bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Oedipus Tyrannus on the Stage
Authors: Owen A. S.
Published: July 2013

Many of us have attended performances of Greek plays; a smaller number have themselves acted in one or more. To all these the question of the production of any play that is being read becomes of great interest, an interest which is not always adequately catered for by commentators in their editions. When I read a Greek play, I always like to imagine myself as ‘producing’ it, and try to visualize it on the stage, as Aristotle tells budding playwrights they should, when they are composing tragedies. I have taken here as giving examples of the kinds of point to be raised what is probably the best known of all Greek plays; but several of the kind of questions that it compels us to ask ourselves can be asked equally well in many other plays.
Heresies I. -DI, -DO, -DUM
Authors: Witton W. F.
Published: July 2013

In most branches of classical study, in the interpretation of history, in criticism, whether textual or literary, and most noticeably in archaeology, the present generation knows more than its parents did; that a similar advance has not been made in the strictly linguistic studies is perhaps due partly to an unexpressed assumption that we already know all that we are likely to know about the classical languages, but is certainly due even more to a love of tradition for its ownsake; what was good enough for Kennedy is good enough for us.
Sosagoras
Authors: Hose H. F.
Published: July 2013

Yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I saw the Herakles of Euripides. Where are the gods, Euclides? Euripides, they say, worships gods of his own, and strange divinities too, if stories are true; but Athens is a city of gossip. He certainly has scant respect for the gods of his fathers; and the audience, but for us few older men, who almost go back to the generation of Marathon, the audience, in the main, was with him. It was the same theatre, my old friend, where you and I, as boys, sat nearly sixty years ago and watched the Persae of Aeschylus. What a day that was! There stood Salamis, where we were taken by our mothers to live in that anxious, waiting crowd for those long weeks while the Persians sacked the city and were at last defeated on that blue strait which glittered in the sun before our eyes while the poet told its story on the stage. Then shortly afterwards you went away and found a home on the shores of the Euxine, and since then you have known Athens, you say, only by my letters. You went away before the work of restoring the Akropolis had advanced very far. I have told you of the temples built upon it in honour of the gods who saved Greece, so men said then. They rose above our heads yesterday, dazzling white against deepest blue; but what are their gods to Athens now?
Books and Authors
Authors: Poynton J. B.
Published: July 2013

Our greatest thoughts occur to us at quite unexpected times and in quite unexpected places. We wish to share them with posterity, but we have nothing with us on which to write them down, and by the time we reach home we shall have forgotten all about them. Sometimes indeed in such circumstances we make use of a tree-trunk or blank wall, but the practice has an obvious disadvantage: it is not easy to convey our manuscript to the publisher, and our manuscript may have to wait many centuries before a publisher comes to it.
The Glass of the Greeks and Romans
Authors: Harden D. B.
Published: July 2013

It is not long since it was commonly thought that the art of blowing glass was known for several thousand years before Christ. Certain Egyptian tomb-paintings of the twelfth dynasty (c. 2OOO b.c.) and later, which really depict metal-workers blowing the flames of their furnace, were thought to represent glass-blowers. As a corollary, it has been said that not a few of the vessels of blown glass found on ancient sites in Greece and other Mediterranean countries belong to the Greek period. Such beliefs are quite incorrect. There is no evidence that the process of blowing glass was invented until about the time of Christ. Scientific excavation in Greece has proved beyond question that any fragments of glass vessels found there belong to Roman or later times; the tombs in Cyprus that contain Hellenistic or earlier pottery contain no blown glass, whereas in tombs of Roman date blown glass tends to displace pottery as funerary furniture; and similar observations have been made during scientific excavations in the other Mediterranean countries.
Pytheas of Marseilles
Authors: Angus C. F.
Published: July 2013

The English are a nation of shopkeepers—Napoleon has said it—and as good commercials we travel. Of all those who at one time or another visit Marseilles, our gateway to the South and East, how many, I wonder, even of those who have received a classical education, remember that they are after all but paying the compliment of a return call, since from that port sailed over 2,200 years ago the first Greek expedition τω̃ν ἡμει̃ς ἴδμεν to explore the North and West and visit the British Isles, under the command of Pytheas.
Latin by the Mason Gray Method
Authors: McEvoy C.
Published: July 2013

One of the most recent of the new approaches to the study of Latin is associated with the name of Mason Gray. Mason Gray was Director of Ancient Languages in the East High School and in Junior High Schools, Rochester, N.Y. His theory is expounded in The Teaching of Latin (D. Appleton & Company, New York, 1929, 8s. 6d.) and finds practical expression in Latin for To-day, Parts I and II (Ginn & Company, London, 1932, 1933, 3s. 6d. and 4s. 6d.).
Ostia
Authors: Rollo W.
Published: July 2013

