The Roman poet Ennius said he had three hearts, one Oscan, one Greek, and one Roman. That is to say he was native Italian by birth and upbringing, Greek by education, and Roman by adoption. By what species of co-operation the three worked as one it may be hard to determine; that they did work as one is clear; the poetry of Ennius, or some of it, lives in testimony. Somehow Italian dearness and the Greek inspiration were fused in the Roman mould to a dynamic end. Est locus Hesperiam quam mortales perhibebant… the anthropological elements have been fused in the crucible of history and the poet's magic is whole-hearted and complete. Yet it is a hybrid product, and it must have been hard at times, even for an Ennius, to escape the pain of a divided heart.

A similar sickness and a similar division must beset all scholars nourished on a culture, let me not say alien, but inherited from a past beside which their native tradition is young. I, an Englishman, born and bred in the fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land, I who

have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

and the proud stones of Greece,

only to find it troubled and broken by the more searching simplicities of Judaea and Christ, how shall I find my spiritual home?

On my study wall is a half-inch Ordnance Map of the Cotswolds. Its greens and browns in subtle half-tones and harmonies epitomize for me days of solid experience in sun and rain and wind and other days walked there only in the mind.

It was just over half a century ago, in 1892, that Gaston Boissier published a discussion of the Stoic ‘martyrs’ under Nero in the second chapter of his well-known work L'Opposition sous les Cèsars. Since then two especially noteworthy studies of the ‘philosophic opposition’ in the first century A.D. have appeared in English, that of M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), pp. 108 ff., and, more recently, that of D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism (1937), pp. 125 ff. The story of men who maintained a critical or, at the least, independent attitude in the face of a totalitarian règime is obviously of great significance for us to-day. Theoretically, of course, the term ‘autocracy’, in its strict sense of ‘unaccountability’ of government, cannot be applied to the imperial system of the early Empire. On paper the ‘tyrants’, Tiberius, Gaius, Nero, and Domitian, no less than the ‘enlightened monarchs’, Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, were delegates senatus populique Romani, chief magistrates and servants of the state. But in practice the ever-expanding range of the imperial provincia, coupled with the unceasing growth of the ‘mystical’ auctoritas bequeathed by the first Princeps to his successors, had produced an effective absolutism comparable, in many respects, to that of the autocrats or ‘dictators’ of modern authoritarian states. How did political thought and action in the Roman Empire respond to this de facto autocracy? How, above all, did they respond to its abuse? For us these are no merely academic questions. The parallelism, such as it is, between the ancient and the modern situations must serve as an excuse for presuming to rehandle a familiar theme.

When the twentieth century ushered in the State Secondary School its fond foster-parents, gazing with delight on their new pet, gave it the only food they knew, an old-fashioned type of mixed classical and mathematical biscuits. The puppy was just getting its teeth into this when a friend dropping in, himself a bit of an expert, forthwith pronounced the food too hard and dry, and substituted a coloured and powerfully smelling preparation based on a scientific formula. The bewildered hound then transferred his attention to this. Soon, however, History came knocking at the door and placed before the dog what was pronounced to be the only real canine diet, a large meaty bone. When again a dish of Economics was offered, the pup leapt playfully towards this, disregarding the French, German, and Spanish recipes which had meanwhile been used to tempt the pampered pet. Before long all available floor space had been used up with an assortment of pabula varia, the dog drifting hopelessly from one plate to another in a vain effort to appease all the dog-fanciers. Now the owners are gazing with concern at the resultant dog. What promised to be a magnificent specimen, the pride of all Crafts, is but a sickly cur, and a martyr to chronic belly-ache.

A state of affairs has in fact been reached which must not and cannot last. Among the manifold changes that seem to be imminent, a reform of the Secondary School curriculum is overdue. If nothing else, then Mr. Butler's Act will render such changes necessary.

These few inconsequent notes have no excuse but the amusement their composition gave to the author. If they are of interest to a handful of readers the frivolous use in wartime of some horae subsecivae may be justified.

