‘I Propose to argue first’, writes M. R. Glover1 of the Bacchae, ‘that Euripides is here, as elsewhere, a realist, giving us a picture of Dionysus’ worship as it really was; and that the miracles are meant as evidence of some supernatural power; and secondly that, if we want to know his judgment on that religion, we shall come nearest to his thought, if not his vocabulary, in saying that it seemed to him devilish.’ The point of view expressed in the opening words reduces the ‘riddle’ of the Bacchae to manageable proportions. As a piece of life, a study of religious psychology, to be set beside the Hippolytus and the Ion, the play becomes comprehensible. It reveals the poet in his old familiar role, watching men and women with his own rare insight and truthfulness, and noting with fidelity their tragic conflicts of the spirit and their bewildering catastrophes. Miss Glover's first proposition, therefore, is undoubtedly correct. Whether Euripides was as emotionally involved in his subject as the second proposition suggests might be much more open to doubt. H. J. Rose,2 on the first point, takes substantially the same position. He writes:

‘To call the play an attack on or a defence of religion in general or any form of it in particular is quite to miss the meaning. It is a study, by a poet who was deeply interested in all religious phenomena, of one of the most notable of them… As he neither attacks nor defends sexual passion in the Hippolytus, but studies it sympathetically and with profound pity for its victims, so here he deals with an equally potent force, which he shows exalting some of those affected by it to the raptures of the chorus, and ruining others like Pentheus and Agave.

Poetry has four appeals: the romantic, the sensuous, the intellectual, and the formal. We may enjoy the story, the sound, the thought, or the shape of a poem. Almost everybody can appreciate the first; and a reciter trying to convert an audience suspicious of poetry might begin with Alfred Noyes's ‘Highwayman’. Susceptibility to the second appeal seems innate in a fortunate few. Some men loved the music of Keats's ‘Nightingale’ long before they understood the words. But others are tone-deaf (I know a Doctor of Divinity who calls Kubla Khan rubbish), and in most of us the appreciation of verbal harmony grows but slowly. And the last two appeals are much more limited. Few can be bothered to master the ‘criticism of life’ of Arnold's ‘Resignation’ or Browning's ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’, or to estimate the place of Troilus and Cressida in Shakespeare's intellectual development, or to discuss the merits of the Spenserian stanza, or to criticize the structure of ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ or the arrangement of the books in Paradise Lost. Such conundrums are left to candidates for Honours in English and the dons who set the papers.

Now if we have only read two or three books of the Aeneid we cannot enjoy the structure of the whole poem. And we shall not apprehend much of Virgil's thought. Indeed, we may misunderstand it, just as, if somebody insists that Milton's God is a bully and the rebel angels heroes, it is fairly safe to infer that he has read only the first two books of Paradise Lost.

In 1545, nearly two years before the death of Henry VIII, there came to England Nicander Nucius of Corfu. He stayed some months, and later wrote an account of his visit in classical Greek.

There must be many like myself who are indebted to Mr. Stanley Casson's last published work, Greece and Britain, for their first acquaintance with Nicander. Unfortunately his chapter on Nicander is all too brief. Moreover, there is only one English edition of the Greek text, and this was published by the Camden Society over a hundred years ago.2 A more accessible edition is called for, as I hope this paper will show.

Nicander came to England with his patron Gerard, whom the Emperor Charles V had dispatched as an emissary to Henry. We know little about Nicander himself, but there are hints that he had recently left his home owing to some personal tragedy. Corfu was then a part of the Venetian Republic and it was to Venice that he made his way, there to meet Gerard, who was travelling to the court of Sultan Suleiman. Nicander accompanied him to Constantinople. His knowledge of local conditions would make him a useful travelling-companion, and it is probable that he also proved helpful as a diplomatic assistant. At any rate, he remained a member of Gerard's suite and followed him faithfully on the long journey through Germany and Belgium which finally brought them both to Calais. Here they received a travel-permit (ἐυλóσιμον), and after a false start crossed to Dover.

Whatever may be his weaknesses in other fields, all will agree that as a literary craftsman Tacitus stands in the first rank. Like Lytton Strachey, he writes with an extraordinary verbal felicity, shows an uncanny genius for delineating character, and is a master of innuendo and suggestion.

It would be an entertaining but profitless pastime for my readers to cast themselves for the part of Nero at the beginning of Book XIV and decide how they would elect to liquidate—pardon the modern term—a troublesome mother. I am sure we could each one of us propound half a dozen more convincing schemes than that adopted by the historical Nero. Judged by the standards of the modern novel, the story is utterly fantastic. Yet such is the artistry of Tacitus that we are held spellbound throughout and accept it as vera historia.

He makes an excellent start: ‘Gaio Vipstano C. Fonteio consulibus diu meditatum scelus non ultra Nero distulit.’ How lucky it was for Tacitus he had no chapter-headings to give his secrets away! Subconsciously the reader draws in a breath of eager anticipation, feeling that if Nero is now about to bring off a long-meditated crime, then he is in for an interesting story. But what was the crime? Just wait and see. But to whet our appetite Tacitus gives us in his description of Nero one of those pungent quasi-epigrammatic touches of psychology of which he is so fond. ‘Vetustate imperii coalita audacia.… ’ ‘This unnatural power’, says Burke, ‘corrupts both the heart and the understanding.’

The lives of the Emperors from Hadrian to Carus, usually grouped together under the title of Scriptores Historiae Augustae, offer a strange problem to the historian. They purport to be addressed to the Emperors Diocletian and Constantine and to be the work of six distinct writers, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus. In fact, they betray occasional evidences of a much later date—whether the age of Julian the Apostate, the age of Theodosius the Great, or one later still. There seems to be a growing agreement that the six independent authors are not to be taken too seriously—at least, that the work, based on material of various dates, finally saw the light through the agency of a single editor. Let us, however, leave the headaches to the historians and see if we can find a laugh for the latinist amid the strange variations of idiom which our mysterious historians permit themselves. The oddest usages probably belong to the hypothetical ‘final’ editor: but even oddity has its variations and I seem to detect such variations here. It should be a serious task for some student of Latin to investigate the problem of date from the linguistic point of view.

There is a strange freedom in the use of cases. Accusative of motion towards is not limited to ‘towns and small islands’: civitatem veniens ‘coming to the city’ (Severus 22. 6), Asiam primum venit (Gallicanus 2. 6), orientem redire (Alexander Severus 63. 5). In with accusative is found where in with ablative is expected: habet in potestatem Thracios (Claudius 15. 2), dispatches quae in urbem ingentem laetitiam fecerunt (Maximinus 24. 6), or we may find ablatives where we expect accusatives: in loco Maximini Gordianus sufficiatus (Maximinus 26. 4).