In September 1913 some two hundred teachers of Latin assembled at Cambridge to study the Direct Method. There was much demonstration, experiment, and discussion: there was great enthusiasm. I best remember one thing. W. L. Paine had brought a class of about a dozen Whitgift boys who had one year's Latin behind them. I was interested in their keen enjoyment of the work, their eagerness to speak and answer. But what surprised me was their accuracy. A boy was called out at the end of the lesson to write up on the board the story which, mainly by question and answer, had been put before the class: he did it with almost no mistakes, and quite quickly. Any such blunder as the confusion of nominative and accusative had met, as the lesson proceeded, with a chorus of immediate correction: but I was still surprised at the final proof of a far higher degree of accuracy at that stage than I had ever seen or believed to be possible. This shows that Dr. Rouse was not a lone magician, of infinite resource and sagacity, who had invented an instrument which only he could use. The Whitgift boys were quite as good as the Perse boys. Paine was a scholar, but of nothing like Dr. Rouse's quality in scholarship. He was a well-qualified Latin master, who had taught on old lines at Oundle and found the whole business abominably dull. After experimenting with oral work in a less degree, he was encouraged at Whitgift to adopt the Direct Method: there he found himself.

The results of epigraphy are not so immediately attractive to the eye as those of most other branches of archaeology. Certainly the fascination of extracting the tale of history from contemporary records on stone, and the wealth and variety of the material available from this source, are coming to be more and more generally recognized. The fact remains that a collection of inscriptions published in the modern manner, consisting of little more than a list of dimensions and a series of battered-looking texts, cannot invite attention in the compelling way of a bronze, a vase, or some everyday implement of ancient life.

I Have been invited to write an article on the subject of the pronunciation of Latin. I put this fact in the forefront, for I do not wish it to be supposed that I am a fanatic who seeks every opportunity of bombarding an unwilling audience with his one fixed idea. As a matter of fact, my main feeling in the matter is that a completely undue importance has been attached to the question, and that it is the so-called reformers and not their opponents who are responsible for this tedious discussion. Having made this apology I will state my case with what brevity I can.

To collect something or another, stamps, coins or butterflies, is a universal pastime, and it needs no explanation or excuse save the satisfaction which it brings. One may play the same game in another way, by collecting information; but the facts which one accumulates must be remote from one's duty and avocation. An old scholar taught me the game more than fifty years ago and I have never stopped playing it; it is such an easy and so engrossing a game. You choose some subject or other which takes your fancy; you buy a note-book and label it with the title of your theme; and you keep jotting down therein whatsoever bears upon the subject, as it comes your way, in all your reading, observation and reflection. I have had many such note-books, and some I have soon grown tired of; but others have lasted long and served me well. One of these is called De Ludis Antiquorum; it is grown old and shabby, for I played with it during many years. Your subject opens out wonderfully as time goes on; it tempts you into by-ways, it carries you afield; if you play the game aright it never comes to an end. It grows in interest continually, for things are interesting only in so far as they relate themselves to other things; only then can you put two and two together and tell stories about them. Such is science itself and such is all the knowledge that interests mankind.

Dr. Alington's golden darts are, as usual, exquisitely fashioned, but they are poor things in a desperate defence and ensure victory to the enemy all along the line.

There probably has never been a time when as much interest was shown in archaeology, and in excavation in particular, as at the present day. The thousands who yearly visit Housesteads, and the widespread popular outcry, echoed in the syndicated press, when Hadrian's Wall was threatened by quarrying operations, reflect the new spirit.

The town of Gadara, on the eastern shores of Galilee, was as famous in the Hellenistic Age for its culture as it afterwards became for its swine. Among its sons were Menippus the Cynic, hero of Lucian and model of Petronius, Meleager, also a satirist but better known as the charming weaver of the Garland, Theodorus, the candid tutor of Tiberius, and lastly, Philodemus. If these four have any quality in common, it is nothing oriental, but rather a certain realism and common sense—Cynicism purged of Cynic squalor by contact with the Seleucid courts.

The veering of the weathercock of taste is a phenomenon which has never yet been fully studied by either aestheticians or historians of art. The shifting of emphasis in matters of choice and appreciation in art have been faithfully recorded, but as yet no attempt to explain the variations has been put forward. Sometimes variations of taste throughout a long period are in the form of a progressive or regressive series, sometimes they are purely erratic, one movement not necessarily being dependent upon its predecessor.

I have been invited to write an article on the subject of the pronunciation of Latin. I put this fact in the forefront, for I do not wish it to be supposed that I am a fanatic who seeks every opportunity of bombarding an unwilling audience with his one fixed idea. As a matter of fact, my main feeling in the matter is that a completely undue importance has been attached to the question, and that it is the so-called reformers and not their opponents who are responsible for this tedious discussion. Having made this apology I will state my case with what brevity I can.

It is the special function of the poet to create beauty. Loveliness may appear in many thousand forms, but among these one of the most satisfying is the ‘pen-picture’, the Homeric or Virgilian simile, complete and perfect in three or four lines. Pope speaks of

‘The Simile that solitary shines

In the dry desert of a thousand lines.’

