bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Questions about Marathon
Authors: Loader W. R.
Published: July 2013

When did the Athenians march out to meet the Persians?

In an attempt to sort out the confused chronology of events before the battle of Marathon, J. A. R. Munro, in the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. iv, maintains that the march must have taken place whilst Eretria was still in a state of siege, and was designed to save that city.

His supposition is based on a statement in Aristotle's Rhetoric, iii. 10, 1411 a 10, where Cephisodotus παρακαλν ποτε τούς 'Aϑηναíους εìς Eὒβοιαν ἐπισιτισαμένους ἒϕη εīν ἐξιἑναι τò Mιλτιἁλου Ψἡϕιαμα. Munro points out that the only possible context for this decree of Miltiades is the Persian investment of Eretria; he then goes on to presume that the decree was implemented, and that the Athenians set out from Athens some time before the date given by Herodotus for their march. To account for their non-arrival at Oropus he suggests that the Persian forces divided, and by an early invasion of Attica diverted the Greek army from its original intention.

A ψἡϕιαμα was a most binding enactment, and could only be can-celled by another ψἡϕιαμα. Because there is no record of such a cancellation, Munro seems to think that the decree must have been carried out. But both Herodotus (vi. 102 seq.) and Plato (Menexenus, 240 b) expressly declare that only after the subjugation of Eretria and the landing at Marathon did the Athenians move from the city.

Munro's difficulty about the ψἡϕιαμα could surely be better dealt with if we suppose that the force of the decree was completely invalidated by the fall of Eretria.
The Lammergeyer Comparative Descriptions in Aristotle and Pliny
Authors: Pollard J. R. T.
Published: July 2013

Aristotle's account of the περκνóπτεος the Black Eagle (H.A. ix. 32. b), is, in the main, an accurate enough description of the Lammergeyer (Gypaetus barbatus): λευκἠ κεϕαλἠ, μεγέθει ἠ μἑγιοτος, πτερἀ ἠ βραχύτατα, καì ὀρροπύγιον πρóμκες, γυπí ὃμοιος ὀρειπέλαργος καλε¯ται καí ὑπάετος. οἰkgr;ε’ ἂλση, τἀ μἐν κακἁ ταὐτἀ ἒχων τοῐς ἂλλοις, τν ’ ἀγαθν οὐἑν. ἁλíσκεται γἀρ καì ιὠκεται ὑττò κορἁκων καì τν ἂλλων, βαρύς γα καí κακóβιος καì τἀ τεθνετα ϕἑρων πειν’ ἑεì καì βοᾀ και μινυρíℑει. The birds which I observed in Abyssinia and Kenya appeared very black, and the white head (λευκἠ κεϕαλἡ) was very noticeable when the bird turned in the sun.

Again it is in fact the largest of the Old World raptores (μεγἑθει μἑγιατος), for specimens have been recorded which measured 10 feet between wing-tips. But it is untrue to say that its wings are βραχύτατα, for it possesses the graceful spread of a gigantic falcon. Sundevall, as Professor D'A. W. Thompson points out in A Glossary of Greek Birds (pp. 146–7, new edition, 1936), suggested that βραχύτατα was an error for μακρóτατα, but it is more likely, in view of Pliny's alts minimis, quoted below, that Aristotle was confusing the lammergeyer with another bird, perhaps Bonelli's (Nisaetus fasciatus Vieill.) or the Dwarf Eagle (Aquila naevia). In flight the lammergeyer's most prominent feature is its long, streamlined rump, which is faithfully described by ὀρροπὑγιον πρóμηκες (this characteristic is well portrayed in Leonard Gill's A First Guide to the Birds of South Africa).
Some Methods of Research into the origin of Greek Deities
Authors: Chittenden Jacqueline
Published: July 2013

There are flaws in the usual methods of research into religious origins which have become apparent to the writer during several years' work on the cult of one Greek god. It has therefore seemed desirable to restate and to examine these methods so as to demonstrate the merits and the faults of each. To do so is one aim of this paper; another is an elucidation of the many important advantages of the historical approach, and, although it is hoped that the principles herein erected as guides to study are applicable to all ancient gods, the illustrations of these principles will derive very largely from Hermes, the god with whose cult and concept the writer has been most closely concerned.

