A poet born, an orator murdered—these are two events of the year after the death of Caesar. Neither, it is true, can be compared in significance with the Ides of March; but after 2,000 years both are still worth recalling. Ovid at any rate seems likely to receive his due share of attention. The modern inhabitants of his native town have instituted a whole Ovidian year to mark his bimillenary, thereby adroitly evading chronological controversy and ensuring that at least one end of their celebrations will fall on the right date. An international commemorative volume of essays has for some time been in preparation by Monsieur N. I. Herescu in France; and here we have two Ovidian articles in this number, while Mr. L. P. Wilkinson's lively appreciation of the poet in Ovid Recalled is already well known. Cicero's prospects seem at present rather more uncertain, but in this country the Summer Conference at Cambridge on ‘The Changing Face of Classical Studies’ will devote one of its study groups to him, and we hope that his death will not go altogether unnoticed in the October number of Greece & Rome.

Clandestine excavation may never quite have attained the status of a national sport in Egypt, but it has none the less been undertaken there on a considerable and no doubt profitable scale for several millennia: tomb-robbing began almost as soon as there were tombs worth robbing. But it is only in the last 150 years or so that these operations have been extended from depositories of real or imagined treasure to rubbish dumps; and only in the last two generations that business in the new branch of the trade has become really brisk. Papyri have been the new attraction, and interest in them has grown as discoveries have multiplied. Vast numbers of papyri have now been found, and by one means or another more are still being brought to light. Of recent finds the most outstanding is a substantial manuscript in the Martin Bodmer collection, of which the editio princeps is just being published in Switzerland, and which is discussed in the following pages by one of its editors. This new papyrus, it seems, came from Alexandria; but beyond that, as so often happens, its provenance is unknown.

About two years ago the papyrus of Menander's Dyskolos was seen in Alexandria, and was afterwards sent, in two instalments, to the library of M. Martin Bodmer, the famous collector, in Geneva. There it was decisively identified and its authenticity was established by Professor Victor Martin. This unique papyrus of a complete play by Menander, which was hitherto known only from the scanty fragments to be gleaned from anthologies, forms a beautifully preserved codex which may be dated around a.d. 200. (See Plates III–V.) At the time when this article was being written, the Dyskolos was about to be published by Professor Martin in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana series, with the requisite textual reconstruction, translation, and notes, to which I have had the privilege of contributing. As will be seen from the editto princeps, out of a total of about 969 verses, there are only about 9 verses missing—in two places in the fourth act; but about 30 verses in the first and second acts are incomplete, and approximately 200 require some sort of emendation, usually to compensate for the scribe's metrical inaccuracies.

We publish in this number a survey of recent developments in the field of Romano-British studies. As the author observes, our new knowledge of Roman Britain percolates only slowly, if at all, into the school-books. But what he says of archaeology, where progress is perhaps most rapid today, applies in some degree to all branches of classical studies; for in every field, as time goes on, the accepted ideas do change, and new, undisputed facts do emerge. Our books should take account of this, but in these days of high publishing costs are all too slow in doing so. Hence this ‘Progress Report’, which is intended to be the first of a series, and which we hope will prove useful to our readers. Their comments, and suggestions of topics for future reports, will be welcome.

What sort of person was Penelope? If Homer were consulted about the casting for a dramatization of the story, what type would he choose to play her part? What sort of person was this Penelope, for whom her husband abandoned a goddess—more than one goddess, indeed—but in whom he yet felt so little confidence on his return that she was almost the last person in the household to learn his identity? One hundred and eight suitors, according to Telemachos' careful count, buzzed about her; either she could not or she would not dismiss them entirely, but she put them off year after year, while she wept for her absent husband, and looked after the housekeeping, and managed the estate, with no help at all from her father-in-law—managed it pretty successfully too, one would think, for all Telemachos' dissatisfaction, or the house could hardly have stood the drain of such continuous entertainment. In all her appearances in the story she seems irreproachably circumspect; yet her own son, a rather staid and solemn fellow, said to a complete stranger, ‘My mother says I am Odysseus' son, but how should I know?’ Even allowing for a conventional reference to a proverbial saying, it is a strange remark from a modest, unsophisticated young man who did not set himself up for a wit, and who, as he justly remarked to his father, was ‘not in the habit of behaving like a light-headed fool’. It is certainly not the sort of answer that Homeric heroes customarily give about their lineage.

