In modern times the rendering of treasured legend through the sung, as well as the spoken, word moved from biblical to classical sources during the fifteenth century. In 1472 a lyric drama on the Orpheus fable was so produced at Mantua, to a text by the poet Poliziano. The music is lost; it must have been in the madrigal style. But, rather more than a hundred years later, scholars and musicians gathered at the house of the Count of Vernio in Florence in an attempt to recover the supposed methods of Athenian tragedy (the musical details of which remain too imprecise to be cogent) in a new kind of declamatory stage-song. The subsequent, comprehensive, and altogether creative achievement of Monteverdi's Orfeo, produced at Mantua in 1608, established the first point in a fresh trickle of operas on classical subjects, which in the eighteenth century became a downpour. Operas that still hold a place on the public stage are mainly of Greek provenance. They range from Iphigénie en Tauride, the culmination of Gluck's late abandonment of light opera for ‘nature’ and classical librettos, and Mozart's exceptional, not at all comic, Idomeneo, to Strauss's equally exceptional Elektra, with Tippett's opera on the death of Priam on the way. (Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (1791) appears to have been a reluctant struggle with a fresh version of Metastasio's text of 1734, which will become pertinent later. Mozart was preoccupied with Die Zauberflöte.)

The standard rendering of the prayer of Glaukos is: ‘For I have this grievous wound and my arm on this side and on that is shot through with sharp pangs.…’

In 1. 510 Χείρ is always correctly translated: ‘With his hand [Χειρὶ] he held his arm [βραΧίονχ]’ where he had been wounded, a little below the shoulder (xii. 389). Homer knew a lot about the results of arrow and other wounds. His translators do not. Failing to understand how a wound in the arm can cause pain in the hand, they have attempted to ‘correct’ what was written, and in so doing have destroyed the sense, the explanation why an apparently simple flesh wound was so crippling. This is an excellent description of injury to the median nerve in the (upper) arm, causing (1) sharp pain felt in the area—palm, thumb, and fingers—supplied by that nerve, (2) aching ‘referred’ to the region just below the shoulder supplied by the circumflex nerve (arising from the same spinal segments, cervical 5 and 6), and (3) paralysis of the flexor (‘grasping’) muscles of the wrist and hand. We should therefore translate: ‘For I have this grievous wound and my hand is pierced through with sharp pangs … and my shoulder is made heavy thereby, nor have I power to grasp my spear firmly.’

Since 1932 there have been available nearly a hundred fragmented lines of a single satyr-play of Aeschylus which require us to reconsider somewhat our image of the dramatist. Not that any revision of Aeschylus is suggested at this point. Such would be intolerable and untrue, for the Aeschylean portraits remain as magnificent as ever. But now there has been added a bright sketch reflecting a humorous and romantic side of the dramatist; as though, after possessing only a half dozen of only the tragedies of Shakespeare, we had found a small portion of A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

Many brilliant assumptions made for the first time by the Greeks have been for centuries part of European thought, and it requires a great deal of historical imagination to realize that much of what we tend to think obvious or inevitable has happened because of the Greeks and not by nature. So with the concept of ‘History’. The word conjures up certain thoughts and feelings which, I suggest, owe their origin to Thucydides when at the end of the fifth century B.c. he evolved a new literary form, a mixture of art and science.

Animals on the stage are usually more trouble than they are worth, and producers are notoriously chary of using them. There are several instances in ancient drama, however, where they seem to be essential to the plot; and it may be worth while to consider the Greek approach to the problem, and see their stage technique for overcoming the difficulties involved.

The advantage of our traditional method of spelling Greek names and titles as though they were Latin and pronouncing them as though they were English (often with a fine disregard of quantity, Crito, Meno, though we scorn such as confuse the penultimate vowel in Man-tinea and Tegea), is just that it is traditional: we are used to it, especially with our eyes, and the visual appearance of a word is important. But we may lose too much by clinging to tradition; no one, I think, wants to revert to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva for Greek gods, nor even to Ulysses for the Greek hero; and in the process of changing to the Greek names we have created two anomalies, Asclepius and Heracles, which are neither Latin nor Greek, nor traditional English.

The first few hours on Greek soil are a fantastic and whirling jumble. Tumult is too feeble a word for the excited and inextricable chaos that is Peiraeus. The road thence to Athens must be at once the busiest and the worst in Greece. The main streets of the city are bedlam. Then suddenly, as a glimpse of the Parthenon is won, the mind skips the last twenty-four centuries and is lost to today. When it returns and you look about you, you might reasonably wonder where in time you are. The signs in the streets and the shops—ΟΔΟΣ ΤΡΙΠΟΔωΝ or ΑΡΤΟΠωΛΕΙΟΝ—are they ancient or modern? ‘All the Athenians … spent their time in nothing else but either to hear or to see some new thing.’ They live today, as they have always done, by talk and argument, be it over St. Paul's teaching or merely the price of a newspaper. Generations of foreign influence, Roman onwards, have left Greece unchanged, uncertain itself which century it is living in. The Unknown Soldier of modern war is represented by a dead hoplite, and beside him are written up two sentences from Thucydides.

It almost seems a sort of impertinence to add yet another layer to the many records (recently estimated as numbering some 230,000 books) of Roman experiences and impressions. Can there possibly be any vision of the Eternal City, any reaction to its manifold variety and continuity, which has not already been set down, romantically or painstakingly according to the writer's ability? Yet it may be that each new generation, even each new visitor, enjoys a private and different view of Rome, and experiences something unfelt by the multitudes of previous explorers. To attempt to translate that vision, to reduce it to words for others to share, is a sure recipe for another attack of nostalgia; and who would wish to escape that?

It is not perhaps generally recognized that the description of the coast of Latium in the seventh book of the Aeneid, in the passage which is often called ‘The Gathering of the Clans’, is in the form of a periplus—literally, ‘a sailing round’. The places and natural features are named in order from the mouth of the Tiber as far as Tarracina (modern Terracina) as if they were seen from the sea by one coasting along the shore. Accounts of this kind are frequent in ancient geographers. Virgil followed a familiar pattern in the six Unes in which this stretch of coast is described:

‘Those who plough thy glades, Tiberinus, and the sacred shore of the Numicus, and work the Rutulian hills with the ploughshare, and Circe's ridge, the fields over which Jupiter Anxurus holds sway, and Feronia rejoicing in her green grove; where lies Satura's unhealthy marsh, and cool through sunken valleys Ufens seeks his way, and is lost in the sea.’

‘Messages were divined by soaking oak leaves in the holy spring. Oak leaves have veins rich in tannins, and I find that by soaking such leaves in dilute iron sulphate solutions hieroglyphics are produced on the dry leaves which could easily pass for distorted Greek characters. On one occasion I succeeded in obtaining characters that perhaps could have been read καιχ ρομε; and it is interesting to note that Gallaeus records a message reading καὶ ‘Ρώμη ῥύμη.’

A phrase of Mr. Middleton Murry in his chapter on the imagery of Shakespeare suggests some interesting possibilities of literary speculation. Noting the odd association of dogs and sweetmeats in four widely separated tragedies Murry remarks: ‘What is to be noted is that the image, having its roots in some vital experience, grows steadily more complex.…’ He goes on to suggest that the origin of a notion so obsessive lay in some unpleasant memory of Sir Thomas Lucy's hall.