Most of us are aware that Rome possessed a harbour town at the mouth of the Tiber and that the ruins of the town are well worth a visit; but how many of us know the story of Ostia, the extraordinary interest attaching to it, the information it supplies on the economic life of Rome, and the great difficulties the Roman engineers had to face in constructing a really serviceable harbour ? Ostia lies about 20 miles from Rome, and for us, thinking in terms of motor-cars and trains, it is far from easy to imagine and to realize how long and difficult this journey must have seemed in the earliest times when the Romans first sought to establish connexion with the coast—not to speak of the dangers to which a traveller in those days must have been exposed. On arrival, we see the far-stretching ruins of the city lying before us in deep silence, for not merely its inhabitants have left Ostia but the sea and the river as well. The tawny Tiber, carrying down sand from the mountains, is the chief cause of the coastline shifting yearly no less than nine yards farther away; the river too has changed its bed and, in doing so, deprived Ostia of the last vestiges of her former greatness.
Charito
Authors: Lumb T. W.
Published: July 2013

Chaereas and Callirrhoe, the earliest extant Greek Romance, ascribed to Charito of Aphrodisia, is a melodrama of no slight vigour. Here is its plot.
A Latin Vocabulary for Beginners
Authors: Clarke Amy K.
Published: July 2013

‘That great instrument of thought, the Verb,’ is a phrase which must have arrested the attention of many young teachers of Latin, and helped to prevent their methods from becoming mechanical and to keep the spirit of their instruction generous and humane. To teach Latin means an increasing appreciation of the power which it derives from its inflected verb, and of the extent to which this moulded the style of the great Latin writers: they had an innate appreciation of their native advantage, used it to its fullest capacity, and developed it in the using.
Some Foreign Influences in Greek Thought
Authors: Barker Ernest
Published: July 2013

There is a quarter of the eastern Mediterranean which has been singularly fertile in the history of thought. Place yourself, in time, in the four centuries from 300 b.c. to a.d. 100: place yourself, in space, on the island of Cyprus, and look northwards to Cilicia, eastwards to northern Syria, and south-eastwards to Phoenicia; and then so placed and so looking, you will find a constellation of many stars. From Citium in Cyprus came Zeno, a Hellenized Phoenician, as Mr. Bevan has called him, who founded the Stoic school. From Soli, in Cilicia, to the north, came Chrysippus, the systematizer of Stoicism. From the neighbouring city of Tarsus came Zeno the Second, the successor to Chrysippus as master of the Porch; and from Tarsus there also came a Hellenized Hebrew (again I quote Mr. Bevan), whom we call St. Paul, and who visited Athens three and a half centuries after the Hellenized Phoenician from Cyprus, and preached in terms of Stoic philosophy, as it is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, in the midst of Mars' Hill. These are not the only sons of Tarsus. There was also Antipater, who was next successor but one to Zeno the Second as the head of the Stoic school; and many centuries afterwards, about a.d. 650, there was also Theodore of Tarsus, the founder of the English Church, who had studied at Athens, was well versed in literature, Greek as well as Latin, and was called ‘the philosopher’.
The Classic and Roman History: A Defence of Tradition
Authors: Bentliff D. G.
Published: July 2013

Opinion seems to be growing among teachers of Roman history that the Empire should be more extensively studied in schools. The feeling was expressed by more than one speaker in a discussion held not so long ago by the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and this ‘boom’ in the Empire is likely to be fostered by Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and by Mr. Stevenson's text-book The Roman Empire—surely one of the first school text-books on this period.
In Lexicographos: Another Heresy
Authors: Stanford W. Bedell
Published: July 2013

MR. W. F. Witton's reconsiderations of grammatical rules, ‘invented’, as he suggests, ‘by some unimaginative medieval scholar’, must be welcome to all teachers and students of the classics. Modern readers, both in schoolroom and in lecture-hall, are less ready to exploit the ambiguities of ‘the exception proves the rule’ than were the medieval Schoolmen, and a reluctance to accept arbitrary laws without examining the credentials of the legislator is one of the more healthy symptoms of this hypercritical and sometimes anarchical age.
Horatius Redivivus: A Bi-Millenary Cento
Authors: Mayall Murray
Published: July 2013

I was glad to hear from Horace Q. Flack that he had arrived in England. He is something of a curiosity: American-born, he claims descent from the Roman poet Horace, whose words he is incessantly quoting.
Copper Fly
Authors: Freeman Kathleen
Published: July 2013

I happened to be looking through one of the volumes of Lyra Graeca when I came across the fascinating account, in Pollux's Word-Book, of some of the games played by Greek children, the jingles that go with the different games, and their titles.
The Tale of a Triumph
Authors: Mattingly H.
Published: July 2013

