Many without direct access to detailed information are by now quite firmly convinced that the numbers of students studying Classics at British Universities have been declining and are continuing to decline. To some this is a matter of regret, to others it is a matter of indifference, and to others again it is something positively to be welcomed. From time to time those with a committed belief in the value of classical studies tend to see hopeful signs of a recovery, while the enemies of Classics can hardly wait for the final demise of an outmoded and irrelevant discipline. But whatever the attitude adopted towards the decline, the fact that there is such a decline is normally not regarded as a matter that can be disputed. Indeed anyone who demurs about the facts tends to be ignored or dismissed, as if he were not only an interested party but a dishonest one as well. The present article is an attempt to consider the actual position in greater detail and it is hoped with greater objectivity than is to be found in many of the statements frequently put forward in the course of discussion.

When Anthia was imprisoned in the robbers' cave one of her guards, Anchialus, a spirited man and one of the most prominent of the band, fell in love with her. At first he tried to win her with words, hoping that she would be given to him as a present by the leader. But Anthia repelled his every attempt, dismayed by nothing, not the cave, nor her chains, nor the robber's threats. She wanted to keep herself for Habrocomes, even though she thought him dead, and often when no one was there to hear her cried: ‘I want to stay Habrocomes' wife and his alone, even though I die, though I suffer worse than I have suffered yet!’ This cast Anchialus into worse torment, and the daily sight of Anthia inflamed his love. Unable to bear it longer, he laid violent hands on her; one night when the robbers and their leader were away, he threw himself on Anthia and tried to violate her. Anthia, in desperate straits, seized a sword that lay to hand and struck Anchialus a mortal blow, for as he was on the point of embracing and kissing her his whole body loomed over her, and she thrust the sword upward into his breast. He had paid the penalty for his wicked passion.

In 1962 J.P. Sullivan reprinted in Critical Essays on Roman Literature, Elegy and Lyric an essay by H.F. Cherniss with the title ‘me ex versiculis parum pudicum’, which he described as a ‘still too little heeded warning against the biographical fashion in literary criticism’. Fashions seem now to have changed. The biographical approach is out of favour. Recent studies of Latin poetry give the impression that the key to it is to be found not in the writer's personality and experience, but in the Greek, particularly Hellenistic, poetry which he supposedly used and imitated, in the form and structure of the poem, even in its position in relation to others in the same book. ‘The only thing’, writes Georg Luck, ‘that the elegiac poets take seriously is their art’ —as if Propertius was never serious about Cynthia. The refusal to believe that Latin poets meant what they said leads to some strange perversities of interpretation. We had always supposed that after Tibullus gave up, or was given up by, Delia he took a new mistress whom he called Nemesis, and that, as he tells us in 2.6.29–40, she had a sister who died from falling out of a window. Now it appears that Tibullus invented Nemesis to give variety to his poetry, and invented the unfortunate sister to give factitious reality to Nemesis.

The Project is working to produce a new course in Ancient Greek, directed at maturer students, and lasting one or two years. Its aim is to promote the fluent and intelligent reading of fifth- and fourth-century Greek, and Homer. The team, supported by a Steering Committee and Advisory Panel drawn from scholars and teachers in Great Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe, started work in September 1974. The first half of the course has been produced and is being tested in some 35 schools and universities in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States; the second half is currently being produced and will be used for the first time in the J.A.C.T. Summer School 1976, and after that in the testing institutions. The Project is due to end in August 1977, but it is hoped to finance a fourth year. We hope that, when published, the course will be available in the American and Australian/New Zealand markets: discussions with publishers over the cheapest possible methods of publication are currently being held.

We read in the fourth book of the Aeneid that unhappy Dido, when Anna came to her as she lay dying,

ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa leuauit,

ter reuoluta toro est … (Aen. 4. 690–1).

Though not the earliest excavator, Schliemann is surely one of the best known, and though he is perhaps most famous as the excavator of Troy his work at Mycenae was equally spectacular in its results and ultimately of greater importance for the study of Aegean prehistory. It seems appropriate, in the centenary year of his excavation of the Shaft Graves in 1876, to present an up-to-date assessment of their significance and of Schliemann himself. This study has developed from the chance discovery that in a letter to Max Müller at Oxford Schliemann reported a detail of the excavation that is not in the published account; in an ensuing hunt for other documents contemporary with the actual excavation, I learned much about Schliemann that seemed to me of considerable interest, as I hope it will be to others outside the small circle of Aegean specialists.

Why is it that literary criticism, at least where classical authors are concerned, must always go from one extreme to the other? Mr. Catlow's article on Horace's Soracte ode is a case in point. Nisbet and Hubbard, in their effort to ‘show how a very literary poet takes over themes conventional in various genres and adapts them to his new idiom’, may have underplayed the originality on which Horace himself so often and so emphatically insists and the imaginative qualities to which his poetry owes much of its perennial appeal. Understandably, Mr. Catlow reacts against this approach; but in his interpretation of the imaginative and evocative qualities of the ode he not merely underplays but altogether ignores Horace's literary pedigree, the lex operis within which Horace (like all other classical poets) wrote, the formal structure of the ode itself, and finally the context of the collection within which this particular ode occupies a prominent and carefully chosen place.

Professor D. M. MacDowell's article continues a recent and welcome tendency to question the common interpretation of hybris by study of the actual instances of the concept throughout Greek literature. MacDowell's definition ‘having energy or power and misusing it self-indulgently’ is fairly broad, and he supports it by five further points:

i) that hybris is always bad,

ii) that it is always voluntary,

iii) that it is frequently, but not always, produced by such things as youth, wealth, and excess of food and drink,

iv) that it is not usually religious, and

v) that it often involves a victim, and is more serious when it does.