It would be hard to exaggerate the difficulties which beset a student when he turns to the problem of an ancient god's origin. Even a partial solution demands his utmost caution, for the easy explanation is hardly ever the right one. He must guard himself against the beguilements of the attractive theory which will very often beckon him down the wrong path. To avoid this and to enter upon his task most wisely he will meditate upon two main initial difficulties.

The first one to present itself is, of course, the fact that the origin of most gods worshipped by the Greeks lies in the past far behind Homer. Therefore the student is faced with an almost total lack of literary and epigraphical material—at least which he can understand— to aid him in the search.
Catullus X: A Rambling Commentary
Authors: Sedgwick W. B.
Published: July 2013

This has always been one of my favourite poems, but if I were asked why, I should be hard put to it for an answer. I suppose it is because it seems to me the most perfect example of urbanitas in Latin poetry. Others will prefer Horace—those who prefer curiosa felicitas, and I admit at once there is nothing here to match such an exquisite felicity as ‘tange Chloen semel arrogantem’ (o si sic omnia!). But even in Horace such apparently effortless grace is rare; usually we find as much curiositas as felicitas: we marvel at the art, but I for one feel uneasily conscious of the tour de force. In other words, I feel the effects are calculated, whereas I always feel that Catullus dashed down his shorter poems, at least, in a few minutes—as we know Schubert did many of his songs: even Mozart composed in his head, though without the necessity of writing. Of the labor limae the outstanding examples are Horace and Beethoven. For Horace we have his own word: in the case of Beethoven no one would suspect to what an extent he carried it, if his note-books had not been preserved.

However de gustibus non disputandum: it is the old controversy between Munro, who favoured Catullus and Lucretius, and Conington, who preferred Horace and Virgil. (Those who have access to Conington's Miscellaneous Writings will find there a most interesting statement of his views: Munro's reply will be found in Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus.)
Some Early Greek Epitaphs
Authors: Jeffery L. H.
Published: July 2013

In Westminster Abbey lie the bones of Ben Jonson; in the little parish church of Cookham in Berkshire lies a local squire named Arthur Babham, who died and was buried at about the same time as the poet. The world knows Ben Jonson, and his epitaph. Who has heard of his contemporary? Yet listen to the first lines of the Cookham memorial:

To Cristall Skyes let Fame resounde the Vertuous Praise aright Of Arthor Babham here depicte in alabastere bright.

Ten further lines record his lineage, his offspring, the expense of his monument, and his ultimate happy destination; but to the reader they mean little, compared with the directness of the words on the Abbey flagstone: ‘O rare Ben Ihonson.’

There is a similar simplicity and lack of pretension in certain of the sepulchral epigrams on individuals contained in Book VII of the Greek Anthology, which marks them out among the multitude of ‘poetical exercises in the form of epitaphs’ (to quote the introduction of the Loeb edition) which form the greater part of the collection. Some of these outstanding examples are attributed, though often on very slender evidence, to famous poets from the seventh to the fifth centuries, while others are anonymous (); but, contrasted with the mass of rhetorical questions, imaginative speculations, and elaborate descriptions which so often detract from the compositions of the later writers, the epitaphs in question all have this common virtue, that the bare facts to be commemorated are stated briefly and lucidly, some-times with the transcendent clarity of great poetry, sometimes with a halting plainness which has equal power to transfix the mind.
The Revolt of the Civilians a.d. 237–8
Authors: Mullens H. G.
Published: July 2013

