bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ciceronian Oratory
Authors: Clarke M. L.
Published: July 2013

In assessing the characteristics of Cicero's oratory we are in the unfortunate position of being unable to compare him with his contemporaries and predecessors. The speeches of Hortensius and of the other famous orators of Cicero's day are lost, as are those of Crassus and Antonius, the much admired figures of his boyhood, with whom, according to the Brutus, Roman oratory first equalled Greek. Yet though we know little of the other orators of the Roman Republic, it is possible by a study of Cicero's speeches and of his oratorical writings to get a fairly good idea of his special characteristics.

A passage in the Brutus will serve as a useful introduction to a brief study of Ciceronian oratory.

[‘Before the time of Hortensius] there was no orator’, says Cicero, ‘who appeared to have studied literature more deeply than the common run of men—literature which is the fountain-head of perfect eloquence; no one who had embraced philosophy—the mother of all good deeds and good words; no one who had learnt civil law—a thing most necessary for private cases, and essential to the orator's good judgement; no one who had at his command the traditions of Rome, from which if occasion demanded he could call up most trustworthy witnesses from the dead; no one who by rapid and neat mockery of his opponent could unbend the minds of the jurymen and turn them for a while from solemnity to smiling and laughter; no one who could widen an issue and bring his speech from a limited dispute referring to a particular person or time to a general question of universal application; no one who could delight by a temporary digression from the issue, or could move the judge to anger or to tears, or in fact—which is the special quality of the orator—could turn his feelings whithersoever the occasion demanded.’
Mud and Smoke in the Odyssey
Authors: Garrido-Božić I. M.
Published: July 2013

When the American bombardment of Belgrade in 1944 drove me to take refuge in Rušanj, a village only twelve miles to the south but so inaccessible that the Germans had never occupied it, I noticed that my hostess, Savka Nikolitch, used to clean her mud floor by sprinkling it with water and sweeping it every day, though any exceptional mess had to be scraped off with a mattock (cf. Odyssey xx. 149: αἱ μ༐νμα koρήσατε πoıπνσασαı ῤὰσσατέ τ and xxii. 455 f.: Λíστρoıσıνὰπεὰoν… ξoν). In the course of conversation she told me that her father-in-law had paid her father a deposit for her (cf. Od. i. 277, ii. 196 ενα). This had been spent on her trousseau. She had brought it to her father-in-law's home in a chest which still contained precisely ‘ʒσατρά τε kαí πέπΛovς kαí ῥήγεα σıγαλóεντα’ (Od. vi. 38). Both her husband and father-in-law had failed to return from the war in 1918. ‘This house lost two oxen’, she said, ‘in the last war—and two men too.’ This was all so Homeric that I looked round to see whether there was anything else about the house which might illustrate the Odyssey. I offer the following observations in all humility to the scholars from whose ranks circumstances have excluded me.

Savka's house is the oldest in the village and reckoned by an expert from Belgrade to be at least two hundred years old. The population of those parts is believed to have migrated from Macedonia during the Turkish rule.
A Little Classics is a Dangerous Thing
Authors: Richardson L. J. D.
Published: July 2013

It is a strange fact that, despite the spread of education and the great number of cultural vade meca in the hands of the public nowadays, there should still be found so many ignorami among the hoi polloi. Too often you will hear people saying ‘octopuses’ when they should, of course, have said ‘octopi’: and we fear that to use the forms ‘platypi’ and ‘rhino-ceri’ is only to incur the reproach of pedantry. The times are out of joint: we worship at the shrine of universal education, but this ideal is the very antipode of the actual fact. Slipshod and inaccurate utterance pervades every strata of society. In particular, exactness and precision in classical quotation, instead of being regarded as the desideratae and, we may almost say, the necessary sine quae non of polite intercourse, are only laughed at as ridiculous refinements. Cui bono?, ‘for what good?’, is the false standard applied to mere elegancies of style. If faults are noticed at all, they are dismissed as trivial lapsi linguae.

