Gaudet cognomine terra. Virgil's stories of Palinurus, Misenus, and Caieta, the helmsman, the trumpeter, and the nurse of Aeneas, are aetiological: they are poetic fictions designed to account for the names of the promontories and towns which are landmarks on the periplus or navigation route along the west coast of Italy, between Lucania and Latium, or, more specifically, between Velia and Ostia. The object here is to examine the topography and archaeology of the three sites to determine whether any features of the terrain assisted Virgil to his three aetiological fictions, and to see whether recent archaeological finds may offer any additional insight into the three episodes.

The Odyssey is principally the story of a return. A man has spent ten years fighting a war in a distant country and another ten years trying, against all sorts of obstacles and distractions, to get home to his wife and family. Will he make it?

Calagurris, the modern Calahorra, is situated by the river Ebro about two hundred miles inland, in what in Roman times was the province of Hispania Citerior or Tarraconensis. Here Quintilian was born some time in the fourth decade of the Christian era. If it were not that his birthplace is recorded by later writers, we should be quite unaware of it. There is nothing in the Institutio Oratoria to suggest that its author was a Spaniard, and though there is no reason why he should have referred to his home country in a treatise on rhetorical education, his work includes just enough personal reminiscence to make it a little surprising that he did not. Moreover, on the rare occasions when he refers to Spain he gives no hint of any connexion with the country. It would be rash to assume that he was ashamed of his Spanish birth, but perhaps long residence in Rome had weakened his consciousness of provincial origin. At the same time we can perhaps see in him certain provincial qualities.

It is commonly held that Plato died in 348/7 b.c. during the archonship of Theophilus or in the first year of the 108th Olympiad. According to a widespread and almost universally accepted tradition, which has found a place in our current books on ‘The History of Greek Philosophy’, Aristotle departed from Athens soon after Plato's death, repairing to Atarneus (or Assos) in Asia Minor, where he stayed with Hermias. Thus, it would appear that the death of Plato was the prime if not sole reason for Aristotle's journey in 348/7 b.c. It has been conjectured, however, that Plato actually died in the spring of 347 b.c., probably in May. Though this is by no means certain, it properly requestions the causality of the Stagirite's flight.

These revolutionary conceptions of metre which were encountered in Ennius by his first audience served in the Annales, his most influential work of all, to elevate to a new plane the history of Rome. The word ‘history’ here is important. It is difficult to say in what precise sense the ordinary Greek accepted Homer as history. Certainly Thucydides discusses the Iliad as history, but that is only half of Homer, and even accepting the Iliad with all its gods and goddesses as a literal account of what took place at Troy the listener would be conscious that it was all a very long time ago. But the subject-matter of the Annales was far from being all a very long time ago. Scholars have pointed out that there was precedent in Hellenistic epic for the treatment of historical events in verse, but this is not a subject on which easy generalization is permissible.

In Book iv of the Georgics, Virgil prescribes the beginning of spring as the time for producing bees abiogenetically: hoc geritur Zephyris primum impellentibus undas,

ante nouis rubeant quam prata coloribus, ante

garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo. (305–7)

German life and letters in the earlier eighteenth century were dominated almost exclusively by French influences. The fragmentation of the German-speaking world within the clumsy and largely imaginary framework of the Holy Roman Empire, the appalling devastation of the Thirty Years War, and the consequent dearth of a living autochthonic cultural tradition had led German intellectuals to look to the impressive achievements of Versailles as the only alternative to barbarism. Leibniz, the greatest philosopher of the German Enlightenment, wrote in Latin and French; Gottsched, an ardent admirer of the Grand Siècle, translated Corneille and Racine and urged imitation of their style upon his fellow countrymen; Frederick the Great, whose indifferent French verse Voltaire had the irksome privilege of correcting, possessed at his palace of Sanssouci (itself an imitation of Versailles) a magnificent library which contained not a single work in German, and though he is said to have had an eloquent command of German expletives, spoke only French at court.

The tradition of classical studies in Poland goes back to the Middle Ages. The first historical chronicle, written in Latin, appeared in this country in the twelfth century. At present Latin is taught in about 30 per cent, of our grammar schools. The course covers four years of instruction, and the texts studied are those of Nepos, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace. Greek is studied at the universities, mainly by students of classical philology, although its knowledge is also required in some other fields of the humanities.

So much has already been written about Plato's myth of Atlantis that one hesitates long before adding anything more. But it can equally be argued that to make just one more suggestion can at least do no harm now.

Looking back, as we do, from the films and television of the twentieth century, we are inclined to think of Greek theatregoers as very serious-minded people, who suffered hard stone seats for days on end to watch a succession of tragedies, each with a solid intellectual content, performed against an austere stage setting by actors who could achieve only a distant approach to realism. We are constantly reminded of the very severe treatment meted out to Euripides for his experimental innovations. He tried out the use of blasphemous expressions—the equivalent, in his dramatic setting, of the four-letter words in modern ‘realistic’ drama: but Hippolytus' cry, ⋯ γλ⋯σσ' ⋯μώμοχ', ⋯ δ⋯ φρ⋯ν ⋯νώμοτος, was parodied mercilessly by the comic poets for years afterwards. Another of his ‘gimmicks’ was the tragic hero in rags, a device which anticipates in some respects the recent trend of ‘kitchensink drama’.