It used to be said that, as far as schools were concerned, Roman history ended at 31 b.c. Nowadays it ends at a.d. 180. No doubt that date is a convenient stopping-point; but the later centuries have in them just as much as the earlier to instruct our generation and to thrill the imagination. The events which this paper describes justify, I think, that contention.
An essay for the more idle reader
Authors: Haworth C. M.
Published: July 2013

My father, like perhaps most of his generation, despised the commentary added to a text as an unnecessary aid meant for bad scholars and lazy schoolboys; and as for translations he regarded them simply as dishonest. But in these days, when classical learning has once again become a pleasure rather than a duty or a way of life, an expensive but a delightful luxury, we are no longer prepared to admit even Euripides in the rags of a bare and ill-printed text. Only the Muses of Homer and perhaps Virgil need hope for a seat on our laps by the fireside, unless they have put on all their attractive best. The rivalry of good publishing houses has made us Epicureans (or do I mean Eclectics?), whose favouritism towards this writer or that is at least in some part dependent on the charm of his commentator and the skill of his printer.
Horace's Ars Poetica: A Systematic Argument
Authors: Tracy H. L.
Published: July 2013

The reproach of careless organization has become a commonplace in the criticism of the Ars Poetica. Some commentators have been satisfied with merely putting on a derogatory label. Others have tried transposing passages in order to reduce the work to a system. Others, with or without appeal to Horace's sources, have tried in various ways to discern or to reconstruct some plan underlying the alleged disorder. None, so far as can be discovered, have made a successful attempt to find the key to the argument in the mode and manner of its presentation.

The aim of this paper is to suggest such a key; to show that the proposed key is valid for the interpretation of all Horace's work; and particularly to show that the proper application of the key reveals in the Ars that lucid and logical thought-structure that is a constant characteristic of the Horatian manner.

Horace is a writer of one idiom only. His method in all his works is an essentially ‘lyrical’ method, whether he is working on lyrical material proper or on satire, epistle, or didactic verse. The seeming casualness of the Ars is a mannerism of the lyrical style. Everywhere in Horace a disarming informality appears on the surface. But closer reading reveals a lucid and closely patterned sequence of thought. Once the lyrical manner is understood, once the key to its interpretation is applied, Horace's typically clear logic, in ode, satire, or treatise stands revealed.
A Point of Tense-Sequence
Authors: Laughton Eric
Published: July 2013

One of the services which Mr. S. A. Handford has rendered to classical teaching in this country is his adoption of the word ‘habit’, rather than ‘rule’, as applied to the sequence of tenses in Latin. 1 For to most people, and especially to the learner, the word ‘rule’ has the finality of something which must be obeyed. But ‘rules’ of grammar and rules of conduct are very different things. Grammar is the systematic analysis of phenomena observed in a language, and a grammarian's ‘rules’ are simply the formulation of habitual modes of expression which he has observed in the language which he is studying. If his observation has been faulty or incomplete, the ‘rule’ which he formulates may be inadequate or false. And so a ‘rule’ which appears to run counter to common sense must provoke suspicion.
Ships in Greek Vase-Painting
Authors: Williams R. T.
Published: July 2013

From the several references to the crews of ships in theIliadand theOdysseyit can be seen that the complement of oarsmen is usually twenty. I assume that Homer is describing the Heroic ships, the ships of the Achaeans, and not necessarily the ships of the time in which he lived. However, naval specialists from the west of Greece, like the Phaeacians, were able to build larger ships; for they sent Odysseus home to Ithaca in a ship with a crew of fifty-two. The ship, too, in which Odysseus left Troy must have been about this size; by the time it had reached Circe's island its complement had been reduced to forty-six, including Odysseus and Eurylochus, but then there had been casualties. Each of the ships which originally left Troy with Odysseus had lost six men during the attack of the Cicones; had it not been for this loss, then, the crew would have been fifty-two. It is true that Odysseus' particular ship had lost six men to Cyclops as well; but it is likely that Odysseus' ship would have been made up to strength from the other ships after the incident. It is at any rate clear that Odysseus' ship had a crew ofabout fifty, and that the pentekontor, although Homer does not use the actual word π∊ντηκóντoρoς, was in use at the time of the Trojan War.