How is this lamentable situation to be improved? The classical teacher is, no doubt, partly responsible; he can plead no alibum in the matter. But he can effect little improvement by himself. He is no dictator, whose cujus is mightier than any quorum of democratic committeemen. We, the enlightened, must therefore band ourselves together and form a militant Society for Purer Latin. We must begin at Jerusalem and purge ourselves first. Let us pay our own final adieux to these errors and say, each and all of us, our several valia to inelegant solecisms.
The Natural Man
Authors: Blaiklock E. M.
Published: July 2013

‘I Propose to argue first’, writes M. R. Glover1 of the Bacchae, ‘that Euripides is here, as elsewhere, a realist, giving us a picture of Dionysus’ worship as it really was; and that the miracles are meant as evidence of some supernatural power; and secondly that, if we want to know his judgment on that religion, we shall come nearest to his thought, if not his vocabulary, in saying that it seemed to him devilish.’ The point of view expressed in the opening words reduces the ‘riddle’ of the Bacchae to manageable proportions. As a piece of life, a study of religious psychology, to be set beside the Hippolytus and the Ion, the play becomes comprehensible. It reveals the poet in his old familiar role, watching men and women with his own rare insight and truthfulness, and noting with fidelity their tragic conflicts of the spirit and their bewildering catastrophes. Miss Glover's first proposition, therefore, is undoubtedly correct. Whether Euripides was as emotionally involved in his subject as the second proposition suggests might be much more open to doubt. H. J. Rose,2 on the first point, takes substantially the same position. He writes:

‘To call the play an attack on or a defence of religion in general or any form of it in particular is quite to miss the meaning. It is a study, by a poet who was deeply interested in all religious phenomena, of one of the most notable of them… As he neither attacks nor defends sexual passion in the Hippolytus, but studies it sympathetically and with profound pity for its victims, so here he deals with an equally potent force, which he shows exalting some of those affected by it to the raptures of the chorus, and ruining others like Pentheus and Agave.
Anacharsis the Scythian
Authors: Armstrong A. MacC.
Published: July 2013

The historical landscape of the Greeks was bounded to the north by the Scythians, a fierce race renowned for milking mares (Hesiod Fr. 55 Rzach), for drinking wine without water (Hdt. vi. 84; Athenaeus 427 a–c), and for living not in fixed houses but in house-wagons, the Mongol yurt (Aeschylus, Prom. Vinct. 709 sq.; Hdt. iv. 46). Plato mentions them along with the Thracians as representatives of those in whom the spirited part of the soul predominates, meaning that they acted with indomitable energy but without their actions being guided by reason (Rep. 435b). The Athenians, quick to espy anyone's good points, employed them as policemen (Aristoph. Thesm. 1017, Lys. 451).
Lucretius, The Poet of Our Time
Authors: Vertue H. St. H.
Published: July 2013

Lucretius is not only one of the most inspired but he is also surely the most modern of the ancient poets. In what breast of all those that love the Camenae did not the news of three volumes of the poet from the hand of Cyril Bailey awaken something of the divina voluptas atque horror? When the reader rises from the study of this new edition he will certainly have concluded that his notitia, as the poet calls it, of what was to be there has been far surpassed by the reality; but he will say too that the deed is a timely one, for Lucretius alone has the scientific outlook of the present age. Possessed of the theories of Democritus and Empedocles he looked out on a world which in many important respects was much the same as our own, with this outstanding difference, that science for him was wedded with great poetry and for us it is not. He is modern then, but he is unique among the moderns, and no thoughtful man who reads Latin can afford to be without him. Scholarship has reaped the field and brought in a rich harvest, but there still remains one corner of the corn uncut. Physicians, as their art requires, assess character and motive in their patients. To some extent their methods can be applied to poetry, and it is due to Lucretius to make the attempt with him. The similarity of his view of the world to ours makes him seem like one of ourselves, but in the divergence all the advantage lies with him.
Birds in Aeschylus
Authors: Pollard J. R. T.
Published: July 2013

§ I. Augury

The legend that Aeschylus met his death when a bird of prey, possibly a lammergeyer, dropped a tortoise upon his bald head is apocryphal, but is at least as old as Sotades. It suggests that he was assoiciated with augry in popular belief. This view is supported by another statement in the Aìσχλoν βìоς, as well as by references in the extant plays and fragments.