In a book that is commonly presented to boys and girls in recognition of their progress in classical languages and literature, the studious recipient will read of Ovid that ‘he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world's bookshelves’. This was in 1912. The opinion of a critic who was at little pains to read the authors (Plautus, for example) whom he was so ready to dismiss with cursory jibes is not in itself worthy of citation. Allowing, however, for gross exaggeration, we can no doubt regard his judgement as consistent with the prevailing opinion of that time. We know too much about ‘wicked writers’ now to give Ovid the prize for wickedness, or even, what he might have aspired to, a very high mark for ‘naughtiness’. Such knowledge was not, indeed, outside the reach of Stobart's contemporaries, but the classical scholars of those days seem to have confined their improper reading to the classics and to have reacted, publicly at least, with expressions of shocked disapproval. The combined romanticism and puritanism of the nineteenth century in England were disastrous to what remained of the popularity that Ovid had enjoyed from Chaucer onwards, and, as usually happens, moral censure was reinforced by aesthetic depreciation. The worthy Sellar did not live long enough to put together the chapter on Ovid in his Roman Poets of the Augustan Age. The chapter we have, concocted from his posthumous notes by W. P. Ker, makes rather depressing reading. We are reminded that Ovid is, in his love poetry, ‘the poet of pleasure and intrigue’, Tibullus and Propertius poets ‘of serious sentiment or passion’.

The true site of the oracle of Dodona was discovered only in comparatively recent years. Christopher Wordsworth was the first to identify it, and the Greek archaeologist Carapanos the first to explore it. It lies to the south-west of Ioannina, at a spot most easily accessible from the coast of Thesprotiaby way of the valley of the Thyamis (Fig. 1). It is reached today by a branch road some ten miles to the south of loannina. The long, narrow valley in which it stands is completely dominated on its western side, and for much of the day overshadowed, by the almost precipitous mountain Tomaros (Olitzika), which rises to a height of 6,500 feet. This mountain bears a chain of craggy peaks, and its flank is scarred with gorges and torrents, fed by the snow which lasts some four months of the year on the upper slopes. The climate of the district is severe and well substantiates Homer's description of Δωδώνη δυσχωί-μερος. The valley is remarkable for its violent thunderstorms, which bring torrential rain to fill the mountain cataracts in the summer, and its soil is thus unusually swampy. The foothills of Tomaros are covered with pine trees, while in the plain below a few rather ragged oaks are still to be seen. The rivers of the district are the Acheron and the Kokytos, both associated with the underworld; and not far away is the Acheloos which makes its way down into Akarnania. (See Pl. VI.)

No author is more helpful than Ovid to anyone whose task it is to express modern ideas in Latin or to sum up in a brief and memorable way the achievements of distinguished men and women. Here I have gratefully brought together some examples of the help he has given me during the last twelve years in presentations for honorary degrees at Oxford. My hope is that this form of bimillenary tribute will not seem out of place in Greece & Rome. The Editors will know that the revival of spoken Latin is much in the air at the moment—there was a conference on the subject at Avignon in 1956—and they themselves not long ago invited suggestions for a Latin rendering of ‘television’. Ovid's own prophetic shot at this word is listed among the other examples of his foresight given below. All my borrowings from him have been actually used in public orations; but I have not thought it necessary to name the honorands concerned, nor have I sometimes scrupled to adapt to present purposes the Latin used to introduce the borrowed quotation.

One of the difficulties facing the teacher of Classics is that of trying to keep abreast of the growing spate of new information. The same problem exists for teachers of other subjects, but in scientific fields it is possible, though arduous, to keep in touch through the several excellent periodicals like Discovery.For the classical scholar there are few such aids apart from the yearly summary in The Journal of Roman Studies, and one can easily refuse to acknowledge any advance at all and rely on texts and commentaries absorbed in one's own school and undergraduate days.

Plato is the world's greatest philosopher, far transcending those who went before and a pattern to those who have come after. No other philosophical writer has had such enduring value and interest. He has been, down the ages, the companion and friend of the world's great thinkers and poets; for, though he lived in a world that, compared with our own with its vast resources of travel and knowledge, seems small and primitive, he is unique among men who have endeavoured to teach the things that matter, that are permanent. He ventured into realms of thought never before approached and had to find Greek words to match his thought while as yet the language had no technical phraseology. This tends to make some of the important theories he expounds difficult to grasp. But the dialogue form in which he wrote, the characterization of which he was master, and the vivid illustrations that light up his teaching awaken in the reader intense interest and help to make easier the task of following Plato in his ‘speculation upon all time and all place’, which he tells us is Philosophy.