This deduction is supported by a Mycenaean vase decorated with a ship, found during the excavation of the Tragana Tholos Tomb at Pylos (Koryphasion) and dated by Furumark to 1230–1100.
Homer to the Rescue a New Method in Beginners' Greek
Authors: Schoder Raymond V.
Published: July 2013

The trouble with Greek is that too few are taking it. This is a great loss, for Greek has unique cultural value and is in itself the most educative item on the highly varied menu for young minds which our schools set forth. A small percentage of students are taking Greek, and finding it a real benefit. But there are surely many more who could be profiting from a substantial helping of Greek yet are not. Why? And can anything be done to remedy the situation?

I would like to diagnose the ill and suggest a feasible cure—one which has worked out quite satisfactorily in practice in over ninety schools of the United States and Canada where a new technique has been used the past few years. Considerable interest in this experiment has developed in England and Scotland, and it has been repeatedly suggested to me that I describe the innovations entailed, for wider notice and under-standing on the part of those who might find it adaptable to their own needs. The following report endeavours to meet this desire.

It is a harsh fact, in Britain as across the Atlantic, that under present educational conditions and economic urgencies the proportion of able young students who can afford to devote six or more years to intensive study of Greek is very small. Why not take up their problem and work out a compromise? If we can assure them that on a special method and programme they could in only two years (at four or five hours a week) learn enough Greek to read a substantial portion of at least one major author before the two years are up, would not many of them accept the opportunity and take that much Greek at any rate? It would mean, too, in practice, many more students taking Greek, if only on a short-term basis.
A Sixteenth-Century Humanist
Authors: Hudson-Williams T.
Published: July 2013

‘This language [Latin] was my mother tongue’, says a country squire, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92), in the first volume of his Essais, c. 25. This is how it came about. Before the boy could speak his father engaged as tutor a German latinist who did not know a word of French. Orders were given that no member of the household was to speak anything but Latin in the boy's hearing. The father and mother as well as the servants, including the chambermaid, picked up the foreign language; ‘we became so soaked in Latin that it flooded the villages around us, and even to-day (1580) the Latin names of artisans and tools are still heard in the neighbourhood. I was above six years of age before I understood any more French or Périgordin than I did Arabic’ (i. 25). He tells us elsewhere that the only verses he ever composed were in Latin. Among his tutors was the Scottish poet Buchanan, a distinguished latinist: Scott tells us that the Laird of Tully-Veolan ‘read the classic poets, to be sure, and the Epithalamium of Georgius Buchanan’ (Waverley, c. 13).

At the age of six Montaigne was sent to the ‘Collège de Guienne, the best in France’. There, under the influence of the macaronic jargon spoken around him, his Ciceronian diction soon ‘became debased’ (s'abastardit). ‘When I was about seven or eight, I used to escape from all other pleasures to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the easiest book known to me, and, because of the subject-matter, the best-suited to my feeble age.’
The Part of the Slave in Terence's Drama
Authors: Amerasinghe C. W.
Published: July 2013

One of the more interesting features of Terence's dramatic work is the evidence in it of frequent conflict between the dramatist and the dramatic conventions of his day. To some instances of this conflict, represented by criticisms, explicit or implicit, of convention, attention has been drawn by Sir Gilbert Norwood in his book on The Art of Terence. But even he has perhaps not followed up the fuller implications of Terence's critical attitude in determining the nature of his drama. My purpose in this article is to show that there was one convention against which, above all others, Terence consistently rebelled, namely, the convention of the slave who manages the action; and I would even go so far as to suggest that his success as a dramatic artist is, to a large extent, dependent upon the way in which he solved the problem of the slave.
Purified or Popular?
Authors: Loader W. R.
Published: July 2013