According to the former the poet, while in Sicily, produced a play entitled αì Aìτναi or αi to mark the occasion of the foundation of Aìτνη by Hiero—oiωνi∊óμ∊νoς βìoν ἐγαθòν τoiς σu;νoiκí∊oνσi τὴν Πóλiν. It is very probable that oiωνi∊óμ∊νoς is employed here in a loose, non-technical sense, but it is also possible that the play included a description of the omens which were observed at the spot where the city was founded.
Virgil's Agricultural Lore
Authors: Jermyn L. A. S.
Published: July 2013

When the Virgil Society did me the very high honour of asking me to lecture to-day, there was little doubt in my mind as to what my subject should be. For Mr. Jackson Knight had been constantly spurring me to develop three ideas which he saw in embryo in my notes to The Singing Farmer—the sources of Virgil's agricultural lore, how he used them, and points in Roman farming which might be of scientific interest to-day. To deal adequately with these subjects would require a volume of imposing proportions: all that can be done in the short space of an hour is to state, and attempt to solve, a few of the problems, and thereby to indicate lines on which further profitable research may proceed. A good deal of accurate research work on Virgil's botany, animal husbandry, and natural history has already been done by the late John Sargeaunt and by Canon Royds; and Professor T. J. Haarhoff has done much to demonstrate the modernity of our poet in his searching study, Vergil in the Experience of South Africa, and will, I understand, be doing still more in a forthcoming volume, to be entitled Vergil the Universal. I can only pray, therefore, that my exiguous mouse, born to-day after mountains of labour, will not abstract anything from your grain-heaps of knowledge but add to them; for it is in this hope that I have tried to be, during the two and a half years since my release from captivity, a picker-up, not merely of learning's crumbs, but of unconsidered trifles.
The Imagery of Lucretius
Authors: Pope Stella R.
Published: July 2013

In explaining to Memmius his purpose in writing De Rerum Natura Lucretius wrote:

nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta

difficile inlustrare Latinis vxsersibus esse

multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum

propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem.

He thus showed that he realized the difficulty of his task in making the Latin tongue express what it had never expressed before. But in spite of the poverty of Latin and the apparently unpoetic nature of his subject, he has proclaimed his philosophy in language that shows him a poet. For the ancient word ‘poet’ has truth in its root (πoıητής); a poet is a maker who, by using words in new ways, makes a new world; he is also, as the Romans knew, a seer, not one who foretells the future, but one who tells forth truths that lie hidden behind appearances.
An Appreciation Of Tristia iii. vii
Authors: Lee A. G.
Published: July 2013

FOR some time past Ovid has been a neglected poet. The opinion has grown up that he is remarkable for two things only: an amazing command of the technique of versification, and a pleasant facility in the art of story-telling. It is useless, so we gather, to look in his works for any genuine feeling, for poetry that springs from the heart; his merits, such as they are, appear only on the surface, rhetorical virtues with nothing substantial beneath them. However, there are encouraging signs that Ovid may return to favour. There appeared, for instance, in 1934 an excellent article by T. F. Higham entitled ‘Ovid: Some Aspects of his Character and Aims’, in which the author attacked the prevalent view because it simply does not make sense of Ovid as a man. Recently, too, H. Frankel published a sympathetic book on the poet which should go far to interest the general public in his work. In a review of this book L. P. Wilkinson wrote of the need for ‘a demonstration with abundant quotation in Latin of what it is that can make Ovid at his best enjoyable reading for us’. The present article is, in a small way, an attempt to provide such a demonstration. It is too much, of course, to hope for a demonstration in the logical sense, for conclusive proof; but what one can attempt is to demonstrate in the first meaning of the word, to point to features that seem to be significant, in the hope that others may'be induced to read with awakened interest.
Greeks Ancient and Modern
Authors: Loader W. R.
Published: July 2013

During the recent German occupation of Greece the occupying authority published a number of brochures in which it was argued that the modern Greeks have nothing whatever in common with the ancient Greeks. These brochures were circulated among German troops with the object of stifling any sympathy or admiration which the ordinary soldier might feel for the present-day Greeks as descendants of the ancient Athenians and Spartans. (It is pleasant to record that that object was not always achieved.)

In part, this propaganda was a revival of Fallmerayer's theory that the Greeks, as a race, vanished in the Middle Ages, their blood being at first diluted and then swamped by that of Slav invaders. It was also in the line of Nazi party doctrine, since Rosenberg in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts contended that the modern Greek was merely a feeble Levantine who had, in common with the ancient Greeks, only the name of Hellene.

Now, although it has been resoundingly refuted, and not least by the Slavs themselves, one can treat Fallmerayer's denial of the continuity of the Greek race with at least a modicum of respect since it was based on arguable premisses. But it is impossible that anyone with reasonable experience of Greece and Greeks could have any patience with Rosenberg's nonsense, which questions even the continuity of the Greek way of life, that continuity which is usually the first striking impression formed by the classically trained visitor to Greece.

