In the first volume of this provocative book it was argued that, like the French chansons de geste, the Homeric poems were composed in a society with keen political and material interests, which are reflected at many points in the story, and may be identified with those of Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia Minor, in the centuries from the eighth to the sixth. Further, that the parts of the poems which contain the simplest and probably the earliest sections of the narratives may be isolated, and present a consistent picture of this world in the early middle of the eighth century, when the Troad—including the site of the later Novum Ilium at Hissarlik—was occupied by the Thracian barbarians of the ‘Seventh City’; when Greek settlers were only in precarious occupation of the shores of the Hellespont, and their minstrels were preoccupied with the wars of occupation; while those of Chios were fascinated by the lands of the far west, newly opened by the sailors of Chalcis and Corinth. The poems of this earlier period—of the ‘first Homer’—form about a quarter of our two epics.

If this presentation of the matter be accepted, it is clearly the next question, under what political and social circumstances were the rest of the poems composed, and eventually combined with the original Wrath of Achilles and Return of Odysseus?

The fragmentary state in which Cicero's treatise De Republica has come down to us has given rise to considerable speculation as to the exact nature of the political ideal contained in it. Very varying conjectures have been advanced as to the significance and status of the rector or moderator rei publicae, and very different answers given to the question: Is the ideal a revised and improved form of the πάτριος πολιτεία or is it some kind of enlightened monarchy? The assumption on which this paper rests is, however, that the issue has not yet grown so academic but that a further examination of it may serve either to reveal some new, or to stress some neglected, feature of the traditional problem.

It is first necessary to say something about the use of the word ‘ideal’ in reference to the Republic. It is customary to talk of the ‘ideal’ which Cicero propounds in that work, yet there is patently something unsatisfactory in the term, since historians are unable to agree as to what that ideal is. It may be suggested that the reason for this is in part an ambiguity of the word ‘ideal’ corresponding to a distinction in Cicero's intention in writing the Republic. What this might be is most easily seen from comparison with Aristotle's Politics, which similarly is said to contain its author's political ideal, and similarly has given rise to dispute as to what exactly that ideal is. In this case, however, there need be no doubt as to what is intended, since Aristotle explicitly distinguishes two senses of ‘ideal’ as applied to constitutions, namely that which is best a priori (ή κατ εὺχήν) and that which is the best that can be expected relative to circumstances (ή ἐκ τν ύποκειμένων).

Autun stands on the left bank of the Arroux, in the north-western corner of the département of Saône-et-Loire. Mont Beuvray, about fifteen miles away, roughly to the west, preserves the name of Bibracte, the capital of the Aedui. About forty years after the meeting at Bibracte of the assembly which, to the annoyance of the Aedui, conferred the command of the Gallic forces upon Vercingetorix (Caesar, B.G. vii. 63), the ancient capital was abolished. Its inhabitants were transferred to the newly established Augustodunum, a specimen of bureaucratic town-planning on an ambitious scale, perpetuating the name of the ruler under whom it was conceived. The Aedui had long been on specially friendly terms with Rome. Caesar (B.G. i. 33. 2) and Tacitus (Ann. xi. 25. 2.) refer to the ‘bond of brotherhood’ between the two states, and Tacitus (ibid.) mentions an ‘ancient treaty’, which must have been in existence as early as 121 B.C. (Livy, Epit. 61, ‘Aeduorum … sociorum populi Romani’). This ‘fraternity’ was still remembered in the fourth century A.D. (see Panegyrici Latini, viii (W. Baehrens, v), 2, ‘plurimis senatusconsultis fratres populi Romani appellati sunt’). That an anti-Roman party, however, existed is shown by the activities of Dumnorix (Caesar, B.G. i. 9. 16–20 and v. 6–7), and an Aeduan, Iulius Sacrouir, was one of the leaders in the Gallic revolt against Tiberius in A.D. 21 (Tacitus, Ann. iii. 40–46). Nothing in Tacitus' account of this event is more interesting than his evidence for the fact that in A.D. 21 Augustodunum was already what we should call a University town—‘Augustodunum caput gentis armatis cohortibus Sacrouir occupauerat ut nobilissimam Galliarum subolem, liberalibus studiis ibi operatam, et eo pignore parentes propinquosque eorum adiungeret; simul arma occulte fabricata iuuentuti dispertit’ (ibid. 43).