In a previous issue of Greece and Rome (vol. xiii, June 1944) there appeared some remarks on the division of tongues which subsists in Greece to-day, the tongues specified being Katharevousa (‘Purified’ or ‘Purifying’ Greek), Demotiki (Popular Greek), and a newspaper language which is blended from the other two in varying proportions according to the linguistic tastes, and sometimes the political affiliations, of the newspaper proprietors. The territory controlled by the partisans of these rival idioms was also broadly sketched in the same number. ‘Katharevousa is the official and formal language, used in Government publications and statements, business correspondence, non-fictional books and treatises, law courts, University lectures (although not so much at Salonica as at Athens) and formal conversation.’ ‘Demotiki is the language of conversation, of song, of popular novels and periodicals (and also of most serious creative works of literature) and the spoken language of trade and business.’ And then the essay attempted to show the main characteristics of the two idioms and their respective relation-ships with classical Greek.

Nothing, however, was said of the struggle for linguistic supremacy between Katharevousa and Demotiki, which has been one of the out-standing and most stimulating features of life in Greece since the time of the War of Independence. As a rule, political differences are the principal cause of internal dissension among the Greeks, but at more than one point during the last hundred years people were ready to believe that the language problem would oust politics from its post of honour as the predominant Hellenic interest.
Columella and his Latin Treatise on Agriculture
Authors: Forster E. S.
Published: July 2013

In view of the interest of Columella's De Re Rustica it is strange that it is not better known. Indeed, it is difficult to secure a text of it, since the last complete edition was published in the eighteenth century and the nearest approach to an English edition is a short selection from his works published in Dublin in 1732.

As to the man himself our knowledge is derived almost wholly from his own writings. His full name was Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. He was a contemporary and friend of Seneca, who lived from 4 b.c. to A.D. 65 and, like Columella, was a native of Spain, and of Seneca's brother Gallio, proconsul of Achaea, who figures in the Acts of the Apostles (xviii. 12) as ‘caring for none of these things’, and also died in A.D. 65. The elder Pliny (A.D. 23–79) quotes freely from Columella. Without going into further detail, I think we may say that the De Re Rustica was probably published in the sixties of the first century A.D.

Columella was born and spent his early years at or near the town of Gades, the modern Cadiz, in the south-west corner of Spain. He does not mention his parents but often speaks of his uncle Marcus, who was also a keen agriculturist and lived in the Spanish province of Baetica in which Gades was situated. Possibly Columella lived with his uncle during his early years. At some period of his life he found himself on military service at Tarentum, where an inscription has been discovered which describes him as a military tribune of the Sexta Legio Ferrata, which is known to have been recruited at Gades.
Version
Authors: Street A. G.
Published: July 2013

The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character. In conjunction with your team of horses, it becomes a glorious galleon, which you steer proudly over the rolling fields like some mariner of old. It is no longer an ugly, awkward, inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch … Not that the poesy of ploughing is continuous. The length of the lines is determined by the head-lands; it is broken into verses by each strike-out, and, if you wish to continue the simile, into different poems by the different fields. Such a nuisance these breaks are! Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever without these petty hindrances ? But, this being impossible, one is forced to turn, to let the plough grate clumsily along the head-land, then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more.

'Tis true I am no physician, but I would suggest in all sincerity that three months’ steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous break-down. For ploughing is a mental tonic of great power. The ploughman is master of the situation. Nothing can stop him. Little by little he changes the surface of the earth. The plough may be slow, but it is so very sure. As the strip of black on the east side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider and wider until it neared the west boundary, I was forced to marvel at the relentless power of the plough.
Weather-Signs in Virgil
Authors: Jermyn L. A. S.
Published: July 2013

