‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ cries Tertullian of Carthage when the Christian Church was barely two centuries old, ‘what harmony is there between Plato's Academy and the Church?’ Then, with all the mastery of eloquence that he had learned in the school of classical rhetoric, he denounces non-Christian literature as pernicious—‘We have no need of curiosity going beyond Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry beyond the Gospel.’

The question might still be crudely asked to-day—Why teach pagan literature in Christian countries and Christian schools? Some may answer that the problem and the conflict are past; none of the greater Christian churches opposes classical education now; on the contrary the clergy mostly encourage it, while it is the scientists that object. But Christianity and the classics meet each other with different facets in different epochs. Sometimes these facets seem less adjustable than those before them. And some of the defences made for pre-Christian literature by Christians, and some of the uses they recommend for it, deserve attention still.

What follows here is mainly an historical survey, and necessarily a very sketchy one. It must begin long before our Lord's time, at the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. By that time Palestine and Egypt, the two great centres of Judaism, had come under Greek rule. After Alexander's death both these regions were taken over by Ptolemy. He and his namesake successors were enlightened and tolerant monarchs. Under their rule Hellenism gained ground among the Jews both at Jerusalem and at Alexandria.

The Roman poet Ennius said he had three hearts, one Oscan, one Greek, and one Roman. That is to say he was native Italian by birth and upbringing, Greek by education, and Roman by adoption. By what species of co-operation the three worked as one it may be hard to determine; that they did work as one is clear; the poetry of Ennius, or some of it, lives in testimony. Somehow Italian dearness and the Greek inspiration were fused in the Roman mould to a dynamic end. Est locus Hesperiam quam mortales perhibebant… the anthropological elements have been fused in the crucible of history and the poet's magic is whole-hearted and complete. Yet it is a hybrid product, and it must have been hard at times, even for an Ennius, to escape the pain of a divided heart.

A similar sickness and a similar division must beset all scholars nourished on a culture, let me not say alien, but inherited from a past beside which their native tradition is young. I, an Englishman, born and bred in the fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land, I who

have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

and the proud stones of Greece,

only to find it troubled and broken by the more searching simplicities of Judaea and Christ, how shall I find my spiritual home?

On my study wall is a half-inch Ordnance Map of the Cotswolds. Its greens and browns in subtle half-tones and harmonies epitomize for me days of solid experience in sun and rain and wind and other days walked there only in the mind.

Increase in knowledge of the psychology of ordinary people, and still more of poets, added to recent progress in scholarship, has affected our necessary approach to old critical problems more than we fully realize yet. In trying to understand ancient poets old questions, such as how to make sense of a passage, how to prove that a poet is consistent with himself, and what the intention of the poet was, are coming to seem more and more insufficient and sometimeseven the wrong questions to ask. Further, it is dangerous to make a solution to a problem depend on answers to such questions, especially when the problem concerns a great and most authentic poet such as Aeschylus or Virgil. Again and again the text of Virgil has been emended for in- sufficient reasons; for example, to make sense, or to agree with the assumed intentions of the poet. The truth is that Virgil, like other great poets, wrote down sometimes not the precise, prosaic result of inten- tions, or any proposition accurate and coherent at some particular moment, but words that symbolized some long mental history, with reference to different meanings actual at different times, or else something that was true all at the same time, but ambiguous and complex, with meanings outreaching syntax, grammar, and words.

When Virgil wrote rapidum cretae or Cretae ueniemus Oaxen he invented the name Oaxes. It was partly a town in Crete, and partly several different rivers in Asia. In so far as it was in Crete, Cretae must be understood, and rapidum translated ‘swift’.

It was just over half a century ago, in 1892, that Gaston Boissier published a discussion of the Stoic ‘martyrs’ under Nero in the second chapter of his well-known work L'Opposition sous les Cèsars. Since then two especially noteworthy studies of the ‘philosophic opposition’ in the first century A.D. have appeared in English, that of M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), pp. 108 ff., and, more recently, that of D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism (1937), pp. 125 ff. The story of men who maintained a critical or, at the least, independent attitude in the face of a totalitarian règime is obviously of great significance for us to-day. Theoretically, of course, the term ‘autocracy’, in its strict sense of ‘unaccountability’ of government, cannot be applied to the imperial system of the early Empire. On paper the ‘tyrants’, Tiberius, Gaius, Nero, and Domitian, no less than the ‘enlightened monarchs’, Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, were delegates senatus populique Romani, chief magistrates and servants of the state. But in practice the ever-expanding range of the imperial provincia, coupled with the unceasing growth of the ‘mystical’ auctoritas bequeathed by the first Princeps to his successors, had produced an effective absolutism comparable, in many respects, to that of the autocrats or ‘dictators’ of modern authoritarian states. How did political thought and action in the Roman Empire respond to this de facto autocracy? How, above all, did they respond to its abuse? For us these are no merely academic questions. The parallelism, such as it is, between the ancient and the modern situations must serve as an excuse for presuming to rehandle a familiar theme.