A clear and vigorous refutation of Rosenberg will be found in Professor St. Kyriakides' monograph, Γλσσα καì Λαïκòς Πoλıτıσμòς τν N∊ωτέρων Eλλἡων(Athens, 1946).
Some Curiosities of Ancient Warfare
Authors: Glover R. F.
Published: July 2013

I

We are often told nowadays that the whole business of war, especially command and administration, is becoming increasingly difficult and complicated as more and more different weapons, each more highly specialized than the last, are brought into service. But the undoubted truth of this contention must not lead us into the error of supposing that ancient warfare was a simple matter between forces composed of nothing but infantry and cavalry. Many of the battles of antiquity, indeed, are made more interesting by the presence of unusual and intriguing armaments; and though some of these may now seem largely obsolete, it does not do to be too sure—was not the Home Guard armed with pikes in its early infancy?

Let us consider, then, the parade state of Antiochus’ army at the battle of Magnesia. After his defeat at Thermopylae in April 191, it will be remembered, he had fled to Ephesus, and by the end of the following year he was ready for the Scipios with an army of 70,000 men. ‘Most of the peoples of the Empire were represented, from Dahae horse-archers of the Caspian to Arabs mounted on dromedaries. It was strong in cavalry—at least 12,000 horse, light or “cataphract”—in light-armed infantry … archers, slingers and javelin men; it included, besides 54 elephants, that engine of war dear to the Ancient East, the dreaded scythed-chariots.’

Here, surely, is a sufficiently varied assortment of nationalities and armaments to show that manifold alliances and specialized equipments are not peculiar to the twentieth century.
Some Poetical Forests
Authors: Lamb R. W.
Published: July 2013

‘Perhaps you can draw a cypress’, says Horace (A.P. 19), a remark which many Latin poets seem to have interpreted as a challenge. Not that the poets, with the exception of Ovid, wasted many words on the cypress itself, although all are very careful to mention it. Usually it is accompanied by some gloomy epithet, feralis (Ovid, Trist. 3. 13. 21; Virg. Aen. 6. 216) or funebris, or has some remote allusion to the funeral pyre (e.g. Lucan 3. 442; Stat. Theb. 4. 464). Homer, on the contrary, preferred a more cheerful epithet ε??ώ??ης.

But the cypress is by no means the only tree in the forest, and the poets take good care to let the reader know it. The Romans thought that there were some parts of poetry, and particularly epic poetry, in which they could improve on the Greeks, and word-painting was one of these. Where the Greeks usually contented themselves with a terse epithet, the Romans loved to dip their brush in bright colours and lay them on thick. Such descriptive passages have their place in poetry, but their employment needs to be regulated carefully in accordance with the requirements of the subject. In epic particularly they should not delay the course of the action, but, as it were, provide a pleasant oasis wherein the reader can rest after perusing the account of some more strenuous activity. The forests we find in Latin verse usually contain far more trees than are generally found on an oasis, but they do provide a convenient resting-point in the action, and at the same time give the poet an opportunity of displaying his powers of word-painting.
Weather-Signs in Virgil
Authors: Jermyn L. A. S.
Published: July 2013

We come now to the signs of fair weather; and the first five lines are important:

nec minus ex imbri soles et aperta serena prospicere et certis poteris cognoscere signis. nam neque tum stellis acies obtunsa videtur, nec fratris radiis obnoxia surgere luna, tenuia nec lanae per caelum vellera ferri.

By definite signs no less will you be able To forecast sunny, clear, and rainless days After the rain, or know it has set fair. Then seen, the stars' keen brilliance is not dulled; Rises no sunlit moon; no woolly cloudlets Flock over heav'n.
A Hypochondriac and his God
Authors: Phillips E. D.
Published: July 2013

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.
Storm and Shipwreck in Roman Literature
Authors: Huxley H. H.
Published: July 2013

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.
Erotion: A Note on Martial
Authors: Lloyd L. J.
Published: July 2013

It has been a commonplace for centuries that there is much more in Martial than scurrility. Yet to those who do not read him his name is probably still synonymous with a certain type of crude and monotonous jesting: to that extent at least he has been unfortunate. The jests, brilliantly phrased and pointed, are plain enough, but (quite apart from the reasonable assumption that he had to make them or starve) it is not mere wishful thinking which compels his admirers to maintain that the true man is not to be found there. For to many he is one of the most human and companionable of Latin authors, and they return with perennial delight to his descriptions of country life, his friends and amusements, his troubles and disappointments, his whole lively picture of the world of his day. Critics have remarked at length on his perpetual brilliance, his complete mastery of language, and it would be pointless to draw attention once again to the superb craftsmanship and exquisite polish which characterize every line of his best work.