PART 1

Collecting of weather-signs must have been a practice of considerable antiquity, for man has always drawn his sustenance from the land or from beasts that convert vegetable into animal protein. A hunter must know the best times for hunting; and for the agriculturist it is essential not only to know when the average seasonal changes of weather occur but to have some means of forecasting variations from the normal. We know two Greek collections of weather-signs, and there may have been a third which was older than either of these. Eudoxus of Cnidus, a pupil of Plato and a distinguished mathematician who lived about 390–337 b.c., had written a prose work on astronomy, entitled Phaenomena. This, at the request of Antigonus of Macedon, was put into verse, under the same title, by Aratus of Soli somewhere between 276 and 274 b.c. The Phaenomena of Aratus is a dull, pretentious piece of versification, of interest to us only because it contains a number of seasonal signs which Virgil has scattered about the Georgics. But the astronomical piece is followed by a passage of 422 lines, which has been given the independent title of Diosemiai or Diosemeiai, on the signs of less normal weather. This is undoubtedly the principal source of Virgil's main collection; and from it, therefore, I shall chiefly be quoting. But there does exist another work, Concerning the Signs of Rain, Wind, Storm, and Fair Weather, a prose work in the form of some twenty pages of notes.
Galen and his Environment
Authors: Eichholz D. E.
Published: July 2013

Galen was born at Pergamum in a.d. 130 or, more likely, 129. His father Nicon, a man of means, was well educated and kindly, but his mother ‘was most irascible, so much so that she would sometimes bite her servants, and was always shouting and always battling with my father, even more so than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5 K. 40). This was a difficult home, particularly for an only son, as we must suppose Galen to have been. But his father attended carefully to his upbringing. At 14 he began to study logic, and a little later the philosophy of all the chief sects. His choice of a profession he also owed to his father, who was prompted by a dream to let him study medicine. There were dangers, as Galen later saw (19 K. 59), in studying medicine and philosophy together, as he now at 17 proceeded to do. But he did not succumb, and the following hypothetical description may be taken as true of himself at this time (De nat. fac. III. x. 179, Loeb Classical Library, ed. A. J. Brock, 2 K 179): ‘A man who wishes to gain more than ordinary knowledge of his subject must at the outset be exceptional both in his natural gifts and in his early training. And when he reaches adolescence, he must have a frenzied enthusiasm for the truth, like one possessed; neither by day nor by night must he cease straining and striving to master all that has been said by the most famous of the ancients.’ His first medical instructor was Satyrus, with whom he studied for four years.
Sea Thoughts from The Odyssey
Authors: Craig J. D.
Published: July 2013

These few reflections were suggested by a recent coastwise voyage with the Odyssey as only book-companion, and the sea is the main theme.

The sea, of course, figures largely in the Odyssey, and how true it all is! Clearly Homer was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of sealife, and we may be sure that his Greek audiences down the years found in him a satisfying interpreter of their own experience as members of a seafaring race.

Homer's stock adjectives and verbs are the quintessence of observation, but observation coloured with artistic imagination. His sea-pictures, with all their vividness, are not photographic, or scientific—if that means abstracting and explaining. Let me illustrate.

A net, to anyone who has made or used one, is a perpetual source of wonder. He knows its knots and its changing shapes, but how is he to describe it—universally? Not, certainly, in the terms of Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition: ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ In the last resort he hails with delight Homer's childlike, invincible, πoλνωπóχ (xxii. 386), for, after all, ‘many holes’ sums up to the eye of imagination the idea of net. True, these ‘holes’ are regularly bounded, but why insist on that when the reader knows it perfectly well and only likes to be re-minded of the general impression? Even Johnson had a glimmering notion that ‘holes’ had something to do with it, for he defines ‘reticulated’ as ‘formed with interstitial vacuities’.
Seven Latin Inscriptions in Rome
Authors: Gordon A. E.
Published: July 2013

Latin inscriptions are among the most revealing and valuable remains from ancient Rome and its Empire. They have been found in the hundreds of thousands—and are still being found—in all parts of the Empire, ranging in date from early times to the fall of the Western Empire and beyond. The earliest are few and of unknown date—perhaps of the regal period, perhaps of the early Republic—and the latest are of yesterday, such as the ones put up to mark the new excavations and discoveries under St. Peter's in Rome. The stories they have to tell are infinite in variety, and the information they give as varied in value. From the city of Rome alone we have the names of more than 50,000 persons recorded in inscriptions, not counting the many more whose cognomina only are given.
To The World's End
Authors: Thomson J. O.
Published: July 2013

A Recurrent motif in Latin poets is the assertion that somebody would follow somebody else anywhere, to the world's end if need be. This mannerism is worth notice for its curious persistence over a long period, and it is amusing to observe the details, the places which suggest themselves to the writers as dangerous or remote.

