In the ten years between 1929 and 1939 three remarkable books were produced in a tiny Irish-speaking community of less than one hundred and fifty people living on the Great Blasket, an island off the south-west coast of Kerry. The authors, two men and a woman, were peasants, eking out a scanty living by farming and fishing. They were technically literate in that they had acquired the rudiments of reading and writing at the island school, but for all practical purposes their culture was oral. They certainly had neither opportunity nor inclination for book-reading. Yet out of the resources of their oral culture they produced works of a high literary standard, one of which has (in translation) achieved the status of a ‘World's Classic’.

The inculcation of techniques of persuasion by Greeks and Romans, i. e. rhetoric, in those days a highly necessary form of vocational training for top people, led eventually to the British classical education. But it is probable that few topics are more disliked by classical students of today than rhetoric; and examinees blench at the mere sight of questions in which the word ‘rhetoric’ appears. As E. R. Dodds remarks, ‘To the average modern Englishman “rhetoric” means a distastefully emotional or showy way of talking;… to the contemporaries of Socrates it meant the practical art of influencing men's will through the spoken word.’ Such an art is presumably still of some importance, and it is still worth considering what Plato/Socrates had to say about it. The enquiry is made the more piquant by the fact that Plato himself has been called e.g. ‘an orator himself in mocking other orators’ (Cic. De Or. 1.47), a ‘propagandist’,2 and most recently ‘[a man who] writes not as a scholar or scientist but from first to last as an advocate, an heir to the tradition of didactic poetry, a nursling of Attic drama and a product, no less than the politicians and litigants whom he criticized so articulately, of a culture which admired the art of the persuader’.

InGreece and Rome, vol. xvii, No. 51, pp. 128–9, Mr. E. Laughton, referring to pp. 140 ff. of Mr. S. A. Handford's The Latin Subjunctive, put forward Cicero, Att. 3. 20. 1 (‘tibi venire in mentem certo scio quae vita esset nostra, quae suavitas, quae dignitas’) as an example of the imperfect subjunctive in an indirect question in primary sequence, where a preceding imperfect or pluperfect tense has not been employed in mitigation of the violation of sequence. In vol. xviii, No. 54, p. 138, Mr. Handford replies that esset probably means ‘would be’, as Tyrrell took it in Cicero in his Letters, and adds ‘so we are still without a clear example of imperfect subjunctive used in a primary sequence indirect question to express durative (or iterative) action’. In vol. xviii, No. 55, p. 18, Mr. Laughton ‘retreats fighting’, but hopes that ‘some day Mr. Handford's challenge may meet with an unequivocal response’.

In paragraph 3 of the Praefatio to book x of Seneca's Controversiae we read, of the brilliant, but casual declaimer, Scaurus, ‘ex his omnibus sciri potest, non quantum oratorem praestaret ignavus Scaurus, sed quantum desereret’ (‘all this goes to show, not how great an orator the lazy Scaurus was, but how great he missed being’). The variant scire posset in excerpt. Montepessulana can safely be ignored. Though I am sure we should all wish to see an example quoted from a more reputable author than the Elder Seneca, this sentence, occurring as it does in a carefully written preface, confirms Mr. Laughton's intuition that this ‘rational mode of expression’ is not impossible in Latin when the sense of the dependent verb is ‘obviously durative’.

Much of the imagery of Aeschylus' plays is vivid and startling. It runs through his tragedies like a thread of bright colour, setting the mood and atmosphere of the drama. Yet often the playwright creates his effects by hints, by a subtle use of a pictorial word here or an unusual verb there. His words are like the quick close-ups of a film which stimulate the imagination to see more, and often it is by a series of visual ideas that he creates the effects he is aiming at.

Readers of Professor E. S. Forster's paper in Greece and Rome, x, 1941, pp. 114–17, may be interested in some of the passages which he does not quote or mention. He refers to Aelian, Varia Historia, xiv. 46, but not to Pollux, v. 47, who speaks of Paeonians as well as Magnesians: Μάγνητας μὲντοὺςἐπὶ Μαιάνλρῳ τρέΦειν φασὶ κύνας πολέμῳ ύπασπιστάς τοιοũτοι Δ̕ἦσαν καὶ Παίοσιν οἱ σύνθηροι κύνες. We hear of a Paeonian and a Perinthian dog in Herodotus, v. I μουνομαχίη τριφασίη έκπροκλήσιός σφι έγένετο καί γάρ άνΔρα ἀνΔρὶ καὶ ἵππον ἵππῳ συνέβαλον καὶ κύνα κυνί.

It is perhaps worth while to collect three striking cases where the history of music impinges on that of classical scholarship. My sources are not recondite, but I find that, for I the obvious source, the ‘Bach Reader’, is misleading; for II the evidence is mostly to be found in Grove; for III the only fairly detailed account I know is in Nieck's Robert Schumann (1923, pp. 47 ff.), now difficult to find, which I supplement from the preface to the 1828 Forcellini.