The rain was falling in torrents and there seemed to be no prospect of its stopping. Publius had already exhausted all his favourite wet-weather games and, after games, all his favourite forms of mischief. He had teased the slaves out of their lives. He had set Davus to look for Stichus and, at the same time, Stichus to look for Davus. If you started them in different parts of the house, you could get a good deal of fun out of their wasted exertions, before they met and discovered the trick. Then he had begged all the titbits from the cook that he was likely to get. Then he had played with the monkey, until it got tired of his exactions and escaped to the roof. And still the rain went on. What was he to do with himself? All amusements exhausted and still several hours to bedtime. A happy thought! He would find Syrus and get him to play their favourite game of story-telling. Syrus was a good listener and helped out Publius' own amateur efforts by his close attention. But when it came to his turn, he was a very prince of story-telling. He must have had a wonderful life before he came to Rome as a slave. He could tell you stories for hours of the life in the desert, of the raids of nomads who came and went so quickly on their camels; of the powerful genies, who would come to you out of a storm of sand and might either destroy you or become your devoted servants, according as you had or had not the word of power to tame them. Publius could never understand how, after such a life, Syrus could put up with being a slave as readily as he did. Rome, at the best, must be very dull after such an existence. Anyhow, Syrus was the man he wanted; the next thing must be to find him.
Euripides and the New Comedy
Authors: Russell A. G.
Published: July 2013

Since the character and achievement of Euripides form one of the most interesting studies in classical literature, it is not surprising to find that the most varied estimates have been made both of his poetic and dramatic ability, but whatever conclusion we may reach we cannot be blind to the great influence which he had on his successors. It was an influence which such shrewd critics as Aristophanes dreaded, but in spite of his censures and warnings the Euripidean outlook gained the day.
Catullus in Geyserland
Authors: Blaiklock E. M.
Published: July 2013

A cycling holiday is necessarily one of limited baggage, but this was not the only reason why I took Catullus in my pocket to Rotorua. I enjoy reading a well-known book in new surroundings. I once read the Greek Gospel of Saint John on the Christchurch-Dunedin Express and filled its simple pages, like a medieval manuscript, with pictures of white beach and headland, smooth plains of wheat and snow-capped hills, from that incomparable stretch of railway that runs down the coast of New Zealand's South Island. So did the beauty of the North Island lakeland illuminate a well-thumbed Catullus. How wrong to read our poets always in the study! We have lost them when they remind us only of grammar and philology, German tomes and prosody. We discover them anew when we can fill their lines with new associations and colour them with a colour sometimes all our own. With my eyes full of scenes from a day's wandering, guideless and off the beaten track, where Maori legends cluster thick about lakes, hot pools, and dark green woods, I read Catullus.
Nec Me Tacebit Bilbilis
Authors: Mattingly H.
Published: July 2013

Martial leant back in his chair and looked out through the open window at the fair country that lay before him. It was a noble land, this Spain that he had left so lightly all those years ago. Had he ever realized half how beautiful it was? But no good thinking of that now. Rome had drawn him as a magnet draws the iron; and, if Valeria herself had been unable to hold him, what could you expect of any landscape, however lovely? Perhaps he knew better now; but he would never have believed it, without the experience. But without doubt it was good to be home again. After all the rubs and rebuffs of life at Rome, spiced though they had been by some rare successes, there was a warm comfort in finding oneself an honoured person, with an assured position, which had not to be maintained by constant self-assertion. There had been the civic welcome on the day of his arrival and now followed the more personal and intimate renewals of acquaintance. Was he not waiting at this very moment to see Valeria for the first time since that old parting? Martial flattered himself that he was no sentimentalist, but his heart beat faster than it need have done at the thought of seeing her again.
Polybius: A Sketch
Authors: Shutt R. J. H.
Published: July 2013

Polybius was born at Megalopolis in Arcadia, which was one of the staunchest members of the Achaean League in its last desperate stand for freedom in the second century b.c. The Hellenistic civilization had been unable to achieve permanent unity in Hellas, and in the second century petty quarrels between neighbouring states seemed likely to overshadow the real danger from without. The dynasties of Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Antigonids were becoming divided amongst themselves; Rome was growing and inevitably meeting opposition from Carthage; Greece was liable to become the battleground, or else fall a prey to the victors. Credit for being the pioneer in the policy of arousing the dormant Achaean League to a realization of its ideals of Greek union and freedom belongs to Aratus of Sikyon: for the accomplishment of the task of uniting the Peloponnese against the danger which threatened, three men are chiefly responsible, Philopoemen who became head of the League after the death of Aratus (213 b.c.), Lycortas, and his son Polybius. All three were natives of Megalopolis, a city which was itself originally an experiment in unity.
Lucan
Authors: Snell Antony
Published: July 2013

The object of this article is to plead that Lucan is an underrated poet, and well worth reading at length. It is assumed that many readers of Greece and Rome have not read more than, at most, books i and vii, and such other pieces as may have met them from time to time in unseens.
Virgil in School
Authors: Edge S. W.
Published: July 2013

It will be agreed, I think, that the reading of Virgil is an indispensable part of the school Latin course, especially for the Sixth Form. Assuming that Virgil will continue to be set for the School Certificate Examination, I suggest that the following ideas are feasible. At all events they are the result of experience gained in Fifth and Sixth Form work.
Across and Down
Authors: Austin R. P.
Published: July 2013