‘No other poet in any language has the same never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting ingenuity, an equal facility and finish.’ So Mr. H. W. Garrod in a well-known essay. And it is a verdict from which few will dissent.

For all that, it may be argued that there is still one further aspect of Martial's genius, or character, which has received something less than its rightful share of attention; a quality of mind difficult to define in set terms, but which perhaps may be tentatively described as tenderness; a sensitive and warm sympathy; above all, an almost painful awareness of the swiftly passing beauty of childhood and the bitterness of the death which comes too soon.
Latin in Early Poland and An Attic Drama of the Renaissance Period
Authors: Hudson-Williams T.
Published: July 2013

The Polish nation adopted Christianity in A.D. 966, but the new faith was very slow in reaching the people, as the services were all in Latin and the clergy were unacquainted with the language of the country. Even the elementary schools were conducted in Latin. The pupils sat in a hut on the bare earthen floor in summer and on bundles of straw in winter.

Except in the institutions in which the instructors were immigrant Germans, where the instruction was given in German, Latin was the only language used in the schools of Poland. The Latin Psalter was the only book in the whole school; the pupils had no exercise books; but they managed to learn some grammar and arithmetic and sang the Latin songs used in the services of the Church. In these circumstances education could make but little progress. Before the end of the thirteenth century the higher clergy issued an edict forbidding the appointment of any person who did not know the Polish language, and enforced the decree with all the authority of the Church; but, as in other European countries, Latin was the official language of the Polish University. The Academy of Cracow was founded by Casimir the Great and raised to the status of a University in 1400, richly endowed by the young Queen Jadwiga, who at her death bequeathed to it all her jewels.

In the sixteenth century the University attained great fame, and Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and Swiss came in numbers to hear the lectures of the professors, especially the great astronomer Copernicus.
Decline and Fall of Pompey the Great
Authors: Collins H. P.
Published: July 2013

Although the last phase of Republican Rome is so familiar to us, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus remains a figure rather than a man. His was the statue beneath which the murdered Caesar fell, and he is still for most of us the figure in the background: Shakespeare passed him by. His vast fame has left the man himself remote.

It was his tragedy that he could not read the writing on the wall. It was partly clouded for him, as all things gradually became clouded, by the deepening shadow of his own portentous greatness. With his solid abilities, too, he had not a streak of genius or political insight. History can show few worse statesmen. He became the chief agent of the doomed Republic without realizing that it was doomed, and lived quite uninspired by that republican idea which animated men so different as Cicero and the younger Cato.

If he had not been outclassed, and defeated in battle, and finally eclipsed, by Julius Caesar, he could have lived in history as the Roman Empire's mightiest architect. He claimed with some reason to have subdued three continents. If not a great general, he was certainly a very good one, and in his younger days he could always get the best out of his soldiers. He was, above all, a good organizer. His campaign against the Mediterranean pirates, whom he swept from the seas in three months, was an unqualified triumph.

He was stabbed to death at Pelusium by hangers-on of the Egyptian court 2,000 years ago on 29 September.
The Mental Equation Factor in ‘Aberrant’ Syntax of Greek and Latin
Authors: Collinge N. E.
Published: July 2013

‘Wir wollen ja mehr oder anderes als die Thatsachen classificieren; wir wollen sie erklären’ is the cry of a neglected linguist of the last century which it would not be idle to echo today, especially in the matter of syntactical oddities in the Greek and Latin authors. The immensely valuable work of those who have collected and classified instances of ‘aberrant’ syntax in the classical languages has the inherent disadvantage that lists and categories are made up according to the resultant form of the aberration rather than the underlying mental process which can itself often be analysed with profit. The result is a division of the phenomena into anacoluthon, contamination, pleonasm, ellipse, constructio ad sensum, and so on, a convenient but somewhat barren method, lessening the possibility of explaining and illuminating one example from another. Indeed to do thus cuts across the scientific method, putting together forms or uses which result from different thought- or speech-habits and separating many which owe their origin to identical or similar tendencies but have moved on somewhat divergent paths. Löfstedt, though he deals with the oddities of usage under conventional headings, pays no little regard to the psychological aspect and admits that a clear-cut division into conventional classes is not always free from considerable difficulty and is not particularly important for the scholar who would explain these things on a psychological basis.* Contamination in particular has been used rather to excess. The much quoted English oddity ‘I am friends with him’ is consistently stated to be a contamination of ‘I am friendly with him’ and ‘we are friendsür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1860, 1.97.
Composition in a Classics Course
Authors: French A.
Published: July 2013

