Since no one doubts the pre-eminence of Socrates as a teacher, there is much, presumably, to be said in favour of his method of instruction. The picture of Socrates to be gained from the earlier dialogues of Plato is one of a man who consistently challenged orthodox opinions. In the same way, but, of course, with nothing like the Athenian's skill, I propose in what follows to react against a commonly accepted view; to be precise, I wish to scrutinize the opinion that the Funeral Speech, delivered by Pericles at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War and known to us from Thucydides, presents the reader with a splendid portrait of fifth-century Athens, and that, in stressing the spirit rather than the forms of Athenian democracy, it qualifies as the ancient equivalent of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We all idealize the ancient Greeks; we ignore the harsh realities and prefer to concentrate our attention on what we see as the grandeur of Aeschylus, the splendour of the Parthenon, and the vision of Pericles; and it is the Funeral Speech, beyond everything else in Greek literature, which allows us to indulge in this type of escapism. That the Funeral Speech does have a ‘glorious’ reputation is a fact. Does it deserve so uncritical a fame ? If this question is posed, I ask it not from any perverted desire to debunk its reputation, but simply in order to gain a deeper understanding not only of the speech but also of the Greeks to whom it was addressed and of the particular statesman who delivered it.

Professor Huxley's article on ‘Bos, Bentley, and Byron’ was delightful to read; it provokes these thoughts of mine.

Majority opinion proves nothing, but it is solidly on the side of bos piger. Kiessling, for instance, and F. Villeneuve (in his 1967 Budé text) place the comma after piger. So do Lewis and Short, the TLL, the compilers of the new Oxford Latin Dictionary, and Dominicus Bo in his Lexicon Horatianum. Acron, Pseudo-Acron, and Porphyrion offer no comment. Piger is attached to caballus by Lane Cooper, and rather hesitantly by A. S. Wilkins. The latter felt that this better fitted the general sense of Horace's argument, a point to which I recur later. Wilkins was less confident of the rhythm of the line as a pointer to the ascription, and mentioned that many (unspecified) editors took piger as going with both nouns; this, indeed, might be an attractive compromise.

I am not of course going to talk about a very concrete person, a little bearded man who lived in Chios or Smyrna. Yet that there was someone called Homer, who was primarily responsible for the creation of the Iliad at least, I take for granted, and accordingly spare you the old jokes. They applied to an entirely different situation in scholarship from the one we have today, and the cause of the difference is the realization that the Homeric poems are in essence oral rather than written poetry.

There will never be a perfect translation of Aristophanes. There have been many translations, with many and diverse merits: one thinks of the poetical grace of F. L. Lucas, the deftness of Godley and Bailey, the easy naturalness of John and Patricia Easterling, the zest of B. B. Rogers, the modernity of Douglass Parker and his associates; but combine all these and you are still left a long way from a perfect translation—for there is much truth in the paradox that the only really perfect translation is the original. The Greek and Latin scholar is more aware of this than most people, and the lover of Aristophanes more still. Yet translations there must be—not only for the ‘general reader’, but increasingly nowadays for the student who wants to know more about ancient literature but is not yet (and in too many cases may never be) competent to study it in the language in which it was written; nor should we forget those who produce plays, and those who go to see them. And it matters a great deal whether the people who meet Aristophanes in these ways are brought to appreciate his qualities as comedian and dramatist. For Aristophanes' own contemporaries did, Plato among them; and if he was really boring or obscure or both (so the reader may argue), his contemporaries must have been so too.

In the last issue of Greece & Rome there appeared two critical analyses of Propertius iii. 10, an elegy written in celebration of Cynthia's birthday. Here I propose to enlarge on some of the points made by my predecessors, and publish my own reactions to reading the poem. I agree with Dr. Lyne and Mr. Morwood in detecting an underlying urgency in the piece: they notice marks of anxiety and preoccupation with passing time, along with a conflation of the concepts of sleep and death. But neither writer asks what I believe to be the necessary first question: what kind of poem is Propertius iii. 10? Formal considerations—classification according to literary genus—do in fact warrant some of their contentions, but leave others in need of modification.

In contrast to earlier works of scholarship directed towards resolving the problems of authenticity and date of composition through considerations of metre, language, and style, there has been a tendency for more recent studies of the Prometheus Bound to concentrate upon those aspects of thematic development which some have seen repeated in the Supplices, now dated to 464–463 B.c., and the Oresteia of 458. So, for instance, C. J. Herington has demonstrated on more than one occasion the apparent divergence that exists between the cosmic system portrayed by Aeschylus in the Persae and Septem and that found in the later plays, including the Prometheus. In the former group he says: ‘the Divine is united against man: let a human being swerve by a hair's-breadth from the rules, and the powers of earth and heaven will join together to castigate him’, while in the later plays ‘the human and divine cosmos is divided into the enemy camps of male and female, and of the opposites that go with them respectively: light/dark, heaven/earth, new/old; the universal fabric is torn in two.’ Certainly the ideas he puts forward here are acceptable in the case of the Oresteia, but for their extension to the Supplices and Prometheus they depend largely upon reconstructions of the lost plays that made up their respective trilogies: a hazardous course, though perhaps not altogether unjustified in the light of the available evidence.

The major puzzle which confronts readers of Odes iii. 14 is the relationship between the public celebration described in the first half of the poem and the private party proposed in the second. Both are responses to the one event—news that Caesar is not, as feared, dead, but has won a victory and is returning home from Spain—but they do not quite harmonize. It is not just that the one response is public and Roman, while the other is private and somewhat Greek, for there is nothing objectionable in this combination. Rather the disharmony lies in a number of contrasts which, taken singly, are slight, but together create an effect which is hard to define but hard to deny.

In very general terms, the physical scientist is concerned to identify and define certain regularities in the material world, and to embody them in laws or theories which both furnish an explanation of them and enable him to predict and to some extent to control particular kinds of future event. It is noticeable at once that the elements of prediction and control are largely absent from Greek speculation, and this is due partly to certain of its inherent characteristics (to which I return in a moment), and partly to its lack of three further particular features which are an essential part of the natural sciences today. These are briefly that they are experimental, quantitative, and laboratory-based. This generalization is, of course, at once too wide and too narrow. Not all scientific theories rely on experiment in the narrow sense or on laboratory operations; the observations of the astronomer and the activities of the field-biologist can, up to a point, dispense with both. But it remains true that the experimental test and the laboratory and its instruments are essential elements in modern science, and neither the astronomer nor the biologist can in the last resort dispense with them. Similarly, quantitative measurement plays an indispensable role in the physical sciences and is the basis on which they have been built up, even though the theoretical physicist may spend little time measuring or experimenting and be mainly concerned with the mathematical analysis which is so vital an element in modern physical theory.