The series seems to begin with Catullus (II. 1–4): he has two cronies who will follow him wherever he goes, whether east to Parthia or Hyrcania and the Sacae beyond, or—presumably on another line, by sea—to the Arabs and the uttermost Indians, litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda, or south to the Nile, or north over the high Alps to the Rhine and the far-western Britons, just then being invaded by Julius Caesar. In fact the poet went east only to Bithynia, and nothing is known of journeys in other directions. (One scholar has even questioned whether he really came home all the way on his ‘yacht’, as poem 4 is generally understood to say.)1

Propertius is extravagant: with his friend he would scale the fabulous mountains of the north wind or go south to Ethiopia and beyond, whatever he may conceive to be there— cum quo Rhipaeos possim conscendere montes ulteriusque domo vadere Memnonia.2 With his lady he would go mare per longum and endure anything (iii. 22. 9). A love-sick girl is made to write to her soldier, who is supposed to have seen the world from Britain and the wintry Getae to a generously large and elastic eastern frontier: if service regulations allowed, she would be with him, and Scythian mountains and frozen waters would not stop her: as it is, she can only look for his whereabouts on a map, e tabula pictos ediscere mundos.
Aim and Motive in Roman Writers Part I
Authors: Lelièvre F. J.
Published: July 2013

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.
Rhetorical Questions in Oratio Obliqua
Authors: Woodcock E. C.
Published: July 2013

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.
Trees and Plants in The Greek Tragic Writers
Authors: Forster Edward S.
Published: July 2013

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.
Iuppiter Dolichenus
Authors: Nash-Williams V. E.
Published: July 2013

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.
George Chapman's Translation of Homer's Iliad
Authors: Fay H. C.
Published: July 2013

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.
The Promise of Herculaneum
Authors: White H. A. B.
Published: July 2013

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.
Musicians and Classical Scholarship
Authors: Sedgwick W. B.
Published: July 2013

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.
Ancient Groceries
Authors: Myres Sir John L.
Published: July 2013

These notes were compiled for a lecture to the grocersapos; assistants and apprentices of Liverpool, early in 1910, but have been revised and somewhat elaborated.

Let us begin by defining our subject. What are Groceries? The con-tents of a grocerapos;s shop are various, and some are common to grocersapos; shops and more special establishments. Some of these (1) are perhaps not strictly ‘groceries’ at all, (2) are absent from early lists of groceries; e.g. tea and coffee, which formerly had their own ‘warehousemen’, and this process of encroachment and regrouping still goes on. What then are the sources and the purposes of all these? Every business of supply is a matter of adapting means to ends. The ends are not set by the business man, but by the public, the customers. The means also are not created by the business man; they exist, or are made, elsewhere and among other peoples. The business man is the middleman who organizes the supply to meet the demand for something which the consumer either cannot supply for himself or only at a disproportionate and therefore unbusiness-like effort.