How fond Ovid is of using res in a personal sense! Augustus is addressed (Ars am. 1. 213) as pulcherrime rerum and Heracles (Her. 9. 107) as maxime rerum. In Fast. 1. 103 Chaos says somewhat comically referring to himself sum res prisca: ‘I'm an old thing’. Indeed Ovid is much given to the use of substantives with unusual meanings. Here are some examples: alea grandis inest (Ars am. 1. 376) ‘there is great danger’; discrimen=the parting of the hair (Ars am. 2. 303); color=a good complexion (cui color est, umero saepe patente cubet, Ars am. 2. 504. Did he borrow this from Vergil's nimium tie crede colori?). Elsewhere Ovid uses color=style; cf. Trist. 1. 1. 61, ipso noscere colore’, ‘your very style will bring you recognition’. In Ars am. 3. 172 a woman is asked quis furor est census corpore ferre suos, ‘why she wears her fortune on her back’—an expression of which he may have been reminded by Propertius’ matrona incedit census induta nepotum (3. 13. 11). What is the Latin for ‘dimples’? Ovid uses lacunae (Ars am. 3. 283 parvaeque utrimque lacunae), whereas Martial borrows the Greek word γɛλασīνοι (Mart. 7. 25. 6 nec grata est facies cui gelasinus abest). No doubt ‘inspiration’ might be expressed in Latin in many ways; Ovid uses pectus—aspicies quantum dederis mihi pectoris, he cries to Augustus at Trist. 2. 561. There seems at first sight little connexion between pecten and elegiac verse; yet at Fast. 2. 121 Ovid writes canimus… alterno pectine=‘I write in elegiacs’. In Fast. 5. 270 there occurs the word nebulae in the sense of the scum on wine—a use not noticed in Lewis and Short. Fatum=the evil genius (Fast. 5. 389 Troiae duo fata, of Heracles and Achilles) is not specifically Ovidian, for Cicero can write (pro Sest. § 93) duo ilia reipublicae paene fata, Gabinium et Pisonem.

It has been suggested that there is less difference between ancient Greek and modern Greek than between present-day English and Chaucer's language. The suggestion is somewhat questionable. Broadly speaking, apart from dialects and local variations, there are presently three languages in Greece, the Kathareuousa, the Demotiki, and the popular newspaper language, which is a blend of the two.

The Kathareuousa is the official and formal language, used in Government publications and statements, business correspondence, non-fictional books and treatises, law courts, University lectures, and in formal conversation. And although its grammatical structure is analytic as opposed to the synthesis of ancient Greek (a change which constitutes the main difference between classical and modern Greek, as it does between other modern and ancient languages), in the Kathareuousa the most strenuous attempt has been made to maintain the accidence and vocabulary of the ancient language.

Words are declined and verbs conjugated (without some of their more difficult and less used moods and tenses) as in Attic Greek, pronouns and prepositions and the cases governed by them are the same, and while, naturally, many terms which describe things known only to the modern world are not to be found in Liddell and Scott, they are generally legitimate and intelligible compounds of words which are to be found in Liddell and Scott. Ἀɛροπλἁνoν for aeroplane, ἀɛρòσTαtoν for balloon, are instances which come easily to mind.

Most teachers of Latin would doubtless cross out ubi if used by a pupil in the sense of ‘When?’ and substitute for it the other interogative adverb quando, notwithstanding the entry ‘quandō, ubi, when?’ retained from the older editions in Prof. J. F. Mountford's revision of the Revised Latin Primer (§ 168) and added in his revision of ‘Bradley's Arnold’ Latin Prose Composition (§ 157 (ii))— entries which are paralleled in some quite elementary Latin text-books.

No other authoritative Latin grammar, and no dictionary, that I have been able to consult records an interrogative use of the temporal ubi, but when the matter was brought to his notice Prof. Mountford instanced, from Merguet's Lexicon, the following passages of Cicero, which at first sight certainly seem to justify the entries:

de demo 77: ‘quamquam ubi tu te popularem, nisi cum pro populo fecisti, potes dicere?’

82: ‘ubi enim tuleras ut mihi aqua et igni interdiceretur?’

127: ‘ubi te isti rei populus Romanus praefecerat?’

pro Cael. 15: ‘ubi denique est in ista suspicione Caeli nomen auditum?’

When it was pointed out that all these passages, even though their natural translation undoubtedly appeared to be ‘When…?’, were rhetorical questions, not genuine requests for information like quando Roman uenisti?, and that they certainly did not prove that ubi and quando were generally interchangeable, Prof. Mountford replied:

‘…The first striking fact is that in all the speeches and philosophical works of Cicero, the only other possible examples are:

de domo 128: “sed quaero quae lex lata sit ut tu aedis meas consecrares, ubi tibi haec potestas data sit, quo iure feceris”.