The casual reader, on seeing these lines, might be forgiven for the thought that Lord Byron had the crossword puzzle in mind when he wrote them. In an uncertain world nothing is more certain than that this was not the case. Byron died in 1824. The crossword puzzle was born, at least in its popular modern shape, almost precisely a century later. Its history begins suddenly. Neither in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1921, nor in the twelfth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1922, does the crossword appear at all. But from the year 1923 references to it become increasingly frequent. In 1924 a popular work entitled The Crossword Puzzle Book was published. In 1925 there was a reference to crosswords in Punch. In 1926 the thirteenth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica had a short article on it. In 1928 the crossword puzzle was mentioned in Galsworthy's Swan Song. From that time every good standard dictionary or work of reference has included it. These facts document its emergence as a literary phenomenon in Great Britain. The history of the crossword in the United States is very similar, except that it would appear to have achieved stardom in the popular firmament a few months earlier in that country than in this.
Pindar—The Function and Technique of Poetry
Authors: Freeman Kathleen
Published: July 2013

All writers are to some extent consciously interested in the technique of their art; many of them far more so than is generally realized. The majority follow the principle Ars maxima celare artem, and do not allow us more than a glimpse into their workshop; many a lyric that delights us by its apparent spontaneity has been hammered out slowly and shaped and altered until its final form contains hardly a trace of the original creation. The late W. B. Yeats in his Autobiography says:

‘Metrical composition is always very difficult to me. Nothing is done upon the first day, not one rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. Sometimes a six-line stanza would take several days, and not seem finished even then.’
Date and Stage Arrangements of the ‘Prometheia’
Authors: Mullens H. G.
Published: July 2013

Although Professor Murray in his edition of Aeschylus' plays puts Prometheus between Persae (472 b.c.) and Septem (467 b.c.), many students nowadays show a tendency to place it in the last period of the poet's work. For instance Mr. W. F. J. Knight (J.H.S. lviii, 1938, p. 53) says:

‘It is important to regard all the extant plays of Aeschylus, and at least some of the plays that are lost, as a single sequence of developing poetic thought. Accordingly, at the end, when Aeschylus solves the hardest problem of all, the marriage of Heaven and Earth, something like the Prometheia with a satanic Zeus might almost have been predicted…. In fact the metaphysical argument may even have some force in determining the date and authenticity of the Prometheia.
The Topography of Punic Carthage
Authors: Harden D. B.
Published: July 2013

In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Barbary corsairs were finally laid low, a great impetus was given to North African research, and numerous scholars visited and wrote about Carthage. Valiant efforts were made at that time to correlate the statements of ancient authors, chiefly Appian, Diodorus, Justin, Polybius, and Strabo, both with each other and with the existing topography of the peninsula, but the theories propounded had usually little virtue save that of originality and imagination. If excavation was undertaken at all (as it was by Davis, for instance, and Beulé), Roman buildings were often mistaken for Punic, so that elaborate plans of Carthage like Davis's2—to mention but one—are no longer of much consequence.
That Word ‘Caput’
Authors: Gosling W. F.
Published: July 2013

A brief survey of the indebtedness of the modern languages of Europe, and in particular our own, to the Latin word caput may be not without interest.

The French did not adopt the classical meaning of caput, but, by way of the slang of the Roman soldiers in all probability, preferred the Latin testa = a tile, French tête. But caput did enter Gaul as the early French chief and modern chef (e.g. chef d'orchestre, chef de cuisine, whence, by the way, the English ‘chef’). English borrowed this word from French under the guise of chief, and from the early French word chevetaine formed the English chieftain. But in one word the French did adopt the classical meaning of caput, and that was in the word couvre-chef (modelled presumably upon the Vulgar Latin capitegium), meaning a covering for the head. This was adopted in Middle English as curchef (kerchief) and signified originally a cloth to cover a woman's head. It was an easy step from this to the modern ‘handkerchief’. Further, Vulgar Latin had a phrase ad caput venire, ‘to come to an end’, ‘to accomplish’. This was taken over into early French as a chief venir: later the verb venir was lost and the phrase a chief was made into the verb achever. Our English word achieve was the inevitable offspring.
The Classics in America
Authors: Honey Mary Trowbridge
Published: July 2013

The position of the Classics in the United States has been determined very largely by the development of the public school system. Between the founding of the first Latin grammar-school in Boston in 1635, or of Harvard University in 1638, and the numerous public (free), State-directed schools of the present day, vast changes have come about in the student body and in the curriculum—changes which have decidedly affected the study of the Classics.
How to Live on Nothing a Day
Authors: Mattingly H.
Published: July 2013