In looking, therefore, at the early history of what was to become a ‘grocery’ business, we are asking three questions: as to the purposes which groceries serve, the sources which fulfil them, and the methods by which the ‘grocer’ adjusts supply to demand. In a modern grocer's shop, then, we may classify its contents in respect of the purposes which they serve, and the means which fulfil these ends.
Background Studies in the Teaching of Latin
Authors: Garforth F. W.
Published: July 2013

From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century the teaching of Latin in England emphasized grammar and the formal aspects of language at the expense of subject-matter and of the general background of civilization. The tradition continued into the twentieth century and is still not dead. Protests against this formalizing and grammaticizing of a potentially liberal subject have been made regularly, at least from Elyot onwards. ‘By what time he [the pupil] cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is extinct with the burthen of grammar’ (Governour, Book I. x). Milton, in the Tractate, writes: ‘Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.… We do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learnt easily and delightfully in one year’ (ed. Morris, p. 5). Locke makes a similar complaint (Thoughts, para. 165 ff.). During England's classical age protests were fewer; for the end—familiarity with Latin and Greek literature (or rather with a fairly narrow selection of it)—was so desirable that it justified the means, however unpleasant. In the nineteenth century the volume of protest grew again and was reinforced by the partisans of science; notably Spencer and Huxley. But the linguistic tradition was strengthened rather than weakened, at least for the time being; for its supporters, rationalizing their prejudices in the face of attack, conjured up the various mental-training arguments which ever since have confused the whole issue of the value of Latin in education.
Athenian Imperialism
Authors: Gregor D. B.
Published: July 2013

L'impérialisme athénien, by Jacqueline de Romilly, recently published, is an important contribution to Thucydidean studies; and as foreign books usually not only cost more but take longer to read, it may save time and money to give here a summary of the argument.

The authoress intends her discussion of the main theme to throw light on the vexed question of the genesis of the History; but with this part of the work we are less concerned. It will be enough to say that she believes Thucydides to have been aware of the ἀληθ∊στἁτη πρóφασıς right from the start (roughly, because the events narrated at the beginning of Bk. II, obviously pre-415, exactly correspond to the phraseology of the speeches at the end of Bk. I, which imply that πρóφασıς); that the subsequent insertions are the Pentekontaetia, the second part of the Athenian's speech at Sparta, the Funeral Oration, Pericles' last speech and obituary notice, details of Brasidas (clearly post-Lysander) in Bk. IV, the personality of Alcibiades, and the Melian Dialogue; and that these insertions were made after 404, when the disastrous end of the war unloosed attacks on the Periclean régime.

Her main argument, however, is that Thucydides' real subject was the Athenian Empire; because (i) the ‘real cause’ was Athenian imperialism, which alarmed Sparta; (ii) it is the background to every major event described (e.g. Plataea, Mytilene, Pylos, Sicily); (iii) the speeches fall into two classes: attack on or defence of the Empire; (iv) he ignores home-politics, because in fact party-differences were only one of degree between extreme and moderate imperialists; (v) the work is a homogeneous unit, whereas many never came to regard the war as one (e.g. Andocides, Pax 9; Aeschines, de F.L. 176); and (vi) the two factors which Pericles selected as guaranteeing victory—the fleet and the treasury—are the same as those on which her empire rested.
Argeiphontes in Homer—The Dragon-Slayer
Authors: Davis S.
Published: July 2013

According to Elliot Smith, the dragon ‘is most intimately associated with the earliest stratum of divinities, for it has been homologized with each of the members of the earliest Trinity, the Great Mother, the Water God, and the Warrior Sun God, both individually and collectively. To add to the complexities of the story, the dragon-slayer is also represented by the same deities, either individually or collectively; and the weapon with which the hero slays the dragon is also homologous both with him and his victim, for it is animated by him who wields it, and its powers of destruction make it a symbol of the same power of evil which it itself destroys.’

Wherever it is found the dragon displays a special partiality for water. It dwells in pools or wells or in the clouds on the tops of mountains, or at the bottom of the sea where it guards vast treasures, or even on the top of a high mountain. It has the same characteristics everywhere, for the dragon of the North is essentially the same as that of the South and the East, an evil power, guarding hoards and withholding good things from men. ‘The slaying of a dragon is the achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram…But if in the West the dragon is usually a “power of evil”, in the far East he is equally emphatically a symbol of beneficence. He is identified with emperors and kings; he is the son of heaven, the bestower of all bounties.’