For months alarming reports had been coming in, telling of the gathering cloud in the east. Now the spring had come, the Athos canal was finally cut, and the Hellespont bridged. As though in fulfilment of some riddling oracle, Xerxes marched his army over the water and sailed his fleet through dry land. The Persian steamroller began to move westwards, and the petty states of Greece faced it in a precarious alliance.

Latin, it seems, may yet continue to be a compulsory requirement for many entrants to Oxford and Cambridge; for others the alternative looks like being stiff enough to be scarcely a soft option; and all alike may be required to show proficiency in English. Perhaps western civilization has not been sold after all.

The natural desire to know how the performance of Greek athletes compared with those of today has caused a great deal of attention to be paid to one of the very few pieces of evidence we possess, the anonymous epigram which speaks of a long jump of 55 feet and a discus throw of 95 feet:

In choosing a subject which—to me at least—sounds at the same time simple and vague, I feel I have to start with a few explanations. It goes without saying that by Greek history I mean only ancient Greek history. But what are epochs? To distinguish various periods in history is an ordinary, though recently disputed, thing to do. They may be artificial, but they seem necessary to enable us to find a way within the limitless spread of our historical material. Epochs are periods too, but they may be not quite the same. We naturally look first at the original Greek words. 'Εпοχή, deriving from ἐпέχειν, indicates, according to Liddell and Scott, a check, a cessation, a stoppage. In terms of time, and that is to say, of history, it may mean a fixed or turning point. Still, that meaning only appears as late as the astronomer Ptolemaios, i.e. the second century A.d. The other word, пερίοδος, means a cycle within space or time. Pindar speaks of the seasons as ἐτέων пερίοδοι, as the recurring sections of the years; hence it is also used simply as an extent of time. It could be said (and has been said) that the two concepts together, the epochs forming the transitions between every two periods, mark a definite rhythm, a sort of short-long, short-long metre, of the course of history. That may be so; but the Greeks were never aware of it. Modern use, anyway, is different: epoch and period seem to be more or less interchangeable. This occurs, for instance, in Ranke's famous book Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte. He was chiefly concerned with discussing the possibility of human progress. In his view it consisted in the fact that in each historical period a certain movement of the human mind is displayed, stressing now one and then another tendency. No generation is superior to the preceding one in every respect, each epoch has its own immediate bond with God (‘jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott’), or to put it more profanely: each epoch or period has its own character, its own achievements, its own faults, its own significance. In Mr. Eliot's words: ‘History is a pattern of timeless moments.’

Homer has been called the Bible of the Greeks. These two, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were certainly their traditional books par excellence. They offered a vivid picture of their heroic past, where fact merged indissolubly into fiction, but each enjoyed the truth of high art; they offered a living panorama of their Olympian religion, now serious, now gay and mocking; more important, a panorama of men and manners, and a vision of nature almost incidental to man the foreground, but seen with an intense awareness and enjoyment. They were recited at public gatherings, they formed the staple of education for several centuries, were learnt by heart, and passed into the common stock of knowledge and feeling and conduct.

Any attentive reader of the Iliad and the Odyssey will have been struck by some very odd features of Homer's religion—the sudden shift from reverence to frivolity, for example. What I want to glance at in this article is something rather different. The gods and goddesses worshipped by the Trojans are called by Greek names. Some deities are definitely partisan—Hera and Poseidon, for example, for the Greeks; Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Ares for the Trojans—while Zeus is strictly impartial. But, if the Trojans were, as we are always told, of a race distinct from the Greeks, Trojan gods will have been translated out of a native idiom into a Greek. Whenever you translate, mistakes in rendering are possible; I want to suggest one particular mistranslation here.

When Fielding fathered the modern English novel in 1742, he left his readers in no doubt about his intentions. The Preface to Joseph Andrews states clearly enough that his purpose was to ridicule affectation. The ancient Greek novelists were generally less explicit about their aims: of the five novels which survive complete, four are without any sort of preface, and we can only guess from the text what the authors were trying to do. Probably their sole object was to entertain. But the man who wrote the fifth, Daphnis and Chloe, was evidently a highly conscious artist with clear ideas about the purpose of his art, and he has left us a preface explaining them—or rather hinting at them, for the full meaning of his words is not immediately apparent. The aim of this article is to bring out the deeper implications of the preface, and to interpret the text in the light of them.