The origins of Athenian class distinctions lie far back in the days of the synoecism, and it is tantalizing that so little is known of this process. Yet much of the interest of the question depends on differences of time and circumstance, so that, although the Athenian social atmosphere was something very unlike our own, the dissimilarity is partly due to conditions which were general in the ancient world and not peculiar to the case under consideration. It is true that, like us, the ancients were distinguished by the fact of belonging to classes. Not all were wealthy; not all were celebrated. Neither were they all skilled, humble, virtuous, or unscrupulous. As now, wealth was not infrequently the accident of birth, and the example of Democedes the physician, who won affluence by his personal capacity, is a rather rare one. On the other hand, many factors which emphasize class distinction to-day were absent. There was no large-scale industry in our sense of the word. Indeed, if we wished to speak of industry in Greek, we should use the term χειρουργία—something performed manually. Again, there was not available a large multiplicity of goods, the acquisition of which would stamp the obviously wealthy. Consider the simple items mentioned in the inscription which gives the inventory of Alcibiades’ bedroom furniture and compare them with those of a later age, with the multa et lauta supellex which Cicero tells us belonged to Pompey. Or compare Cicero's own villas and portrait galleries with the homely domesticity of Ischomachos as we see it in Xenophon's Oeconomica.

When the twentieth century ushered in the State Secondary School its fond foster-parents, gazing with delight on their new pet, gave it the only food they knew, an old-fashioned type of mixed classical and mathematical biscuits. The puppy was just getting its teeth into this when a friend dropping in, himself a bit of an expert, forthwith pronounced the food too hard and dry, and substituted a coloured and powerfully smelling preparation based on a scientific formula. The bewildered hound then transferred his attention to this. Soon, however, History came knocking at the door and placed before the dog what was pronounced to be the only real canine diet, a large meaty bone. When again a dish of Economics was offered, the pup leapt playfully towards this, disregarding the French, German, and Spanish recipes which had meanwhile been used to tempt the pampered pet. Before long all available floor space had been used up with an assortment of pabula varia, the dog drifting hopelessly from one plate to another in a vain effort to appease all the dog-fanciers. Now the owners are gazing with concern at the resultant dog. What promised to be a magnificent specimen, the pride of all Crafts, is but a sickly cur, and a martyr to chronic belly-ache.

A state of affairs has in fact been reached which must not and cannot last. Among the manifold changes that seem to be imminent, a reform of the Secondary School curriculum is overdue. If nothing else, then Mr. Butler's Act will render such changes necessary.

These few inconsequent notes have no excuse but the amusement their composition gave to the author. If they are of interest to a handful of readers the frivolous use in wartime of some horae subsecivae may be justified.

How fond Ovid is of using res in a personal sense! Augustus is addressed (Ars am. 1. 213) as pulcherrime rerum and Heracles (Her. 9. 107) as maxime rerum. In Fast. 1. 103 Chaos says somewhat comically referring to himself sum res prisca: ‘I'm an old thing’. Indeed Ovid is much given to the use of substantives with unusual meanings. Here are some examples: alea grandis inest (Ars am. 1. 376) ‘there is great danger’; discrimen=the parting of the hair (Ars am. 2. 303); color=a good complexion (cui color est, umero saepe patente cubet, Ars am. 2. 504. Did he borrow this from Vergil's nimium tie crede colori?). Elsewhere Ovid uses color=style; cf. Trist. 1. 1. 61, ipso noscere colore’, ‘your very style will bring you recognition’. In Ars am. 3. 172 a woman is asked quis furor est census corpore ferre suos, ‘why she wears her fortune on her back’—an expression of which he may have been reminded by Propertius’ matrona incedit census induta nepotum (3. 13. 11). What is the Latin for ‘dimples’? Ovid uses lacunae (Ars am. 3. 283 parvaeque utrimque lacunae), whereas Martial borrows the Greek word γɛλασīνοι (Mart. 7. 25. 6 nec grata est facies cui gelasinus abest). No doubt ‘inspiration’ might be expressed in Latin in many ways; Ovid uses pectus—aspicies quantum dederis mihi pectoris, he cries to Augustus at Trist. 2. 561. There seems at first sight little connexion between pecten and elegiac verse; yet at Fast. 2. 121 Ovid writes canimus… alterno pectine=‘I write in elegiacs’. In Fast. 5. 270 there occurs the word nebulae in the sense of the scum on wine—a use not noticed in Lewis and Short. Fatum=the evil genius (Fast. 5. 389 Troiae duo fata, of Heracles and Achilles) is not specifically Ovidian, for Cicero can write (pro Sest. § 93) duo ilia reipublicae paene fata, Gabinium et Pisonem.

