There is much confused thinking about swords, the way they were used and the influence of their users on their form. An extreme case is that of the late Harold Peake who, describing a sword-type, said: ‘These weapons, which must have been used as hatchets as well as for slashing, are called leaf-shaped swords’. He may, of course, have meant that they were used for hacking as well as for slashing—uses which, as I shall show, differ more than one would think; but it does sound as if he thought that the Late Bronze Age warrior used his prized sword for chopping firewood.

Take nomenclature and definitions first. In the apparent absence of agreed definitions, each writer has to invent his own or leave it to the reader to do so. Peake, on the same page as the sentence just quoted, makes his definitions by stating that the dagger gave birth to the dirk and the dirk to the sword. I shall adopt this clear and concise nomenclature, but divide swords into two groups—long and short.

The process commonly called Interpretatio Romana, by which in ancient times a barbarian deity was identified with some Roman god or goddess, was admittedly of a locally very different nature. To quote an example: In Southern Gaul we find a whole series of Celtic deities connected with hot healing springs, Bormo, Grannus, Belenus, Nisincius, all in due course identified with Apollo. It seems obvious that the function of healing provided the link or association between the native deity and the Roman god. With this sole function their properties were not exhausted. But the fact that there are traces of fertility-aspects, that they were nearly always associated with a female consort or mother, etc., is a thing apart; there is no indication that these characteristics influenced the identification. Neither did the connection with hot springs, as far as I can see. We hear of an Apollo Thermios in Lesbos and at Thermon in Aetolia; in the Aegean island he was at any rate a patron of hot springs. Likewise, there were cults of Apollo near hot springs in Anatolia. But there are no indications whatever that these beliefs influenced the Roman Apollo.

That a system of writing had been in use in the Mycenaean civilisation on the mainland of Greece had been known ever since the then existing evidence was collected by Tsountas and Manatt in The Mycenaean Age, published in 1897. Further evidence thereafter slowly accumulated. An inscribed stirrup jar was found at Orchomenos in 1903. In subsequent years others were discovered at Tiryns, Thebes, and Eleusis; but in the fourth volume of The Palace of Minos, published in 1935, Sir Arthur Evans could only say as regards the Greek mainland ‘ the absence of clay tablets should be rather set down to the accidents of discovery or to climatic causes ’. Four years later in 1939 Professor Blegen found in the newly discovered Palace of Nestor at Pylos an archive room with several hundred inscribed clay tablets. This number he has further increased in his resumed excavations in 1952. In recording the discovery of the House of the Oil Merchant at Mycenae in 1950 I ventured to prophesy that if the excavation of that house could be completed it was quite likely that inscribed clay tablets would be found in its ruins. In the complete excavation of that house at Mycenae in the summer of 1952 the prophecy was fulfilled and thirty-eight clay tablets were found in two of its rooms. This is a discovery of the first importance; in conjunction with the tablets from Pylos it shows that we must expect to find inscribed clay tablets in any Mycenaean palace or large private house on the Greek mainland. There must have been tablets in the palace at Mycenae but that site was badly damaged by later building above it and subsequent denudation. At Tiryns too there must have been tablets, but that site like the Mycenae palace was excavated in the 1880’s when archaeologists were not so alive to the possibilities of what might be found. A clay tablet in the earth or even just out of the earth is barely recognizable as such. Consequently the excavator himself must have a good eye for such things and train his workmen to observe and preserve even the most insignificant looking objects of clay. It is probably too late now to find tablets at Tiryns, but some presumably must still lurk in the ruins of the palace at Thebes if that site can ever be fully excavated. The Acropolis of Athens with the palace of Erechtheus presumably once had tablets, but the classical buildings and the excavations of the last century there have destroyed any hope of their survival.

I have it in mind that our Royal Patron, in the course of her Christmas broadcast to her peoples, used the following words:

Those words have recurred to me more than once since I first heard them, and I take them as the text for the short address which recent custom demands of me this afternoon.

The ‘spirit of adventure’. I suppose that the phrase contains nearly all that makes life worth while; but to define it is another matter. We in this room today represent an era which has had its fill of rudimentary adventure, or has at least had ready opportunity for hazards beyond the dreams of Henty. In saying that, I am consciously contrasting our lot with that of our parents or grandparents, living as they did in an epoch of certainty, in an environment of good solid mahogany, with the picture always before them of a little sedate Old Lady in whose house there was no room for the word ‘ defeat ’. Adventure there was in plenty in that bygone world, but it was sharply discrete from the security of the average household outside the services. By the adventurous of spirit it had for the most part to be sought, and sought deliberately, whether in two dimensions or in three. And sought it was. In those far-off days, for example, I can recall the sturdy figure of my father, living the most humdrum of lives and eking it out with a vicarious adventuring that comes back freshly to my memory. As he strode regularly to or from his office, his daily existence was packed with boyish adventure. Tartarin, all Tarascon, had nothing to offer him. He had, in vivid imagination, forded the Kabul river under fire, until he could describe the splash of every bullet; he had never actually been east of Nuremberg, but he had shot man-eating tigers whose breath lay hot upon my boyish ears. All men who had striven beyond the frontiers were his heroes. His worshipped familiars ranged in fact from Robertson of Chitral to a commissionaire who had marched to Kandahar with Roberts. To a later generation such episodes have become a commonplace, but I have sometimes doubted whether a familiar actuality could ever have held a candle to my father’s world of fancy.