I. From a (Latin) note on Quintilian (i. 12.3, ed. 1738: not in the later editions) by Gesner, a first-rate scholar and lexicographer, who was Rector of the Thomasschule when Bach was Cantor. It is interesting to contrast Gesner's enthusiastic appreciation with his successor Ernesti's contemptuous indifference—which suggests that there is more to be said for Bach in his quarrel with Ernesti than we are sometimes led to suppose.

Quintilian is speaking of the brilliant performances of musicians; Gesner comments: ‘All this you (sc. Quintilian) would think of little consequence if you could return from the other world and see Bach playing with both hands and all his fingers, on an instrument which seems to combine many citharas in one—the organum organorum, running over it hither and thither with both hands and swiftest motion of the feet, eliciting many varied passages and sounds diverse yet unified—if you could see him, I say, doing a thing which several citharists and innumerable tibicines could not do, and not, like a citharoedus, playing only his own part, but equally watchful of all the symphoniaci, to the number of 30 or 40; calling this one to attention by a nod, another by a stamp of the foot, a third by a warning finger; giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it.

Alexander's parents were both striking personalities. Olympias, a native of Epirus, whose family traced their ancestry back to Achilles, was jealous and possessive—and terribly passionate. Her emotions found an outlet in the wild orgiastic rites of Dionysus, and at Alexander's accession and again after his death her desire for vengeance erupted in acts of unbridled savagery. This streak of cruelty reappears in Alexander, especially when in his later years he was under increasing strain. Philip, too, was capable of great passion although he nearly always managed to control himself. It is scarcely surprising therefore that their son should occasionally be subject to volcanic outbursts. To call him, as Mithridates VI of Pontus has been called, a ‘barbarian varnished’ would be absurd; it is scarcely less so to expect from him the conduct of a Greek gentleman or the product of one of our public schools. He also reproduced some of Philip's most notable qualities. We see in him the same reckless, even foolhardy, bravery, the same dogged persistence, the same open-handed generosity. From his father he inherited too his capacity for managing men and affairs.

The unusual personality of Alexander the Great is reflected in an extraordinary number of portraits. They begin in his early youth, and do not end with his death. They continue during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and all subsequent periods down to modern times. The portraits of Alexander not only reflect the different phases of his short life but become an artistic motif for all following periods.

Servius in his note on Aeneid iv. 92 comments that Virgil uses the epithet Saturnia of Iuno only ‘when she is about to do mischief, for he knows that the planet Saturn has a baleful influence’. An astrological interpretation of Virgil is doubtless interesting, but if, as none will question, Virgil is a poet before he is an astrologer, the only satisfactory explanation of an epithet is one that elucidates its poetic significance. An examination of Virgil's use of the epithet Saturnia does, I think, make it clear both that the epithet has poetic significance and that its significance is intimately bound up with Iuno's role in the poem. Her intervention in the action of the Aeneid determines that action in a way that distinguishes it from the interventions of the various gods and goddesses in the actions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even from the interventions of other gods in the Aeneid itself. Venus behaves in the Aeneid in much the same way as the Homeric gods and goddesses do. She is at hand to perform little miracles for her son, as Athena was at hand to help Odysseus or Telemachus. Now it is a striking fact that the epithets used of Venus in the Aeneid have no special significance. On twenty-one occasions she is referred to as Venus without an epithet, once she is Venus aurea, and four times she is Cytherea. These are all conventional, and agree well with the conventional nature of Venus' intervention in the action.

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.

It is well known that many poets, from Callimachus (Anth. Pal. ix. 507) down to those mentioned by Rosamund Harding on pp. 38—9 of her book An Anatomy of Inspiration (Cambridge, 1942), have preferred to compose their works by night. It is perhaps less well known that some poems are or claim to be the result of involuntary insomnia. One example is Catullus 1. Catullus had spent a day composing poetry in the company of his friend, the brilliant young ‘new’ poet Licinius Calvus (lines 1–16):

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi

multum lusimus in meis tabellis,

ut convenerat esse delicatos:

scribens versiculos uterque nostrum

ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,

reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum.

It is not easy to give a satisfactory answer to boys and girls who rightly want to know why they should embark on the study of Latin if they are to drop it after two years. The solution seemed to be to make the question unnecessary, and so a break was made at Mirfield Grammar School with the traditional approach to Latin for those pupils who were unable to pursue the normal ‘O’ level course. Previous policy had been to follow a parallel course in the two streams for the first two years. A very real fault in the system was that certain pupils parted with Latin at the end of their second year with no sense of achievement and with considerable relief. The challenge to provide a course to meet their special needs was obvious and needed to be met.

A study of the personality of Cato Censorius is both interesting and instructive because of the times in which he lived, a period which began with the Hannibalic War and included those fateful fifty years of the second century which ordered the destiny of Rome herself and indirectly of the whole world. In the shaping of that destiny Cato played a not unimportant part, and the interest of the man lies both in what he did and in his reactions to the events which confronted him. Such a study also throws light on ancient biographical methods. To the ancient mind the personal element was by far the most important for the understanding of history; the individual acquired a correspondingly higher value and importance in the interpretation of movements and events; and in a time when the State was confronted with many problems, the men who strove to deal with them in different ways assumed importance in men's minds as provoking those very problems which they were only trying to solve.