The veering of the weathercock of taste is a phenomenon which has never yet been fully studied by either aestheticians or historians of art. The shifting of emphasis in matters of choice and appreciation in art have been faithfully recorded, but as yet no attempt to explain the variations has been put forward. Sometimes variations of taste throughout a long period are in the form of a progressive or regressive series, sometimes they are purely erratic, one movement not necessarily being dependent upon its predecessor.

In 1763 the Clarendon Press at Oxford issued a Greek Testament printed from a fount newly cut for them by John Baskerville of Birmingham. It was the beginning of a new era in Greek typography in England. For the crabbed and curly abbreviations which perpetuated in print the obscurities of manuscript, following the sixteenth-century type of Robert Estienne, were substituted clearly formed letters pleasant to see and easy to read. Some abbreviations there still were, for the basis was still a written hand of not a century later than Estienne, but they were not obscure. Estienne, printer to the King, Francis I, had taken as his model the letters drawn for him by the King's scribe, a Cretan, Angelos Vergetios: Baskerville borrowed from the school library of Coventry a manuscript written by an English schoolmaster, Euclid's Harmonics copied by Philemon Holland, and ‘partly formed his characters from it’.

It is good for the schoolmaster who considers himself up-to-date to research occasionally among old school-books, and to discover how many of his ‘modern’ ideas are not modern at all; and a few evenings spent in the library of an old country house may be an enlightening and humbling experience. The pioneer will find that he is just an antiquary, the innovator that he is a reactionary. But if he can stomach the blow to his pride, he may find himself amused as well as enlightened, though the source of amusement will vary with the type of book. An eighteenth-century Greek Grammar will rely for its entertainment on the drawings and manuscript glosses of the pupil; but pleasure less crude is afforded by such a book as Familiarium Colloquiorum Libellus Graece et Latine, which was published in London in the year 1667, autore Johanne Posselio.

The excellent article by Professor Droop in the May number of Greece and Rome leaves little to add. There are, however, one or two points on which it seems to me necessary to enlarge and perhaps to join issue.

Many of us have attended performances of Greek plays; a smaller number have themselves acted in one or more. To all these the question of the production of any play that is being read becomes of great interest, an interest which is not always adequately catered for by commentators in their editions. When I read a Greek play, I always like to imagine myself as ‘producing’ it, and try to visualize it on the stage, as Aristotle tells budding playwrights they should, when they are composing tragedies. I have taken here as giving examples of the kinds of point to be raised what is probably the best known of all Greek plays; but several of the kind of questions that it compels us to ask ourselves can be asked equally well in many other plays.

‘I never looke upon an author’, says Montaigne, ‘be they such as write of vertue and of actions, but I curiously endevour to find out what he was himselfe.… Plutarke's compositions, if they be well savored, do plainly manifest the same unto us: and I am perswaded I know him inwardly: yet would I be glad we had some memories of his owne life.’ What we know of the externals of Plutarch's life can in fact be put in a few sentences. Born shortly before the middle of the first century a.d., a member of an old Boeotian family in easy circumstances, he combined with the ordinary occupations of a country gentleman the profession of lecturing, though it is improbable that he charged any fees for his courses. His devotion to the municipal affairs of Chaeronea involved him in various missions, one of which took him to Rome while still a young man, in the principate of Vespasian. Here his days were occupied by lecturing and what he grandly calls ‘political business’, his evenings by dinner parties; so that he had no time, he tells us, to practise himself in the Roman tongue. In his youth he visited Alexandria also, perhaps for his studies; and we find him at Rome again under Domitian, perhaps collecting materials for the Roman biographies. But his later years were passed, so far as our knowledge goes, between Chaeronea, where he kept a sort of school for gentlemen's sons and held a succession of municipal offices, and Delphi, where he was a member of the priestly college. He married the daughter of a fellow citizen; begot five children (two of whom died in childhood); and himself lived to a ripe age. Practically the whole of this meagre curriculum vitae has been constructed out of scattered references in Plutarch's own writings. Almost the only piece of extraneous evidence is Suidas' statement that Trajan made him consul in his old age: this I have some difficulty in crediting, for there is no hint anywhere in his writings of his having held high office or of any personal relations which could explain Trajan's act—and Plutarch was hardly the man to leave his honours unmentioned. If he has told us little of the outward tenor of his life, I suspect that there was little to tell. He likens it himself to a well-written manuscript, wherein are few erasures.

JuliusCaesar was murdered not because he abused his autocratic powers but because the Roman nobility was not prepared to stomach an autocrat at all. Octavian, therefore, made fair profession of restoring the Republic and watched over the establishment of a new constitution in which the functions of government were divided between the Princeps, First Citizen of Rome, and the Senate, a constitution in which, in the last resort, although the fact was ingeniously concealed, supreme power lay with the Princeps. When, towards the end of his life, Augustus wrote: ‘Of power I had no more than my colleagues in each several magistracy’, he expressed no more than an ingenious half-truth. The Senate might console itself with the reflection that it voted the Emperor his imperium for limited periods of five or ten years, and that it reserved the right to refuse to extend this imperium or, after the death of Augustus, to elect a successor to him. These were vain thoughts, but they were entertained none the less. In the background was the army, strong enough and ready enough to see that the empire which had been established by the legions should not be destroyed by the politicians.

Tacitus as an historian has long been critically revalued: as an artist, I think, he has been spared too much. To promote that further revaluation is the purpose of these notes.