Pservilius spongia threw back the coverlet and drew himself up on the narrow pallet that was his bed. It was cold—cold and dark; the first rays of daylight were only just beginning to creep in through the small slit of a window. Yes, cold and dark; but there was a patron to be visited before the first hour, and it would take a full hour's walk to get to his house. Spongia sprang out of bed, poured a little cold water into his basin and washed in haste. Then he opened the window and tilted the dirty water out into the street below. An answering cry suggested that the chance shot had found a mark. ‘Better wait a few minutes before I start,’ thought Spongia, ‘it sounds as if I had hit some one; it is possible that he may be annoyed.’
Charles James Fox and the Classics
Authors: Clarke M. L.
Published: July 2013

Few figures in our political history have aroused such affectionate admiration among posterity as Charles James Fox. Not the least attractive feature of his personality is his love of classical literature. He is the supreme example of the scholarly statesman. Some may suspect that the legendary scholarship of our eighteenth-century statesmen did not extend beyond a few tags from Horace and Virgil, relics of a rigorous public school education. Of Fox at any rate this was not true. A study of his notes on the Classics shows him as a true lover of ancient literature and a fine scholar. It is not inappropriate that his bust should stand next to that of Porson in the Upper School at Eton.
Illustrations of the Classics from Mann
Authors: Mullens H. G.
Published: July 2013

The Isle of Man was left untouched by the Romans. It was a stronghold of Celtic culture until in the Dark Ages the Scandinavian sea adventurers made it a naval base. The two races lived side by side and no influence other than theirs showed itself until the seventeenth century, when the English fashions in architecture and social life began to reproduce themselves in the island. Thus the contribution made to the British heritage by those two strains is more easily recognizable here than perhaps in any other part of the British Isles. In this paper I deal only with the Celts, our knowledge of whom (apart from archaeology) is based almost entirely on the records of Greece and Rome. I confine myself to two authors universally read in schools—Caesar, a competent observer at first hand, and Tacitus, a reliable conveyer of borrowed information. All quotations from the former are from the Gallic War, those from Books IV and V referring to Celts in Britain, the others referring to Celts in Gaul. All quotations from Tacitus are from the Agricola. There were really three types of Celts, but their culture was at the time of these writers fairly homogeneous. It is not to be wondered at that illustrations can be found in the Isle of Man for statements made about Celts in Britain and Gaul, for the whole of the Celtic world seems to have enjoyed free intercourse and to have shared the same religious organization.
Quo Sensu Credis Et Ore?: A Study of Facial Expression in Greek and Latin Literature
Authors: Fergusson Margaret B.
Published: July 2013

Isaac vossius, scholar and Canon of Windsor in the seventeenth century, regretted ‘that the whole human race did not banish the plague and confusion of so many tongues and adopt an universal and self-evident system of signs and pantomimic expression’. Imago animi vultus est, says Cicero, and again, vultus … qui sermo quidam tacitus est; and finally, in the de Oratore (iii. 216), ‘every passion of the heart has its appropriate look and tone and gesture, and the whole body of man and his whole countenance and every voice he utters re-echo like the strings of a harp to the touch of every emotion in his soul’.
Chinese Painting and Archaic Greek Art
Authors: Webster T. B. L.
Published: July 2013

‘If a man were a good painter, he could deceive children and fools by painting a carpenter and showing it from a long way off, because it would seem really to be a carpenter.’ Plato here (Republic, 598c) is undoubtedly describing realistic painting, perhaps not so photographically realistic as the paintings in Pompeii or the painting that we know to-day, but painting which aimed at producing a likeness and rendering the appearance of the original. Such pictures can be seen on the vases of the fourth century and of the late fifth century b.c., for instance the two women on a red-figured perfume vase in the Manchester School of Art, which was painted about the time of the dramatic date of the Republic (Pl. I). But if we go back rather over a hundred years to the black-figure vase reproduced by Mr. Austin in Greece and Rome, vol. vii, we are in a completely different world of flat figures in conventional poses, and if we go further back still to the Geometric vase (Fig. I) which forms the subject of Mr. Austin's article, we are yet further from the world of ‘likeness’. These early Greek painters cannot have wanted to produce likenesses; but what was their aim ?
A Greek Humanist
Authors: Hudson-Williams H. LL.
Published: July 2013

Fourth-century Athens was the scene of heated professional jealousy between the exponents of different systems of education. One of the most distinguished educational figures of the age was the rhetorician Isocrates, who in the early years of this century opened a school at Athens which attracted pupils from the most illustrious families throughout the Greek world. His father had owned a flute-factory and a moderate income had enabled him to give his son an excellent education. But during or shortly after the Peloponnesian War the family property was lost, and when in 403 the democracy was restored, Isocrates found himself compelled to put his education to some practical use. Physical disabilities, we are told, prevented his taking an active part in public life, and for some years he followed the career of a λογογράφος, one who composed speeches for his clients to deliver in the law-courts. It is a period of his life to which he makes no allusion in his works and we may assume that he was glad to abandon this profession for one better suited to his talents.
The Tale of Troy
Authors: Colvile K. N.
Published: July 2013

