The Classical Association was founded in December 1903 in the Botany Lecture Theatre of University College, London. University College has invited the Association to celebrate its Jubilee there from 7 to 10 April 1954. Invitations have been received from the University, King's College, and Westminster School to hold part of the functions in their buildings and a special exhibition of new books is being arranged by the University Library. In connexion with the Jubilee an appeal is being issued to members with the object of raising a small working capital to avoid the necessity of increasing the subscription, which in spite of growing membership no longer produces enough to cover the increased cost of printing and provides no margin for extra activities.

It is hoped that the Hon. Secretary, Professor L. J. D. Richardson, will give the opening lecture on the history of the Association. Headings will clearly be: the foundation of local branches in this country and of parallel associations in the Commonwealth, the establishment of the Association's three journals, the institution of school reading competitions, and the excellent work done by the Education Sub-Committee. During its fifty years of life the Association has endeavoured to fulfil the objects laid down in the rules. Two recent activities are designed particularly ‘to encourage investigation and call attention to new discoveries’ and ‘to create opportunities for friendly intercourse’, viz. participation in the Joint Committee of Greek and Roman Societies, which runs the successful triennial meetings at Oxford and Cambridge, and membership of the International Federation of Classical Studies, whose next conference will be in Copenhagen in August 1954.

Although the last phase of Republican Rome is so familiar to us, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus remains a figure rather than a man. His was the statue beneath which the murdered Caesar fell, and he is still for most of us the figure in the background: Shakespeare passed him by. His vast fame has left the man himself remote.

It was his tragedy that he could not read the writing on the wall. It was partly clouded for him, as all things gradually became clouded, by the deepening shadow of his own portentous greatness. With his solid abilities, too, he had not a streak of genius or political insight. History can show few worse statesmen. He became the chief agent of the doomed Republic without realizing that it was doomed, and lived quite uninspired by that republican idea which animated men so different as Cicero and the younger Cato.

If he had not been outclassed, and defeated in battle, and finally eclipsed, by Julius Caesar, he could have lived in history as the Roman Empire's mightiest architect. He claimed with some reason to have subdued three continents. If not a great general, he was certainly a very good one, and in his younger days he could always get the best out of his soldiers. He was, above all, a good organizer. His campaign against the Mediterranean pirates, whom he swept from the seas in three months, was an unqualified triumph.

He was stabbed to death at Pelusium by hangers-on of the Egyptian court 2,000 years ago on 29 September.

Every country has its heroes, legendary or historical, who are remembered for some noble action that has caught the popular imagination and made their names immortal. Among the Romans, just as Fabricius was the type of incorruptibility, Decius Mus of devotion to country, Regulus of faith to the pledged word, so the name of Lucretia was proverbial for chastity. The story of her suicide after she had been violated by Sextus Tarquin is recounted by the historians Livy, Dionysius, and Diodorus, and alluded to by many Roman poets and prose-writers. But apart from such allusions, it is curious that of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us none save Ovid has treated her story at any length; moreover, there is apparently no representation of her among the extant remains of Roman art. To painters and poets of later times, however, she made a strong appeal. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, for example, there is the famous painting by Titian; and in our own literature Chaucer sang the praise of ‘the verray wyf, the verray trewe Lucresse’ in his Legend of Good Women, Gower included her in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare in his youth composed that highly coloured arabesque The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood turned the story into a tragic drama, and most recently Benjamin Britten has made it the subject of an opera.

That Ovid found in Lucretia an attractive figure is evident from the detailed manner in which he treats her story in the second book of his Fasti.

It is difficult to define exactly the difference between the early work of a poet (or of a dramatist in verse) and his later work. In fact any general definition is impossible, for poets vary. Some merely dry up and go on writing from habit; others change their style consciously and deliberately, others unconsciously—but all change. Anyone who has thought about and read poetry will agree that if a poet lives long enough, his work is bound to change. Any Shakespeare scholar can distinguish by style alone, not to mention other evidence, Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona from his Tempest. Similarly, any competent critic will admit that Milton could not have written Lycidas or his Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity after he wrote Paradise Lost. Again Dante could not have written the poems in his Vita Nuova after he finished the Divine Comedy. In both cases some people prefer the earlier poems. A poet does not always improve with years, but his mind changes gradually and his work reflects that.

Poets differ so much that we are usually content to enjoy their works without noticing their order. But it is not always possible to ignore it. A fragmentary papyrus has lately been discovered which appears to be the remains of an extract from the Didascaliae prefixed to a play of Aeschylus. It states that Aeschylus was victorious with a group of plays which contained the Danaides and Amymone, and that Sophocles was second. As it is generally agreed that the Supplices belonged to the same group as the plays mentioned it can be assumed with confidence that this name was to be found on the part of the papyrus now missing.

My first attempts at rendering ancient lyric metres in English quantity were made with Greek choruses. I was trying in this way to give boys some idea of the run of the Greek patterns. I found the experiment profitable at least to myself; I began to study and enjoy the shape of the strophes with a new liveliness of interest.

I had used E. A. Sonnenschein's book What is Rhythm? in the teaching of English for some years before it occurred to me that here was the key to the old problem of writing quantitative verse in English. Of all the experiments made by poets and scholars, from the Elizabethans down to Robinson Ellis's Catullus and Robert Bridges's Ibant Obscuri, though some have been read with pleasure, none succeed in keeping the shape and balance of the ancient lines. Sonnenschein used a kymograph, and with most laborious care measured the length of English syllables as they are pronounced, counting the hundredths of a second taken in the pronunciation of each syllable. I have not tested him on any machine, because my ear accepts as valid the rules which emerge from his experiments. To show how this works I give a rendering of Horace, Odes, i. II:

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quern mihi, quern tibi ….

Ask not thou what the end gods have assigned either to me or thee, Things not lawful to know, Leuconoe. Let Babylonian signs Rest unsearched; better far, just to endure all that shall come to pass.

‘Wir wollen ja mehr oder anderes als die Thatsachen classificieren; wir wollen sie erklären’ is the cry of a neglected linguist of the last century which it would not be idle to echo today, especially in the matter of syntactical oddities in the Greek and Latin authors. The immensely valuable work of those who have collected and classified instances of ‘aberrant’ syntax in the classical languages has the inherent disadvantage that lists and categories are made up according to the resultant form of the aberration rather than the underlying mental process which can itself often be analysed with profit. The result is a division of the phenomena into anacoluthon, contamination, pleonasm, ellipse, constructio ad sensum, and so on, a convenient but somewhat barren method, lessening the possibility of explaining and illuminating one example from another. Indeed to do thus cuts across the scientific method, putting together forms or uses which result from different thought- or speech-habits and separating many which owe their origin to identical or similar tendencies but have moved on somewhat divergent paths. Löfstedt, though he deals with the oddities of usage under conventional headings, pays no little regard to the psychological aspect and admits that a clear-cut division into conventional classes is not always free from considerable difficulty and is not particularly important for the scholar who would explain these things on a psychological basis.* Contamination in particular has been used rather to excess. The much quoted English oddity ‘I am friends with him’ is consistently stated to be a contamination of ‘I am friendly with him’ and ‘we are friendsür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1860, 1.97.