It has been suggested that there is less difference between ancient Greek and modern Greek than between present-day English and Chaucer's language. The suggestion is somewhat questionable. Broadly speaking, apart from dialects and local variations, there are presently three languages in Greece, the Kathareuousa, the Demotiki, and the popular newspaper language, which is a blend of the two.

The Kathareuousa is the official and formal language, used in Government publications and statements, business correspondence, non-fictional books and treatises, law courts, University lectures, and in formal conversation. And although its grammatical structure is analytic as opposed to the synthesis of ancient Greek (a change which constitutes the main difference between classical and modern Greek, as it does between other modern and ancient languages), in the Kathareuousa the most strenuous attempt has been made to maintain the accidence and vocabulary of the ancient language.

Words are declined and verbs conjugated (without some of their more difficult and less used moods and tenses) as in Attic Greek, pronouns and prepositions and the cases governed by them are the same, and while, naturally, many terms which describe things known only to the modern world are not to be found in Liddell and Scott, they are generally legitimate and intelligible compounds of words which are to be found in Liddell and Scott. Ἀɛροπλἁνoν for aeroplane, ἀɛρòσTαtoν for balloon, are instances which come easily to mind.

Most teachers of Latin would doubtless cross out ubi if used by a pupil in the sense of ‘When?’ and substitute for it the other interogative adverb quando, notwithstanding the entry ‘quandō, ubi, when?’ retained from the older editions in Prof. J. F. Mountford's revision of the Revised Latin Primer (§ 168) and added in his revision of ‘Bradley's Arnold’ Latin Prose Composition (§ 157 (ii))— entries which are paralleled in some quite elementary Latin text-books.

No other authoritative Latin grammar, and no dictionary, that I have been able to consult records an interrogative use of the temporal ubi, but when the matter was brought to his notice Prof. Mountford instanced, from Merguet's Lexicon, the following passages of Cicero, which at first sight certainly seem to justify the entries:

de demo 77: ‘quamquam ubi tu te popularem, nisi cum pro populo fecisti, potes dicere?’

82: ‘ubi enim tuleras ut mihi aqua et igni interdiceretur?’

127: ‘ubi te isti rei populus Romanus praefecerat?’

pro Cael. 15: ‘ubi denique est in ista suspicione Caeli nomen auditum?’

When it was pointed out that all these passages, even though their natural translation undoubtedly appeared to be ‘When…?’, were rhetorical questions, not genuine requests for information like quando Roman uenisti?, and that they certainly did not prove that ubi and quando were generally interchangeable, Prof. Mountford replied:

‘…The first striking fact is that in all the speeches and philosophical works of Cicero, the only other possible examples are:

de domo 128: “sed quaero quae lex lata sit ut tu aedis meas consecrares, ubi tibi haec potestas data sit, quo iure feceris”.

Mr. chips, one might imagine, would be likely to associate bombs with Caesar for the rest of his quiet days. One Latin lesson tied the two together. A young officer in a New Zealand regiment had that thought in mind when he wrote his belated New Year greetings. ‘You will always think of us’, he said, ‘when you open Thucydides VII. Aren't we vain, Mr. Chips?’ There is no vanity about it. It is not only the memory of a very able Greek class which will entangle for ever the Sicilian Expedition with the events of 1941. There are grimmer reasons. Rommel arrived ominously at Tripoli on the day we read of Gylippus’ coming to Syracuse. We backed to Egypt step by step with the first Athenian disasters. The same moon shone on the Athenian attempt on Epipolae and on the opening of the German Balkan drive. Larissa, Athens, Corinth, Argos! The Anzacs retreated through Greece as the Athenians fought their last fight at Syracuse. They struggled back across the hills of Crete as Demosthenes and Nicias began the disastrous retreat. And then the Navy broke the spell. No ships filled the southern bays of Sicily to take Athenians home on the moonless nights. There was no Dunkirk, no evacuation. Misfortune was complete. Ours might have been. There will be no forgetting those months when another class reads Macaulay's favourite book again.

Macaulay was quite strikingly correct. Thucydides’ seventh book passes all the tests of classic excellence. Its narrative, like a Greek tragedy, is interwoven with the universal of human experience.