes. His work was singled out by the younger Pliny (Ep. iv. 3. 4) as the standard by which to assess contemporary poetasters in the field. Yet before 1889 he was no more than a name, to whom a few dull fragments could be assigned. In fact before 1889 the whole genre of Hellenistic mime, literary and non-literary alike, was a dark mystery, doubtless consigned to oblivion during the ages of Byzantine antischolasticism. To the immense popularity of mimes in late antiquity countless references in contemporary sources bear a distinctly scandalized witness. Some descriptions survived, a few definitions, many condemnations, but no texts.

In his biography of Cicero, Plutarch quotes from Augustus an admission that the future emperor had once made use of Cicero's lover of power (philarchia) by offering to support the orator for a second consulship in return for Cicero's help. This incident allegedly dates from the period after Caesar's death when Octavian feared that he would otherwise be left without political support.

InThe Twelve Lays of the Gipsy, one of the masterpieces of modern Greek poetry, Palamás puts into the mouth of his Gipsy these words, addressed to the Beautiful Immortals, who symbolize the achievements of ancient Greek civilization:

What if you are immortal ? Your life is over,

The full life that you lived in full bodily vigour

In the sun and air of the blissful country of your birth.

Now there is another sun, another air, and you are only

Apparitions.

In the Special Paper of the Oxford and Cambridge Board's A Level examination in Latin last summer (1970) I tried the experiment of setting, as an appendage to a longer unseen from Martial, a quatrain which candidates were invited to translate into either prose or verse. The response was gratifying: out of 200 candidates offering the paper, close on one-third produced versions incorporating at least one pair of rhymes; there were also some attempts at unrhymed verse, but only a few of these had a pattern which effectively distinguished them from prose. Considering that this was an exercise claiming only a tiny fraction of a three-hour session, the number of candidates who both grasped the point of the epigram and showed some wit in versifying it was quite sufficient to mark the experiment as a success.

The site of ancient Dystos in south-central Euboea deserves to be better known. The imposing circuit of the city wall with its main gate and eleven towers bears comparison with the fort at Eleutherae or the walls of Messene or Thasos. The numerous remains of private houses are of considerable interest for the history of Greek domestic architecture.

Scholars have always tried to find plausible explanations why certain sorts of error have occurred in manuscripts, and much progress has recently been made in trying to analyse such sources of corruption. However, it is not always remembered that scribes were usually monks and that their minds may often have been on higher things than copying Livy's history for the umpteenth time. Over the last few years I have been collating the primary manuscripts of the first five books of Livy and so large a number of revealing corruptions came to light that it seemed valuable to collect them together as evidence of subconscious or unconscious preoccupations of scribes. The result is important, because it means that editors must not be over-mechanical in their approach to the transmission of texts.

Legend informs us that the Amazons were women, that they were not only warlike but successful above average as warriors, and that they had no breasts. The masculinity of the second and third characteristics ought to make us highly suspicious of the accuracy of the first, and the explanations provided by the ancient Greeks do not bear any very close examination.

We have all suffered in the company of a bore who cracks jokes so obscure that they demand a laborious explanation, for, in order to raise a laugh, humour must have an immediate impact, and obscurity is seldom a hallmark of the good joke. A captive audience can be terrifyingly unresponsive, and anyone who has read an Aristophanic comedy with students soon learns for himself that a scholarly exposition may destroy any joke, irrespective of its qualities. Yesterday's joke is stale and last year's joke dead; to resurrect a joke more than two thousand years old is no easy task. In an attempt to make the ancient writer of comedy more vital, we may have recourse to a contemporary analogy: twenty years ago we might have compared the technique of Aristophanes' comedies with that of the comedy series currently successful on radio; today the medium as well as the show has changed, and we refer to the art of television humour, and this indeed is a better parallel, since television comedy depends upon visual as much as upon verbal effects. Both radio and television number their audience in hundreds of thousands, and, what is more important, their audience represents as fair a cross-section of the total population as did the audience attending the theatre in fifth-century Athens. The fact that Athenian drama was staged at festivals organized by the state proves that it was entertainment designed to please everybody and not just a select few, that is, it was designed for a ‘popular’ and not an élite audience. The colossal size of the Greek theatre (the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens accommodated some 14,000 spectators) offers further confirmation. But the modern theatre is no longer a source of mass entertainment, and even the long-running farce, however many parties up in town for the day may patronize it, hardly suggests the type of audience and atmosphere which Aristophanes and his compatriots would have known and been anxious to exploit. Some idea of this atmosphere may be gained if one thinks in terms of a frequently quoted modern parallel, the emotionally charged football match. The intimacy of the smart revue, an analogy favoured by some, makes it a poor basis for comparison. If it is the English stage and our own experience of the theatre which must provide us with our illustration, the most evocative comparison, I suggest, is one between the audience packed into the Theatre of Dionysus and the audience which jostles its way into the seats at the Christmas pantomime, for this is an audience mainly composed of children as unsophisticated and uninhibited (and as determined to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from what for them also is an annual treat) as those who witnessed the original performance of Old Comedy. The audience at the pantomime, joining in the choruses of the songs and booing the villain, can be unrestrained one moment, but sit spellbound a minute later as the spectators gape at the spectacular ‘set’ which precedes the intermission and announces the finale. The frequent address to the audience made by Aristophanes' characters argues for the same degree of audience participation, while the entry of the chorus—my personal favourite is the parodos of the Birds—would be greeted by an attentiveness in keeping with its solemnity and splendour.