It is an axiom of modern linguistics that the form of any given word is much more constant than its meaning. It is true that linguistic communication would break down altogether unless it were accepted that some firm correlation existed between form and meaning. When the teacher uses the word chair all the listening pupils have some idea of what she means, so that the sound of the word is a meaningful linguistic signal to them all, yet the possible variation of the shades of meaning it can evoke is enormous, e.g. not only (to take a random, selection) can it refer to an article of household furniture of various types, shapes, sizes, and materials, but to the presiding over a meeting, a professorial appointment, a physical action, &c. When contrasted with the more or less constant form of the word chair, the variation and complexity of its meaning is staggering, for whereas the form of the word chair is subject to change only within a strictly limited phonetic, morphemic, and syntactical range, the range of variation in its meaning is as extensive as the variation in the situations in respect of which it is used.
Asphodel, White Wine, and Enriched Thunderbolts
Authors: MacKendrick Paul
Published: July 2013

In the spring of 1950 my wife and I took part in an archaeological dig at Cosa, on the Tuscan coast ninety miles above Rome. Anyone who has travelled by train in daylight on the coastal line to or from Genoa and the Riviera has seen the site: the great grey polygonal walls looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamp-lands of the Maremma. During the war the Fascists had built at Orbetello, the nearest town to Cosa, a dynamite factory which became the target of the air-photographers of our Strategic Bombing Command. These air photographs appeared to reveal on the hill of Malabarba, just inland from Cosa, the characteristic large mounds which mark the site of Etruscan tombs; these mounds, which later turned out, on prosaic terrestrial examination, to be sanddunes, were the bait which attracted the archaeologists of the American Academy in Rome to the site.
Can You Trust Tacitus?
Authors: Wellesley K.
Published: July 2013

In November or December 1528 a citizen of Lyon was digging the foundations for a house on the northern outskirts of the town. In so doing he turned up the bronze tablet known to us as the Claudian Tablet. This document, copied from the Acta Senatus and displayed in the federal district at Lugudunum, is a verbatim report of the speech pronounced by Claudius in the Senate in a.d. 48 in favour of the admission to that body of certain Gallic chieftains. Forty-one years after its discovery a historian first placed it alongside the literary version of this same speech which we find in the Annals of Tacitus (xi. 24), and we have not yet exhausted the lessons which this vital juxtaposition can offer us. It is not very often that we are able to look over the shoulder of an ancient writer and see how he wields paste and scissors and box of paints. It is therefore with anticipation and relief that we turn to an undeniably authentic document known, in its original version, to Tacitus, and try to measure the historian's fidelity in using it.
The Growth of Telemachus
Authors: Millar C. M. H. , Carmichael J. W. S.
Published: July 2013

Although Telemachus is not the chief character of the Odyssey, his part in the plot is of considerable importance, and in one way he seems to be unique. For he is, perhaps, the only character in Greek literature who shows any development. All the other people who appear in Homer are already fully grown and, as characters, static. For in an epic it is the story which is of first importance, and the people can be adequately described by one major trait. In Greek tragedy, also, where no doubt character is of greater moment and occupies a larger proportion of the whole, we never see the characters growing as time passes. For there was a continual obstacle to the development of character on the tragic stage from a rather unexpected quarter—the Chorus. As H. C. Baldry says, ‘Because of the chorus, a fifth-century tragedy could not easily be a serial drama, leaping from incident to incident and place to place… such plays leave no scope for the development of character. The hero's nature may be revealed to the audience step by step, but in most of the extant tragedies it does not change.’
Philosophy and History Among the Greeks
Authors: Reinhardt Karl
Published: July 2013

