Autumn brings the new season's travel brochures thick and fast upon us, glossy and alluring; and none more enticing than those which invite us to cruise to classical lands. With word and picture they set us day-dreaming of a thousand sights to be seen, of picnic lunch among spring flowers and fallen columns, of bathing in azure waters, exotic local dishes, and the final, farewell dinner at sea. They wield the magic of place-names with almost Miltonic skill: Tarquinia and Paestum, Palermo and Tripoli; Athens, of course—Athens above all; and Delphi, too, and the Cyclades, Samos, and Troy; even Jerusalem and Baalbek.

To all philhellenes, anti-militarists, tyrant-haters, lovers of poetry, and dislikers of prose; to all who feel a distaste for politics, and especially the politics of the Roman Republic in its declining years; to all who in their youth wrestled with those famous (or infamous?) Commentaries until the iron entered their souls; to all, in short, whose interest in Julius Caesar is less than enthusiastic, we would offer an apology—and a consolation. An apology, because this number of Greece & Rome is largely concerned with their bête noire: this year is the 2,000th anniversary of Caesar's death, and it seemed a fitting occasion for attempting to take stock of a man who, for good or ill, had so great an impact on the Roman world. And a consolation, simply because it is a Caesarian millenary that we commemorate in this number: they can rest assured that we shall not do it again.

A Number of statues representing early national heroes, and presumably quite imaginary as portraits, were, according to the ancient sources, erected in Rome before the second century b.c. But our earliest reference to honorific portraits of contemporary, or near-contemporary, public persons relates to the year 158 b.c., when an order was issued, so the elder Pliny informs us, for the removal from the Forum of all statues of magistrates which had not been officially authorized— populi out senatus sententia statutae. What these second-century honorific statues of magistrates were like we do not know for certain, since none of them has survived. It would, however, be a fairly safe conjecture that they were the work, not of Romans or Italians, but of immigrant Hellenistic artists. We have no knowledge of any school of specifically Roman portrait-sculptors of this period; while from Greek lands, and particularly from Delos, comes abundant evidence that Greek portraitists, natives of Athens and of other east-Mediterranean centres, were carving portrait-statues of Roman officials and of other contemporary individuals precisely at this time. Some of these statues carried on the ‘baroque’ tradition of the idealized, heroized, or heaven-inspired Hellenistic ruler-portrait that began with Alexander's likenesses. Others, on the other hand, exemplify a new and highly realistic, one might almost say prosaic, development in Hellenistic iconography.

It was Minoan writing that led Arthur Evans to Crete. In Greek antique shops and elsewhere he had seen certain stone signets, each with three or four facets inscribed with what he felt sure were characters of some prehistoric system of writing (cf. Suppl. PL CLXXVII (a)); they were alleged to come from Crete. After a visit to that island in 1894 to collect further evidence he was able to recognize, besides these ‘hieroglyphs’, a later and more linear type of writing occasionally scratched on vessels of pottery or stone from prehistoric sites in Greece and Crete. In a long article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1894 he hazarded some remarkable conclusions from this scanty evidence: that although the ‘hieroglyphs’ probably concealed a pre-Greek language, the later, linear script might have been used for writing Greek; and that this linear script was a syllabary somehow related to the syllabary used in Cyprus in historical times as an alternative to the Greek alphabet. He was right on both points; but paradoxically his excavations at Knossos, begun in 1900 in pursuit of the origins and history of these scripts, led him gradually farther from the truth. Within the first week of digging he had begun to unearth clay tablets written in what he later dubbed ‘Linear B’ script (cf. Suppl. Pis. CLXXVIII (a), (b), CLXXIX and CLXXX (a)); and they were associated with objects at once identified as belonging to the Mycenaean civilization known from mainland Greece since Schliemann's excavations in the 1870'8. Further exploration, however, revealing the earlier stages of the civilization of Knossos, made it necessary to distinguish a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilization, in many ways a parent of the Mycenaean. Evans saw this civilization more and more as continuous, and as non-Greek. The corollary of this would be that the hieroglyphic script and the two linear scripts that succeeded it (for he now recognized an intermediate stage—‘Linear A’ (cf. Suppl. PI. CLXXVII (cj)—as well as the Linear B of his Knossos tablets)—all represented one non-Greek ‘Minoan’ language.

When Caesar was born, probably in 100 b.c., it is doubtful whether anyone at Rome would have expected a son of this secondary branch of the patrician Iulii Caesares to rise to great eminence in the state. The family, to be sure, was very old; it was said to have come to Rome from Alba Longa when King Tullus Hostilius destroyed the city, and the Iulii kept the tradition alive by maintaining associations with Alba and the Alban gods. But, in spite of the family's antiquity, the nobility of the Iulii, to paraphrase Cicero on another patrician, was better known to men of letters and to historians than it was to the voters. It was not even very well known to men of letters and historians, for the ten or eleven lulii who reached high office in the fifth and fourth centuries hardly average a line apiece in the six books that Livy devotes to their period—books crowded with vivid stories of patrician families like the Fabii, the Manlii, and the Valerii.