It was not until the time of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus that the Greeks took the initiative in studying botany from a scientific point of view, but naturally earlier Greek writers were interested in varying degrees and for various reasons in the plants which they saw around them, and therefore mention them in their works.

The present is the third of a series of articles, the first two of which have appeared in the Classical Review, ‘Trees and Plants in Homer’ (C.R., vol. 1, July 1936, pp. 97 ff.) and ‘Trees and Plants in Herodotus’ (ib., vol. lvi, July 1942, pp. 57 ff.). The present article deals with the references to trees and plants in the thirty-five extant plays and fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It is proposed first to tabulate the references to trees, shrubs, and plants in these authors and indicate the contexts in which they occur, and then to try to draw some conclusions as to the interest which these writers display in plant life and the attitude which they adopt towards it. Forty-three botanical names occur in the plays of the three dramatists, whereas in Homer there are fifty and in Herodotus fifty-seven. It will be clear, I think, that the dramatists took much less interest in plant-life than either Homer or Herodotus.

To take trees and shrubs first, the oak, ρῠς (Quercus robor)—a word which, like the Sanskrit root dru, was originally a general term for ‘tree’ or ‘wood’, and hence is used for the ‘king of trees’—occurs frequently in the Greek tragedians, especially in Euripides.

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.

The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.

What is it that prompts an author to write? Or, supposing some initial stimulus towards writing in general exists, what governs an author's choice of theme and his treatment of it? What does he try to do through his writing, and what does he find writing offers him? No doubt the final answers to these questions belong to psychology and metaphysics rather than literature, but at any rate various approaches can be made with firm and familiar ground still underfoot. One may say, for example, with Dr. Johnson that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ and there is no need to look far into the literary history of Rome to find men writing to earn their living or improve their circumstances in life. Livius Andronicus was a slave and taught and wrote his way to freedom; Plautus worked in a mill until he had bettered himself by his plays. The same is likely to have been true of Caecilius, another slave, and Terence, if manumitted early in life for personal reasons, would not have been enabled without his writing to maintain his closeness to wealthy and influential men—so much so that the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy has an earlier counterpart through his association with Scipio Africanus and Laelius. Ennius is another such, an obscure southern Italian whose qualities were recognized by M. Porcius Cato and got him an entry to Rome. True, Ennius did trace his descent from Messapus, the eponymous Boeotian king of Messapia, but as with Callimachus and Battus one does not know how serious the claim was: in hard cash at any rate it seems to have been worth little, for he lived in Rome simply enough writing and teaching until further patronage came.

I

Utility lies at the root of much prose: in Cato it is only implicit, though indubitable, but here is the note in Varro: ‘Quare quoniam emisti fundum quem bene colendo fructuosum cum facere velis, meque ut id mihi habeam curare roges, experiar: et non solum ut ipse, quoad vivam, quid fieri oporteat ut te moneam, sed etiam post mortem’ (R.R. i. 1), and the prefatory remarks to books ii and iii reveal essentially the same motive: fructus is the aim of estate management and Varro is setting out to serve that end by compiling good advice. That such advice will survive etiam post mortem is one of the practical benefits of committing it to writing, but there is no suggestion of a larger immortality though the dialogue form is of course very much the expression of ars. Here is the note again in another of the earlier extant prose works, the rhetorical treatise ad Herennium whose recipient realizes ‘non… in se parum fructus habet copia dicendi’ (cf. III. 1 ad hanc utilitatem progredi): here fructus recalls Varro's fructuosum, but the difference between the literal and the metaphorical fructus is significant to the student of social history. From a social as well as a literary standpoint too there is interest in the explicit rejection by the auctor ad Herennium of certain possible motives for writing: Profit and Reputation—‘non enim spe quaestus aut gloria commoti venimus ad scribendum quemadmodum ceteri’, and in particular Reputation derived from a bogus erudition. ‘Illa quae Graeci scriptores inanis adrogantiae causa sibi adsumpserunt reliquimus: nam illi, ne parum multa scisse viderentur, ea conquisiverunt quae nihil attinebant ut ars difficilior cognitu putaretur.’