Mr. chips, one might imagine, would be likely to associate bombs with Caesar for the rest of his quiet days. One Latin lesson tied the two together. A young officer in a New Zealand regiment had that thought in mind when he wrote his belated New Year greetings. ‘You will always think of us’, he said, ‘when you open Thucydides VII. Aren't we vain, Mr. Chips?’ There is no vanity about it. It is not only the memory of a very able Greek class which will entangle for ever the Sicilian Expedition with the events of 1941. There are grimmer reasons. Rommel arrived ominously at Tripoli on the day we read of Gylippus’ coming to Syracuse. We backed to Egypt step by step with the first Athenian disasters. The same moon shone on the Athenian attempt on Epipolae and on the opening of the German Balkan drive. Larissa, Athens, Corinth, Argos! The Anzacs retreated through Greece as the Athenians fought their last fight at Syracuse. They struggled back across the hills of Crete as Demosthenes and Nicias began the disastrous retreat. And then the Navy broke the spell. No ships filled the southern bays of Sicily to take Athenians home on the moonless nights. There was no Dunkirk, no evacuation. Misfortune was complete. Ours might have been. There will be no forgetting those months when another class reads Macaulay's favourite book again.

Macaulay was quite strikingly correct. Thucydides’ seventh book passes all the tests of classic excellence. Its narrative, like a Greek tragedy, is interwoven with the universal of human experience.

For antiquarians Hesiod is no doubt a more useful poet than either Homer or Euripides. He differs from Homer in having a definite character and even an approximate date; from both Euripides and Homer in dealing with the concrete, everyday facts of contemporary life. It is from him, for instance, that we have our earliest account of a plough made artificially with separate pieces of wood; Homer never troubled his head with such banal matters, but here is a chance for the antiquarians to make merry. The Works and Days above all other works is the antiquarian's thesaurus.

But if we subtract Hesiod's descriptions of ploughs, his list of days and similar paragraphs which are admittedly boring, we are left with a good three-fourths of the Works and Days still intact. For example, we have the three λòγoi with which the poem begins. Here, if we expect the glitter of Homer, the ‘surge and thunder of the Odyssey’, we shall be disappointed; but we shall find that monstrous familiarity with the gods, and that astonishing intimacy with the universe before man's creation, which only Greek literature can show us. Shelley indeed, as Francis Thompson observed, had in some degree this Greek characteristic— ‘the universe is his box of toys… he dances in and out of the gates of heaven’—but only Hesiod and Aeschylus in the Prometheus have yet succeeded in opening up the full prospect of eternity. Hesiod knows the origin of everything, divine and human; he had the effrontery to write a Theogony, and knew the exact life history of the second sort of Strife: ‘she was born of dark gloomy Night, and high Zeus, who dwells in heaven, set her in the roots of earth’ (Works and Days, 11. 17–19).

Perhaps it is a little late to deprecate the decline of ‘Verses’. Nevertheless such of us as put our trust in a classical renaissance after the war cannot but hope that that branch of scholarship in which Britain was and still is pre-eminent will survive and flourish again in happier times.

In Lorna Doone John Ridd describes his second in his fight at Blundell's: ‘A rare ripe scholar he was, and now he hath routed up the Germans in the matter of criticism.’ It would be interesting to know who that contemporary of Bentley might have been, because we British do not appear to be cut out for ‘scholars’ in the formal sense. We have yet to produce a Madvig or a Cobet, and it is doubtful whether we ever shall. Constitutionally we are apt to be not so interested in externals as in internals; and once having learned Greek and Latin we wanted to write them and express great thoughts in them. So we invented ‘Verses’.

Wilamowitz, it is recorded, once attempted to compose a Greek iambic in order to illustrate a point of metre. The result was ludicrous. It is extraordinary how so great a scholar could have been so poor at manipulating the language. It is doubtful whether the author of the Prolegomena Xenophontea could have composed a set of verses in any wise comparable to those produced by Thomas Saunders Evans as a boy at Shrewsbury, and although the latter never exhibited the extreme form of precociousness which enabled the Dutch scholar to acquire an international reputation in the early twenties, the praise he once earned from his headmaster when announcing the winning copy of hexameters could hardly have been higher: ‘Gentlemen, the copy of verses which has been awarded the prize this year is worthy of Vergil!’ No wonder another copy of verses written by a Shrewsbury boy at that time and secreted among some Oxford papers won a University prize!