These words were not spoken by a classicist with an axe to grind, but by a scientist addressing his fellow scientists at the 1961 meeting of the British Association. The reminder was timely. A few weeks later the first of the ‘new wave’ of universities opened its doors to students at Brighton. There is an important period of development ahead. What is disturbing is that in the plans so far announced by the new institutions there should be no apparent provision for the study of antiquity, and in particular of the civilization of Greece and Rome. Yet even if the study of the ancient world for its own sake is considered too unpractical to be acceptable in the universities of the sixties, one may still ask what school of European or social studies can make its work a fully intelligible and fruitful whole if it tends only the branches of the tree and neglects the roots, or what links can be established between diverse disciplines if their common background is ignored. To an extent that no one can yet determine our language, literature, religion, superstitions, and institutions of every kind, even our social attitudes and our very cast of thought, are all profoundly influenced by our inheritance from the past. They will be fully understood only when they are fully illuminated by what we can learn from that past, whether medieval, classical, or even prehistoric. In this sense there is no study more topical or more useful than the study of antiquity; and no humane study, certainly, in which greater advances and more revealing discoveries are waiting to be made.

‘The last two centuries of the second millennium saw the disappearance of the highly developed civilisations which had, up to then, been flourishing in several lands in the near East, including Egypt, the Aegean area, and Anatolia. Their place was taken by other cultures, none of which seems to have been on the high level which had been maintained previously, and it would be far from the truth to suggest that the peoples who had been dominant earlier in the eastern Mediterranean area merely lost ground culturally. For they did, in fact, do much more. They almost faded out of sight, at least for a time. Such a deep change, simultaneous in several lands, is not likely to have been due to purely local causes. Consequently, the presence of some overriding factor may be suspected, a political event of such magnitude that it could affect a vast area.’

‘O’level Latin is small Latin. It is very small Latin indeed. Why should a classical scholar be exercised by its problems? Why should a schoolmaster be exercised by them if his heart is in sixth-form Classics? Why indeed should anyone be interested?

During the recent controversy on entrance requirements for Oxford and Cambridge a curious but unmistakable reluctance could be observed among classical scholars in the universities. I mean the reluctance to defend or even pay attention to the precarious position of Latin as an entrance requirement. Those teaching Classics at provincial universities felt that this was a matter for the ancient universities since they themselves had no such requirements. And to many in the ancient universities small Latin seemed altogether too small to engage their attention. Hence the feeling, nihil ad nos. In any case, Latin, they argued, was firmly entrenched in the bigger schools, and faculty demands in all universities would do the rest.

The fourth century saw a withdrawal of philosophy to its more secluded haunts, but it was only a partial withdrawal. There remained and developed a certain antithesis, physical and topographical as well as spiritual and philosophical, between the stoa (and the agora) and the garden.

Among those who have little direct experience of grammar schools, whose opinions are formed by chatty articles and cranky correspondence in the more light-hearted newspapers, it is an accepted view—a dogma in the proper sense of the word—that Latin is on its rapid way out of the schools and that Greek is already virtually extinct. If I explain to the curious outsider that, besides a general interest in schools, I have a special concern for the Latin and Greek taught in them, the almost invariable response is, ‘I shouldn't think you have much to do, then, nowadays’. Whether my own time is properly filled or not, it would be inappropriate to discuss in public; but the implication is worth considering. A few facts may be given, for without them opinions are of little value.

The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which Aeschylus may have altered the forms or emphases of the traditional plots which he used in the Oresteia and the Supplices and to decide whether we are justified in interpreting any such adjustments as a commentary on recent or contemporary politics. Much of what follows is not, of course, new; but a fresh analysis of the old evidence will, I hope, show that rather than take sides strongly in political disputes, Aeschylus chose to suggest how men ought to approach problems of public life and solve them in the best interests of all.

It is not easy to give a satisfactory answer to boys and girls who rightly want to know why they should embark on the study of Latin if they are to drop it after two years. The solution seemed to be to make the question unnecessary, and so a break was made at Mirfield Grammar School with the traditional approach to Latin for those pupils who were unable to pursue the normal ‘O’ level course. Previous policy had been to follow a parallel course in the two streams for the first two years. A very real fault in the system was that certain pupils parted with Latin at the end of their second year with no sense of achievement and with considerable relief. The challenge to provide a course to meet their special needs was obvious and needed to be met.

It has been said: ‘The Classics can be scrapped because of the advance of modern science.’ But, apart from the timeless values in the aesthetic and the moral spheres, we now have the amazing fact that in the realm of science itself, Nobel Prizewinners like Heisenberg and Schrödinger have been pleading for a return to the ancient Greeks; and that, too, in the most modern of scientific fields—atomic physics.