This paper is a warmed-up dish, crambe repetita, but devoid, I trust, of lethal after-effects. I had hoped to serve it up without much re-cooking. Vain hope—for in the interval since its first appearance Denys Page, Regius Professor of Greek in this University, has delivered a course of lectures on the Odyssey, and subsequently polished them up into book form. The book came out only last year; and after I had read it and then reverted to my own paper, I felt rather like a man peering about with a candle after switching off the electric light. At first I thought it my duty to attempt some analysis of Professor Page's book, or at least of its conclusions, but after some struggles I abandoned the idea. For, after all, Professor Page's line of approach does not cross mine. He is a scholar of a high order, full of theories about how, when, and where the Odyssey was composed, and in search of evidence to support his theories he puts the poem under a microscope and is constrained to devote much of his attention to its defects, to the holes in its fabric, so to speak, and the patches, rather than to its merits. So it comes as something of a surprise when, at the end of his book, he ranks the Odyssey as K 2 among the peaks of literature, second only to Everest in the form of Shakespeare.

The discovery in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, at Pylos in Messenia, the home of Homer's Nestor, of clay tablets written in a script (Linear B) hitherto found only in the Late Minoan II palace (c. 1500–1400 b.c.) at Knossos in Minoan Crete, created a stir at the time and brought to the fore an acute problem which had already been taxing the ingenuity of classical scholars for many a year in their attempts at a solution. Unfortunately, though the discovery was seen in its proper perspective by some, all thoughts and energies were soon devoted to the purposes of the war; Greece was occupied by the enemy and excavations were suspended. Thus it is only within the last few years that the Pylos tablets have been found to be decipherable; and with this has come the solution of a problem of outstanding importance not only to classical scholars but to prehistorians generally. It is perhaps as well to state briefly how this problem arose and then to discuss the resultant increase in our knowledge due to its solution.

There are features in both the logical and the dramatic structure of the Crito the interest of which has not, I think, been sufficiently appreciated. They are worth discussion; and this will lead further to a consideration of the dialogue as μίμησις in the sense in which Aristotle uses the word in the Poetics.

Physiognomy (φυσιογνωμονία), the systematic diagnosis of a man's character from his bodily features, originated as a branch of Greek medicine. True, it had antecedents in Babylonia, but the Babylonian science was more concerned with the prediction of the vicissitudes of a man's life than with deciphering his mental and moral qualities, and even deliverances dealing with such qualities were couched in the omen form. Prophetic physiognomists or metoposcopi held their ground throughout classical antiquity, but it was recognized that there were two classes of physiognomist, the seers and the physicians. The medical science of physiognomy was an attempt to extend the idea of treating a man's visible conditions as signs or symptoms of his invisible state, and to produce a list of signs such that the mind's construction could be inferred when it was not transparent. According to Galen this science was invented by Hippocrates himself, which is likely enough, for physiognomical observations occur in probably authentic Hippo-cratic treatises, and there seem to be none in earlier Greek authors. It was introduced into Athens about the time of Socrates, for the philosopher Antisthenes devoted a treatise to it, and there was a story of a visiting expert's diagnosing Socrates as stupid and fond of women.

Γρ⋯λλος, Lat. gryllus, is the ancient technical term for a kind of caricature (iocosa tabella) as opposed to serious painting or drawing. No monument of art to which this term could be applied with any probability was known up to a few years ago. But in the last number of the Classical Review Professor D. L. Page has pointed out that in an illustrated literary papyrus published recently the word γρ⋯λλῳ must refer to the drawings transmitted in that same text. With this I agree; and I should like to put before the readers of Greece & Rome the main facts about that strange document as I now see them.

The present vogue for prisoners' escape stories gives rise quite naturally to an inquiry about the ancient world: has Greek and Roman history or literature any comparable stories to offer? One might expect their pages to be crowded with such stories; escapes are usually made in time of wars and tyrannies, of upheavals and rapid changes of fortune; and heaven knows there were enough of all these in the history of Greece and Rome.