Clandestine excavation may never quite have attained the status of a national sport in Egypt, but it has none the less been undertaken there on a considerable and no doubt profitable scale for several millennia: tomb-robbing began almost as soon as there were tombs worth robbing. But it is only in the last 150 years or so that these operations have been extended from depositories of real or imagined treasure to rubbish dumps; and only in the last two generations that business in the new branch of the trade has become really brisk. Papyri have been the new attraction, and interest in them has grown as discoveries have multiplied. Vast numbers of papyri have now been found, and by one means or another more are still being brought to light. Of recent finds the most outstanding is a substantial manuscript in the Martin Bodmer collection, of which the editio princeps is just being published in Switzerland, and which is discussed in the following pages by one of its editors. This new papyrus, it seems, came from Alexandria; but beyond that, as so often happens, its provenance is unknown.

About two years ago the papyrus of Menander's Dyskolos was seen in Alexandria, and was afterwards sent, in two instalments, to the library of M. Martin Bodmer, the famous collector, in Geneva. There it was decisively identified and its authenticity was established by Professor Victor Martin. This unique papyrus of a complete play by Menander, which was hitherto known only from the scanty fragments to be gleaned from anthologies, forms a beautifully preserved codex which may be dated around a.d. 200. (See Plates III–V.) At the time when this article was being written, the Dyskolos was about to be published by Professor Martin in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana series, with the requisite textual reconstruction, translation, and notes, to which I have had the privilege of contributing. As will be seen from the editto princeps, out of a total of about 969 verses, there are only about 9 verses missing—in two places in the fourth act; but about 30 verses in the first and second acts are incomplete, and approximately 200 require some sort of emendation, usually to compensate for the scribe's metrical inaccuracies.

What sort of person was Penelope? If Homer were consulted about the casting for a dramatization of the story, what type would he choose to play her part? What sort of person was this Penelope, for whom her husband abandoned a goddess—more than one goddess, indeed—but in whom he yet felt so little confidence on his return that she was almost the last person in the household to learn his identity? One hundred and eight suitors, according to Telemachos' careful count, buzzed about her; either she could not or she would not dismiss them entirely, but she put them off year after year, while she wept for her absent husband, and looked after the housekeeping, and managed the estate, with no help at all from her father-in-law—managed it pretty successfully too, one would think, for all Telemachos' dissatisfaction, or the house could hardly have stood the drain of such continuous entertainment. In all her appearances in the story she seems irreproachably circumspect; yet her own son, a rather staid and solemn fellow, said to a complete stranger, ‘My mother says I am Odysseus' son, but how should I know?’ Even allowing for a conventional reference to a proverbial saying, it is a strange remark from a modest, unsophisticated young man who did not set himself up for a wit, and who, as he justly remarked to his father, was ‘not in the habit of behaving like a light-headed fool’. It is certainly not the sort of answer that Homeric heroes customarily give about their lineage.

The true site of the oracle of Dodona was discovered only in comparatively recent years. Christopher Wordsworth was the first to identify it, and the Greek archaeologist Carapanos the first to explore it. It lies to the south-west of Ioannina, at a spot most easily accessible from the coast of Thesprotiaby way of the valley of the Thyamis (Fig. 1). It is reached today by a branch road some ten miles to the south of loannina. The long, narrow valley in which it stands is completely dominated on its western side, and for much of the day overshadowed, by the almost precipitous mountain Tomaros (Olitzika), which rises to a height of 6,500 feet. This mountain bears a chain of craggy peaks, and its flank is scarred with gorges and torrents, fed by the snow which lasts some four months of the year on the upper slopes. The climate of the district is severe and well substantiates Homer's description of Δωδώνη δυσχωί-μερος. The valley is remarkable for its violent thunderstorms, which bring torrential rain to fill the mountain cataracts in the summer, and its soil is thus unusually swampy. The foothills of Tomaros are covered with pine trees, while in the plain below a few rather ragged oaks are still to be seen. The rivers of the district are the Acheron and the Kokytos, both associated with the underworld; and not far away is the Acheloos which makes its way down into Akarnania. (See Pl. VI.)

Plato is the world's greatest philosopher, far transcending those who went before and a pattern to those who have come after. No other philosophical writer has had such enduring value and interest. He has been, down the ages, the companion and friend of the world's great thinkers and poets; for, though he lived in a world that, compared with our own with its vast resources of travel and knowledge, seems small and primitive, he is unique among men who have endeavoured to teach the things that matter, that are permanent. He ventured into realms of thought never before approached and had to find Greek words to match his thought while as yet the language had no technical phraseology. This tends to make some of the important theories he expounds difficult to grasp. But the dialogue form in which he wrote, the characterization of which he was master, and the vivid illustrations that light up his teaching awaken in the reader intense interest and help to make easier the task of following Plato in his ‘speculation upon all time and all place’, which he tells us is Philosophy.

The discovery in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, at Pylos in Messenia, the home of Homer's Nestor, of clay tablets written in a script (Linear B) hitherto found only in the Late Minoan II palace (c. 1500–1400 b.c.) at Knossos in Minoan Crete, created a stir at the time and brought to the fore an acute problem which had already been taxing the ingenuity of classical scholars for many a year in their attempts at a solution. Unfortunately, though the discovery was seen in its proper perspective by some, all thoughts and energies were soon devoted to the purposes of the war; Greece was occupied by the enemy and excavations were suspended. Thus it is only within the last few years that the Pylos tablets have been found to be decipherable; and with this has come the solution of a problem of outstanding importance not only to classical scholars but to prehistorians generally. It is perhaps as well to state briefly how this problem arose and then to discuss the resultant increase in our knowledge due to its solution.