One might easily say that the Tale of Troy was the most famous in the Western world. Already in the days of the earliest European literature it furnishes the background of half its drama and poetry. Homer alone would confer immortality on his epic theme, and all through ancient and medieval times Troy provided motives for every kind of art. And yet can one to-day say that the legend and the way in which literature has handled it are familiar to the general reader? Is even the Iliad, whether in the original Greek or in translation, known at first hand to more than a small minority? Perhaps, then, it is not superfluous to look back over the literary history of some 3,000 years and see by what channels this celebrated theme has come down to us.
Poetry for the Examinee
Authors: Chapman C. S.
Published: July 2013

As far as I can remember, although I read Virgil as a school-boy, scanned Virgil, translated Virgil, and learned Virgil by heart, yet no one ever tried to explain to me why I should study Virgil, except, of course, as a means to securing a School or Higher Certificate. Vaguely I was aware that Virgil was said to be a great poet, and I knew that Tennyson had written a celebrated poem about him. But nobody tried to make me feel that he was a great poet, nobody tried to open my eyes. Nor is this surprising, because no one tried to make me feel that Lycidas was a great poem either, although I learned most of it by heart. Certain things in Lycidas, I know, did move me, particularly the passage about St. Peter, the blind mouths,
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
Thourioi
Authors: Freeman Kathleen
Published: July 2013

On the coast of southern Italy, just before the coastline changes its direction from south-west to south-east, there was in ancient times a place where the high mountain range stood back a little, and in front of these mountains a series of semicircular terraces formed a kind of giant's amphitheatre looking out to sea on to the Gulf of Tarentum. At this spot two rivers flowed close together into the sea; their alluvial deposit had built up a small fertile plain, and the route taken by the larger of them down from the mountains pointed to a short cut to the sea on the other side, the Etruscan Sea. Here, in the latter half of the eighth century b.c., a band of settlers from Achaea built a town between the two rivers, which they named, as colonists tend to do, after a river and a spring in their home-land: the larger river they called Krathis, ‘the Mixer’, and the smaller Sybaris, ‘the Gusher’. The newly-built town took its name from the Sybaris. Both these rivers are there to-day; the Krathis is still called the Crati, and the Sybaris, which now flows into the Krathis, is called Coscile.
On Teaching the Gerund and Gerundive in Latin
Authors: Maguinness W. S.
Published: July 2013

The task of elucidating the nature and use of the gerund and gerundive is notoriously one of the most difficult which the teacher of Latin has to face. He can draw no analogy between these forms and those used for the same purposes in English or in the other modern languages studied by his pupils; and the twofold antithesis between these two parts of the verb and between the uses of each in the nominative and in the oblique cases constitutes a puzzle whose adequate clarification by the usual methods must inevitably demand more time than can easily be devoted to a single construction. My fairly long experience of teaching first-year university students and of assessing S.C. and H.S.C. candidates certainly indicates that the gerund and gerundive have often been left behind ungrasped. And yet to hammer away at these constructions until, if ever, they are understood would be an obnoxious example of that ‘grind of grammar’ so justly condemned by most enlightened teachers. The fact is that we have here a usage which must be learnt gradually, not indeed by Direct Method or by the unaided impressions received in the reading of texts. A vigorous initial effort is necessary to grasp in general the essential character of the two forms, the difference between them, and their quite different behaviour in different circumstances, but, instead of overburdening the pupil's memory, whether he be a junior or a comparatively advanced pupil, and overtaxing his brain-power with the attempt to digest the complicated and conflicting details once and for all, I suggest that the system of gradual assimilation, based on a mnemonic table, may be as helpful to others' pupils as it seems to have been to mine. I have found it especially useful in ‘refresher’ lessons for pupils with a confused knowledge, rather than ignorance, of the construction.
Latin or Greek?
Authors: Stanier R. S.
Published: July 2013

I propose to review briefly the main grounds of attack on the Classics, and the defence and vindication that can be put forward; to suggest that it is Latin which is open to the attacks, and Greek which holds the key to the defence.…
Woad
Authors: Witton W. F.
Published: July 2013

‘Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horribiliores sunt in pugna aspectu.’ Every schoolboy is familiar with the passage, and the general accuracy of the statement is everywhere accepted; although the hypercritical might question the omnes. For Caesar cannot be speaking from his own knowledge, since his acquaintance with the British was limited; and the use of woad being a peculiarly British institution—I know of no evidence of its use on the Continent—it would not be surprising if some at least of the tribes in the south of Britain, who had been established there for not more than two or three generations, were slow to adopt what must have seemed to them a very barbarous habit.
ΑΛΗΘΕΣΤΑΤΗ ΠΡΟΦΑΣΙΣ
Authors: Smith R. E.
Published: July 2013