‘History and philosophy’, the problem I am dealing with, does not seem to be a Greek one. It seems much more to be a modern one. You may find this both in English books—e.g. Collingwood on the idea of history, which I read with great interest and profit—and in some German essays, especially by younger philosophers, who state the disastrous gap between the philosophical desire for sense and the absence of sense in history, particularly as epitomized by the most recent events of our own history. It is obvious that philosophers in this crisis feel more troubled than historians. Classical scholars do not seem to be moved at all.
Walking away from the News
Authors: Blaiklock E. M.
Published: July 2013

In the year 414 b.c. Aristophanes of Athens produced a play which has intrigued the world ever since. It is an uproarious comedy based upon the recapture by the birds, under the leadership of human beings, of the Kingdom of the Universe. The birds, in fact, had ruled it originally. The Olympians were usurpers.
The Sixth Book of the AENEID
Authors: Williams R. D.
Published: July 2013

The sixth book is the focal point of the Aeneid; it completes and concludes what has gone before, and it provides a new impetus for the second half of the poem. It is not an isolated piece of theology; it has its work to do within the design of the poem. It is of vital importance in the development of the main themes of the Aeneid, and it is on three of these that I want to concentrate as we accompany Aeneas on his journey from the cave at Avernus to the Gates of Ivory. We shall be concerned firstly with how a memorable picture—or perhaps two memorable pictures—of the world after death is built up from the rich and tangled heritage of poetry, folk-lore, philosophy, and religion. In the words of T. R. Glover—to whose warm and sensitive appreciation of the poet Virgilian studies are deeply indebted—‘we find here as elsewhere that Virgil tries to sum up all that is of value in the traditions, the philosophies, and the fancies of the past’. It is in the later part of Book vi that Virgil comes nearest to a solution of the problem of human suffering with which the whole poem is so preoccupied, as he gropes towards a conception of the life after death in which sin is purified away and virtue rewarded. Secondly, the golden hopes for the future of Rome and the Roman world are in this book expressed with a patriotic pride more complete than anywhere else; the vision of the temporal destiny of the world follows upon the vision of the spiritual after-life. Thirdly, and this is the aspect which I shall stress most because it is not generally stressed enough, this book (like the rest of the Aeneid) is above all about Aeneas himself, his character and resolution, his experiences, past, present, and future. We must always remember that the aim of the book is not primarily philosophical or theological—and in this it differs from the myths of Plato to which it owes so much; the aim is to present a poetic vision which has special reference to Aeneas and Rome within the design and framework of the total epic poem.
Tacitus on the Germans
Authors: Beare W.
Published: July 2013

One of the most primitive and genuine elements of Roman religion was the feeling that some mysterious power haunted the dark wood. Germany was pre-eminently the land of dark woods in which the practical-minded Roman faltered and lost his way. There were the woods along the banks of the Rhine, in which we sometimes walked in our student days at the University of Bonn. There was the wooded Taunus range, where we visited the reconstructed Saalburg, a fort belonging to the limes or line of entrenchments constructed to protect the Roman territory in south-west Germany. There was Abnoba, the Black Forest; there was the Hercynian Forest; a vague term applied to the vast range of wooded hills stretching a thousand miles from the Rhine along the Danube and around Bohemia to the Carpathians; there was the Saltus Teutoburgiensis, where in A.d. 9 Quintilius Varus and his three legions had been wiped out by the Cherusci under their leader Arminius in a battle which had turned the tide of history; there was the unknown island wood where our grim ancestors, the Anglii and the Saxones, performed the gloomy rites of the goddess Nerthus from which none of the slave ministrants was allowed to come away alive. Beyond lay even wilder regions and more savage peoples: the Aestii or Esthonians, who wore boars' heads and lived on the Baltic shore, from which they gathered amber and were astonished to receive a price for it from the traders; the nomadic Sarmatae of central and southern Russia, who lived in wagons and ate horse-flesh; the ferocious Fenni, or Finns, who had no home at all, but slept on the ground and lived on herbs and any animals they could shoot with their bone-tipped arrows, hunting with the bow being the life of both the man and the woman, while the babies were left with no protection against weather and wild creatures except a sort of hovel made out of interlaced branches; and further still the Hellusii and the Oxiones, who had the faces of men and the bodies of animals; to the north the dead seas of the midnight sun, the frozen Arctic Ocean, where every morning could be heard the noise of the sun rising from the waters, and the horses drawing his chariot could be seen.
Greek Javelin Throwing
Authors: Harris H. A.
Published: July 2013