One of the less known but by no means of the less voluminous or peculiar among the Greek writers of the imperial age was Publius Aelius Aristides of the second century, Roman citizen, Greek landowner and rhetorician, and unique in surviving literature as a nervous hypochondriac and lifelong devotee of Asclepius. The details of his career, as recorded in his own writings and in Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists, have been conveniently set forth with full references by André Boulanger in his exhaustive, but very readable, study, Aelius Aristide. Only the framework can be indicated here, to be filled in at certain points with the extraordinary experiences which befell Aristides after illness had altered the course of his life. These are described at length and in great confusion in his Hieroi Logoi, written to glorify Asclepius, which perhaps they do; of Aristides they give a picture which deserves greater fame than it enjoys. Their testimony is of particular value because they have not been selected and edited by an interested priesthood, but are the remnants of a collection which bears all the marks of individual sincerity and private eccentricity.

Aristides was born in A.D. 118 on his family's estate at Laneum in Mysia, near Hadrianutherae. His father Eudaemon, who died in his childhood, was a philosopher and priest of Zeus, and evidently a man of wealth and refinement. As a boy he was sent to study under the famous grammaticus, Alexander of Cotiaeum, who was later tutor to Marcus Aurelius, and by him instructed most thoroughly in the poets, orators, historians, and philosophers.

Although the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 overwhelmed both Pompeii and Herculaneum, the importance of Herculaneum has today been eclipsed by the comparative ease of excavation and the size of Pompeii. Ten years ago it was estimated that for every one visitor to Herculaneum there were four to Pompeii. This was not always so: from 1709, when Prince d'Elbœuf, excavating an old well, accidentally struck a part of the theatre at Herculaneum, until 1781, when one of his successors, La Vega, was ordered to turn to Pompeii, Herculaneum was considered to be the more important find. Under Charles III of Naples, the engineers Alcubierre, Weber, and La Vega worked there.

The importance of Pompeii, as compared with Herculaneum, in the eyes of archaeologists and scholars, is reflected in the literature on the subject: while there has been much detailed and recent research on Pompeii, Herculaneum has attracted the attention of few scholars.1 Now that most of the interesting districts of Pompeii have been uncovered, archaeologists with modern equipment may concentrate on Herculaneum.

The early history of Herculaneum is obscure. Strabo sums up its first inhabitants in the sentence: ‘The Oscans used to possess both Herculaneum and her neighbour Pompeii, which lies on the river Sarno; next came the Etruscans and Pelasgians, and thereafter the Samnites; but these also were expelled from the places.’ Yet its inhabitants of later days were proud to trace back their origin to the Greek god Heracles, and there is no doubt that this town shows more evidence of Greek influence in its works of art than Pompeii.

Iuppiter Dolichenus is of interest as one of the group of oriental deities whose worship gained so wide a footing in the Roman world under the Empire. Second only in popularity to the Persian Mithras, Dolichenus extended his sway to the farthest limits of the Empire, and in some outlying provinces like Britain seems even to have challenged the primacy of Mithras himself.

Doliche, the original seat of Iuppiter Dolichenus, was a small town in the iron-bearing district of Commagene (ubi ferrum nascitur) in northern Syria, the meeting-place of several ancient military and trading routes. The earliest portrayals of the Dolichene god, dating from the mid-second and early first millennia B.C., identify him as in origin a Hittite thunder-god, with mixed Khurrite and Semitic attributes. He is shown as a bearded figure, with a pigtail, standing on a bull (symbolical of thunder and fertility), facing right, wearing a peaked and horned bonnet, fringed tunic, girdle, and sword, and brandishing a double axe in his right hand and a triple thunderbolt in his left; in the field above his head is the winged disk of the sun. The Hittite name of the god was Teshub, but by the later fully Semiticized Syrians he was identified with the Semitic god Hadad as the Ba'al (i.e. ‘Lord’) of the town of Doliche. In pre-Roman times, under the influence of Chaldean cosmology, there was a tendency to extend his supremacy to the heavens generally (‘Ba'alshamin’), and this extended status is reflected in later Roman dedications in the use of such epithets as aeternus, conservator totius mundi, exsuperantissimus, and the like.