Thucydides in the first book of his history, before enumerating the different αἰτίαι which were the prelude to the outbreak of hostilities, says: ‘but the true reason (ἰληθεστάτη πρόφασις), though it was never mentioned, was Sparta's fear of Athens' growth to power.’ The statement is repeated in other parts of this book, and we must assume that when it was written it represented Thucydides' considered judgement. These passages belong to the latest stratum of his work, and date from the time when he had formed a unified conception of what had previously seemed to him isolated events, namely the Archidamian War, the Sicilian Expedition, and the Decelean War. As he looked back after 404 they seemed parts of a whole, a Peloponnesian War, and what gave them unity was a single purpose behind them, the Spartan determination to remove from Greece the dangerous power of Athens, which she regarded as a threat to her own security. Judgements as to causes when the results are complete may in human affairs be as dangerous as illuminating, since reason insists on arranging things according to a pattern; it is our duty therefore to inquire whether Thucydides' interpretation corresponds with the facts, whether the unity which he has given to these three events is real or imaginary.
The Appreciation of Latin Poetry
Authors: Clarke A. K.
Published: July 2013

The best Latin poetry loses nearly all its quality in translation and even the beginnings of its appreciation need a little knowledge of Latin. This is not entirely a truism, or universally applicable. Some poetry, like Homer and the Psalter, can be truly though partially apprehended through translations; but the spirit of Latin poetry, deprived of its own embodiment, eludes us. The Italian Camena, however wooingly the great translators approach her, ‘flies, plunges deeper in the bowering wood’, in that sylvan felicity of sound answering to sound, which links Latin poetry to the senses rather than to the intellect, and refuses to yield up its secret in any language except its own.
The Learner and the Latin Period
Authors: Laughton Eric
Published: July 2013

The observations which follow will to some appear heretical and perhaps dangerous; but I believe that they are worth making, if only to draw attention to a tendency in the present teaching of Latin prose which seems more dangerous still. When the beginner, having covered the field of essential grammar and syntax, is first introduced to the writing of continuous prose, he is rightly reminded of the disjointed style which is often encountered in English. This, he is told, was foreign to the Roman, who preferred to express his ideas in the form of a ‘period’, that is to say, a complex, architectural sentence-structure in which several subordinate clauses are made to depend in various ways upon the main clause. This period, he learns, is central to Latin prose, and an example or two from Cicero and Livy will be given to illustrate its use; he is then advised to emulate these models. His first exercise may well be nine or ten lines of English, to be turned into a single Latin ‘period’. The result is rarely satisfactory. The unhappy learner, in his attempt to produce the required composite sentence, upsets the natural order of clauses, presses phrases into strained and alien constructions, and probably achieves confusion. Here, for instance, is one of the first exercises in Bradley's Aids to Latin Prose; the passage, it is stated, ‘should be fused into a single sentence by the aid of participles, relatives, and conjunctions’:

‘Both sides had exhausted their ammunition. The fight had raged at close quarters for three hours without any result. The carnage was horrible. The soldiers were suffocated with the heat and dust, and could scarcely keep their feet on the bloody and slippery soil; but no one could say that he had seen the back of a single foe, or heard a single voice asking for quarter. It seemed as though the gods of Mexico had inspired the nation with superhuman strength, and a courage proof against wounds or death.’
Ammianus Marcellinus and the Romans
Authors: Thompson E. A.
Published: July 2013

When Julian reached the Gallic armies at Rheims in the summer of a.d. 356 and laid his plans with the commanders for the coming campaign, it is not likely that he gave much attention to Ammianus Marcellinus, a young staff officer who was present at the discussions. Yet most of our information about the Apostate and about the years on either side of his brief and tragic career—from the aftermath of Magnentius' rebellion in 353 to the battle of Adrianople in 378—is derived from the work of that Antiochene Greek who had arrived at the army only a few months before the Caesar and who was later to become his admirer and friend.
Tragic Optimism in the Aeneid
Authors: Mullens H. G.
Published: July 2013

An ἀγών between the dignity and aspiration of man and the apparently overwhelming power of the gods or of circumstance recurs frequently as a theme in the Greek tragedies. The solution proposed by the Greek writers was always positive and encouraging to man. The same theme is found in the Aeneid, and the answer is not dissimilar to the solution offered in some of his plays by Aeschylus. Virgil views the struggle historically and he makes his hero the embodiment of past, present, and future. He is Aeneas the founder of the Roman race, he is Augustus the inaugurator of the new Rome, and he is also what Augustus and his successors in the poet's opinion should be. That is to say, he is the tradition of the past, the actuality of the present, and an ideal for the future. Above all he is the Roman people then, now, and to come; and the ideal for the future is a social ideal. The tragic idea of the Aeneid is made plain at the beginning of the poem by means of the celestial machinery. The first scene is the storm (i, 34–156) when all the powers of heaven seem to be trying to wreck the already ruined Trojans. We might indulge in a misapplication of words and choose as a motto for this passage

tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (l. 11)

The gods are cruel and unjust as in Prometheus Vinctus. The second scene shows the effect of this ‘persecution’ upon the Trojans. They are fessi rerum (178), ‘weary of the world’. But from Aeneas suffering evokes a confession of faith—

per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas ostendunt; illic fas regna resurgere Troiae. Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis. (204–7)
Virgil and the Homeric Epithet
Authors: Richardson L. J. D.
Published: July 2013

When the poet Martial regrets that he cannot express the name of his friend Ěărĭnus in Latin verse and suggests with some irony that a Greek poet, to whom nothing is impossible, would not have had the same difficulty, he illustrates his envious complaint by quoting the first two words of Iliad, v. 31—TAρεζ, xAρεζ, that is the name Ares with variant quantities:

dicunt ărĭnon tamen poetae,

sed Graeci, quibus est nihil negatum

et quos TAρεζ, xAρεζ, decet sonare.