Earlier in the play GETAS (a slave) and SIKON (a hired cook), endeavouring to borrow from the misanthropic KNEMON utensils for a sacrifice and picnic in the grotto of Pan and the Nymphs, were repelled with insults and blows. The accident of falling into his own well and being rescued has so far debilitated and humbled KNEMON that he consents to his daughter's wedding; but he still refuses to attend the celebrations in the grotto, and retires to bed in his own house. Here his long-suffering attendant SIMICHE deserts him, and leaves him to the mercy of GETAs and SIKON.

A question which occurs frequently to classical students and others concerns the relation between ancient and modern Greek. It is the purpose of the present article to indicate in as brief a fashion as possible the lines on which the question might be approached.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and the modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably 99 per cent, of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French and two in Afrikaans. Thus the declension of φίλος is precisely the same now (except for the absence of the dual, which was obsolescent in Xenophon's day, and of the dative) as it was in the fifth century B.c. The conjugation of the present of ἒχω is identical with that of the classical verb, although the third plural ending -ουσι occurs mostly dialectically, e.g. in Cypriot, and has been largely replaced by -ουν.

For the Greeks, athletics occupied the place in life which in the modern world is taken by football and cricket. Ball games were not unknown to the Greeks, as two famous reliefs in Athens show, but literature is silent about them, while it abounds in allusions and metaphors drawn from athletics—running, jumping, boxing, wrestling, and throwing the javelin and discus. Their popularity continued for many centuries: we read of them in Homer; even the unathletic St. Paul cannot avoid frequent metaphors drawn from the games; and the great athletic festivals were discontinued only when, in the fourth century a.d., the Christian Roman emperors put an end to them as pagan rites.

Ancient drama is frequently said nowadays to be unsuited to the taste of modern audiences, and when one sees modern productions of ancient plays one is inclined to agree. And yet the plays read well, and they certainly appealed to a wide variety of audiences in ancient times. Can it be that it is the production and not the play that is at fault? Apart from the obvious fact that most modern producers are unable or unwilling to handle a chorus effectively, it does seem very often that the production is based on an interpretation of the play, which, if it is not actually misguided, is at any rate hesitant. There are two factors which make it extremely difficult to interpret or appreciate an ancient play. First, the influence of Aristotle has caused us to judge ancient drama by the rules which he laid down and to measure all tragedies by the standard of Sophokles' Oedipus the King, although it is obvious that the poets were not guided by Aristotle's rules and that many tragedies aimed at effects quite different from those of the Oedipus the King. Thus we expect ancient tragedy to be ‘tragic’ in our sense of the word, and we are baffled when we find no ‘tragic’ element to satisfy our expectations. Secondly, the knowledge that drama originated as part of the cult of Dionysos impels us to label it ‘ritual drama’, and to feel that it must be solemn and conventional and must concern itself with weighty moral and theological problems. We are slightly surprised to find that it is not confined to a re-enactment of the Dionysos myths, and we hardly dare to contemplate the possibility that poets dealt very freely with the myths and legends which they took as their subjects. But ancient drama had to appeal to mixed audiences. It could not afford to be bound by academic rules or by excessive subservience to tradition. The fact that dramatic performances were organized as competitions was in itself an inducement to introduce new methods of handling the traditional material; and, if we look at the plays which have survived, we can see that drama changed constantly to suit the inevitable changes in public taste.

In 1883 M. Patin published his Études sur la poésie latine, and devoted his seventh chapter (pp. 117 ff.) to Lucretius under the heading ‘Du poëme De la Nature. L'anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce’. His theme was that behind Lucretius' poetry one can detect a deeply divided personality, a man dedicated indeed to the doctrines of Epicurus, but revealing in his language and imagery a naturally religious spirit chafing, perhaps unconsciously, against the constraints of his philosophy. On reading this chapter one becomes aware of a certain apologetic undertone. M. Patin is preoccupied with justifying his almost excessive enthusiasm for a pagan poet to a Christian audience. Two of the pitfalls confronting the literary critic are that he will identify himself in his own imagination with the author whom he is criticizing, and that he will be so identified by his readers. In his eagerness to avoid the second M. Patin slips into the first; for all its brilliance, his chapter illuminates the personality of its writer rather than of Lucretius, and might almost be entitled ‘L'anti-Patin chez Patin’. Yet his chapter, and especially his chapter-heading, have set the tone for much subsequent criticism of Lucretius. Taking up his main thesis, critics have arbitrarily broadened its terms of reference, drawing attention to such apparent inconsistencies as the contrast between the picture of Mars and Venus as lovers and as open to be moved by prayers for suffering humanity (i. 29 ff.), and the picture of the gods living a life of untroubled contemplation in the interstellar spaces, remote from our world and uninterested in its affairs (iii. 18 ff.). And the tensions and contradictions of the poem have been linked by some with the story of the poet's madness and suicide.