Field events are notoriously the Cinderellas of the athletic world, and this was as true in antiquity as in our own day. The Greeks practised three, long jump, discus, and javelin, and in their festivals did not accord them the status of separate events but grouped them, together with a foot race and wrestling, which were also solo events in their own right, in the pentathlon. This was first included in the Olympic programme in 708 b.c.; other festivals imitated Olympia, and, with the astonishing conservatism of the Greek athletic world, the pentathlon remained unchanged until the disappearance of the festivals a thousand years later.
The Problem of the Non-Specialist Student of Latin
Authors: Bullock-Davies Constance
Published: July 2013

The non-specialist student of Latin has been with us for a long time, but he has become a somewhat imposing problem nowadays. When Latin was a compulsory subject for matriculation, he partook of the nature of the seed which fell by the wayside or on stony ground, and his subsequent growth frequently proved to be as chancy as his habitat; but now more interest is being taken in him and his particular needs, perhaps because Latin has once more the opportunity of becoming a subject in its own right. The pride of place which it has lost in the school curriculum ought not to be regretted, for it was based on false values. Tradition, in its loosest and worst sense, may be said to have kept Latin alive; and, paradoxically, tradition, in terms of methods and convictions, has very nearly strangled it. Now that it has been freed from its unenviable position, the time is ripe for a reconsideration of its proper function.
Miltonic Light on Professor Denys Page's Homeric Theory
Authors: Young Douglas
Published: July 2013

In his sprightly volume The Homeric Odyssey (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955; originally the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), Professor Denys Page favoured the public with what he terms (p. 149) a few points of interest from his notes on the vocabularies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listing words and phrases found in the Iliad but rarely or never in the Odyssey, and vice versa, he concludes (p. 157) ‘that the two poems were composed and transmitted in separate regions of Hellas’.
Klephtika: The Tradition of the Tales of Banditry in Apuleius
Authors: Mackay P. A.
Published: July 2013

The essence of the adventure story is, above all, travel. If the author is to indulge his reader's taste for the wonderful and the marvellous, he must, if he is dealing with anyone but the most sophisticated reader of science-fiction, do it in a way that provides a scale against which the wonders may stand out. A strange being may be brought to familiar surroundings, or alternatively, and much more commonly, a neighbour, as it were, may be projected into a foreign environment, about which he later gives us his account.
Latin in Africa: The Cultural Point of View
Authors: Dalton R. H. F.
Published: July 2013

As a teacher of Classics in West Africa I was often questioned about the value of ‘highly academic studies’ to people who had apparently only just emerged from their own primitive society and who had many other and more important things to learn. It is perhaps significant that no criticism of the teaching of Latin, at least, has been heard by me from Africans themselves, and certainly not from those most concerned, the pupils in secondary schools. This may, of course, be due to material reasons; young Africans have notoriously good memories, which are of considerable help in the lower reaches of Latin teaching and in the presentation of set books at examinations, and therefore Latin is considered a reasonably safe option at School Certificate level (or its equivalent). I do not, however, believe that this is the whole story; Latin, if competently taught, has a great deal more to offer to an African child, for there are considerable similarities between (early) Roman and African religious, social, and domestic customs—those, in fact, common to tribal societies.
The Style of Aeschylus as Satyr-Playwright
Authors: Howe Thalia Phillies
Published: July 2013

Since1932 there have been available nearly a hundred fragmented lines of a single satyr-play of Aeschylus which require us to reconsider somewhat our image of the dramatist. Not that any revision of Aeschylus is suggested at this point. Such would be intolerable and untrue, for the Aeschylean portraits remain as magnificent as ever. But now there has been added a bright sketch reflecting a humorous and romantic side of the dramatist; as though, after possessing only a half dozen of only the tragedies of Shakespeare, we had found a small portion ofA Midsummer-Night's Dream.
Final -E In Lewis and Short
Authors: Dilke O. A. W.
Published: July 2013

Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, published in 1879 and often reprinted, is still invaluable for university and upper-school work. Users of it may have noticed that the final syllable of certain words ending in -e is wrongly marked long; but most are probably unaware of the extent of this error. The following list gives all words which the present writer has discovered with this incorrect ē (bis after an adverb indicates an entry under the adverb and under the adjective connected with it).
Stadia and Starting-Grooves
Authors: Harris H. A.
Published: July 2013

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.
Changing Fashions in Ancient Drama—I
Authors: Hooker Edna M.
Published: July 2013

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.