But had Martial been able to cite in his hendecasyllables the whole of that line of Homer, namely

TAρεζ, xAρεζ, βρoτoλoγiγέ, μiαiϕνε, τεiχεσiπλῆτα,

he could have pointed to a much more formidable obstacle than mere quantitative incompatibility which lay in the path of every Latin poet who, almost without exception, turned for inspiration and guidance to Greek originals. The strength of this Homeric line lies in its memorable compounds, here chancing to increase in length as the line proceeds: the line is almost of the type called by the Greeks ‘rhopalic’, bludgeon-like, growing progressively in thickness towards the butt-end. Homer's music is not merely ‘winged'; it is ‘strong-wing'd’. The God of War is here called βρoτoλoιγóς, ‘mortal-plaguing’: μıαıøóνoς, ‘blood-polluted’: τειχεσιπλἡτης, ‘battlement-storming’—all these breathless mouthfuls within three-quarters of one hexameter line. Latin is usually regarded as a succinct language, a speech employing fewer words to express an organized idea than most tongues. But it would be futile to attempt to enclose within the compass of four and a half feet of a Latin hexameter the connotation of the three Greek compound adjectives, with their sixfold content—the notions of plague and mankind, pollution and murder, sacker and walled cities.
The Ancient Shape of Attica
Authors: Myres J. L.
Published: July 2013

The physical shape of Attica has not altered appreciably since ancient times; Attica is far too well founded for that in the remote geological structure of the Aegean. But Attica is a promontory, an akté, plunged in the sea at the far end of the main watershed of peninsular Greece; and filled also with abrupt and lofty mountains, which prevent it from being ‘easy to oversee’ (eusynoptos) in the sense prescribed by Aristotle for his ideal city-state. Consequently the ground-plan, the ‘shape’ of Attica on a map of Greece, has been differently interpreted by different observers.

On the modern map, based on ‘trigonometrical’ measurement of angles subtended by bases of exactly measured length, Attica appears as a wedge-shaped promontory, one side of which lies between Piraeus and C. Sunium, the other between Sunium and the bend of the coast south of Rhamnus. The angle between these two coasts is about 45 °, or half of a right angle. West of Piraeus, the island of Salamis, seen from the sea, not only looks like part of Attica, but conceals the great ingression of the Saronic Gulf into the Bay of Eleusis. And north of Rhamnus, even on the modern map, few people realize that the coast runs much more nearly west than north—bearing about 300° from Rhamnus to the Euripus Strait; so completely does Euboea insist on its immemorial connexion with Attica, and disguise the fact that from Parnassus east-ward into Attica the Greek mainland is an isthmus, lying nearly east and west, and only about 24 miles broad between the bays of Livadostro (anc. Creüsa) on the Corinthian Gulf, and Skroponeri on the Euboean channel, on the border between Boeotia and Locris.
Is our Roman History Teaching Reactionary?
Authors: Examiner
Published: July 2013

Three years of war have clarified a good many issues. One of the luxuries that soon had to go was the academic and scholastic privilege of sitting on the fence in the interests of ‘intellectual honesty’. The war has forced us to take sides. There are values to which to-day—in different degrees of understanding and sincerity—we all necessarily subscribe. We believe in the virtue of free thought and discussion, in coming to conclusions on the basis of objective evidence, in deciding our courses of action through the operation of an informed democracy: we are against the autocratic rule of a group or an individual, we reject dogmas (such as racial teaching) based on emotion, a priori assertions that must not be tested, ‘inspired’ truth as the controller of scientific investigation. If anyone doubts that we have made up our minds about these values, let him consider the fact that 99–99 per cent, of the people of this country are ready to fight on in an increasingly conscious struggle against the Fascist enemy who denies them all.

Now for the past few years it has been my privilege to mark ancient history answers of candidates for Higher Certificates from some of the leading schools in the country. And as the issues to which I have just referred have grown clearer, I have become progressively more uneasy. The question which has gradually, framed itself in my mind is this: Are we teachers of Roman history in fact engaged in an unconscious trahison des clercs? Are we in danger of becoming an intellectual ‘fifth column’? In short, are we presenting Roman history in such a way as to bring those rightly accepted democratic values into contempt? (I say ‘Roman history’ designedly: for the dangers I have in mind do not arise to the same extent in relation to Greek history.)