The following is the rule about rhetorical questions in O.O. which is given in most authoritative grammars:

Questions in the indicative in O.R., if they are part of a continuous report of a speech, are put in the infinitive, if they are of the first or third person; in the subjunctive, if they are of the second person, i.e. cur fngio? becomes cur se fugere? cur fugis? becomes cur Me fugeret? and cur fugit? becomes cur ilium fugere?

But this rule is based merely on statistics. It is useful as a rough ruleof-thumb for Latin composition, but as a guide to the interpretation of Latin literature it is worse than useless, because it not only leaves an untidy litter of exceptions to puzzle the learner in many passages of Caesar and Livy, but, like so many grammar-book rules, it obscures the fact that syntactical constructions as well as words and inflexions come into use only as channels for the expression of particular notions in the human mind. The interaction upon one another of habitual methods of expression does cause exceptions to any rule that can be drawn up, and consequently the best accounts, such as are given by Kuhner-Stegmann (ii, pp. 537 ff.) and Riemann, Syntaxe latine (pp. 446–8), are too complicated to be of much use to a schoolboy. Nevertheless, an author's choice of construction is normally determined by the notion which he wishes to express, and it is of the utmost importance that a student should be made to understand that linguistic phenomena are the audible or visible results of a people's effort to think and to express living ideas, and not merely a collection of objective data which can be reduced only to statistical rules.

Roman literature of the classical period abounds in references to the difficulties and dangers of a voyage by sea. Indeed both in Greece and Rome the indignant complaint against seafaring was a recognized rhetorical theme, of which we possess a most interesting specimen in the Trogymnasmata' or ‘Preparatory Exercises’ of Nicolaus the Sophist (viii. 6), to be found in the first volume of Walz's Rhetores Graeci. The two Senecas also have treated this topic in a formal way. In verse the theme is extremely common, though the thought is often compressed to a few lines. It occurs in Epic poetry (for every epic must have its storm), in comedy and tragedy, in lyric, elegiac, and didactic verse. History, epistolography, and philosophical prose furnish further examples. From this wealth of material I have selected what seem to me to be the salient features.

In the numerous accounts of the Golden Age, when primitive man lived a life uncomplicated by civic developments and international relations, when he confined himself to his proper element the earth, and had neither inclination nor facilities for trespassing on the unknown expanse of Neptune's ‘second realm’, the invention of the ship is regarded as the source of many evils. Man sails the seas to reach lands which God in His wisdom has set apart as beyond His province. The course of a ship over the waves involves not merely insult to the outraged sea-god, whose supremacy is thereby challenged and whose permission has not been sought, but physical discomfort to the Ocean from the weight of the vessel, the furrow driven by the keel, and the strokes of the oar-blades.

It is perhaps worth while to collect three striking cases where the history of music impinges on that of classical scholarship. My sources are not recondite, but I find that, for I the obvious source, the ‘Bach Reader’, is misleading; for II the evidence is mostly to be found in Grove; for III the only fairly detailed account I know is in Nieck's Robert Schumann (1923, pp. 47 ff.), now difficult to find, which I supplement from the preface to the 1828 Forcellini.

I. From a (Latin) note on Quintilian (i. 12.3, ed. 1738: not in the later editions) by Gesner, a first-rate scholar and lexicographer, who was Rector of the Thomasschule when Bach was Cantor. It is interesting to contrast Gesner's enthusiastic appreciation with his successor Ernesti's contemptuous indifference—which suggests that there is more to be said for Bach in his quarrel with Ernesti than we are sometimes led to suppose.

Quintilian is speaking of the brilliant performances of musicians; Gesner comments: ‘All this you (sc. Quintilian) would think of little consequence if you could return from the other world and see Bach playing with both hands and all his fingers, on an instrument which seems to combine many citharas in one—the organum organorum, running over it hither and thither with both hands and swiftest motion of the feet, eliciting many varied passages and sounds diverse yet unified—if you could see him, I say, doing a thing which several citharists and innumerable tibicines could not do, and not, like a citharoedus, playing only his own part, but equally watchful of all the symphoniaci, to the number of 30 or 40; calling this one to attention by a nod, another by a stamp of the foot, a third by a warning finger; giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it.