In all European literature there is nothing more justly famous than Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaa in Bk. vi of the Odyssey. Editors of the Odyssey from antiquity to the present day have agreed in regarding the land of the Phaeacians and Scheria, their city, as an imaginary place, although it is remarked from time to time that it may be drawn from some real place and the Phaeacians from a real people. But there is in fact sufficient internal evidence in the poem to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Scheria is to be identified with Trapani in northwestern Sicily. The extraordinary thing is that no one ever realized this seemingly obvious fact or sought to make the identification until Samuel Butler did so some sixty years ago. His book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897, was, however, so badly received that all its contents, good and bad alike, were rejected as so much rubbish. The only informed consideration his theories have ever received came from Professor Farrington (recently retired from the University College of Swansea), who wrote in general support of them in 1929, when lecturer at Cape Town University. No one, so far as the author of this article has been able to ascertain, has ever so much as paid a visit to Trapani in order to see Butler's country and to check his facts, until he and his son did so in the summer of 1952.

MichaelVentris died at the age of 34 last September in a motor accident. His discovery that the Linear B texts of Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, and other sites were Greek ranks as one of the most brilliant achievements of scholarship, and has been internationally acclaimed a feat of the same order as that of Champollion in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The brilliance of this discovery is matched by its importance; it will take years to work out the consequences of the new knowledge, which proves that Mycenaean civilization was Greek-speaking, gives us texts contemporary and comparable with texts from the adjoining civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, and shows us the state of the Greek language half a millennium before our earliest Greek literature.

JuliusCaesar wrote seven books (a book to every year) on his campaigns in Gaul from 58 to 52 b.c., and three books (the first two describing the events of 49, the third those of 48) on his campaigns against Pompey and the Republican government in the civil war. A. Hirtius, who had perhaps been his secretary in Gaul, wrote Book viii of the B.G.—presumably in the latter part of 44—to describe Caesar's doings in 51 and 50, to link the two parts of Caesar's work together. This we know from Hirtius' own evidence, from the modest little introduction to his book. Who wrote the surviving accounts of Caesar's campaigns from 47 to 45 (the Bellum Alexandrinum, Bellum Africum, and Bellum Hispaniense), we do not know at all.

When Juvenal's friend Umbricius is enumerating the manifold occupations which will furnish a livelihood for a starving Greek, he places the practice of medicine between the skill of the tightrope-walker and the black art of the wizard. Though in this outburst he is stressing particularly the versatility of the race of Ulysses, we are entitled to give a liberal interpretation to the contemptuous diminutive Graeculus and to assume that the term is loosely used to comprehend all Greek-speaking aliens in Rome. The readiness of the Greeks to set up as doctors, the exaggerated respect they commanded, and the unsuitability of such a profession for the serious-minded Roman are set forth in a speech of that arch-enemy of Hellenism, Cato, preserved for us in Pliny's Natural History Certainly the doctors whose names appear in the poems of Juvenal, Martial, and Ausonius sound unmistakably Greek —Alcon, Diaulus, Dasius, Eunomus, Heras, Hermocrates, Herodes, Symmachus, and Themison. The low status of the physician is well brought out in those epigrams of Martial in which, with no appreciable difference in the modus vivendi, a doctor becomes an undertaker and an eye-specialist a gladiator. Phaedrus too has told us the instructive tale of the worthless cobbler who turned doctor. We are reminded of the facility with which the hero of Mr. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, who has, by becoming an assistant at a pets’ cemetery in the U.S.A., lost face with the English community, seeks a living as a non-sectarian minister. This comparison carries with it the implication that professional training was sometimes lacking; and indeed, if we exclude the medical handbooks, references to the student are as rare as Juvenal's black swan. But we all know Martial's complaint that, when as yet he was merely poorly, the imposition of a hundred chilly hands (the hands of Dr. Symmachus' apprentices) precipitated a genuine fever.5 Not merely financial success but a certain degree of respectability were of course acquired by many doctors who practised in Rome. In this connexion should first be mentioned Julius Caesar's gift of the citizenship to encourage practitioners to settle permanently in the City. Pliny importuned Trajan with a request that citizenship should be granted to the relatives of his physician. At the top of the profession were such men as Antonius Musa, the physician of Augustus, to whose medical skill and deserved imperial distinction adequate reference is made by the Emperor's biographer. Employment was clearly conditional upon satisfactory treatment. Cicero in a letter to Atticus uses a simile of the transfer of a patient from one consultant to another. The more affluent invalid could, as in a much later age Sidonius shows us, seek safety in numbers and health in the multiplication of remedies. For Sidonius alludes bitterly to the bedside wrangles of rival physicians. We should dearly love to know what happened at a ‘sick-parade’ in the medical quarters of a legionary camp but, our evidence being scanty and not of a personal nature, the subject must reluctantly be dismissed. Undoubtedly the epic treatment of Mago's spear-wound by the ancient Synhalus bears no resemblance to sober fact; nor are Punic practices a guide to Roman. Seneca, a more sober authority, contrasts the noisy outcries of recruits, albeit their wounds are merely superficial, with the quiet and patient endurance of veterans into whom the steel has gone deep. The latter, he says, behaved as if the affected limbs belonged to other people. Two uncongenial duties, which fell to the lot of certain doctors, call for brief mention. The first is their attendance on condemned criminals who were ordered to perform the happy dispatch with their own hands. In Nero's reign, Suetonius tells us, the expert would sever the veins of any who dawdled. The second assignment is connected with the business of the slave markets. The pitiable creatures, conspicuously placed on a wooden scaffold, naked and (if newly arrived from abroad) with whitened feet, bore suspended from their necks a certificate recording not merely name and aptitudes but imperfections both moral and physical. The discriminating buyer would, if he suspected significant omissions from the health sheet of the slave he fancied, supplement the testimony of eye and hand (for the men, women, and children were prodded like beasts at a cattle-mart) by taking medical opinion. The grisly scene is painted with great relish by Claudian in his onslaught on the eunuchconsul Eutropius.

