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.

No class of writers is more neglected than the men who wrote in Latin after the Renaissance. Medieval studies usually stop at that point, and thenceforth the attention of scholars is absorbed in the young literatures written in the vernacular languages of Europe. Classical scholars are chary of venturing even as far as St. Augustine or Ausonius, and the Middle Ages are to the majority a closed book. Yet these post-Renaissance authors, no less than the writers of the Middle Ages, are witnesses to the endurance of Latin culture. Fracastoro, no less than Dante or Augustine, is instructive as being under the influence of Virgil. Both Medievalists and Classicists can benefit from a study of such Late Latin poets as G. Buchanan, Joannes Secundus, and John Owen, to name only the more prominent. Even the historian can derive much interesting material from their work as signposts of opinion in an age of transition and symbols of the enduring value of the Latin tradition. For Owen in particular may be pleaded his enormous popularity in his lifetime, which suggests that his epigrams were more than academic exercises to charm the indolent at the court of James I. They were soon translated into French, German, and Spanish, and there were five English versions. His reputation was truly international and appealed beyond the circle of those who spoke Latin freely.

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.

Josephus almost invariably calls Strabo the Cappadocian. But he belonged not to Great Cappadocia, the home of Basil and the two Gregories, but to Cappadocia Pontica, more usually called Pontus. ‘Amaseia, my fatherland, a very strong city’ was his birthplace. ‘My city is situate in a large, deep valley, through which flows the river Iris. Both by human design and by nature it is admirably laid out, affording the advantage of both a city and a fortress: for it is a high, precipitous rock which descends steeply to the river, and has on one side the wall on the river edge where is the settled city, and on the other the wall that runs up on either side to the twin peaks.’ It had a water-supply which could not be cut off, passages being cut through the rock to the springs, and two bridges, one to the suburbs and another from the suburbs to the outside country. Its territory was larger and better than that of any other Pontic town. Within its walls were the palace and tombs of the Pontic kings: he certainly means the Pontic Achaemenids, not the Polemones. He adds that it was given to kings, but is now provincial. The era is fixed by coinage to 2 B.C., when it was annexed to the province of Galatia. It was still a metropolis in Christian times with many subordinate bishoprics, and we last hear of it as wrecked by an earthquake in the reign of Justinian. It is generally agreed that Strabo did not return to his native place to spend the last years of his life: he probably had no relatives left there.