The strategy of the Carthaginians, in the writer's opinion, must be regarded as an aggressive one that had been devised long before the outbreak of the war in 218 B.c. The view that their operations in Spain did not have an attack on Italy as their ultimate object is naïve. The truth is that they went to Spain after their defeat in the First Punic War precisely in order to build up a base. They hoped to make it the point d'appui for their planned war of revenge against Rome: the Iberian peninsula was to be for them a springboard for attack.

It is now generally acknowledged that in the concluding chapters of the Agricola Tacitus is on several occasions guilty of distortion of the truth. The story told in 40. 2, for example, of the secret mission of one of Domitian's confidential freedmen with an offer of the governorship of Syria as a bribe to Agricola in case he should appear reluctant to obey the orders for his recall is obviously sheer fabrication, designed solely to intensify the picture of suspicion and distrust on the part of the Emperor that Tacitus is endeavouring to create. Again, though in 43. 2 Tacitus records the rumour that Agricola had been poisoned by Domitian (the rumour is repeated by Dio Cassius, lxvi. 20, as sober truth), he does so in such a way as to indicate that he himself did not believe this charge, though he hoped his readers would. There are, however, three points that have never been satisfactorily explained: the relations between Agricola and Domitian between A.d. 85 and 93, Agricola's refusal of the proconsulship of Asia, and the reason for his non-employment in the Danubian wars.

This, then, was the state of the theatre when the Romans first came into direct contact with the Greeks in the middle of the third century: revivals of fifth-century melodramas and romantic tragedies, especially those of Euripides, and revivals of the New Comedy of the late fourth and early third centuries, especially the plays of Menander, held the stage. The Romans themselves had nothing quite like this in their own popular entertainment. They had stage-shows of a sort, of course. Their own native form of entertainment was the satura, which seems to have been some sort of variety show; and they had imported Etruscan ludi, consisting mainly of music and dancing, and the Campanian Atellane farce, which was something rather similar to a harlequinade. The Greek theatre, which at this period was outwardly more splendid than ever before, was to the Romans an impressive and fascinating novelty; and, when Livius Andronicus in 240 B.c. translated a Greek tragedy and a Greek comedy for the Roman stage, he achieved an immediate success and started a vogue for drama in the Greek style at Rome which ousted the old satura from the stage. It is sometimes regarded as a reflection on Roman taste that the Roman theatre in the third and second centuries B.c. should have concentrated on Euripidean melodrama and Menandrean New Comedy to the exclusion of the greater works of the fifth-century Greek dramatists. But this is an unjustified conclusion. The choice of models represents not the taste of the Romans—for in fact Greek-style drama failed to achieve lasting popularity at Rome—but that of the contemporary Greek theatre, which was the only guide that the Romans had at that date. At this period Rome imitated the literature which was currently fashionable in the Greek world. It was not until the time of Catullus and the ‘learned’ poets that the Romans, following the lead of the Alexandrine scholars, made a systematic study of Greek literature. It was only then that the Romans made the acquaintance of those works which had become the province of the scholar, and so were able to draw upon the whole range of Greek literature for their models. The inspiration derived from studying Greek poetry of the finest periods was to lead to great developments in lyric and elegy and in pastoral and didactic poetry, but it came too late for drama, which was by that time fast disappearing from the Roman theatre.

καὶ μισθοὺς αἰτεῖτε, διδάσκαλοι. ‘You schoolmasters actually expect a salary as well! What an ungrateful lot you are!’ Well, I must allow there is something in Strato's jibe. It is a pleasant life, and after thirty years spent in teaching boys and undergraduates from thirteen to about twenty-two, I can say I have enjoyed it all; and certainly, like Solon, I continually learn new lessons as I grow older. I wish I could justify my reading this paper by claiming that I had something to offer that would fulfil that one of the objects of our Association that is described as ‘to improve the practice of classical teaching’. But I fear no such illumination is likely to reward my audience. Still, another of our Association's objects is ‘to create opportunities for intercourse among lovers of classical learning’, and that your kind invitation to me has provided.

‘And so,’ said Appius, in Varro's De Re Rustica, ‘in the matter of farmyard-feeding we come to the third act, which is about fishponds.’ ‘Third act be hanged!’ said Axius; ‘do you suppose that, because you were so very economical when a young man as not to drink wine and honey at home, we are going to neglect honey ?’