It is a poor age which does not throw up a giant. Whether he responds to a crisis or whether he creates his own opportunity, rising unbidden to tyranny, the genius dominates the contemporary scene. His achievements linger with posterity. Yet without that character which can attract loyalty and absolute devotion, without that personal magnetism which can turn dependable associates into fanatical adherents and servants into slaves, no run of successes can lift a man out of the rut of leadership into that position from which he bestraddles his contemporaries like a Colossus.

It is a very remarkable fact that, in the register of Chinese cities and counties for the year a.d. 5, there should appear a city and county with the most ancient Chinese name for Rome. The Chinese, then as now, did not give foreign names to their cities. In that list, with its over 1,500 cities, there are only two other Chinese places with foreign names. We know that both those localities were populated by immigrants who came from those places outside China. It follows that people from the Roman Empire must have emigrated to China and founded this city.

So much is written nowadays about the propagandist element in Caesar's Commentaries, and his supposed misrepresentation of his own actions, that it is almost forgotten that he provides the only contemporary narrative of a major Roman imperialist war, and that by its principal agent. The obscure record of the wars of Augustus has been subjected to a severe scrutiny, and the most diverse and recondite theories propounded about his purposes. But this long and detailed account of the greatest single extension of the Roman Empire has hardly been examined seriously for the things that its author was not concerned to conceal—the springs and purposes and means of that new form of imperialism that under Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus converted the Roman dominion from a suzerainty over a maritime fringe of Mediterranean provinces into a solid and broad-based continental empire. Caesar is most valuable in his admissions, for he admits such actions,; methods, and objectives as were commonly approved by the opinion of the governing class, whether political friends or enemies.

The victories of Pharsalus, Thapsus, and Munda had left Caesar in a position of undisputed authority and, as the year 44 opened, the question in Roman minds must have been how Caesar intended to consolidate and perpetuate his position. His assassination on the Ides of March left his contemporaries with little indication of what political solution Caesar had devised, and left to subsequent historians of the period the intriguing problem of deducing from such evidence as the last few months of Caesar's life provide what his political intentions had been. The initial difficulty of this problem is to free one's mind from the simplifications and, indeed, distortions with which subsequent political thought has reported the critical events of Caesar's last months; for in most of western civilization, particularly the English-speaking portion, the popular impression of Caesar as a tyrant and the conspirators as democrats is almost ineradicable, thanks to the dramatic story of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The first 150 years of the Roman Empire, from the settlement of Augustus in 27 b.c. to the death of Hadrian in a.d. 138, saw the emergence of Rome as a power which in various ways was to influence the future of Europe, the Near East, and the whole civilized world for many centuries. Among other aspects too numerous to mention, a new system of government emerged, and a new theory of the place of the ruler in the state. On the emperor depended all prosperity, from him alone came the blessing of peace, and he was the sole source of victory. It is a period, therefore, in which the emotional and psychological relationship between ruler and ruled is of interest and importance, as it was in Elizabethan England.