It has long been fashionable to believe that the Romans had little conception of natural beauty, and to assume that any sympathetic awareness of nature which they displayed could be accounted for in terms of their moral or utilitarian preconceptions. The moral relationship which in much of classical Greek literature was assumed to exist between man and nature had been reflected in and strengthened by the philosophical theories of Plato and, later, the Stoics. Yet this conception was already an anachronism by the time of the appearance of Lucretius' theory of Voluptas, and appears to have been progressively weakened in the later Republic and early Empire until in Ovid natural processes become the mere backcloth of human activity and emotion. Professor Segal has recently illustrated the employment of nature by Ovid as a literary symbol for the reflection of human emotion, and earlier work had revealed the emotional and moral attitudes to nature of Virgil and other poets, but it is questionable whether awareness of natural beauty as such, unalloyed by moral or emotional symbolism, is to be detected in Roman poetry, much less in Roman prose writing. This view may be supported by a careful scrutiny of Roman literature, where the reader will find it difficult to locate any obvious similarity to some of the commonest modern reactions to natural beauty; and further practical confirmation of this attitude may perhaps be derived from the apparent disdain of the Roman road-builders for any of those concessions to natural contours made by twentieth-century rural conservationists.

In iv. i. 64 Propertius calls himself a Roman Callimachus, and it is part of the Callimachean method to echo and mock epic style. There seems to be a good example of this in Book Four, which the commentators appear to have overlooked.

It might have been expected that the Cyclops, as our only complete surviving satyr-play, would attract wide attention among scholars. In fact, it has largely been neglected: no edition (and very little else) has appeared for over forty years in English. The present paper aims merely to suggest that the time may be ripe for reappraisal.

The Trojan War has been perennially interesting, whether study centres on works of imaginative literature such as the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, the historical situation which provided the subject for those poems, the Bronze Age world of Troy and Mycenae which formed a background to the war, or the post-classical reworking of the material in the medieval Troy romances, Shakespeare, or Giraudoux. As well as supplying writers with incidents and episodes, the story of the war has given to artists a seemingly inexhaustible supply of themes on which their fancy feeds. A great proportion of Greek and Roman art can be connected with legends that stem from the Trojan War, and the whole complex of myths and history has proved a potent source for later artists. The theme chosen here is that of the Trojan Horse, and we shall look at some ways in which artists in antiquity viewed the incident.

Precisely how long ago the Chinese began to export their silk westwards along the trade routes of Central Asia we do not know. Ezekiel seems to have been familiar with silk, and Isaiah may have heard of the Chinese. By 115 b.c. we are on firmer ground, for in that year Mithridates II of Parthia made an alliance with Wu Ti, the great Han emperor of China, designed at least in part to facilitate commerce between the two powers, who were for the first time within direct commercial reach of one another. Half-way through the following century Julius Caesar possessed silk curtains. But the trade throughout this period was no more than a trickle. The caravan routes from the Ordos region of North China to the eastern frontier of Iran passed through the territories of numerous Turkic tribes, whose possession of Central Asia had so far been virtually unchallenged.

Many of the readers of Greece & Rome will have received a copy of the pamphlet ‘Classics in the Curriculum’ recently published by the Department of Education and Science in the series ‘Education Information’. Those who have not may obtain one gratis by applying to the Publications Officer, Department of Education and Science, Curzon Street, London, W.I.