TheAdelphi is Terence's best-known, though not necessarily his best, play. It tells how a timid young man, Ctesiphon, son of a strict and parsimonious father, Demea, falls in love with a slave-girl, Bacchis. His brother, Aeschinus, who has been adopted and brought up by his easygoing uncle Micio, abducts the girl on Ctesiphon's behalf, thereby causing much distress both to Pamphila, to whom Aeschinus is secretly betrothed, and to Micio himself, who is afraid that his indulgent attitude towards his adopted son's youthful escapades has encouraged him to go too far. However, the whole misunderstanding is sorted out: Micio gives his consent to the marriage of Aeschinus and Pamphila, and Aeschinus swears to Micio eternal gratitude, while Demea is persuaded to put aside his anger at the behaviour of the two young men and come in to the marriage feast. In the next scene Demea comes out and declares that he is going to change his attitude to life and do his best to win popularity by affability and generosity. He proceeds to put this idea into practice by a display of friendliness towards Syrus, Micio's steward, who had taken a leading part in the intrigue, to Geta, the loyal slave of Pamphila, and to Aeschinus himself, whom he encourages to break down the wall between Micio's house and Pamphila's to enable him to bring home his bride more easily; he then persuades the staunch bachelor, Micio, to marry Sostrata, Pamphila's mother, and to give a farm to Sostrata's old family friend, Hegio, in these two instances being stoutly supported by Aeschinus.

‘Reading’ is one of those unfortunate words whose meaning is not immediately clear. In order to specify what I mean on this particular occasion I have to add the word ‘aloud’, because what I want to write about is not the silent reading of Greek and Latin, but the reading of Greek and Latin so as to be heard—as indeed they were intended to be read.

Since the Second World War we have been subjected to a flood of memoirs and counter-memoirs by generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians. One of the direct results of this is that our vocabulary has been increased—if not enriched—by a military jargon. Most of the latter's terms have in fact very specialized meanings, and if they are used out of their proper context they can present a highly coloured view of a rather simple situation. Can these terms be applied with validity to historical situations of antiquity ? At first sight there is an attraction in theirvery modernity, for they seem to give a freshness of approach; but Professor Salmon's use of them in his recent article, ‘The Strategy of the Second Punic War’, has made the dangers of their use manifestly clear. By his use of these anachronisms—for that is surely what they are—Professor Salmon has given nothing new in the way of interpretation, but merely provided confirmation of Oman's dictum ‘Historians may have the most divergent views according to their predispositions’, and has exaggerated the capabilities of both sides beyond belief.

Cicero's grandfather is credited with the observation that the better a Roman knew Greek the bigger a scoundrel he was. Nevertheless one of his sons, Lucius, belonged to a circle that knew quite a lot of Greek and another, Marcus, certainly gave his own children a Greek education. Marcus, the father of the orator, seems to have shared the prevailing view that one had either a Greek education or none at all. Indeed, in 92, when Cicero was fourteen years old, the newly established Roman schools of rhetoric were closed down by the censors Crassus and Domitius, Crassus' reason, according to Cicero, being that the Roman schools were a travesty of their Greek exemplars: ‘nam apud Graecos, cuicui modi essent, uidebam tamen esse praeter hanc exercitationem linguae doctrinam aliquam et humanitate dignam scientiam, hos uero nouos magistros nihil intellegebam posse docere, nisi ut auderent.’ Amongst these schools was that of L. Plotius Gallus, who seems before the closure to have attracted a fair number of pupils.

In May 1862 one of the members of the Public Schools Commission asked Dr. Moberly, the Headmaster of Winchester, whether it was the habit in his school to teach modern or ancient history by set lessons, and he got the frank reply, ‘No; I should not know how to do it.’ And C. E. Graves, in the course of his evidence before the same Commissioners, said of the Greek history that he had studied a few years earlier at Shrewsbury, ‘We used to get it up from a small book by a German, written in Latin.’ The century that has passed since then has seen astonishing changes both in the content and in the methods of education, and in particular the promotion of historical studies to a place of central importance has made considerable alterations in the frontiers even if it has not been the result of deliberate ‘re-drawing the map of learning’, and it certainly constitutes one of the main factors which the contemporary cartographers of education must take into account.

The Pliny who is known to us from his letters has too often been dismissed as a conscientious but timid administrator, a pedant aspiring to literary fame, and a generous patron whose uncritical support of promising young men ends by becoming a bore. The answer would be that the Roman conception of friendship was one of mutual aid and reciprocal obligations on the part of cliens and patronus; that desire for gloria is marked in almost every Roman we know about and is closely associated with the hope non omnis moriar; and that when Pliny was sent out as an administrator with special powers as legatus Augusti propraetore consulari potestate to inquire into the financial and administrative confusion in the affairs of Bithynia and Pontus, he had considerable legal experience from his work in the Chancery court of Rome as well as expert knowledge of Bithynia from his handling of the defence in the cases brought by the province against the senatorial governors Iulius Bassus and Rufus Varenus.