Γρ⋯λλος, Lat. gryllus, is the ancient technical term for a kind of caricature (iocosa tabella) as opposed to serious painting or drawing. No monument of art to which this term could be applied with any probability was known up to a few years ago. But in the last number of the Classical Review Professor D. L. Page has pointed out that in an illustrated literary papyrus published recently the word γρ⋯λλῳ must refer to the drawings transmitted in that same text. With this I agree; and I should like to put before the readers of Greece & Rome the main facts about that strange document as I now see them.

In his description of Cicero's eloquence Quintilian says that he had the power of carrying a jury with him against its better judgement without the jury's realizing what was happening. This magical power of Cicero's is exercised not only on Roman jurors, but also on most modern readers and even on some editors. This process is particularly apparent in many interpretations of the Pro Caelio. For example, Professor R. G. Austin, in his great edition of that speech, says, ‘Whatever the secret history, it is clear that the actual indictment was formal, and that Clodia was the real driving force behind it; society reasons prompted the case, and the issue was the social disappearance of either Clodia or Caelius.’ Yet an impartial weighing of the evidence with a mind unclouded by Cicero's brilliant oratory will point to the conclusion that the part played by Clodia in the case, though an important part, was only a subsidiary one.

SirFrankAdcock, in his book, Caesar as Man of Letters, observes (p. 72) that Caesar's description of his defeat at Dyrrhachium, in B.C. iii. 69, shows a change of style. ‘Here, as Caesar lives again through this crisis in his fortunes, the plain style is for a moment infused with the vividness of his recollection’; and we note especially the words omniaque erant tumultus timoris fugae plena, which recall plena erant omnia timoris et luctus, found in the description of Curio's disaster in B.C. ii. 41. But long before that, in E.G. v. 33, Caesar had written: ‘Praeterea accidit, quod fieri necesse erat, ut uulgo milites ab signis discederent, quae quisque eorum carissima haberet ab impedimentis petere atque arripere properaret, clamore et fletu omnia complerentur.’ This is in the vivid and moving account of the disaster which befel Sabinus and Cotta in 54 b.c.; and indeed Sir Frank Adcock does note that here ‘there is a more dramatic treatment of the situation’.

OneHundred years ago, in July 1858, Darwin and Wallace propounded the theory of evolution by natural selection, and thereby caused a revolution in human thought. It may be of interest to recall that in certain important particulars, though not in all, this doctrine had been anticipated by the Greeks and Romans. Fragments of a striking didactic poem On Nature by the fifth-century philosopher, statesman, and mystic Empedokles of Akragas suggest a conception of nature as an experimenter, who by following a process of trial and error creates some strange monsters and mixtures of species. The more fantastic speculations of Empedokles were rejected by Epicurus, who reduced the idea to a more scientific form, and one more in conformity with the atomic theory; and the Epicurean version was in turn followed by Lucretius in the fifth book of the De Rerum Natura. The passages quoted below provide parallels to the ideas of natural selection and the survival of the fittest; but, as is now recognized, what Lucretius and the ancient world generally did not anticipate was the idea that crowned all—that natural selection could lead to the creation of new species by the evolution of one out of another. The relevant texts are cited by Bailey in his commentary on these passages.

In this famous picture of the migrating birds, what precisely had Virgil in mind? In his note on the passage Conington writes: ‘the birds are apparently supposed to have accomplished their voyage over the sea, and to be just alighting in a mass in the warmer clime that is to receive them.’ Conington was evidently dissatisfied with this explanation, and so was Long, whom he quotes as remarking that ‘the flocking together of the birds before departure would be a fitter and more natural comparison’. There is further awkwardness involved if we take both terram and terris as referring to the same place.

One of the features of classical scholarship during the last ten years has been a renewal of interest in Latin literature. In England, at least, this was at a low ebb between the two great wars. The literature of Rome was regarded as derivative and second-rate. Virgil was the unwilling prisoner of the Augustan propaganda machine, Horace the favourite poet of those with no feeling for poetry, Ovid (apart from the Ars Amatoria) no more than a verse-writer of fatal facility, Plautus a knock-about comedian, and Terence a bore. Apart from Catullus, Lucretius, Petronius, and Tacitus, Latin could play no cards that Greek could not instantly trump. I do not think this an unfair picture of the impression of Latin literature I was given as an undergraduate. Why this was so is less easy to say. Partly, perhaps, because Oxford and Cambridge produced a succession of great expositors of Greek literature at a time when many of their Latin colleagues seemed immersed in the more arid forms of textual scholarship. Partly, again, because the iconoclasm of the age found in Latin a profitable and easy target.

Prudentius ranks as the third lyric poet after Horace and Catullus; he is also the greatest of the early Christian poets. In a short poem, which is the prelude to his chief collection, he gives a sketch of his career, but, unlike Ovid, affords only vague indications. At school he was put under a stern master:

aetas prima crepantibus flevit sub ferulis.

Then, after a stormy youth, he took to the law. Later he entered on a public career and held two high provincial governorships. Afterwards the Emperor (probably Theodosius) brought him to court as his own minister. Finally, when past the age of fifty, with hair already turning white (nix capitis), Prudentius resolved to devote the rest of his life to the praise of the True God.

How many classical masters and mistresses inwardly wonder about the relevance of what they are teaching in their junior and middle-school Latin lessons? Is what is taught relevant to the claims we make for the place of classical studies in the curriculum?

One of the most permanent of the values of Latin is that it helps to make real to the pupil the continuing heritage of Rome in that part of the civilized world which has drawn its culture largely or in part from Europe. And yet we must admit that the pupils who reach Ordinary level and go no farther hardly taste this. Even though at the moment those who are following advanced studies in Latin are increasing in number, nevertheless the number of those who do not go beyond Ordinary level is likely to remain far greater.