Afoolish fondness for domestic pets, and a desire to have some kind of animal to share one's hearth and home, is usually regarded as a characteristically British trait, and it seems at first sight scarcely probable that the ancient Romans would have had any sympathy with such a sentimental weakness. Yet, if we turn to the literature of the notoriously practical Romans, we shall find plenty of evidence that they enjoyed the possession of those engaging companions no less than we do, and that they ranged over a wide field in choosing an object for their affections.

There can be no doubt that birds were first favourites with all classes of Roman society, and the first instance which springs to mind, no doubt, is that of Lesbia's sparrow, immortalized in the verses of Catullus. Two poems were written in its honour, one describing its happy lot as Lesbia's darling and delight, and one, the famous elegy, mourning the untimely death of the little bird, Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque. The custom of writing elegies on one's mistress's pets persisted, but with the general increase in wealth and luxury under the Empire, my lady's taste in birds became more sophisticated. The humble sparrow—or was it really a bullfinch?—which cheered Lesbia's heart would have been regarded with disdain by Ovid's Corinna. Her affections were centred on a psittacus, one of those jewel-bright parrots from the East, and especially from India, which are frequently mentioned in Imperial days, forming an elegant addition to the salons of society.

The nineteen volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri have contributed so much to classical studies over the last fifty years that it is surprising how little has been written on the town of Oxyrhynchus. There is no monograph from which the layman can obtain a balanced picture.2 No doubt scholars have been deterred from the task of compiling one by the thought of the enormous number of papyri still awaiting publication. In 1920 B. P. Grenfell estimated that of the material in the possession of the Egypt Exploration Society a little over half of the literary finds but ‘not nearly half’ of the documents had been published. The progress made since that date scarcely alters the figures. I shall try to show what sort of place Oxyrhynchus was so that its papyri may be related to their background. The layman, whose picture of the papyrologist is often that of a ‘back-room’ wizard producing something out of nothing, may thereby be helped to see these documents and texts as the expression of the life of a community, and as a result to understand both what is likely to be forthcoming from papyrological work and to assess the value of published texts. Because the quantity of material is so overwhelming, I have found it essential to restrict myself to the second and third centuries after Christ.

Since the contrary is often asserted, I begin by emphasizing that Oxyrhynchus was an important place. This importance was recognized in A.D. 272, when the phrase λαμπρἀ καì λαμπρωτἀτπ ‘illustrious and most illustrious’ found a place in the town's official title, perhaps in direct connexion with the first occasion (namely in the following year A.D. 273) when the world-games, the Iso-Capitolia, were held in Oxyrhynchus.

Horace puts in the mouth of Ofellus a sermon on plain living. Healthy hunger, says the honest yeoman, is content with ordinary fare; gluttons would like to see a big fish in a big dish,

porrectum magno magnum spectare catino,

but may the south wind turn their dainties bad, though the freshest turbot is already stale for a jaded appetite:

praesentes austri, coquite horum obsonia, quamquam putet aper rhombusque recens, mala copia quando aegrum sollicitat stomachum.

So Sat. ii. 2. 39–43: let us call the passage (a). He adds that he mentions turbots in particular because they happen to be more in fashion nowadays than sturgeons (46–48). Later in the same satire he talks (b) of the scandal and expense of big turbots and big dishes,

grandes rhombi patinaeque grande ferunt una cum damno dedecus. (95–96)

In another satire, an ironical lecture on cookery, we hear (c) that it is a gross fault to buy a big fish very dear and then serve it shabbily in too small a dish,

immane est vitium dare milia terna macello. angustoque vagos piscis urgere catino. (ii. 4. 76–77)

(The conventional translation of rhombus as a turbot has been retained, though it may well be some other fish.)

Juvenal, Satire iv, tells how a huge turbot was caught in the Adriatic off Ancona and hurried south to Alba as a gift to the Emperor. Fisherman and fish are promptly granted audience,

spectant admissa obsonia patres, (64)

and Domitian summons his Cabinet to discuss what is to be done with the treasure trove.